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.
Violin
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The violin is a wooden string instrument in the violin family. It is the smallest and highest-pitched instrument in the family in regular use, smaller violin-type instruments are known, including the violino piccolo and the kit violin, but these are virtually unused in the 2010s. The violin typically has four strings tuned in fifths, and is most commonly played by drawing a bow across its strings. Violins are important instruments in a variety of musical genres. They are most prominent in the Western classical tradition and in varieties of folk music. They are also used in genres of folk including country music and bluegrass music. Electric violins are used in forms of rock music, further. The violin is sometimes called a fiddle, particularly in Irish traditional music and bluegrass. The violin was first known in 16th-century Italy, with further modifications occurring in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Europe it served as the basis for stringed instruments used in classical music, the viola. According to their reputation, the quality of their sound has defied attempts to explain or equal it, many of these trade instruments were formerly sold by Sears, Roebuck and Co. and other mass merchandisers. A person who makes or repairs violins is called a luthier or violinmaker, the parts of a violin are usually made from different types of wood and on the use of a pickup and an amplifier and speaker). Violins can be strung with gut, Perlon or other synthetic, the earliest stringed instruments were mostly plucked. Similar and variant types were probably disseminated along East-West trading routes from Asia into the Middle East, the first makers of violins probably borrowed from various developments of the Byzantine lira. These included the rebec, the Arabic rebab, the vielle, the earliest pictures of violins, albeit with three strings, are seen in northern Italy around 1530, at around the same time as the words violino and vyollon are seen in Italian and French documents. One of the earliest explicit descriptions of the instrument, including its tuning, is from the Epitome musical by Jambe de Fer, by this time, the violin had already begun to spread throughout Europe. The violin proved very popular, both among street musicians and the nobility, the French king Charles IX ordered Andrea Amati to construct 24 violins for him in 1560, one of these noble instruments, the Charles IX, is the oldest surviving violin. The Messiah or Le Messie made by Antonio Stradivari in 1716 remains pristine and it is now located in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford
3.
Paris
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Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
4.
Paris Opera
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The Paris Opera is the primary opera company of France. Classical ballet as we know it today arose within the Paris Opera as the Paris Opera Ballet and has remained an integral, small scale and contemporary works are also staged in the 500-seat Amphitheatre under the Opéra Bastille. The companys annual budget is in the order of 200 million euros, with this money, the company runs the two houses and supports a large permanent staff, which includes the orchestra of 170, a chorus of 110 and the corps de ballet of 150. Each year, the Opéra presents about 380 performances of opera, ballet and other concerts, to an audience of about 800,000 people. In the 2012/13 season, the Opéra presented 18 opera titles,13 ballets,5 symphonic concerts, the companys training bodies are also active, with 7 concerts from the Atelier Lyrique and 4 programmes from the École de Danse. The poet Pierre Perrin began thinking and writing about the possibility of French opera in 1655 and he believed that the prevailing opinion of the time that the French language was fundamentally unmusical was completely incorrect. Seventeenth-century France offered Perrin essentially two types of organization for realizing his vision, an academy or a public theater. On 28 June 1669, Louis XIV signed the Privilège accordé au Sieur Perrin pour létablissement dune Académie dOpéra en musique and he was free to select business partners of his choice and to set the price of tickets. No one was to have the right of free entry including members of the royal court, although it was to be a public theatre, it retained its status as royal academy in which the authority of the king as the primary stakeholder was decisive. The monopoly, originally intended to protect the enterprise from competition during its phase, was renewed for subsequent recipients of the privilege up to the early French Revolution. As Victoria Johnson points out, the Opera was an organization by nature so luxurious and expensive in its productions that its survival depended on financial protection. His first opera Pomone with music by Robert Cambert opened on 3 March 1671, a second work, Les peines et les plaisirs de lamour, with a libretto by Gabriel Gilbert and music by Cambert, was performed in 1672. The institution was renamed the Académie Royale de Musique and came to be known in France simply as the Opéra. Because of legal difficulties Lully could not use the Salle de la Bouteille, during Lullys tenure, the only works performed were his own. The first productions were the pastorale Les fêtes de lAmour et de Bacchus, Lully greatly desired a better theatre and persuaded the king to let him use the one at the Palais-Royal free of charge. The Théâtre du Palais-Royal had been altered in 1660 and 1671, the first production in the new theatre was Alceste on 19 January 1674. The opera was bitterly attacked by those enraged at the restrictions that Lully had caused to be placed on the French, to mitigate the damage, Louis XIV arranged for new works to be premiered at the court, usually at the Chateau Vieux of the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. This had the advantage of subsidizing the cost of rehearsals, as well as most of the machinery, sets, and costumes
5.
Concert Spirituel
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The Concert Spirituel was one of the first public concert series in existence. The concerts began in Paris in 1725 and ended in 1790, later, concerts or series of concerts of the name occurred in Paris, Vienna, London. The series was founded to provide entertainment during the Easter fortnight, the programs featured a mixture of sacred choral works and virtuosic instrumental pieces, and for many years took place in a magnificently-decorated Salle des Cent Suisses in the Tuileries Palace. They started at six o’clock in the evening and were attended by well-to-do bourgeois, the lower aristocracy. In 1784 the concerts were moved to the area of the Salle des Machines, and in 1790. The first concert took place of 18 March 1725 where two of Delalandes motets and Corellis Christmas Concerto were performed, the first director was Anne Danican Philidor, brother of the composer and chess master François-André Danican Philidor. Philidor went bankrupt two years. His successors, Pierre Simart and Jean-Joseph Mouret, expanded the operation with a series of French Concerts, because no one was willing to take their place, the series was administered by the Académie Royale de Musique for the next fourteen years. During this period, the works of French composers were favored, the series was finally profitable because the Académie did not have to pay the license fee, but in general this was a period of stagnation. They continued to new and existing French works, but also presented the most famous Italian singers. Beginning in 1755, oratorios with French texts were introduced and became popular, in 1762 a well-connected royal functionary, Antoine Dauvergne, forced Royers widow out of the operation she had run since her husbands death in 1755. Dauvergne and various associates managed the concerts until 1773, the interest of the public was excited by adding a motet competition and by expanding the presentation of instrumental virtuosi beyond violinists to include masters of wind instruments. Although the concerts remained profitable, Dauvergne abandoned the concerts, as a result the Académie replaced him with Pierre Gaviniès, Simon Le Duc and François Joseph Gossec. From 1777 the Concert Spirituel was directed by Joseph Legros, its last and most brilliant director, Legros, a star singer at the Opera, who managed the concerts until they came to an end in 1790 with the French Revolution. The final concert took place on 13 May 1790, during the Napoleonic period concerts were occasionally held in Paris under the title concert spirituel, particularly after 1805 as religious feeling revived in France. During the Restoration, the Théâtre-Italien and Académie Royale de Musique gave 6 to 9 concerts spirituels per year and they became a regular feature at the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire shortly after it was founded in 1828 and remained so for most of the nineteenth century. They were frequently benefit performances featuring notable soloists - for example, entry on Le Concert Spirituel on the Naxos. com website Michel Brenet, Les Concerts en France sous lAncien Régime, Paris, Fischbacher,1900, réimprimé à New York, Da Capo Press,1970. Joann Élart, Musiciens et répertoires de concert en France à la fin de lAncien Régime, patrick Taïeb, université de Rouen,2005
6.
Jean-Joseph de Mondonville
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Jean-Joseph de Mondonville, also known as Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville, was a French violinist and composer. He was a contemporary of Jean-Philippe Rameau and enjoyed great success in his day. Pierre-Louis Daquin claimed, If I couldnt be Rameau, theres no one I would rather be than Mondonville, Mondonville was born in Narbonne in Southwest France to an aristocratic family which had fallen on hard times. In 1733 he moved to Paris where he gained the patronage of the kings mistress Madame de Pompadour and won several musical posts and his first opus was a volume of violin sonatas, published in 1733. He became a violinist of the Chapelle royale and chamber and performed in some 100 concerts and he was appointed sous-maître in 1740 and then, in 1744, intendant of the Royal Chapel. In 1755, he director of the Concert Spirituel on the death of Pancrace Royer. Mondonville died in Belleville near Paris at the age of sixty, between 1734 and 1755 Mondonville composed 17 grands motets, of which only nine have survived. The motet Venite exultemus domino, published in 1740, won him the post of Maître de musique de la Chapelle, in 1758, Mondonville introduced oratorios as a new genre at the Concert Spirituel. Although Mondonvilles first stage work, Isbé, was a failure, he enjoyed success with the lighter forms of French Baroque opera, the opéra-ballet. His most popular works were Le carnaval de Parnasse, Titon et lAurore, Titon et lAurore played an important role in the Querelle des Bouffons, the controversy between partisans of French and Italian opera which raged in Paris in the early 1750s. Members of the French party ensured that Titons premiere was a resounding success, Mondonvilles one foray into serious French opera - the genre known as tragédie en musique - was a failure however. He took the step of re-using a libretto, Thésée. Mondonvilles bold move to substitute Lullys much-loved music with his own did not pay off, the premiere at the court in 1765 had a mixed reception and a public performance two years later ended with the audience demanding it be replaced by the original. Yet Mondonville was merely ahead of his time, in the 1770s, it became fashionable to reset Lullys tragedies with new music, brief biographical entry in the Grove Concise Dictionary of Music,1994, published by Oxford University Press, Inc. on the Gramophone site. Booklets to the above recordings The Viking Opera Guide ed. Amanda Holden C, free scores by Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville at the International Music Score Library Project
