Milton Babbitt
Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, teacher. He is noted for his serial and electronic music. Babbitt was born in Philadelphia to Albert E. Sarah Potamkin, he was Jewish. He was raised in Jackson and began studying the violin when he was four but soon switched to clarinet and saxophone. Early in his life he was attracted to theater music, he was making his own arrangements of popular songs at seven, when he was thirteen, he won a local songwriting contest. Babbitt's father was a mathematician, it was mathematics that Babbitt intended to study when he entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1931. However, he soon left and went to New York University instead, where he studied music with Philip James and Marion Bauer. There he became interested in the music of the composers of the Second Viennese School and went on to write a number of articles on twelve tone music, including the first description of combinatoriality and a serial "time-point" technique. After receiving his bachelor of arts degree from New York University College of Arts and Science in 1935 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, he studied under Roger Sessions and later at Princeton University.
At the university, he joined the music faculty in 1938 and received one of Princeton's first Master of Fine Arts degrees in 1942. During the Second World War, Babbitt divided his time between mathematical research in Washington, D. C. and Princeton, where he became a member of the mathematics faculty from 1943 to 1945. In 1948, Babbitt returned to Princeton University's music faculty and in 1973 became a member of the faculty at the Juilliard School in New York. Among his more notable former students are music theorists David Lewin and John Rahn, composers Bruce Adolphe, Michael Dellaira, Kenneth Fuchs, Laura Karpman, Paul Lansky, Donald Martino, John Melby, Kenneth Lampl, Tobias Picker, J. K. Randall, the theatre composer Stephen Sondheim and pianists Frederic Rzewski and Richard Aaker Trythall, the jazz guitarist and composer Stanley Jordan. In 1958, Babbitt achieved unsought notoriety through an article in the popular magazine High Fidelity. Babbitt said his own title for the article was "The Composer as Specialist" (as it was published several times, including in Babbitt 2003, 48–54, but that "The editor, without my knowledge and—therefore—my consent or assent, replaced my title by the more'provocative' one:'Who Cares if You Listen?'
A title which reflects little of the letter and nothing of the spirit of the article". More than 30 years he commented: "For all that the true source of that offensively vulgar title has been revealed many times, in many ways, even—eventually—by the offending journal itself, I still am far more to be known as the author of'Who Cares if You Listen?' than as the composer of music to which you may or may not care to listen". Babbitt became interested in electronic music, he was hired by RCA as consultant composer to work with its RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, in 1961 produced his Composition for Synthesizer. Babbitt was less interested in producing new timbres than in the rhythmic precision he could achieve using the Mark II synthesizer, a degree of precision unobtainable in live performances. Although he would shift his focus away from electronic music, the genre that first gained for him public notice, by the 1960s Babbitt was writing both electronic music and music for conventional musical instruments combining the two.
Philomel, for example, was written for soprano and a synthesized accompaniment stored on magnetic tape. From 1985 until his death he served as the Chairman of the BMI Student Composer Awards, the international competition for young classical composers. Milton Babbitt died in Princeton, New Jersey on January 29, 2011 at the age of 94. 1965 – Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1974 – Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1982 – Pulitzer Prize, Special Citation, "for his life's work as a distinguished and seminal American composer" (Columbia University 1991, 70. 2000 – National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international, professional music fraternity 2010 – The Max Reger Foundation of America – Extraordinary Life Time Musical Achievement Award. "Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition". The Score and I. M. A. Magazine 12:53–61.. "Who Cares if You Listen?". High Fidelity.. "Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants," Musical Quarterly 46/2.. "Set Structure as Compositional Determinant," Journal of Music Theory 5/1..
"The Structure and Function of Musical Theory," College Music Symposium 5.. "Contemporary Music Composition and Music Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History", Perspectives in Musicology: The Inaugural Lectures of the Ph. D. Program in Music at the City University of New York, edited by Barry S. Brook, Edward Downes, Sherman Van Solkema, 270–307. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-02142-4. Reprinted, New York: Pendragon Press, 1985. ISB
Halim El-Dabh
Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh was an Egyptian American composer, ethnomusicologist, educator, who has had a career spanning six decades. He is known as an early pioneer of electronic music. In 1944 he composed musique concrète. From the late 1950s to early 1960s he produced influential work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. El-Dabh was born and grew up in Sakakini, Egypt, a member of a large and affluent Coptic Christian family that had earlier emigrated from Abutig in the Upper Egyptian province of Asyut; the family name is not uncommon in Egypt. In 1932 the family relocated to the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis. Following his father's profession of agriculture, he graduated from Fuad I University in 1945 with a degree in agricultural engineering, while studying and composing music on an informal basis. Although his main income was derived from his job as an agricultural consultant, he achieved recognition in Egypt from the mid- to late 1940s for his innovative compositions and piano technique.
It was. El-Dabh first conducted experiments in sound manipulation with wire recorders there in the early 1940s. By 1944, he had composed one of the earliest known works of tape music or musique concrète, called The Expression of Zaar, pre-dating Pierre Schaeffer's work by four years. Having borrowed a wire recorder from the offices of Middle East Radio, El-Dabh took it to the streets to capture outside sounds an ancient zaar ceremony, a type of exorcism conducted in public. Intrigued by the possibilities of manipulating recorded sound for musical purposes, he believed it could open up the raw audio content of the zaar ceremony to further investigation into "the inner sound" contained within. According to El-Dabh, "I just started playing around with the equipment at the station, including reverberation, echo chambers, voltage controls, a re-recording room that had movable walls to create different kinds and amounts of reverb." He further explains: "I concentrated on those high tones that reverberated and had different beats and clashes, started eliminating the fundamental tones, isolating the high overtones so that in the finished recording, the voices are not recognizable any more, only the high overtones, with their beats and clashes, may be heard."
He thus discovered the potential of sound recordings as raw material to compose music. His final 20-25 minute piece was recorded onto magnetic tape and called The Expression of Zaar, publicly presented in 1944 at an art gallery event in Cairo. Following a well received 1949 performance at the All Saints Cathedral in Cairo, he was invited by an official of the U. S. embassy to study in the United States. Coming to the United States in 1950 on a Fulbright fellowship, El-Dabh studied composition with John Donald Robb and Ernst Krenek at the University of New Mexico. El-Dabh and his family rented a house in Demarest, New Jersey before buying a home in Cresskill, New Jersey where they lived for some time. El-Dabh soon became a part of the New York new music scene of the 1950s, alongside such like-minded composers as Henry Cowell, John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Alan Hovhaness, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, he obtained U. S. citizenship in 1961. Among El-Dabh's works are four ballet scores for Martha Graham, including her masterpiece Clytemnestra, as well as One More Gaudy Night, A Look at Lightning, Lucifer.
Many of his compositions draw on Ancient Egyptian themes or texts, one such work is his orchestral/choral score for the Sound and Light show at the site of Great Pyramid of Giza, performed there each evening since 1961. El-Dabh's primary instruments are the piano and darabukha, many of his works are composed for these instruments. In 1958 he performed the demanding solo part in the New York City premiere of his Fantasia-Tahmeel for darabukha and string orchestra, with an orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. In 1959 he composed several works for an ensemble of percussion instruments from India, for the New York Percussion Trio. After having become acquainted with Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky by 1955, by which time El-Dabh he had been experimenting with electronic music for ten years, they invited him to work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1959 as one of the first outside composers there, where he would become one of the most influential composers associated with the early years of the studio.
El-Dabh's unique approach to combining spoken words and percussion sounds with electronic signals and processing contributed to the development of early electroacoustic techniques at the center. Some of his compositions made extensive use of Columbia-Princeton's RCA Synthesizer, an early programmable synthesizer, he worked there sporadically until 1961, creating various tape works, including at least two in collaboration with Luening. Other composers he had become acquainted with at Columbia-Princeton include John Cage, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein. El-Dabh produced eight electronic pieces in 1959 alone, including his multi-part electronic music
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It stands on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of southern Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec; as of 2016, Ottawa had a city population of 964,743 and a metropolitan population of 1,323,783 making it the fourth-largest city and the fifth-largest CMA in Canada. Founded in 1826 as Bytown, incorporated as Ottawa in 1855, the city has evolved into the political centre of Canada, its original boundaries were expanded through numerous annexations and were replaced by a new city incorporation and amalgamation in 2001 which increased its land area. The city name "Ottawa" was chosen in reference to the Ottawa River, the name of, derived from the Algonquin Odawa, meaning "to trade". Ottawa has the most educated population among Canadian cities and is home to a number of post-secondary and cultural institutions, including the National Arts Centre, the National Gallery, numerous national museums. Ottawa has the highest standard of living in low unemployment.
With the draining of the Champlain Sea around ten thousand years ago, the Ottawa Valley became habitable. Local populations used the area for wild edible harvesting, fishing, trade and camps for over 6500 years; the Ottawa river valley has archaeological sites with arrow heads and stone tools. Three major rivers meet within Ottawa, making it an important trade and travel area for thousands of years; the Algonquins called the Ottawa River Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi meaning "Great River" or "Grand River". Étienne Brûlé regarded as the first European to travel up the Ottawa River, passed by Ottawa in 1610 on his way to the Great Lakes. Three years Samuel de Champlain wrote about the waterfalls in the area and about his encounters with the Algonquins, using the Ottawa River for centuries. Many missionaries would follow the early traders; the first maps of the area used the word Ottawa, derived from the Algonquin word adawe, to name the river. Philemon Wright, a New Englander, created the first settlement in the area on 7 March 1800 on the north side of the river, across from the present day city of Ottawa in Hull.
He, with five other families and twenty-five labourers, set about to create an agricultural community called Wrightsville. Wright pioneered the Ottawa Valley timber trade by transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Quebec City. Bytown, Ottawa's original name, was founded as a community in 1826 when hundreds of land speculators were attracted to the south side of the river when news spread that British authorities were constructing the northerly end of the Rideau Canal military project at that location; the following year, the town was named after British military engineer Colonel John By, responsible for the entire Rideau Waterway construction project. The canal's military purpose was to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, bypassing a vulnerable stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering the state of New York that had left re-supply ships bound for southwestern Ontario exposed to enemy fire during the War of 1812. Colonel By set up military barracks on the site of today's Parliament Hill.
He laid out the streets of the town and created two distinct neighbourhoods named "Upper Town" west of the canal and "Lower Town" east of the canal. Similar to its Upper Canada and Lower Canada namesakes "Upper Town" was predominantly English speaking and Protestant whereas "Lower Town" was predominantly French and Catholic. Bytown's population grew to 1,000 as the Rideau Canal was being completed in 1832. Bytown encountered some impassioned and violent times in her early pioneer period that included Irish labour unrest that attributed to the Shiners' War from 1835 to 1845 and political dissension evident from the 1849 Stony Monday Riot. In 1855 Bytown was incorporated as a city. William Pittman Lett was installed as the first city clerk guiding it through 36 years of development. On New Year's Eve 1857, Queen Victoria, as a symbolic and political gesture, was presented with the responsibility of selecting a location for the permanent capital of the Province of Canada. In reality, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had assigned this selection process to the Executive Branch of the Government, as previous attempts to arrive at a consensus had ended in deadlock.
The "Queen's choice" turned out to be the small frontier town of Ottawa for two main reasons: Firstly, Ottawa's isolated location in a back country surrounded by dense forest far from the Canada–US border and situated on a cliff face would make it more defensible from attack. Secondly, Ottawa was midway between Toronto and Kingston and Montreal and Quebec City. Additionally, despite Ottawa's regional isolation it had seasonal water transportation access to Montreal over the Ottawa River and to Kingston via the Rideau Waterway. By 1854 it had a modern all season Bytown and Prescott Railway that carried passengers and supplies the 82-kilometres to Prescott on the Saint Lawrence River and beyond. Ottawa's small size, it was thought, would make it less prone to rampaging politically motivated mobs, as had happened in the previous Canadian capitals; the government owned the land that would become Parliament Hill which they thought would be an ideal location for the Parliament Buildings. Ottawa was th
Bruno Maderna
Bruno Maderna was an Italian conductor and composer. Bruno Maderna was born Bruno Grossato in Venice but decided to take the name of his mother, Caterina Maderna. At the age of four he began studying the violin with his grandfather. ‘My grandfather thought that if you could play the violin you could do anything become the biggest gangster. If you play the violin you are always sure of a place in heaven.’ As a child he played several instruments in his father's small variety band. A child prodigy, in the early thirties he was not only performing violin concertos, he was conducting orchestral concerts: first with the orchestra of La Scala in Milan in Trieste, Venice and Verona. Orphaned at the age of four, Maderna was adopted by a wealthy woman from Verona, Irma Manfredi, who saw that he received a solid musical education, he took private lessons in harmony and composition from Arrigo Pedrollo in 1935–37 and studied composition with Alessandro Bustini at the Rome Conservatory in 1937–40. After Rome he returned to Venice, where he attended the advanced course for composers organised by Gian Francesco Malipiero at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory.
He studied conducting with Antonio Guarnieri at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and Hermann Scherchen in Venice. Through Scherchen Maderna discovered twelve-tone technique and the music of the Second Viennese School. During the Second World War he took part in the partisan resistance. From 1948 to 1952 he taught music theory at the Venice Conservatory. During this period he collaborated with Malipiero on critical editions of Italian early music. Fellow composers he met at this time included Luigi Dallapiccola and, at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Messiaen, Pousseur and Stockhausen. In 1950 Maderna started an international career as a conductor, first in Paris and Munich across Europe. In 1955 he founded the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano with Luciano Berio and Incontri musicali, a series of concerts disseminating contemporary music in Italy. In 1957–58, at the invitation of Giorgio Federico Ghedini, he taught at the Milan Conservatory, between 1960 and 1962 he lectured at Dartington International Summer School in England.
From 1961 to 1966, Maderna and Pierre Boulez were the main directors of the International Kranichsteiner Kammerensemble in Darmstadt. Despite this heavy workload throughout these years Maderna found time to compose. During the 1960s and'70s he spent much time in the United States and conducting. In 1971–72 he was appointed director of new music at Tanglewood. In 1972–73 he became the principal conductor of the Orchestra Sinfonica of RAI in Milan. Maderna died of cancer in Darmstadt in 1973. A number of composers wrote pieces in Maderna's memory, including Luciano Berio. Earle Brown's Centering, dedicated to the memory of Maderna, ends with a short quotation from Maderna's First Oboe Concerto. Maderna composed much music in all genres: instrumental, chamber and electronic, as well as large amounts of incidental music and transcriptions and editions of early music. At the heart of Maderna's output are a number of concertos, including one for violin, one for two pianos, two for solo piano and several for flute and orchestra.
He was drawn to the oboe, composing three concertos in all: the first in 1962–63 followed by two more in 1967 and 1973. Other major orchestral works include Aura and Biogramma and Quadrivium, for four percussionists and four orchestral groups. Giuseppe Sinopoli recorded all three of these pieces with the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1979. Maderna's Requiem, composed between 1944 and 1946, was rediscovered and performed in 2009. Bruno Maderna produced scores for eight films and two documentaries; the last of these was for Giulio Questi's thriller La morte ha fatto l'uovo in 1968. Luna Alcalay: Una strofa di Dante Béla Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 1 Alban Berg: Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskartentexten von Peter Altenberg, Op. 4 Drei Orchesterstücke, Op. 6 Wozzeck Lulu Lulu Suite Konrad Boehmer: Position Pierre Boulez: Le marteau sans maître Figures, Prismes Polyphonie X Earle Brown: Available Forms I on Panorama della musica nuova Åke Hermanson: In Nuce, Op. 7 Günter Kahowez: Plejaden No. 2 Włodzimierz Kotoński: Canto György Ligeti: Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures Witold Lutosławski: Jeux Vénitiens (Concertgebouworkest
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists are interested in the root or ultimate causes of phenomena, frame their understanding in mathematical terms. Physicists work across a wide range of research fields, spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic and particle physics, through biological physics, to cosmological length scales encompassing the universe as a whole; the field includes two types of physicists: experimental physicists who specialize in the observation of physical phenomena and the analysis of experiments, theoretical physicists who specialize in mathematical modeling of physical systems to rationalize and predict natural phenomena. Physicists can apply their knowledge towards solving practical problems or to developing new technologies; the study and practice of physics is based on an intellectual ladder of discoveries and insights from ancient times to the present.
Many mathematical and physical ideas used today found their earliest expression in ancient Greek culture, for example in the work of Euclid, Thales of Miletus and Aristarchus. Roots emerged in ancient Asian culture and in the Islamic medieval period, for example the work of Alhazen in the 11th century; the modern scientific worldview and the bulk of physics education can be said to flow from the scientific revolution in Europe, starting with the work of Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler in the early 1600s. Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation were formulated in the 17th century; the experimental discoveries of Faraday and the theory of Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism were developmental high points during the 19th century. Many physicists contributed to the development of quantum mechanics in the early-to-mid 20th century. New knowledge in the early 21st century includes a large increase in understanding physical cosmology; the broad and general study of nature, natural philosophy, was divided into several fields in the 19th century, when the concept of "science" received its modern shape.
Specific categories emerged, such as "biology" and "biologist", "physics" and "physicist", "chemistry" and "chemist", among other technical fields and titles. The term physicist was coined by William Whewell in his 1840 book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. A standard undergraduate physics curriculum consists of classical mechanics and magnetism, non-relativistic quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, laboratory experience. Physics students need training in mathematics, in computer science. Any physics-oriented career position requires at least an undergraduate degree in physics or applied physics, while career options widen with a Master's degree like MSc, MPhil, MPhys or MSci. For research-oriented careers, students work toward a doctoral degree specializing in a particular field. Fields of specialization include experimental and theoretical astrophysics, atomic physics, biological physics, chemical physics, condensed matter physics, geophysics, gravitational physics, material science, medical physics, molecular physics, nuclear physics, radiophysics, electromagnetic field and microwave physics, particle physics, plasma physics.
The highest honor awarded to physicists is the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded since 1901 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. National physics professional societies have many awards for professional recognition. In the case of the American Physical Society, as of 2017, there are 33 separate prizes and 38 separate awards in the field; the three major employers of career physicists are academic institutions and private industries, with the largest employer being the last. Physicists in academia or government labs tend to have titles such as Assistants, Professors, Sr./Jr. Scientist, or postdocs; as per the American Institute of Physics, some 20% of new physics Ph. D.s holds jobs in engineering development programs, while 14% turn to computer software and about 11% are in business/education. A majority of physicists employed apply their skills and training to interdisciplinary sectors. Job titles for graduate physicists include Agricultural Scientist, Air Traffic Controller, Computer Programmer, Electrical Engineer, Environmental Analyst, Medical Physicist, Oceanographer, Physics Teacher/Professor/Researcher, Research Scientist, Reactor Physicist, Engineering Physicist, Satellite Missions Analyst, Science Writer, Software Engineer, Systems Engineer, Microelectronics Engineer, Radar Developer, Technical Consultant, etc.
A majority of Physics terminal bachelor's degree holders are employed in the private sector. Other fields are academia and military service, nonprofit entities and teaching. Typical duties of physicists with master's and doctoral degrees working in their domain involve research and analysis, data preparation, instrumentation and development of industrial or medical equipment and software development, etc. Chartered Physicist is a chartered status and a professional qualification awarded by the Institute of Physics, it is denoted by the postnominals "CPhys". Achieving chartered status in any profession denotes to the wider community a high level of specialised subject knowledge and professional competence. According to the Institute of Physics, holders of the award of the Chartered Physicist demonst
