1.
Bleecker Street
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Bleecker Street is a west–east street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is most famous today as a Greenwich Village nightclub district, the street connects a neighborhood today popular for music venues and comedy, but which was once a major center for American bohemia. The street is named after the name of Anthony Lispenard Bleecker, a banker, the father of Anthony Bleecker. Bleecker Street connects Abingdon Square to the Bowery and East Village, Bleecker Street is named by and after the Bleecker family because the street ran through the farm of the family. In 1808, Anthony Lispenard Bleecker and his wife deeded to the city a portion of the land on which Bleecker Street sits. Originally Bleecker Street extended from Bowery to Broadway, along the side of the Bleecker farm. In 1829 it was joined with Herring Street, extending Bleecker Street northwest to Abingdon Square, LeRoy Place is the former name of a block of Bleecker Street between Mercer and Greene Streets. This was where the first palatial winged residences were built, the effect was accomplished by making the central houses taller and closer to the street, while the other houses on the side were set back. The central buildings also had bigger, raised entrances and lantern-like roof projections, the houses were built by Isaac A. Pearson, on both sides of Bleecker Street. To set his project apart from the rest of the area, Bleecker Street is served by the 46 <6> B D F M trains at Bleecker Street/Broadway – Lafayette Street station. The 12 trains serve the Christopher Street – Sheridan Square station one block north of Bleecker Street, traffic on the street is one-way, going southeast. In early December 2007, a lane was marked on the street. Bleecker Street is referenced in Stephen Kings The Dark Tower series, the Marc Jacobs store on Bleecker Street is mentioned in the novel Bergdorf Blondes by Plum Sykes as a hangout for emaciated young women. Nobel laureate Derek Walcott has written a poem about Bleecker Street entitled Bleecker Street, in Philip Roths novel The Human Stain, the character Coleman Silk takes the woman who would later be his wife to a Bleecker Street cafe early in their relationship. The main character of Warren Elliss novel Crooked Little Vein visits some freak bar on Bleecker Street, in Marvel Comics, 177A Bleecker Street is the location of Doctor Stranges Sanctum Sanctorum. Film and television Bleecker Street is in Nick & Norahs Infinite Playlist, Bleecker Street Cinema is mentioned in the movie Desperately Seeking Susan. 11th and Bleecker is mentioned in New Line Home Entertainments production of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, peter Parker tells Mary Jane that he saw her billboard advertisement on Bleecker in Spider-Man 2. Long-running television series Friends featured Bleecker Street signposts in several cut-scenes, much of the film No Reservations, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart, is set in a restaurant on the corner of Bleecker and Charles Streets
2.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
3.
Nightclub
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A nightclub is an entertainment venue and bar which serves alcoholic beverages that usually operates late into the night. Another distinction is that whereas many pubs and sports bars aim at a market, nightclubs typically aim at a niche market of music and dancing enthusiasts. The upmarket nature of nightclubs can be seen in the inclusion of VIP areas in some nightclubs, for celebrities, nightclubs are much more likely than pubs or sports bars to use bouncers to screen prospective clubgoers for entry. Some nightclub bouncers do not admit people with ripped jeans or other clothing or gang apparel as part of a dress code. The busiest nights for a nightclub are Friday and Saturday night, most clubs or club nights cater to certain music genres, such as house music or gothic rock. A nightclub may also be called a discothèque, disco, or dance club, from about 1900 to 1920, working class Americans would gather at honky tonks or juke joints to dance to music played on a piano or a jukebox. Webster Hall is credited as the first modern nightclub, being built in 1886 and starting off as a hall, originally functioning as a home for dance. During Prohibition in the United States, nightclubs went underground as illegal speakeasy bars, with Webster Hall staying open, with rumors circulating of Al Capones involvement and police bribery. With the repeal of Prohibition in February 1933, nightclubs were revived, such as New Yorks 21 Club, Copacabana, El Morocco, in Germany, possibly the first discothèque was Scotch-Club. These discothèques were also patronized by anti-Vichy youth called zazous, there were also underground discothèques in Nazi Germany patronized by anti-Nazi youth called the swing kids. In Harlem, Connies Inn and the Cotton Club were popular venues for white audiences, before 1953 and even some years thereafter, most bars and nightclubs used a jukebox or mostly live bands. The Whisky à Gogo set into place the elements of the modern post World War II discothèque-style nightclub. At the end of the 1950s, several of the bars in Soho introduced afternoon dancing. In the early 1960s, Mark Birley opened a members-only discothèque nightclub, Annabels, in Berkeley Square, in 1962, the Peppermint Lounge in New York City became popular and is the place where go-go dancing originated. However, the first rock and roll generation preferred rough and tumble bars and taverns to nightclubs, disco has its roots in the underground club scene. It brought together people from all walks of life and backgrounds and these clubs acted as safe havens for homosexual partygoers to dance in peace and away from public scrutiny. Disco allowed patrons to explore sexuality and push the envelope on the dance floor, disco clubs acted as an escape from such depressing environments and acted as the fantasy marginalized peoples could escape to forget oppression and racism. Disco clubs originally functioned as liberated party spaces and were seen as places of political statement, a smooth mix of long single records to keep people dancing all night long
4.
Music venue
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A music venue is any location used for a concert or musical performance. A music venue range in size and location, from an outdoor bandshell or bandstand or a hall to an indoor sports stadium. Typically, different types of venues host different genres of music, music venues may be either privately or publicly funded, and may charge for admission. An example of a publicly funded music venue is a park bandstand, a nightclub is a privately funded venue, venues like these often charge an entry fee to generate a profit. Music venues do not necessarily host live acts, disc jockeys at a discothèque or nightclub play recorded music through a PA system. Depending on the type of venue, the hours, location and length of performance may differ. Other attractions, such as art or social activities, may also be available. For example, at a bar or pub, the band may be playing live songs while drinks are being served. Some classes of venues may play live music in the background, music venues can be categorised in a number of ways. Typically, the genre of music played at the venue, whether it is temporary, the majority of music venues are permanent, however, there are temporary music venues. An example of a venue would be one constructed for a music festival. Music venues may be the result of private or public enterprises, some venues only promote acts of one particular genre and example of this are opera houses. Music venues can be categorised by size and capacity, a nightclub will often have a much smaller capacity than that of a stadium. Music venues are either outdoor or indoor, examples of outdoor venues include bandstands and bandshells, such outdoor venues provide minimal shelter for performing musicians and are usually located in parks. A temporary music festival is typically an outdoor venue, examples of indoor venues include public houses, nightclubs, coffee bars and stadia. Venues can play music, recorded music, or a combination of the two, depending on the event or time of day. A characteristic of every live music venue is that one or more stages are present. Venues may be unticketed, casual entry available on the door, or advance tickets only, a dress code may or may not apply
5.
Multimedia
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Multimedia is content that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, video and interactive content. Multimedia contrasts with media that use only rudimentary computer displays such as text-only or traditional forms of printed or hand-produced material, Multimedia devices are electronic media devices used to store and experience multimedia content. Multimedia is distinguished from mixed media in art, for example. The term rich media is synonymous with interactive multimedia, the term multimedia was coined by singer and artist Bob Goldstein to promote the July 1966 opening of his LightWorks at LOursin show at Southampton, Long Island. Goldstein was perhaps aware of an American artist named Dick Higgins, two years later, in 1968, the term multimedia was re-appropriated to describe the work of a political consultant, David Sawyer, the husband of Iris Sawyer—one of Goldsteins producers at LOursin. In the intervening forty years, the word has taken on different meanings, in the late 1970s, the term referred to presentations consisting of multi-projector slide shows timed to an audio track. However, by the 1990s multimedia took on its current meaning, in the 1993 first edition of Multimedia, Making It Work, Tay Vaughan declared Multimedia is any combination of text, graphic art, sound, animation, and video that is delivered by computer. When you allow the user – the viewer of the project – to control what, when you provide a structure of linked elements through which the user can navigate, interactive multimedia becomes hypermedia. The German language society Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache recognized the words significance, the institute summed up its rationale by stating has become a central word in the wonderful new media world. In common usage, multimedia refers to an electronically delivered combination of media including video, still images, audio, much of the content on the web today falls within this definition as understood by millions. That era saw also a boost in the production of educational multimedia CD-ROMs, the term video, if not used exclusively to describe motion photography, is ambiguous in multimedia terminology. Video is often used to describe the format, delivery format. Multiple forms of content are often not considered modern forms of presentation such as audio or video. Likewise, single forms of content with single methods of information processing are often called multimedia. Performing arts may also be considered multimedia considering that performers and props are multiple forms of content and media. Multimedia presentations may be viewed by person on stage, projected, transmitted, a broadcast may be a live or recorded multimedia presentation. Broadcasts and recordings can be analog or digital electronic media technology. Digital online multimedia may be downloaded or streamed, streaming multimedia may be live or on-demand
6.
Cabaret
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Cabaret is a form of entertainment featuring music, song, dance, recitation, or drama. It is mainly distinguished by the venue, which might be a pub. The audience, often dining or drinking, does not typically dance, performances are usually introduced by a master of ceremonies or MC. The entertainment, as done by an ensemble of actors and according to its European origins, is oriented towards adult audiences. In the United States striptease, burlesque, drag shows, or a solo vocalist with a pianist, the word cabaret was first used in 1655. It is derived from tavern probably from Middle Dutch cambret, the word cabaret came to mean a restaurant or night club by 1912. Cabaret can be divided in 10 different types. However, these are artificial dividing lines, cabaret shows are most of the time a compound of elements from the different types, the cabaret performer plays with language, sometimes poetic, but often is he or she rock hard and hateful. The cabaret performer analyses in his/her stubborn manner actual, social and political topics, the cabaret performer tells an often slightly absurd story with a moral packed in it. The cabaret performer plays with music, for example by twisting or combining familiar melodies, the cabaret performer tells nonsensical and absurd stories and plays idiotic types. The emphasis is less on text in the show of cabaret performer. Here the cabaret performer eludes on his liberating through laughter role, an iteration of storytelling cabaret The cabaret performer quickly switches between the different styles/types of cabaret, types, or songs. In this the cabaret performer is a guest at a government, institution or a company, cabarets existed in Paris in the 16th century, they were ancestors of the modern restaurant. Unlike taverns they sold wine not by itself but only with a meal, customers might sing if they had drunk enough wine, but early cabarets did not have formal programs of entertainment. Cabarets were frequently used as meeting places for writers and artists, in 1773 French poets, painters, musicians and writers began to meet in a cabaret called Le Caveau on rue de Buci, where they composed and sang songs. The Caveau continued until 1816, when it was forced to close because its clients wrote songs mocking the royal government, in the 18th century the café-concert or café-chantant appeared, which offered food along with music, singers, or magicians. The most famous was the Cafe des Aveugles in the cellars of the Palais-Royal, in the early 19th century many cafés-chantants appeared around the city, the most famous were the Café des Ambassadeurs on the Champs-Élysées and the Eldorado on boulevard Strasbourg. By 1900 there were more than 150 cafés-chantants in Paris, the first cabaret in the modern sense was Le Chat Noir in the Bohemian neighborhood of Montmartre, created in 1881 by Rodolphe Salis, a theatrical agent and entrepreneur
7.
John Storyk
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John Storyk, a registered architect and acoustician, is a founding partner of Walters-Storyk Design Group. The Walters-Storyk Design Group is a winner of the prestigious TEC Award for outstanding achievement in Acoustics/Facility Design. As an aspiring musician and architecture student at Princeton and Columbia Universities, John Storyk’s first commission after graduating from Princeton University in 1968 was for Jimi Hendrix in 1969. That studio, Electric Lady, continues to churn out hit records today in its site in NYs Greenwich Village. He recently designed MJH Studios in Cranbury, NJ, scheduled to open in early 2017 and his 2011 Jungle City, a $6+ million NYC ‘Destination Studio’ was featured in the NY Times and Vanity Fair. Storyk also serves as a professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In January,2015, Berklee 160 Mass, ave. won the 2015 TEC Award for outstanding achievement in Acoustics/Facility Design, marking WSDGs 9th TEC Award in this category. John Storyk is a member of the American Institute of Architects and he is a frequent contributor to AES Convention Panels and Papers. A recipient of the AES Fellowship Award, he lectures at schools around the U. S. ft. audio education complex in a building at 160 Massachusetts Avenue. The couple raised two sons in Highland, New York and now live in Highland and the Yucatán Coast in Mexico, John Storyk Interview - NAMM Oral History Library
8.
Olivier Messiaen
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Olivier-Eugène-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is complex, harmonically and melodically it often uses modes of limited transposition. Messiaen also drew on his Roman Catholic faith for his pieces and he travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences such as Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He said he perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords, combinations of these colours, for a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with total serialism, in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many global musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan, Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s, the piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. He was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941 and his many distinguished pupils included Quincy Jones, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife. He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music and his innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaens music distinctive. Olivier-Eugène-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10,1908 in Avignon, France and he was the elder of two sons of Cécile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaens mother published a sequence of poems, Lâme en bourgeon, the last chapter of Tandis que la terre tourne, Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre Messiaen enlisted, there Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné and he took piano lessons having already taught himself to play. His interest included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the moved to Nantes. The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris, Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11. At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress, in 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon
9.
The Wall Street Journal
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The Wall Street Journal is an American business-focused, English-language international daily newspaper based in New York City. The Journal, along with its Asian and European editions, is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, the newspaper is published in the broadsheet format and online. The Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, the Journal had a circulation of about 2.4 million copies as of March 2013, compared with USA Todays 1.7 million. The newspaper has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes through 2015 and derives its name from Wall Street in the heart of the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The Journal has been printed continuously since its inception on July 8,1889, by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, the Journal also publishes the luxury news and lifestyle magazine WSJ. They were later aggregated in a daily summary called the Customers Afternoon Letter. In 1896, The Dow Jones Industrial Average was officially launched and it was the first of several indices of stock and bond prices on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1899, the Journals Review & Outlook column, which still today, appeared for the first time. Journalist Clarence Barron purchased control of the company for US$130,000 in 1902, circulation was then around 7,000, Barron and his predecessors were credited with creating an atmosphere of fearless, independent financial reporting—a novelty in the early days of business journalism. In 1921, Barrons, Americas premier financial weekly, was founded, Barron died in 1928, a year before Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that greatly affected the Great Depression in the United States. Barrons descendants, the Bancroft family, would continue to control the company until 2007, the Journal took its modern shape and prominence in the 1940s, a time of industrial expansion for the United States and its financial institutions in New York. Bernard Kilgore was named managing editor of the paper in 1941, under Kilgore, in 1947, that the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize, for William Henry Grimess editorials. In 1970, Dow Jones bought the Ottaway newspaper chain, which at the time comprised nine dailies, later, the name was changed to Dow Jones Local Media Group. In 2007 News Corp. acquired Dow Jones, a luxury lifestyle magazine, was launched in 2008. A complement to the print newspaper, The Wall Street Journal Online, was launched in 1996, in 2003, Dow Jones began to integrate reporting of the Journals print and online subscribers together in Audit Bureau of Circulations statements. In 2007, it was believed to be the largest paid-subscription news site on the Web. Since then, online subscribership has fallen, due in part to rising subscription costs, in May 2008, an annual subscription to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal cost $119 for those who do not have subscriptions to the print edition. By June 2013, the monthly cost for a subscription to the edition was $22.99, or $275.88 annually
10.
Manhattan School of Music
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The Manhattan School of Music is a major music conservatory located on the Upper West Side of New York City. The school offers degrees on the bachelors, masters, and doctoral levels in the areas of classical and jazz performance, founded in 1917, the school is located on Claremont Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City, adjacent to Broadway and West 122nd Street. The MSM campus was originally the home to The Institute of Musical Art until Juilliard migrated to the Lincoln Center area of Midtown Manhattan, the property was originally owned by the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum until The Institute of Musical Art purchased it in 1910. The campus of Columbia University resides close by, where it has been since 1895, many of the students live in the schools residence hall, Andersen Hall. As of 2011,75 percent of the come from outside New York State and 31 percent from outside the United States. The Manhattan School of Music was founded in 1917–1918, by the pianist and philanthropist Janet D. Schenck, eventually, its name was changed to Manhattan School of Music. In 1943, the artistic and academic growth of the resulted in a charter amendment to grant the bachelor of music degree. Two subsequent amendments authorized the offering in 1947 of the master of music degree and, in 1974, in 1956, Dr. Schenck retired and Metropolitan Opera baritone John Brownlee was appointed director, a title later revised to president. President Brownlee initiated the idea of relocating the school to the Morningside Heights neighborhood, in 1969, George Schick, Metropolitan Opera conductor, accompanist, and opera coach, succeeded Brownlee as president and led the schools move to its present location. He created the program, while all other major school functions were managed by Senior Director Stanley Bednar. John O. Crosby, founder and general director of the Santa Fe Opera, was appointed president in 1976 and he was followed by Gideon W. Waldrop, who was appointed in 1986, and Peter C. Simon in 1989. On July 1,1992, Marta Casals Istomin was named president, Dr. Robert Sirota, former director of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, took over the presidency in 2005. He was succeeded by James Gandre, formerly of Roosevelt University, Manhattan School of Music offers a wide variety of live audience performance experiences for its students. There are three orchestras, The MSM Symphony, the Philharmonia, and the Chamber Sinfonia. In addition, many ensembles are assembled for orchestral chamber music. The MSM Wind Ensemble also performs throughout the year, the Jazz Arts Program also contains various ensembles, such as the Jazz Philharmonic, the Jazz Orchestra, Concert Jazz Band, Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, and Chamber Jazz Ensemble. Tactus, the ensemble for chamber music, is made up of graduate students in the schools Contemporary Performance Program. The school also holds an annual competition with which the winner is offered the opportunity to perform with the Symphony Orchestra
11.
Fine art
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Historically, the five main fine arts were painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry, with performing arts including theatre and dance. Today, the fine arts commonly include additional forms, such as film, photography, video production/editing, design, sequential art, conceptual art, and printmaking. However, in some institutes of learning or in museums, fine art, in that sense, there are conceptual differences between the fine arts and the applied arts. The word fine does not so much denote the quality of the artwork in question and this definition originally excluded the applied or decorative arts, and the products of what were regarded as crafts. According to some writers the concept of a category of fine art is an invention of the early modern period in the West. Larry Shiner in his The Invention of Art, A Cultural History locates the invention in the 18th century, There was a traditional “system of the arts” in the West before the eighteenth century. ”Similar ideas have been expressed by Paul Oskar Kristeller, Pierre Bourdieu, and Terry Eagleton, though the point of invention is often placed earlier, in the Italian Renaissance. The separation of arts and crafts that often exists in Europe, in Japanese aesthetics the activities of everyday life are depicted by integrating not only art with craft but man-made with nature. Traditional Chinese art distinguished within Chinese painting between the mostly landscape painting of scholar gentlemen and the artisans of the schools of court painting. A high status was given to many things that would be seen as craft objects in the West, in particular ceramics, jade carving, weaving. Drawing is a form of expression and is one of the major forms of the visual arts. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, chalk, pastels, markers, stylus, There are a number of subcategories of drawing, including cartooning. Mosaics are images formed with pieces of stone or glass. They can be decorative or functional, an artist who designs and makes mosaics is called a mosaic artist or a mosaicist. Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper, except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable of producing multiples of the same piece, which is called a print. Each print is considered an original, as opposed to a copy, the reasoning behind this is that the print is not a reproduction of another work of art in a different medium — for instance, a painting — but rather an image designed from inception as a print. An individual print is also referred to as an impression, prints are created from a single original surface, known technically as a matrix. But there are other kinds, discussed below. Multiple nearly identical prints can be called an edition, in modern times each print is often signed and numbered forming a limited edition
12.
Jazz
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Jazz is a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the Black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience, intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as one of Americas original art forms. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musicians music which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments. In the early 1980s, a form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin, the question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a term dating back to 1860 meaning pep. The use of the word in a context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a context in New Orleans was in a November 14,1916 Times-Picayune article about jas bands. In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, When Broadway picked it up. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, in the opinion of Robert Christgau, most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz. As Duke Ellington, one of jazzs most famous figures, said, although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements
