1.
Composer
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A composer is a person who creates or writes music, which can be vocal music, instrumental music or music which combines both instruments and voices. The core meaning of the term refers to individuals who have contributed to the tradition of Western classical music through creation of works expressed in written musical notation, many composers are also skilled performers, either as singers, instrumentalists, and/or conductors. Examples of composers who are well known for their ability as performers include J. S. Bach, Mozart. In many popular genres, such as rock and country. For a singer or instrumental performer, the process of deciding how to perform music that has previously composed and notated is termed interpretation. Different performers interpretations of the work of music can vary widely, in terms of the tempos that are chosen. Composers and songwriters who present their own music are interpreting, just as much as those who perform the music of others, although a musical composition often has a single author, this is not always the case. A piece of music can also be composed with words, images, or, in the 20th and 21st century, a culture eventually developed whereby faithfulness to the composers written intention came to be highly valued. This musical culture is almost certainly related to the esteem in which the leading classical composers are often held by performers. The movement might be considered a way of creating greater faithfulness to the original in works composed at a time that expected performers to improvise. In Classical music, the composer typically orchestrates her own compositions, in some cases, a pop songwriter may not use notation at all, and instead compose the song in her mind and then play or record it from memory. In jazz and popular music, notable recordings by influential performers are given the weight that written scores play in classical music. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians varies, which issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of music. In the development of European classical music, the function of composing music initially did not have greater importance than that of performing it. The preservation of individual compositions did not receive attention and musicians generally had no qualms about modifying compositions for performance. In as much as the role of the composer in western art music has seen continued solidification, for instance, in certain contexts the line between composer and performer, sound designer, arranger, producer, and other roles, can be quite blurred. The term composer is often used to refer to composers of music, such as those found in classical, jazz or other forms of art. In popular and folk music, the composer is usually called a songwriter and this is distinct from a 19th-century conception of instrumental composition, where the work was represented solely by a musical score to be interpreted by performers
2.
Les Six
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Les Six is a name given to a group of six French composers who worked in Montparnasse. The name, inspired by Mily Balakirevs The Five, originates in critic Henri Collets 1920 article Les cinq Russes, les six Français et M. Satie. Their music is seen as a reaction against the musical style of Richard Wagner. The members were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, for the first of these events, the walls of the studio were decorated with canvases by Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Modigliani and others. Music by Erik Satie, Honegger, Auric and Durey was played and it was this concert that gave Satie the idea of assembling a group of composers around himself to be known as Les nouveaux jeunes, forerunners of Les Six. Auric and Poulenc followed ideas of Cocteau, Honegger followed German Romanticism, after World War I, Jean Cocteau and Les Six began to frequent a bar known as La gaya which became Le Bœuf sur le Toit when the establishment moved to larger quarters. As the famous ballet by Milhaud had been conceived at the old premises, on the renamed bars opening night, pianist Jean Wiéner played tunes by George Gershwin and Vincent Youmans while Cocteau and Milhaud played percussion. Among those in attendance were impresario Serge Diaghilev, artist Pablo Picasso, filmmaker René Clair, singer Jane Bathori, the Group was officially launched in January 1920 by a series of two articles by the French music critic and composer Henri Collet in the French journal Commedia. While it seems apparent that Cocteau was behind these articles, the name of the Group was selected by Collet. On only one of these occasions was the entire Groupe des Six involved, Auric and Poulenc were involved in all six of these collaborations, Milhaud in five, Honegger and Tailleferre in three, but Durey in only one. In 1920 the group published an album of pieces together. This was the work in which all six composers collaborated. Durey, who was not in Paris at the time, chose not to participate, the première was the occasion of a public scandal rivalling that of Le sacre du printemps in 1913. In spite of this, Les mariés de la tour Eiffel was in the repertoire of the Ballets suédois throughout the 1920s, the other composers who contributed to the suite were Jean Françaix, Léo Preger and Henri Sauguet. Les Six, The French Composers and their Mentors Jean Cocteau, ISBN 978-0-7206-1293-6 J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, Claude V. Palisca. 8th edition, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, London ISBN 978-0-393-93125-9 Les Six, Satie, and Cocteau – by Stéphane Villemin
3.
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
4.
Polytonality
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Polytonality is the musical use of more than one key simultaneously. Bitonality is the use of two different keys at the same time. Polyvalence is the use of more than one function, from the same key. Some examples of bitonality superimpose fully harmonized sections of music in different keys, Lithuanian traditional singing style sutartines is based on polytonality. This six-bar melody is performed as a canon, and repetition starts from the fourth bar, as a result, parts are constantly singing in different tonality simultaneously. As a traditional style, sutartines disappeared in Lithuanian villages by the first decades of the 20th century, tribes throughout India—including the Kuravan of Kerala, the Jaunsari of Uttar Pradesh, the Gond, the Santal, and the Munda—also use bitonality, in responsorial song. In other words, Bach is trying to make the best of both worlds—the homotonal one of his own day and the one of a couple of centuries later. However, it was not featured prominently in non-programmatic contexts until the twentieth century, particularly in the work of Charles Ives, Béla Bartók, and Stravinsky. Ives claimed that he learned the technique of polytonality from his father, bartóks Playsong demonstrates easily perceivable bitonality through the harmonic motion of each key. Polytonality requires the presentation of simultaneous key-centers, the term polychord describes chords that can be constructed by superimposing multiple familiar tonal sonorities. The Petrushka chord is an example of a polychord and this is the norm in jazz, for example, which makes frequent use of extended and polychordal harmonies without any intended suggestion of multiple keys. The following passage, taken from Beethovens Piano Sonata in E♭, Op. 81a, passages of music, such as Poulencs Mouvements Perpetuels, I. may be misinterpreted as polytonal rather than polymodal. In this case, two scales are recognizable but are assimilated through the common tonic, polyscalarity is defined as the simultaneous use of musical objects which clearly suggest different source-collections. Specifically in reference to Stravinskys music, Tymoczko uses the term polyscalarity out of deference to terminological sensibilities, in other words, the term is meant to avoid any implication that the listener can perceive two keys at once. Though Tymoczko believes that polytonality is perceivable, he believes polyscalarity is better suited to describe Stravinskys music and this term is also used as a response to Van den Toorns analysis against polytonality. Van den Toorn, in an attempt to dismiss polytonal analysis used an approach to analyze the music with the octatonic scale. However, Tymoczko states that this was problematic in that it does not resolve all instances of multiple interactions between scales and chords, moreover, Tymoczko quotes Stravinskys claim that the music of Petrouchkas second tableau was conceived in two keys. Polyscalarity is then a term encompassing multiscalar superimpositions and cases which give a different explanation than the octatonic scale, Some music theorists, including Milton Babbitt and Paul Hindemith have questioned whether polytonality is a useful or meaningful notion or viable auditory possibility
5.
Marseille
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Marseille, also known as Marseilles in English, is a city in France. Known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as Massalia, Marseille was the most important trading centre in the region, Marseille is now Frances largest city on the Mediterranean coast and the largest port for commerce, freight and cruise ships. The city was European Capital of Culture, together with Košice, Slovakia and it hosted the European Football Championship in 2016, and will be the European Capital of Sport in 2017. The city is home to campuses of Aix-Marseille University and part of one of the largest metropolitan conurbations in France. Marseille is the second largest city in France after Paris and the centre of the third largest metropolitan area in France after Paris, further east still are the Sainte-Baume, the city of Toulon and the French Riviera. To the north of Marseille, beyond the low Garlaban and Etoile mountain ranges, is the 1,011 m Mont Sainte Victoire. To the west of Marseille is the artists colony of lEstaque, further west are the Côte Bleue, the Gulf of Lion. The airport lies to the north west of the city at Marignane on the Étang de Berre, the citys main thoroughfare stretches eastward from the Old Port to the Réformés quarter. Two large forts flank the entrance to the Old Port—Fort Saint-Nicolas on the south side and Fort Saint-Jean on the north. Further out in the Bay of Marseille is the Frioul archipelago which comprises four islands, one of which, If, is the location of Château dIf, the main commercial centre of the city intersects with the Canebière at rue St Ferréol and the Centre Bourse. To the south east of central Marseille in the 6th arrondissement are the Prefecture and the fountain of Place Castellane. To the south west are the hills of the 7th arrondissement, the railway station—Gare de Marseille Saint-Charles—is north of the Centre Bourse in the 1st arrondissement, it is linked by the Boulevard dAthènes to the Canebière. Marseille has a Mediterranean climate with mild, humid winters and warm to hot, december, January, and February are the coldest months, averaging temperatures of around 12 °C during the day and 4 °C at night. Marseille is officially the sunniest major city in France with over 2,900 hours of sunshine while the average sunshine in France is around 1,950 hours, less frequent is the Sirocco, a hot, sand-bearing wind, coming from the Sahara Desert. Snowfalls are infrequent, over 50% of years do not experience a single snowfall, Massalia, whose name was probably adapted from an existing language related to Ligurian, was the first Greek settlement in France. It was established within modern Marseille around 600 BC by colonists coming from Phocaea on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. The connection between Massalia and the Phoceans is mentioned in Thucydidess Peloponnesian War, he notes that the Phocaean project was opposed by the Carthaginians, the founding of Massalia has also been recorded as a legend. Protis was invited inland to a banquet held by the chief of the local Ligurian tribe for suitors seeking the hand of his daughter Gyptis in marriage, at the end of the banquet, Gyptis presented the ceremonial cup of wine to Protis, indicating her unequivocal choice
6.
Jews
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The Jews, also known as the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group originating from the Israelites, or Hebrews, of the Ancient Near East. Jews originated as a national and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, the Merneptah Stele appears to confirm the existence of a people of Israel, associated with the god El, somewhere in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. The Israelites, as an outgrowth of the Canaanite population, consolidated their hold with the emergence of the Kingdom of Israel, some consider that these Canaanite sedentary Israelites melded with incoming nomadic groups known as Hebrews. The worldwide Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million prior to World War II, but approximately 6 million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Since then the population has risen again, and as of 2015 was estimated at 14.3 million by the Berman Jewish DataBank. According to the report, about 43% of all Jews reside in Israel and these numbers include all those who self-identified as Jews in a socio-demographic study or were identified as such by a respondent in the same household. The exact world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure, Israel is the only country where Jews form a majority of the population. The modern State of Israel was established as a Jewish state and defines itself as such in its Declaration of Independence and its Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to any Jew who requests it. The English word Jew continues Middle English Gyw, Iewe, according to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. The Hebrew word for Jew, יְהוּדִי ISO 259-3 Yhudi, is pronounced, with the stress on the syllable, in Israeli Hebrew. The Ladino name is ג׳ודיו, Djudio, ג׳ודיוס, Djudios, Yiddish, ייִד Yid, ייִדן, Yidn. The etymological equivalent is in use in languages, e. g. but derivations of the word Hebrew are also in use to describe a Jew, e. g. in Italian. The German word Jude is pronounced, the corresponding adjective jüdisch is the origin of the word Yiddish, in such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a factual reconstruction for the origin of the Jews is a difficult and complex endeavor. It requires examining at least 3,000 years of ancient human history using documents in vast quantities, as archaeological discovery relies upon researchers and scholars from diverse disciplines, the goal is to interpret all of the factual data, focusing on the most consistent theory. In this case, it is complicated by long standing politics and religious, Jacob and his family migrated to Ancient Egypt after being invited to live with Jacobs son Joseph by the Pharaoh himself. The patriarchs descendants were later enslaved until the Exodus led by Moses, traditionally dated to the 13th century BCE, Modern archaeology has largely discarded the historicity of the Patriarchs and of the Exodus story, with it being reframed as constituting the Israelites inspiring national myth narrative. The growth of Yahweh-centric belief, along with a number of practices, gradually gave rise to a distinct Israelite ethnic group
7.
Aix-en-Provence
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Aix-en-Provence, or simply Aix, is a city-commune in the south of France, about 30 km north of Marseille. It is in the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte dAzur, in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, the population of Aix numbers approximately 143,000. Its inhabitants are called Aixois or, less commonly, Aquisextains, Aix was founded in 123 BC by the Roman consul Sextius Calvinus, who gave his name to its springs, following the destruction of the nearby Gallic oppidum at Entremont. In the 4th century AD it became the metropolis of Narbonensis Secunda and it was occupied by the Visigoths in 477. In the succeeding century, the town was plundered by the Franks and Lombards. Aix passed to the crown of France with the rest of Provence in 1487, and in 1501 Louis XII established there the parliament of Provence, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the town was the seat of the Intendance of Provence. Current archeological excavations in the Ville des Tours, a suburb of Aix, have unearthed the remains of a Roman amphitheatre. The city slopes gently north to south and the Montagne Sainte-Victoire can easily be seen to the east. Aixs position in the south of France gives it a warm climate and it has an average January temperature of 5 °C and a July average of 23 °C. It has an average of 300 days of sunshine and only 91 days of rain, while it is partially protected from the Mistral, Aix still occasionally experiences the cooler and gusty conditions it brings. Unlike most of France which has a climate, Aix-en-Provence has a Mediterranean climate. The Cours Mirabeau is a thoroughfare, planted with double rows of plane-trees, bordered by fine houses. It follows the line of the old city wall and divides the town into two sections. The new town extends to the south and west, the old town, with its narrow, along this avenue, which is lined on one side with banks and on the other with cafés, is the Deux Garçons, the most famous brasserie in Aix. Built in 1792, it has been frequented by the likes of Paul Cézanne, Émile Zola, the Cathedral of the Holy Saviour is situated to the north in the medieval part of Aix. The archbishops palace and a Romanesque cloister adjoin the cathedral on its south side, the Archbishopric of Aix is now shared with Arles. Among its other public institutions, Aix also has the second most important Appeal Court outside of Paris, the Hôtel de Ville, a building in the classical style of the middle of the 17th century, looks onto a picturesque square. It contains some fine woodwork and tapestries, at its side rises a handsome clock-tower erected in 1510
8.
Conservatoire de Paris
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The Conservatoire de Paris is a college of music and dance founded in 1795, now situated in the avenue Jean Jaurès in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, France. The Conservatoire offers instruction in music, dance, and drama, today the conservatories operate under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and Communication. On 3 December 1783 Papillon de la Ferté, intendant of the Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, the school was instituted by a decree of 3 January 1784 and opened on 1 April with the composer François-Joseph Gossec as the provisional director. Piccinni refused the directorship, but did join the faculty as a professor of singing, the new school was located in buildings adjacent to the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs at the junction of the rue Bergère and the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière. In June, a class in dramatic declamation was added, in 1792, Bernard Sarrette created the École gratuite de la garde nationale, which in the following year became the Institut national de musique. On 3 August 1795, the government combined the École royale with the Institut national de musique, the combined organization remained in the facilities on the rue Bergère. The first 351 pupils commenced their studies in October 1796, a concert hall, designed by the architect François-Jacques Delannoy, was inaugurated on 7 July 1811. The hall, which exists today, was in the shape of a U. It held an audience of 1055, the acoustics were generally regarded as superb. The French composer and conductor Antoine Elwart described it as the Stradivarius of concert halls, in 1828 François Habeneck, a professor of violin and head of the Conservatorys orchestra, founded the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. The Society held concerts in the hall almost continuously until 1945, the French composer Hector Berlioz premiered his Symphonie fantastique in the conservatorys hall on 5 December 1830 with an orchestra of more than a hundred players. The original library was created by Sarrette in 1801, after the construction of the concert hall, the library moved to a large room above the entrance vestibule. In the 1830s, Berlioz became a curator in the Conservatory library and was the librarian from 1852 until his death in 1869. He was succeeded as librarian by Félicien David, Sarrette was dismissed on 28 December 1814, after the Bourbon Restoration, but was reinstated on 26 May 1815, after Napoleons return to power during the Hundred Days. However, after Napoleons fall, Sarrette was finally compelled to retire on 17 November, in 1819, François Benoist was appointed professor of organ. Probably the best known director in the 19th century was Luigi Cherubini, Cherubini maintained high standards and his staff included teachers such as François-Joseph Fétis, Habeneck, Fromental Halévy, Le Sueur, Ferdinando Paer, and Anton Reicha. Cherubini was succeeded by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber in 1842, in 1852, Camille Urso, who studied with Lambert Massart, became the first female student to win a prize on violin. The Conservatory Instrument Museum, founded in 1861, was formed from the instrument collection of Louis Clapisson, the French music historian Gustave Chouquet became the curator of the museum in 1871 and did much to expand and upgrade the collection
9.
Arthur Honegger
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Arthur Honegger was a Swiss composer, who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. He was a member of Les Six and his most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which was inspired by the sound of a steam locomotive. Born Oscar-Arthur Honegger to Swiss parents in Le Havre, France, he studied harmony. After studying for two years at the Zurich Conservatory he enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire from 1911 to 1918 and he made his Paris compositional debut in 1916 and in 1918 wrote the ballet Le dit des jeux du monde, generally considered to be his first characteristic work. In 1926 he married Andrée Vaurabourg, a pianist and fellow student at the Paris Conservatoire and they had one daughter, Pascale, born in 1932. Honegger also had a son, Jean-Claude, with the singer Claire Croiza, in the early 1920s, Honegger shot to fame with his dramatic psalm Le roi David, which is still in the choral repertoire. Between World War I and World War II, Honegger was very prolific and he composed the music for Abel Gances epic 1927 film, Napoléon. He composed nine ballets and three vocal stage works, amongst other works, one of those stage works, Jeanne dArc au bûcher, a dramatic oratorio, is thought of as one of his finest works. In addition to his pieces written alone, he collaborated with Jacques Ibert on both an opera, LAiglon, and an operetta, during this time period he also wrote Danse de la chèvre, an essential piece of flute repertoire. Dedicated to René Le Roy and written for flute alone, this piece is lively and charming, but with the same directness of all Honeggers work. Honegger always remained in touch with Switzerland, his parents country of origin, until the outbreak of the war and he joined the French Resistance and was generally unaffected by the Nazis themselves, who allowed him to continue his work without too much interference. He also taught composition at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, however, he was greatly depressed by the war. Between its outbreak and his death, he wrote his last four symphonies which are among the most powerful works of the 20th century. Written in 1946 just after the end of the war, it has parallels with Benjamin Brittens Sinfonia da Requiem of 1940, in contrast with this work is the lyrical, nostalgic Symphony No. 4, subtitled Deliciae Basilienses, written as a tribute to days of relaxation spent in that Swiss city during the war, Honegger was widely known as a train enthusiast, and once notably said, I have always loved locomotives passionately. For me they are living creatures and I love them as others love women or horses and his mouvement symphonique Pacific 231 gained him early notoriety in 1923. Many of Honeggers works were championed by his longtime friend Georges Tzipine, in 1953 he wrote his last composition, A Christmas Cantata. After a protracted illness, he died at home in Paris of an attack on 27 November 1955 and was interred in the Saint-Vincent Cemetery in the Montmartre Quarter
10.
Germaine Tailleferre
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Germaine Tailleferre was a French composer and the only female member of the group of composers known as Les Six. At the Paris Conservatory her skills were rewarded with prizes in several categories, most notably Tailleferre wrote 18 short works in the Petit livre de harpe de Madame Tardieu for Caroline Luigini, the Conservatory’s Assistant Professor of harp. It was in the Montparnasse atelier of one of her friends where the initial idea for Les Six began. The publication of Jean Cocteaus manifesto Le coq et lArlequin resulted in Henri Collets media articles that led to instant fame for the group, in 1923, Tailleferre began to spend a great deal of time with Maurice Ravel at his home in Montfort-lAmaury. Ravel encouraged her to enter the Prix de Rome Competition, in 1925, she married Ralph Barton, an American caricaturist, and moved to Manhattan, New York. She remained in the United States until 1927 when she and her returned to France. Her work in music included Le petit chose by Maurice Cloche. At the outbreak of World War II, she was forced to leave the majority of her scores at her home in Grasse, with the exception of her recently completed Three Études for Piano and Orchestra. Escaping across Spain to Portugal, she found passage on a boat that brought her to the United States, the majority of this music was not published until after her death. In 1976, she accepted the post of accompanist for a music and movement class at the École alsacienne. During the last period of her life, she concentrated mainly on smaller forms due to increasing problems with arthritis in her hands. Her last major work was the Concerto de la fidelité for coloratura soprano and orchestra, germaine Tailleferre continued to compose right up until a few weeks before her death, on 7 November 1983 in Paris. She is buried in Quincy-Voisins, Seine-et-Marne, France
11.
Musical composition
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People who create new compositions are called composers in classical music. In popular music and traditional music, the creators of new songs are usually called songwriters, with songs, Composition is the act or practice of creating a song or other piece of music. In popular music and traditional music, songwriting may involve the creation of an outline of the song, called the lead sheet. In classical music, orchestration is typically done by the composer, in some cases, a pop or traditional songwriter may not use written notation at all, and instead compose the song in her mind and then play, sing and/or record it from memory. In jazz and popular music, notable recordings by influential performers are given the weight that written or printed scores play in classical music. Although a musical composition often uses musical notation and has a single author, a piece of music can also be composed with words, images, or, since the 20th century, with computer programs that explain or notate how the singer or musician should create musical sounds. A more commonly known example of chance-based music is the sound of wind chimes jingling in a breeze, although in the 2000s, composition is considered to consist of the manipulation of each aspect of music, according to Jean-Benjamin de Laborde, Composition consists in two things only. The first is the ordering and disposing of several sounds. in such a manner that their succession pleases the ear and this is what the Ancients called melody. The second is the rendering audible of two or more simultaneous sounds in such a manner that their combination is pleasant and this is what we call harmony, and it alone merits the name of composition. In classical music, a piece of music exists in the form of a composition in musical notation or as a live acoustic event. Since the invention of recording, a classical piece or popular song may also exist as a recording. If music is composed before being performed, music can be performed from memory, by reading written musical notation, compositions comprise a huge variety of musical elements, which vary widely from between genres and cultures. Popular music genres after about 1960 make extensive use of electric and electronic instruments, such as electric guitar, electric and electronic instruments are used in contemporary classical music compositions and concerts, albeit to a lesser degree than in popular music. Music from the Baroque music era, for example, used only acoustic and mechanical such as strings, brass, woodwinds, timpani and keyboard instruments such as harpsichord. A 2000s-era pop band may use electric guitar played with electronic effects through a guitar amplifier, different musical styles permit singers or performers to use various amounts of musical improvisation during the performance of a composed song or piece. In free jazz, the performers may play without any sheet music, improvisation is the act of composing musical elements spontaneously during the performance, as opposed to having a composer write down the music beforehand. Improvisation was an important skill during the Baroque music era, instrumentalists and singers were expected to be able to improvise ornaments, during the classical period, solo instrumentalists were expected to be able to improvise virtuostic cadenzas during a concerto. During the Romantic music era, composers began writing out ornaments and cadenzas, in contemporary classical music, some composers began writing pieces which indicate that the performer should improvise during certain sections
12.
Charles-Marie Widor
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Charles-Marie Jean Albert Widor was a French organist, composer and teacher, most notable for his ten organ symphonies. Widor was born in Lyon, to a family of organ builders, after this term of study Widor moved to Paris, where he would make his home for the rest of his life. At the age of 24 he was appointed assistant to Camille Saint-Saëns at Église de la Madeleine, the organ at St-Sulpice was Cavaillé-Colls masterwork, the instruments spectacular capabilities proved an inspiration to Widor. Despite his jobs ostensibly provisional nature, Widor remained as organist at St-Sulpice for nearly 64 years and he was succeeded in 1934 by his former student and assistant, Marcel Dupré. In 1890, upon the death of César Franck, Widor succeeded him as professor at the Paris Conservatoire. The class he inherited was initially stunned by this new teacher, who demanded a formidable technique. Bachs organ works as prerequisites to effective improvisation, later, he gave up this post to become composition professor at the same institution. Albert Schweitzer also studied with Widor, mainly from 1899, master, Widor, whose own master Lemmens was an important Bach exponent, encouraged Schweitzers theological exploration of Bachs music. Among the leading organ recitalists of his time, Widor visited many different nations in this capacity, including Russia, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Poland and Switzerland. In addition he participated in the concerts of many of Cavaillé-Colls greatest instruments, notably Notre-Dame de Paris, Saint-Germain-des-Près. In 1921, Widor founded the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau with Francis-Louis Casadesus and he was the Director until 1934, when he was succeeded by Maurice Ravel. His close friend, Isidor Philipp gave piano lessons there, at the age of 76, Widor married Mathilde de Montesquiou-Fézensac on 26 April 1920 at Charchigné. The 36-year-old Mathilde was a member of one of the oldest and most prominent families of Europe and she died in 1960, there were no children from this union. On 31 December 1933, at age 89, Widor retired from his position at Saint-Sulpice, three years later he suffered a stroke which paralysed the right side of his body, although he remained mentally alert to the last. He died at his home in Paris on 12 March 1937 at the age of 93, Widor wrote music for a wide variety of instruments and ensembles and composed four operas and a ballet, but only his works for organ are played with any regularity today. These include, ten Organ Symphonies, three Symphonies for orchestra with organ, Suite Latine, Trois Nouvelles Pièces, and six arrangements of works by Bach under the title Bachs Memento, the organ symphonies are his most significant contribution to the organ repertoire. It is unusual for a written for one instrument to be assigned the term symphony. However, Widor was at the forefront of a revival in French organ music, the organ of the Baroque and Classical periods was designed to project a clear and crisp sound capable of handling contrapuntal writing
13.
Harmony
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In music, harmony considers the process by which the composition of individual sounds, or superpositions of sounds, is analysed by hearing. Usually, this means simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches, or chords, the study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic line. In popular and jazz harmony, chords are named by their root plus various terms, in many types of music, notably baroque, romantic, modern, and jazz, chords are often augmented with tensions. A tension is an additional member that creates a relatively dissonant interval in relation to the bass. Typically, in the common practice period a dissonant chord resolves to a consonant chord. Harmonization usually sounds pleasant to the ear when there is a balance between the consonant and dissonant sounds, in simple words, that occurs when there is a balance between tense and relaxed moments. The term harmony derives from the Greek ἁρμονία, meaning joint, agreement, concord, from the verb ἁρμόζω, to fit together, the term was often used for the whole field of music, while music referred to the arts in general. In Ancient Greece, the term defined the combination of contrasted elements, in the Middle Ages the term was used to describe two pitches sounding in combination, and in the Renaissance the concept was expanded to denote three pitches sounding together. Aristoxenus wrote a work entitled Harmonika Stoicheia, which is thought the first work in European history written on the subject of harmony, the underlying principle behind these texts is that harmony sanctions harmoniousness by conforming to certain pre-established compositional principles. Current dictionary definitions, while attempting to give concise descriptions, often highlight the ambiguity of the term in modern use, ambiguities tend to arise from either aesthetic considerations or from the point of view of musical texture (distinguishing between harmonic and contrapuntal. The view that modern tonal harmony in Western music began in about 1600 is commonplace in music theory and this is usually accounted for by the replacement of horizontal writing, common in the music of the Renaissance, with a new emphasis on the vertical element of composed music. Modern theorists, however, tend to see this as an unsatisfactory generalisation, as Carl Dahlhaus puts it, It was not that counterpoint was supplanted by harmony but that an older type both of counterpoint and of vertical technique was succeeded by a newer type. And harmony comprises not only the structure of chords but also their movement, like music as a whole, harmony is a process. Descriptions and definitions of harmony and harmonic practice may show bias towards European musical traditions, pitch simultaneity in particular is rarely a major consideration. Nevertheless, emphasis on the precomposed in European art music and the written theory surrounding it shows considerable cultural bias, the conception of musics that live in oral traditions as something composed with the use of improvisatory techniques separates them from the higher-standing works that use notation. Yet the evolution of harmonic practice and language itself, in Western art music, is and was facilitated by this process of prior composition, some traditions of Western music performance, composition, and theory have specific rules of harmony. This model provides that the seventh and ninth are not dissonant
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Counterpoint
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In music, counterpoint is the relationship between voices that are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradition, strongly developing during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period, the term originates from the Latin punctus contra punctum meaning point against point. Counterpoint generally involves musical lines with strongly independent identities, Counterpoint has been used to designate a voice or even an entire composition. In each era, contrapuntally organized music writing has been subject to rules—sometimes strict ones, chords are the simultaneous soundings of notes, whereas harmonic, vertical features are considered secondary and almost incidental when counterpoint is the predominant textural element. Counterpoint focuses on melodic interaction—only secondarily on the produced by that interaction. In the words of John Rahn, It is hard to write a beautiful song and it is harder to write several individually beautiful songs that, when sung simultaneously, sound as a more beautiful polyphonic whole. The way that is accomplished in detail is, some examples of related compositional techniques include, the round, the canon, and perhaps the most complex contrapuntal convention, the fugue. All of these are examples of imitative counterpoint, Species counterpoint generally offers less freedom to the composer than other types of counterpoint and therefore is called a strict counterpoint. The student gradually attains the ability to free counterpoint according to the given rules at the time. The idea is at least as old as 1532, when Giovanni Maria Lanfranco described a concept in his Scintille di musica. Zacconi, unlike later theorists, included a few extra contrapuntal techniques, a succession of later theorists quite closely imitated Fuxs seminal work, often with some small and idiosyncratic modifications in the rules. The following rules apply to melodic writing in each species, for each part, if the final is approached from below, then the leading tone must be raised in a minor key, but not in Phrygian or Hypophrygian mode. Thus, in the Dorian mode on D, a C♯ is necessary at the cadence, permitted melodic intervals are the perfect fourth, fifth, and octave, as well as the major and minor second, major and minor third, and ascending minor sixth. The ascending minor sixth must be followed by motion downwards. The three notes should be from the triad, if this is impossible, they should not outline more than one octave. In general, do not write more than two skips in the same direction, if writing a skip in one direction, it is best to proceed after the skip with motion in the other direction. The interval of a tritone in three notes should be avoided as is the interval of a seventh in three notes, there must be a climax or high point in the line countering the cantus firmus. This usually occurs somewhere in the middle of exercise and must occur on a strong beat, an outlining of a seventh is avoided within a single line moving in the same direction
15.
Vincent d'Indy
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Vincent dIndy was a French composer and teacher. Paul Marie Théodore Vincent dIndy was born in Paris into a family of royalist. He had piano lessons from an age from his paternal grandmother. From the age of 14 he studied harmony with Albert Lavignac, at age 19, during the Franco-Prussian War, he enlisted in the National Guard, but returned to musical life as soon as the hostilities were over. On the advice of Henri Duparc, he became a student of César Franck at the Conservatoire de Paris. As a follower of Franck, dIndy came to admire what he considered the standards of German symphonism, in the summer of 1873 he visited Germany, where he met Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. On 25 January 1874 his overture Les Piccolomini was performed at a Pasdeloup concert, around this time he married Isabelle de Pampelonne, one of his cousins. In 1875 his symphony dedicated to János Hunyadi was performed and that same year he played a minor role – the prompter – at the premiere of Bizets opera Carmen. In 1876 he was present at the first production of Richard Wagners Ring Cycle at Bayreuth and this made a great impression on him and he became a fervent Wagnerite. In 1878 dIndys symphonic ballad La Forêt enchantée was performed, in 1882 he heard Wagners Parsifal. In 1883 his choral work Le Chant de la cloche appeared, in 1884 his symphonic poem Saugefleurie was premiered. His piano suite called Poème des montagnes came from around this time, in 1887 appeared his Suite in D for trumpet,2 flutes and string quartet. That same year he was involved in Lamoureuxs production of Wagners Lohengrin as choirmaster and his music drama Fervaal occupied him between 1889 and 1895. DIndy taught there and later at the Paris Conservatoire until his death, xian was one of the earliest Chinese composers of western classical music See, List of music students by teacher, A to B#Vincent dIndy. While A. A. Saygun became one of the pioneers of music in Turkey. Few of dIndys works are performed regularly today and his music drama Le Légende de Saint Christophe, based on themes from Gregorian chant, was performed for the first, and possibly last, time, on 6 June 1920. His comédie musicale had its premiere in paris on 10 June 1927 and his Lied for cello and orchestra, Op.19, was recorded by Julian Lloyd Webber and the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier in 1991. As well as Franck, dIndys works show the influence of Berlioz, DIndy helped revive a number of then largely forgotten early works, for example, making his own edition of Claudio Monteverdis opera Lincoronazione di Poppea
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Paul Claudel
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Paul Claudel was a French poet, dramatist and diplomat, and the younger brother of the sculptress Camille Claudel. He was most famous for his dramas, which often convey his devout Catholicism. Claudel was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in six different years and he was born in Villeneuve-sur-Fère, into a family of farmers and government officials. His father, Louis-Prosper, dealt in mortgages and bank transactions and his mother, the former Louise Cerveaux, came from a Champagne family of Catholic farmers and priests. Having spent his first years in Champagne, he studied at the lycée of Bar-le-Duc and at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1881 and he would remain a strong Catholic for the rest of his life. He studied at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, the young Claudel seriously considered entering a Benedictine monastery, but in the end began a career in the French diplomatic corps, in which he would serve from 1893 to 1936. He was first vice-consul in New York, and later in Boston. C. while he served in Brazil during the First World War he supervised the continued provision of food supplies from South America to France. In 1936 he retired to his château in Brangues, after a long affair with Rosalie Vetch, a married woman with four children and pregnant with Claudels child, ended in February 1905, Claudel married Reine Sainte-Marie-Perrin on 15 March 1906. In his youth Claudel was heavily influenced by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, like them, he was horrified by modern materialist views of life. Unlike most of them, his response was to embrace Catholicism, all his writings are passionate rejections of the idea of a mechanical or random universe, instead proclaiming the deep spiritual meaning of human life founded on Gods all-governing grace and love. Claudel wrote in a unique verse style and he rejected traditional metrics in favour of long, luxuriant, unrhymed lines of free verse, the so-called verset claudelien, influenced by the Latin psalms of the Vulgate. He used scenes of passionate, obsessive human love to convey with great power Gods infinite love for humanity and his plays were often extraordinarily long, sometimes stretching to eleven hours, and pressed the realities of material staging to their limits. Yet they were staged, at least in part, to rapturous acclaim. In later years he wrote texts to be set to music, most notably Jeanne dArc au Bûcher, as well as his verse dramas, Claudel also wrote much lyric poetry, for example the Cinq Grandes Odes. Claudel was always a controversial figure during his lifetime, and remains so today and his devout Catholicism and his right-wing political views, both slightly unusual stances among his intellectual peers, made him, and continue to make him, unpopular in many circles. As a Catholic, he could not avoid a sense of bitter satisfaction at the fall of the anti-clerical French Third Republic. Claudels diaries make clear his consistent contempt for Nazism, and his attitude to the Vichy regime quickly hardened into opposition. He also committed his sister Camille Claudel to a hospital in March 1913
17.
Playwright
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A playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes plays. The term is not a variant spelling of playwrite, but something quite distinct, hence the prefix and the suffix combine to indicate someone who has wrought words, themes, and other elements into a dramatic form - someone who crafts plays. The homophone with write is in this case entirely coincidental, the term playwright appears to have been coined by Ben Jonson in his Epigram 49, To Playwright, as an insult, to suggest a mere tradesman fashioning works for the theatre. Jonson described himself as a poet, not a playwright, since plays during that time were written in meter and this view was held as late as the early 19th century. The term playwright later lost this negative connotation, the earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are the Ancient Greeks. These early plays were written for annual Athenian competitions among playwrights held around the 5th century BC, such notables as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes established forms still relied on by their modern counterparts. For the ancient Greeks, playwriting involved poïesis, the act of making and this is the source of the English word poet. In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle wrote his Poetics, the first play-writing manual, in this famous text, Aristotle established the principle of action or praxis as the basis for all drama. He then included a hierarchy of elements for the beginning with plot, character, thought, diction, music. The ends of drama were plot, character, and thought, the means of drama were language and music, since the myths, upon which Greek tragedy were based, were widely known, plot had to do with the arrangement and selection of existing material. Character was equated with choice as rather than psychology, so that character was determined by action, in tragedy, the notion of ethical choice determined the character of the individual. Thought had more to do and the imitation of an action that is serious, thus, he developed his notion of hamartia, or tragic flaw, an error in judgment by the main character or protagonist. It provides the basis for the play, a term still held as the sine qua non of dramaturgy. The Poetics, while very brief and highly condensed, is studied today. Perhaps the most Aristotelian of contemporary playwrights is David Mamet, who embraces the idea of character as agent of the action, and emphasizes causality in the structure of his plays. His recently revived, Speed-the-Plow, is quintessentially Aristotelian, in that it observes the unities and builds its plot through a causal stream of discoveries and reversals. The Italian Renaissance brought about a stricter interpretation of Aristotle, as this long-lost work came to light in the late 15th century. The neoclassical ideal, which was to reach its apogee in France during the 17th century, dwelled upon the unities, of action, place, and time
18.
Ambassador
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The word is also often used more liberally for persons who are known, without national appointment, to represent certain professions, activities and fields of endeavor such as sales. An ambassador is the government representative stationed in a foreign capital. The host country typically allows the control of specific territory called an embassy, whose territory, staff. Under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, an ambassador has the highest diplomatic rank, countries may choose to maintain diplomatic relations at a lower level by appointing a chargé daffaires in place of an ambassador. The equivalent to an Ambassador exchanged among members of the Commonwealth of Nations are known as High Commissioners, the ambassadors of the Holy See are known as Papal or Apostolic Nuncios. The first known usage of the term is known to be in the 14th century, the foreign government to which an ambassador is assigned must first approve the person. In some cases, the government might reverse its approval by declaring the diplomat a persona non grata. This kind of declaration usually results in recalling the ambassador to his/her home nation, due to the advent of modern travel, todays world is a much smaller place in relative terms. As an officer of the service, an ambassador is expected to protect the citizens of his home country in the host country. Another result of the increase in travel is the growth of trade between nations. For most countries, the economy is now part of the global economy. This means increased opportunities to sell and trade with other nations, one of the cornerstones of foreign diplomatic missions is to work for peace. This task can grow into a fight against international terrorism, the trade, international bribery. Ambassadors help stop these acts, helping people across the globe and these activities are important and sensitive and are usually carried out in coordination with the Defense Ministry of the state and the head of the nation. The rise of the diplomatic system was a product of the Italian Renaissance. The use of ambassadors became a strategy in Italy during the 17th century. The political changes in Italy altered the role of ambassadors in diplomatic affairs, because many of the states in Italy were small in size, they were particularly vulnerable to larger states. The ambassador system was used to disperse information and to protect the vulnerable states
19.
Ernesto Nazareth
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Ernesto Júlio de Nazareth was a Brazilian composer and pianist, especially noted for his creative Maxixe and Choro compositions. Influenced by African rhythms and many styles like the Lundu. A musician of classical training, he classified his music as Brazilian tangos, since the Argentine tango and his piano repertoire is now part of the teaching programs of both classical and popular styles, as Nazareth once served at the boundary between these two worlds. Ernesto Nazareth was born in Rio de Janeiro, one of five children and his mother, Carolina da Cunha gave him his first piano lessons. At the age of ten, after his mothers death, he continued his studies with Eduardo Moreira. Strongly influenced by Chopin, Nazareth published his first composition Você Bem Sabe, at this time, he began his professional career playing in cafes, balls, society parties and in the waiting rooms of movie theaters. In 1893, Casa Vieira Machado published his famous tango Brejeiro, in 1879, he wrote his first tango Cruz perigo. In 1880, at the age of 17, he made his first public appearance at the Mozart Club, the following year, he composed the tango Não caio noutra, his first great success, with several reprints. In 1885, he performed in concerts in different clubs of the court and his first concert as a pianist took place in 1898. The following year he prepared the first edition of the tango Turuna, in 1905, he had his first work, Brejeiro, recorded by singer Mario Pinheiro with the title O sertanejo enamorado with lyrics by Catulo da Paixão Cearense. Meanwhile, the Casa Édison marching band recorded his tango Brushed, in 1907 Ernesto Nazareth was appointed third book-keeper of the National Treasury, a position that he did not occupy for not mastering the English language. In 1908, he working as a pianist at the Mozart Club. The following year, he participated in a concert held at the National Institute of Music, playing the gavotte Corbeille de fleurs, instead, he began to teach private piano lessons and was hired as a pianist for Casa Gomes in 1921 and the Odeon Cinema from 1920-1924. In São Paulo and Campinas he performed shows in the Municipal Theater. He was given then a piano as a gift from his admirers. He was one of the first artists to play for the Society Radio of Rio de Janeiro, in 1932 he presented for the first time, a recital in which he performed only his compositions. On February 5,1934, Nazareth fled the asylum and was found three days later in the adjacent forest near a waterfall, dead by drowning. Nazareth was noted for creatively combining diverse influences into his music, not only of Brazilian music but also from the music of Europe, Africa, many of his compositions remain part of the repertory today
20.
Carnival
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Carnival is a Western Christian festive season that occurs before the liturgical season of Lent. The main events occur during February or early March, during the period historically known as Shrovetide. Carnival typically involves a public celebration and/or parade combining some elements of a circus, masks, people wear masks and costumes during many such celebrations, allowing them to lose their everyday individuality and experience a heightened sense of social unity. Excessive consumption of alcohol, meat, and other foods proscribed during Lent is extremely common, the term Carnival is traditionally used in areas with a large Catholic presence. However, the Philippines, a predominantly Roman Catholic country, does not celebrate Carnival anymore since the dissolution of the Manila Carnival after 1939, in Slavic Eastern Orthodox nations, Maslenitsa is celebrated during the last week before Great Lent. In German-speaking Europe and the Netherlands, the Carnival season traditionally opens on 11/11 and this dates back to celebrations before the Advent season or with harvest celebrations of St. Martins Day. Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is the biggest in the world, followed jointly by Barranquilla, Colombia, alternative names are used for regional and local celebrations. The origin may be from the Italian word carne or carrus, the former suggests an origin within Christianity, while the alternative links to earlier religions. Folk etymologies state that the word comes from the Late Latin expression carne vale, the word carne may also be translated as flesh, producing a farewell to the flesh, a phrase embraced by certain carnival celebrants to embolden the festivals carefree spirit. However, this interpretation is not supported by philological evidence, the Italian carne levare is one possible origin, meaning to remove meat, since meat is prohibited during Lent. Other scholars argue for the origin from the Roman name for the festival of the Navigium Isidis, the festival consisted of a parade of masks following an adorned wooden boat, possibly source of the floats. From the anthropological point of view, carnival is a ritual, in which social roles are reversed. Winter was thought of as the reign of the winter spirits, Carnival can thus be regarded as a rite of passage from darkness to light, from winter to summer, a fertility celebration, the first spring festival of the new year. Traditionally, a carnival feast was the last opportunity for people to eat well. Until spring produce was available, people were limited to the necessary meals during this period. On what nowadays is called vastenavond, all the winter stores of lard, butter. The selected livestock had already been slaughtered in November and the meat would be no longer preservable, all the food that had survived the winter had to be eaten to assure that everyone was fed enough to survive until the coming spring would provide new food sources. Several Germanic tribes celebrated the returning of the daylight, the winter would be driven out, to make sure that fertility could return in spring
