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Vexations
''Vexations'' is a musical work by Erik Satie. Apparently conceived for keyboard (although the single page of manuscript does not specify an instrument), it consists of a short theme in the bass whose four presentations are heard alternatingly unaccompanied and played with chords above. The theme and its accompanying chords are written using enharmonic notation. The piece is undated, but scholars usually assign a date around 1893–1894 on the basis of musical and biographical evidence. The piece bears the inscription "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." ("") From the 1960s onward, this text has mostly been interpreted as an instruction that the page of music should be played 840 times, although this may not have been Satie's intention. Publication Satie did not publish the work in his lifetime, and is not known ever to have performed or mentioned it. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Cale
John Davies Cale (born 9 March 1942) is a Welsh musician, composer, and record producer who was a founding member of the American rock band the Velvet Underground. Over his six-decade career, Cale has worked in various styles across rock, drone, classical, avant-garde and electronic music. John Cale studied music at Goldsmiths College, University of London (UoL), before relocating in 1963 to New York City's downtown music scene, where he performed as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music and formed the Velvet Underground. Since leaving the band in 1968, Cale has released seventeen solo studio albums, including the widely acclaimed '' Paris 1919'' (1973) and '' Music for a New Society'' (1982). Cale has also acquired a reputation as an adventurous record producer, working on the debut studio albums of several influential artists, including the Stooges and Patti Smith. Early life and career John Davies Cale was born on 9 March 1942 in the mining village of Garnant in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sports Et Divertissements
''Sports et divertissements'' (''Sports and Pastimes'') is a cycle of 21 short piano pieces composed in 1914 by Erik Satie. The set consists of a prefatory chorale and 20 musical vignettes depicting various sports and leisure activities. First published in 1923, it has long been considered one of his finest achievements.Pierre-Daniel Templier, "Erik Satie", MIT Press, 1969, p. 85. Translated from the original French edition published by Rieder, Paris, 1932.Patrick Gowers and Nigel Wilkins, "Erik Satie", "The New Grove: Twentieth-Century French Masters", Macmillan Publishers Limited, London, 1986, p. 140. Reprinted from "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians", 1980 edition. Musically it represents the peak of Satie's humoristic piano suites (1912-1915), but stands apart from that series in its fusion of several different art forms. ''Sports'' originally appeared as a collector's album with illustrations by Charles Martin (artist), Charles Martin, accompanied by music, pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Viola Farber
Viola Farber (February 25, 1931 – December 24, 1998) was an American choreographer and dancer. Biography Viola Farber was born on February 25, 1931, in Heidelberg, Germany. In Germany, Farber began dancing. However, at the age of six she was discouraged by her parents. At the age of seven, Farber and her family moved to the United States. Even though her parents did not allow her to dance, Farber continued dancing on her own, though she focused more of her energy on learning to play the piano. During the one year that Farber spent at the University of Illinois studying music, she began taking dance classes from Margaret Erlanger. When Farber transferred to George Washington University, she focused on both music and dance. By 1952, Farber had transferred once again, to Black Mountain College was dance with Katherine Litz and music with Lou Harrison. In 1953, Farber became a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. She created many roles in Cunningham's works, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erik Satie
Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (born 17 May 18661 July 1925), better known as Erik Satie, was a French composer and pianist. The son of a French father and a British mother, he studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, Paris Conservatoire but was an undistinguished student and did not obtain a diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in café-cabarets in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his ''Gymnopédies'' and ''Gnossiennes''. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached. After a period in which he composed little, Satie entered Paris's second music academy, the Schola Cantorum de Paris, Schola Cantorum, as a mature student. His studies there were more successful than those at the Conservatoire. From about 1910 he became the focus of successive groups of young composers attracted by his unconventionality and originality. Among them were the group known as Les Six. A meeting with Jean Cocteau in 1915 led to the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harmony
In music, harmony is the concept of combining different sounds in order to create new, distinct musical ideas. Theories of harmony seek to describe or explain the effects created by distinct pitches or tones coinciding with one another; harmonic objects such as chords, textures and tonalities are identified, defined, and categorized in the development of these theories. Harmony is broadly understood to involve both a "vertical" dimension (frequency-space) and a "horizontal" dimension (time-space), and often overlaps with related musical concepts such as melody, timbre, and form. A particular emphasis on harmony is one of the core concepts underlying the theory and practice of Western music. The study of harmony involves the juxtaposition of individual pitches to create chords, and in turn the juxtaposition of chords to create larger chord progressions. The principles of connection that govern these structures have been the subject of centuries worth of theoretical work ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Musical Mode
In music theory, the term mode or ''modus'' is used in a number of distinct senses, depending on context. Its most common use may be described as a type of musical scale coupled with a set of characteristic melodic and harmonic behaviors. It is applied to major and minor keys as well as the seven diatonic modes (including the former as Ionian and Aeolian) which are defined by their starting note or tonic. ( Olivier Messiaen's modes of limited transposition are strictly a scale type.) Related to the diatonic modes are the eight church modes or Gregorian modes, in which authentic and plagal forms of scales are distinguished by ambitus and tenor or reciting tone. Although both diatonic and Gregorian modes borrow terminology from ancient Greece, the Greek ''tonoi'' do not otherwise resemble their medieval/modern counterparts. Previously, in the Middle Ages the term modus was used to describe intervals, individual notes, and rhythms (see ). Modal rhythm was an essential ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Counterpoint
In music theory, counterpoint is the relationship of two or more simultaneous musical lines (also called voices) that are harmonically dependent on each other, yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. The term originates from the Latin ''punctus contra punctum'' meaning "point against point", i.e. "note against note". John Rahn describes counterpoint as follows: Counterpoint has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradition, strongly developing during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period, especially in the Baroque period. In Western pedagogy, counterpoint is taught through a system of species (see below). There are several different forms of counterpoint, including imitative counterpoint and free counterpoint. Imitative counterpoint involves the repetition of a main melodic idea across different vocal parts, with or without variation. Compositions written in free counterpoint often incorporate non-traditional harmonies and c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chord Progression
In a musical composition, a chord progression or harmonic progression (informally chord changes, used as a plural, or simply changes) is a succession of chords. Chord progressions are the foundation of harmony in Western musical tradition from the common practice era of Classical music to the 21st century. Chord progressions are the foundation of popular music styles (e.g., pop music, rock music), traditional music, as well as genres such as blues and jazz. In these genres, chord progressions are the defining feature on which melody and rhythm are built. In tonal music, chord progressions have the function of either establishing or otherwise contradicting a tonality, the technical name for what is commonly understood as the " key" of a song or piece. Chord progressions, such as the extremely common chord progression I-V-vi-IV, are usually expressed by Roman numerals in Classical music theory. In many styles of popular and traditional music, chord progressions are expressed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unendliche Melodie
"Music of the Future" ("") is the title of an essay by Richard Wagner, first published in French translation in 1860 as "La musique de l'avenir" and published in the original German in 1861. It was intended to introduce the librettos of Wagner's operas to a French audience at the time when he was hoping to launch in Paris a production of ''Tannhäuser'', and sets out a number of his desiderata for true opera, including the need for 'endless melody'. Wagner deliberately put the title in quotation marks to distance himself from the term; ''Zukunftsmusik'' had already been adopted, both by Wagner's enemies, in the 1850s, often as a deliberate misunderstanding of the ideas set out in Wagner's 1849 essay, ''The Artwork of the Future'', and by his supporters, notably Franz Liszt. Wagner's essay seeks to explain why the term is inadequate, or inappropriate, for his approach. Background Early use of the term, and its anti-Wagnerian overtones The earliest public use of the pejorative Germ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joshua Rifkin
Joshua Rifkin (born April 22, 1944) is an American conductor, pianist, and musicologist. He is currently a professor of music at Boston University. As a performer, he has recorded music by composers from Antoine Busnois to Silvestre Revueltas; as a scholar he has published research on composers from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Rifkin is known among classical musicians for his theory which says that most of Bach's choral works were sung with only one singer per choral line. Rifkin argued that "so long as we define 'chorus' in the conventional modern sense, then Bach's chorus with few exceptions simply did not exist." He is best known among the public for helping to revive ragtime in the 1970s by recording three albums of Scott Joplin's works for Nonesuch Records. Musical career Joplin In November 1970, Rifkin released the first of three albums of Scott Joplin's work: '' Scott Joplin: Piano Rags.'' Released by Nonesuch, a classical music label, the album was cri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parody
A parody is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satire, satirical or irony, ironic imitation. Often its subject is an Originality, original work or some aspect of it (theme/content, author, style, etc), but a parody can also be about a real-life person (e.g. a politician), event, or movement (e.g. the French Revolution or Counterculture of the 1960s, 1960s counterculture). Literary scholar Professor Simon Dentith defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice". The literary theorist Linda Hutcheon said "parody ... is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Parody may be found in art or culture, including literature, parody music, music, Theatre, theater, television and film, animation, and Video game, gaming. The writer and critic John Gross observes in his ''Oxford Book of Parodies'', that parody seems to flourish on te ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
