Important people in music history that you should know about.
A living composer! I had deliberated on whether to write this article and how to go about it. The works of Glass’s we’re going to be discussing aren’t necessarily the best place to start for this composer to get to know him and his … Continue reading Influential People: Philip Glass
aka Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy “Musical prodigies … are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early … Continue reading Influential People: Felix Mendelssohn
Truly in Schubert there is the divine spark. Ludwig van Beethoven His influence is interesting, and we’re not really going to be discussing his influence as much as his potential influence, or something. This article that I scanned quickly asks … Continue reading Influential People: Franz Schubert
(title image located here, from the Dutch National Archive) In this video of Mitsuko Uchida speaking about Schoenberg’s piano concerto, she mentions how Debussy and Schoenberg approached their rebellion against tonality in different ways. She says (I’m paraphrasing; just go watch … Continue reading Influential People: Pierre Boulez
Claude-Achille Debussy, one of the most notable names in Impressionist music, a term he apparently despised. He was born in 1862, and along with Ravel, his fellow countryman and composer, became outstandingly famous for music of incredibly inventive orchestrations, suggestive of imagery and … Continue reading Influential People: Claude Debussy
So…. influential in a different way. While people like Nadia Boulanger or Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov were incredibly influential as, among other things, educators, the only student of Dvořák’s whose name jumped out at me was one Josef Suk (composer, not the violinist), … Continue reading Influential People: Antonín Dvořák
No orchestra could exist without his tone poems, written to celebrate the glories of the post-Wagnerian symphony orchestra. Strauss! Finally. He’s here. One of the many composers I’ve been ignoring the past few years, and how can we discuss symphonic poems … Continue reading Influential People: Richard Strauss
So… kind of finally, we get around to this guy. The cover image for this article is a far less common (to me…?) image of the composer, not the one below that everyone’s used to seeing: Anyway, he’s outstandingly famous now … Continue reading Influential People: Igor Stravinsky
“No one was more famous during their lifetime, and few were more quickly ignored after death.” – Faubion Bowers “No composer has had more scorn heaped on him or greater love bestowed.” -The Great Soviet Encyclopedia So this is another … Continue reading Influential People: Alexander Scriabin
So this article comes along far more because of who the man taught than any other influence his compositions had. We’ve talked about Anton Arensky only once before, with regards to his piano concerto. It was a work unabashedly modeled after … Continue reading Influential People: Anton Arensky
or Influential People: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky By now, we’ve gone through enough of the history of the previous pieces and composers that we kind of already have an understanding of the climate in which the rest of the composers … Continue reading Tchaikovsky and the Composing Circles
Ilya Repin’s work is amazing; he also painted RK. From Wikipedia So this is perhaps the first name of the bunch that people might recognize. The only thing of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov which we have discussed so far is his piano … Continue reading Influential People: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
The younger, less round Balakirev In talking about Russian music, even people who don’t listen to classical music might be able to name Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, even Prokofiev or Shostakovich, and we will surely get to them all. But this week, … Continue reading Influential People: Mily Balakirev
I started including this information in tomorrow’s music post, but it got a little long, so I decided I’d make it a separate thing ahead of the discussion of the first work in our Russian symphony series.
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| Rubinstein on the podium as portrayed by Ilya Repin. |
Franz Liszt: where does one begin? Handsome chap, too Most people know him as the frighteningly virtuosic virtuoso pianist born in 1811, the year after Chopin and Schumann, he himself being one of the most influential performers/composers of the 19th … Continue reading Influential People: Franz Liszt
Epilogue: Total Serialism a.k.a Influential People: Milton Babbitt It’s been a while. If you haven’t read or don’t remember a three-part series I wrote a few months back on the beginnings of the twelve-tone system, go check out the first … Continue reading Dodecaphony: Part 4 (a.k.a. Influential People: Milton Babbitt)
The picture that everyone knows of the composer who looks like George Washington He excelled in every musical genre… He is familiarly known as the ‘father of the symphony’ and could with greater justice be thus regarded for the … Continue reading Influential People: Franz Josef Haydn
Do-what? (a.k.a. Influential People: Arnold Schoenberg) part 2 here part 3 here This was going to be a simple introduction to the early works of the Second Viennese School, and to that group of composers itself, but as with many … Continue reading Dodecaphony: Part 1
Ms. Boulanger with Igor Stravinsky I have a fascination with charts, like the “six degrees of separation” type charts that resemble family trees or mind mapping graphs. I even laid a few out years ago, to see, interestingly, who is … Continue reading Influential People: Nadia Boulanger
Fugue for Thought 