1.
Cantastoria
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Cantastoria comes from Italian for story-singer and is known by many other names around the world. It is a form where a performer tells or sings a story while gesturing to a series of images. These images can be painted, printed or drawn on any sort of material, in 6th-century India, religious tales called saubhikas were performed by traveling storytellers who carried banners painted with images of gods from house to house. Another form called yamapapaka featured vertical cloth scrolls accompanied by sung stories of the afterlife, nowadays, this Indian traditional art is still performed by Chitrakar women of West Bengal. In Tibet this was known as ma-ni-pa and in China this was known as pien, other Indonesian theater forms such as wayang kulit, a shadow play, and wayang golek, rod puppetry, developed around the same time and are still performed today. In Japan, cantastoria appears as etoki or emaki in the form of hanging scrolls divided into panels, foreshadowing the immensely popular manga. Etoki sometimes took the shape of little booklets, or even displays of dolls posed on the roadside with backgrounds behind them. In the 20th century, Japanese canndymen would bicycle around with serial shows called kamishibai where the story was told to a series of changing pictures that slid in and out of an open-framed box. Some kamishibai shows had a show element to them, where a viewer could pay extra to peer through a hole. In Spain this was called retablo de las maravillas and under other names. The singing bench migrated northward to Central and Northern Europe where it served as sensationalist quasi-news about murder, fires, death, affairs, sex scandals and the like. Performers of such controversial bench songs were seen as vagrants and troublemakers and were arrested, exiled. In Czechoslovakia banner shows were called kramářská píseň, most of them fell into an oblivion, with the notable exception of a parody song Cannoneer Jabůrek. In Hungary the term is képmutogatás, in Germany itinerant balladeers performed moritat or bänkelsang banner shows for four centuries until the Nazis banned the practice in the 1940s. The German bänkelsang survives in Bertolt Brechts Threepenny Opera and in the work of Peter Schumann. In aboriginal Australia storytellers paint story sequences on tree bark and also on themselves for the purposes of performing the tale, in the 19th century giant scrolling moving panorama performances were performed throughout the United Kingdom and United States. Elements of picture storytelling can also be seen in the portable mural-posters of the Beehive Collective, painting and Performance, Chinese Picture Recitation and its Indian Genesis. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press,1988, too Many Captain Cooks, film by Penny McDonald starring Paddy Wainburranga Mariangela Giusti and Urmila Chakraborty, Immagini Storie Parole
2.
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
3.
Kurt Weill
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Kurt Julian Weill was a German composer, active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed such as his best-known work The Threepenny Opera. Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a useful purpose. He also wrote works for the concert hall. He became a United States citizen on August 27,1943, Weill was born on March 2,1900, the third of four children to Albert Weill and Emma Weill. He grew up in a religious Jewish family in the Sandvorstadt, the Jewish quarter in Dessau, Germany, where his father was a cantor. At the age of twelve, Weill started taking lessons and made his first attempts at writing music. In 1915, Weill started taking lessons with Albert Bing, Kapellmeister at the Herzogliches Hoftheater zu Dessau, who taught him piano, composition, music theory. Weill performed publicly on piano for the first time in 1915, koch, and also attended philosophy lectures by Max Dessoir and Ernst Cassirer. The same year, he wrote his first string quartet, from May to September 1920, Weill spent a couple of months in Leipzig, where his father had become the new director of a Jewish orphanage. Before he returned to Berlin, in September 1920, he composed Sulamith, a fantasy for soprano, female choir. Back in Berlin, Weill had an interview with Ferruccio Busoni in December 1920, after examining some of Weills compositions, Busoni accepted him as one of five master students in composition at the Preußische Akademie der Künste in Berlin. From January 1921 to December 1923, Weill studied music composition with him, during his first year he composed his first symphony, Sinfonie in einem Satz, as well as the lieder Die Bekehrte and two Rilkelieder for voice and piano. To support his family in Leipzig, he worked as a pianist in a Bierkeller tavern. In spring of 1922, Weill joined the November Groups music faction and that year he composed a psalm, a divertimento for orchestra, and Sinfonia Sacra, Fantasia, Passacaglia, and Hymnus for Orchestra. On November 18,1922, his childrens pantomime Die Zaubernacht premiered at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm, out of financial need, Weill taught music theory and composition to private students from 1923 to 1925. Among his students were Claudio Arrau, Maurice Abravanel, Heinz Jolles, in December 1923, Weill finished his studies with Busoni
4.
Bertolt Brecht
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Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director of the 20th century. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born in February 1898 in Augsburg, Bavaria, Brechts mother was a devout Protestant and his father a Catholic. The modest house where he was born is preserved as a Brecht Museum. His father worked for a mill, becoming its managing director in 1914. Thanks to his mothers influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would have an effect on his writing. From her, too, came the image of the self-denying woman that recurs in his drama. Brechts home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied, at school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a lifelong creative partnership. Neher designed many of the sets for Brechts dramas and helped to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre, when Brecht was 16, the First World War broke out. Initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates swallowed by the army and his expulsion was only prevented through the intervention of his religion teacher. On his fathers recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for a course at Munich University. There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist, from July 1916, Brechts newspaper articles began appearing under the new name Bert Brecht. Brecht was drafted into service in the autumn of 1918, only to be posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military VD clinic. In July 1919, Brecht and Paula Banholzer had a son, some time in either 1920 or 1921, Brecht took a small part in the political cabaret of the Munich comedian Karl Valentin. Brechts diaries for the few years record numerous visits to see Valentin perform. Brecht compared Valentin to Charlie Chaplin, for his virtually complete rejection of mimicry and he did short sketches in which he played refractory employees, orchestral musicians or photographers, who hated their employers and made them look ridiculous. The employer was played by his partner, Liesl Karlstadt, a popular woman comedian who used to pad herself out, anyone can be creative, he quipped, its rewriting other people thats a challenge. Brecht completed his second play, Drums in the Night. Between November 1921 and April 1922 Brecht made acquaintance with many people in the Berlin cultural scene
5.
The Threepenny Opera
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The work offers a Socialist critique of the capitalist world. It opened on 31 August 1928 at Berlins Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, songs from The Threepenny Opera have been widely covered and become standards, most notably Die Moritat von Mackie Messer and Seeräuberjenny. Brecht was first motivated to prepare a version of The Beggars Opera by the revival of the original by Nigel Playfair in London in 1920. He offered the idea to the impresario Ernst Josef Aufricht who was seeking a production to launch his new company at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin. The score by Weill uses only one of the melodies which Johann Pepusch wrote for the original Beggars Opera. Weill claimed at the time that music cannot further the action of the play or create its background, Weills score shows influence of jazz and German dance-music of the time. The orchestration involves a small ensemble with a deal of doubling-up on instruments. The Threepenny Opera was first performed at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1928 on a set designed by Caspar Neher, despite an initially poor reception, it became a great success, playing 400 times in the next two years. The performance was a springboard for one of the best known interpreters of Brecht and Weills work, Lotte Lenya, who was married to Weill. By 1933, when Weill and Brecht were forced to leave Germany by the Nazi seizure of power, in between, on 8 February 1935 Edward Clark conducted the first British broadcast of the work. It received scathing reviews from Ernest Newman and other critics, but the most savage criticism came from Weill himself, who described it privately as. The worst performance imaginable … the whole thing was completely misunderstood, but his criticisms seem to have been for the concept of the piece as a Germanised version of The Beggars Opera, rather than for Clarks conducting of it, of which Weill made no mention. America was introduced to the work by the version of G. W. Pabst. The first American production, adapted into English by Gifford Cochran and Jerrold Krimsky and staged by Francesco Von Mendelssohn and it opened on Broadway at the Empire Theatre, on April 13,1933, and closed after 12 performances. Mixed reviews praised the music but slammed the production, with the critic Gilbert Gabriel calling it a dreary enigma, a French version produced by Gaston Baty and written by Ninon Steinhof and André Mauprey was presented in October 1930 at the Théâtre Montparnasse in Paris. It was rendered as LOpéra de quatsous, in 1930 the work was premiered in Moscow at the Kamerny Theatre, directed by Alexander Tairov. It was the one of Brechts works to be performed in Russia during his lifetime. Izvestia disapproved, It is high time that our theatres ceased playing homage to petit-bourgeois bad taste, the first Italian production, titled LOpera da tre soldi and directed by Giorgio Strehler, premiered at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan on 27 February 1956 in the presence of Bertolt Brecht
6.
Berlin
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Berlin is the capital and the largest city of Germany as well as one of its constituent 16 states. With a population of approximately 3.5 million, Berlin is the second most populous city proper, due to its location in the European Plain, Berlin is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. Around one-third of the area is composed of forests, parks, gardens, rivers. Berlin in the 1920s was the third largest municipality in the world, following German reunification in 1990, Berlin once again became the capital of all-Germany. Berlin is a city of culture, politics, media. Its economy is based on high-tech firms and the sector, encompassing a diverse range of creative industries, research facilities, media corporations. Berlin serves as a hub for air and rail traffic and has a highly complex public transportation network. The metropolis is a popular tourist destination, significant industries also include IT, pharmaceuticals, biomedical engineering, clean tech, biotechnology, construction and electronics. Modern Berlin is home to world renowned universities, orchestras, museums and its urban setting has made it a sought-after location for international film productions. The city is known for its festivals, diverse architecture, nightlife, contemporary arts. Since 2000 Berlin has seen the emergence of a cosmopolitan entrepreneurial scene, the name Berlin has its roots in the language of West Slavic inhabitants of the area of todays Berlin, and may be related to the Old Polabian stem berl-/birl-. All German place names ending on -ow, -itz and -in, since the Ber- at the beginning sounds like the German word Bär, a bear appears in the coat of arms of the city. It is therefore a canting arm, the first written records of towns in the area of present-day Berlin date from the late 12th century. Spandau is first mentioned in 1197 and Köpenick in 1209, although these areas did not join Berlin until 1920, the central part of Berlin can be traced back to two towns. Cölln on the Fischerinsel is first mentioned in a 1237 document,1237 is considered the founding date of the city. The two towns over time formed close economic and social ties, and profited from the right on the two important trade routes Via Imperii and from Bruges to Novgorod. In 1307, they formed an alliance with a common external policy, in 1415 Frederick I became the elector of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, which he ruled until 1440. In 1443 Frederick II Irontooth started the construction of a new palace in the twin city Berlin-Cölln
7.
Theater am Schiffbauerdamm
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The Theater am Schiffbauerdamm is a theatre building at the Schiffbauerdamm riverside in the Mitte district of Berlin, Germany, opened on November 19,1892. Since 1954 it has been home to the Berliner Ensemble theatre company, founded in 1949 by Helene Weigel, the original name of the Neo-baroque construction by the architect Heinrich Seeling was Neues Theater. The first performance was Johann Wolfgang von Goethes play Iphigenie auf Tauris, die Weber, a naturalistic drama by Gerhart Hauptmann had its premiere in a private audience at the theatre on February 26,1893. From 1903 to 1906 the Neues Theater was under the management of Max Reinhardt, Bertolt Brecht staged Marieluise Fleißers play Pioneers in Ingolstadt on March 30,1929, causing a veritable scandal. The theatre saw Gustaf Gründgens giving his debut as a director with Jean Cocteaus Orphée, from 1931 on the theatre was called Deutsches Nationaltheater am Schiffbauerdamm. Notable actors included Lotte Lenya, Carola Neher, Hilde Körber, Helene Weigel, Ernst Busch, Ernst Deutsch, Kurt Gerron, Theo Lingen, with the Nazi takeover in 1933 the theatre declined and was finally closed in 1944. Reopened after World War II it was taken over by Bertolt Brecht. Today it is considered one of the most glamorous theatres in Germany and the building is currently undergoing historic preservation
8.
Bobby Darin
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Bobby Darin was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and actor of film and television. He performed in a range of genres, including jazz, pop, rock n roll, folk, swing. He started as a songwriter for Connie Francis, and recorded his own first million-seller Splish Splash in 1958 and this was followed by Dream Lover, Mack the Knife, and Beyond the Sea, which brought him world fame. In 1962 he won a Golden Globe Award for his first film Come September, co-starring his first wife, during the 1960s he became more politically active and worked on Robert F. Kennedys Democratic presidential campaign. He was present on the night of June 4/5,1968 and that same year he discovered that he had been brought up by his grandmother, not his mother, and that the girl he had thought to be his sister was actually his mother. These events deeply affected Darin and sent him into a period of seclusion. Although he made a successful comeback - in television - his health was beginning to fail, as he had always expected and this knowledge of his vulnerability had always spurred him on to exploit his musical talent while still young. He died at age 37, following an operation in Los Angeles. Born Walden Robert Cassotto in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Bobby Darin was reared by his maternal grandmother, Darins birth mother, Vanina Juliette Nina Cassotto, became pregnant with him in the summer of 1935 when she was 17. Presumably because of the nature of out-of-wedlock pregnancies in that era, Nina. Darins maternal grandfather, Saverio Antonio Big Sam Curly Cassotto, was of Italian descent and his maternal grandmother, Vivian Fern Walden, who called herself Polly, was of English ancestry and a vaudeville singer. From his birth, Darin always believed Nina to be his older sister, but in 1968, when he was 32, Nina told Darin the truth, reportedly devastating him. By the time he was a teenager, Darin could play several instruments, including piano, drums and he later added harmonica and xylophone. Darin moved to the Bronx early in his life and graduated from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, in later years he attributed his arrogance to his experiences at the high school, where he was surrounded by brighter students who would tease him. He then enrolled at Hunter College and soon gravitated to the drama department, after only two semesters, he dropped out to pursue an acting career. Darins career took off with a partnership, formed in 1955 with Don Kirshner. They wrote jingles and songs, beginning with Bubblegum Pop, in 1956 his agent negotiated a contract with Decca Records. The songs recorded at Decca had very little success, a member of the Brill Building gang of struggling songwriters, Darin was introduced to singer Connie Francis, for whom he helped write several songs
9.
Street organ
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A street organ is an automatic mechanical pneumatic organ designed to be mobile enough to play its music in the street. The two most commonly seen types are the smaller German and the larger Dutch street organ, many were built by Italian organ builders who had settled in France and Germany, creating companies such as Frati, Gavioli, Gasparini and Fassano. These early organs had more pipes than the serinette, could more than one tune. Wooden bass pipes were placed underneath the organ and on the front were often mounted a set of pan-flutes or piccolo pipes, with decorative finishes. In New York City, the influx of Italian immigrants led to a situation where by 1880 nearly one in 20 Italian men in certain areas were organ grinders. An unfortunate consequence was the destruction of hundreds of organs, the barrels of which contained a record of the music of the day. Before the invention of the record player, this was the only permanent recording of these tunes. The law that banned barrel organs in New York was repealed in 1975, many cities in the United Kingdom also had ordinances prohibiting organ grinders. The authorities often encouraged policemen to treat the grinders as beggars or public nuisances, in Paris there were a limited number of permits for organ grinders, and entry in that reserved circle was based on a waiting list or seniority system. According to Ord-Hume the disappearance of organ grinders from European streets was in part due to the early application of national and international copyright laws. The organ grinder was a musical novelty street performer of the 19th century and the part of the 20th century. Period literature often represents the grinder as a gentleman of ill repute or as a representative of the lower classes. Newspaper reporters would sometimes describe them cynically or jocularly as minor extortionists who were paid to keep silent, later depictions would stress the romantic or picturesque aspects of the activity. Whereas some organ grinders were very likely itinerants or vagabonds, many, the strap around his neck would balance the organ, leaving one hand free to turn the crank and the other to steady the organ. A tin cup on top of the organ or in the hand of a companion, was used to solicit payments for his performance. The largest organs were usually mounted on a cart, and required a team of operators to move, the most elaborate organs would have mechanical figures or automata mounted on top of or in the front of the case, along with percussion instruments. Their dreadful music is the result of a purely mechanical gesture, there are in London around a dozen firms specialising in the manufacture of piano organs, which they hire out for 15 shillings a week. As a result, the beggars of London live mainly on the poor, Music lovers usually hated the organ grinders, since most grinders seemed to be tone-deaf and lacking any sense of rhythm
10.
Highwayman
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A highwayman was a robber who stole from travellers. This type of thief usually travelled and robbed by horse, as compared to a footpad who travelled and robbed on foot, such robbers operated in Great Britain from the Elizabethan era until the early 19th century. In many other countries, they persisted for a few decades longer, the word highwayman is first known to have been used in the year 1617, other euphemisms included knights of the road and gentlemen of the road. In the 19th-century American West, highwaymen were known as road agents, in Australia they were known as bushrangers. The great age of highwaymen was the period from the Restoration in 1660 to the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Some of them are known to have been disbanded soldiers and even officers of the English Civil War and French wars, no doubt the warlike character of the age multiplied crimes of violence. What favoured them most was the lack of governance and absence of a force, parish constables were almost wholly ineffective and commonplace detection. Most of the highwaymen held up travellers and took their money, some had channels by which they could dispose of bills of exchange. Others had a racket on the transport of an extensive district. Highwaymen, along with rioters and smugglers, defied the government of the time. They often attacked coaches for their lack of protection, including public stagecoaches, the famous demand to Stand and deliver. Was in use from the 17th century, the phrase Your money or your life. He clapped a bayonet to my breast, and said, with an oath, Your money and he had on a soldiers waistcoat and breeches. I put the bayonet aside, and gave him my silver, there were many famous victims of highwaymen. Horace Walpole, shot at in Hyde Park, wryly observed, One is forced to travel, even at noon, during this period, crime was rife and encounters with highwaymen could be bloody if the victim attempted to resist. There is a history of treating highway robbers as heroes. Originally they were admired by many as bold men who confronted their victims face-to-face and were ready to fight for what they wanted, the most famous English robber hero is the legendary medieval outlaw Robin Hood. In 17th- through early-19th-century Ireland, acts of robbery were often part of a tradition of resistance to British colonial rule
11.
Captain Macheath
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Captain Macheath is a fictional character who appears both in John Gays The Beggars Opera, its sequel Polly, and roughly 200 years later in Bertolt Brechts The Threepenny Opera. Macheath made his first appearance in John Gays The Beggars Opera as a chivalrous highwayman and he then appeared as a pirate in Gays sequel. He was probably inspired in part by Jack Sheppard who, like Macheath, escaped prison and enjoyed the affections of a prostitute. His nemesis is Peachum who, in John Gays original work, both characters can be understood as satires of Robert Walpole and Jonathan Wild. Captain Macheath is the chief protagonist of the 1841 Victorian penny dreadful Captain Macheath by Pierce Egan the Younger, in Bertolt Brechts The Threepenny Opera, he is referred to as Mack the Knife, and is the subject of the song of the same name. Whilst his character plays roughly the same role as in the work it is derived from, Macheath is a less romantic character here, described as a cutthroat, rapist
12.
John Gay
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John Gay was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggars Opera, a ballad opera, the characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names. Gay was born in Barnstaple, England, and was educated at the grammar school. John Hanmer, the Nonconformist minister of the town, the dedication of his Rural Sports to Alexander Pope was the beginning of a lasting friendship. In 1714, Gay wrote The Shepherds Week, a series of six pastorals drawn from English rustic life, Gays pastorals achieved this goal and his ludicrous pictures of the English country lads and their loves were found to be entertaining on their own account. In 1715, probably with help from Pope, he produced What dye call it. A dramatic skit on contemporary tragedy, with reference to Thomas Otways Venice Preservd. It left the public so ignorant of its meaning that Lewis Theobald. In 1716 appeared his Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London and it contains graphic and humorous descriptions of the London of that period. In taking a form, Gays poem was able to poke fun at the notion of complete reformation of street civility. In January 1717 he produced the comedy, Three Hours After Marriage, which was thought to be grossly indecent and he had assistance from Pope and John Arbuthnot, but they allowed it to be assumed that Gay was the sole author. Gay had numerous patrons, and in 1720 he published Poems on Several Occasions by subscription, in that year James Craggs, the secretary of state, presented him with some South Sea stock. Gay, disregarding the advice of Pope and others of his friends, invested all his money in South Sea stock, the shock is said to have made him dangerously ill. His friends did not fail him at this juncture and he had patrons in William Pulteney, afterwards Earl of Bath, in the third Earl of Burlington, who constantly entertained him at Chiswick or at Burlington House, and in the third Duke of Queensberry. He was a frequent visitor with Pope, and received unvarying kindness from William Congreve and he was offered the situation of gentleman-usher to the Princess Louisa, who was also still a child. He refused this offer, which all his friends seem to have regarded as an indignity and he had never rendered any special services to the court. This famous piece, which was said to have made Rich gay and Gay rich, was an innovation in many respects, the satire of the play has a double allegory. Gays decision to launch the work was also influenced by the huge interest that the Jack Sheppard
13.
The Beggar's Opera
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The Beggars Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. It is one of the plays in Augustan drama and is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today. Ballad operas were satiric musical plays that some of the conventions of opera. The lyrics of the airs in the piece are set to popular ballads, opera arias, church hymns. The Beggars Opera premiered at the Lincolns Inn Fields Theatre on 29 January 1728 and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the work became Gays greatest success and has been played ever since, it has been called the most popular play of the eighteenth century. The piece satirised Italian opera, which had become popular in London, instead of the grand music and themes of opera, the work uses familiar tunes and characters that were ordinary people. Some of the songs were by composers like Handel. The audience could hum along with the music and identify with the characters, the story satirised politics, poverty and injustice, focusing on the theme of corruption at all levels of society. Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum, became an overnight success and her pictures were in great demand, verses were written to her and books published about her. After appearing in comedies, and then in numerous repetitions of The Beggars Opera, she ran away with her married lover, Charles Powlett. Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill adapted the opera into Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928, sticking closely to the plot and characters but with a new libretto. The original idea of the came from Jonathan Swift, who wrote to Alexander Pope on 30 August 1716 asking. what think you. Their friend, Gay, decided that it would be a rather than a pastoral opera. For his original production in 1728, Gay intended all the songs to be sung without any accompaniment, adding to the shocking and gritty atmosphere of his conception. Although there is no evidence of who the arranger was, inspection of the original 1729 score, formally published by Dover Books. It also deals with social inequity on a scale, primarily through the comparison of low-class thieves and whores with their aristocratic. Gay used Scottish folk melodies mostly taken from the poet Allan Ramsays hugely popular collection The Gentle Shepherd plus two French tunes, to serve his hilariously pointed and irreverent texts. Pepusch composed an overture and arranged all the tunes shortly before the night at Lincolns Inn Fields on 28 January 1728
14.
Jack Sheppard
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Jack Sheppard was a notorious English thief and gaol-breaker of early 18th-century London. Born into a family, he was apprenticed as a carpenter but took to theft and burglary in 1723. He was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724 but escaped four times from prison, making him a public figure. Ultimately, he was caught, convicted, and hanged at Tyburn, the inability of the notorious Thief-Taker General Jonathan Wild to control Sheppard, and injuries suffered by Wild at the hands of Sheppards colleague, Joseph Blueskin Blake, led to Wilds downfall. Sheppard was as renowned for his attempts to escape from prison as he was for his crimes, an autobiographical Narrative, thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe, was sold at his execution, quickly followed by popular plays. The character of Macheath in John Gays The Beggars Opera was based on Sheppard and he returned to the public consciousness around 1840, when William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel entitled Jack Sheppard, with illustrations by George Cruikshank. Sheppard was born in Whites Row, in Londons Spitalfields and he was baptised on 5 March, the day after he was born, at St Dunstans, Stepney, suggesting a fear of infant mortality by his parents, perhaps because the newborn was weak or sickly. His parents named him after a brother, John, who had died before his birth. In life, he was known as Jack, or even Gentleman Jack or Jack the Lad. He had a brother, Thomas, and a younger sister. Their father, a carpenter, died while Sheppard was young, unable to support her family without her husbands income, Jacks mother sent him to Mr Garretts School, a workhouse near St Helens Bishopsgate, when he was six years old. Sheppard was sent out as an apprentice to a cane-chair maker, taking a settlement of 20 shillings. He was sent out to a second cane-chair maker, but Sheppard was treated badly, finally, when Sheppard was 10, he went to work as a shop-boy for William Kneebone, a wool draper with a shop on the Strand. Sheppards mother had been working for Kneebone since her husbands death, Kneebone taught Sheppard to read and write and apprenticed him to a carpenter, Owen Wood, in Wych Street, off Drury Lane in Covent Garden. Sheppard signed his seven-year indenture on 2 April 1717, by 1722, Sheppard was showing great promise as a carpenter. Aged 20, he was a man, only 54 and lightly built. He had a face with large, dark eyes, a wide mouth. Despite a slight stutter, his wit made him popular in the taverns of Drury Lane and he served five unblemished years of his apprenticeship but then began to be led into crime
15.
Shark
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Sharks are a group of elasmobranch fish characterized by a cartilaginous skeleton, five to seven gill slits on the sides of the head, and pectoral fins that are not fused to the head. Modern sharks are classified within the clade Selachimorpha and are the group to the rays. Under this broader definition, the earliest known sharks date back to more than 420 million years ago, acanthodians are often referred to as spiny sharks, though they are not part of Chondrichthyes proper, they are a paraphyletic assemblage leading to cartilaginous fish as a whole. Since then, sharks have diversified into over 500 species, Sharks are found in all seas and are common to depths of 2,000 metres. They generally do not live in freshwater although there are a few exceptions, such as the bull shark and the river shark. Sharks have a covering of dermal denticles that protects their skin from damage and they have numerous sets of replaceable teeth. Well-known species such as the white shark, tiger shark, blue shark, mako shark. Many shark populations are threatened by human activities, until the 16th century, sharks were known to mariners as sea dogs. The etymology of the shark is uncertain. One theory is that it derives from the Yucatec Maya word xok, however, the Middle English Dictionary records an isolated occurrence of the word shark in a letter written by Thomas Beckington in 1442, which rules out a New World etymology. Evidence for the existence of sharks dates from the Ordovician period, 450–420 million years ago, before land vertebrates existed and before many plants had colonized the continents. Only scales have been recovered from the first sharks and not all agree that these are from true sharks. The oldest generally accepted shark scales are from about 420 million years ago, the first sharks looked very different from modern sharks. The majority of sharks can be traced back to around 100 million years ago. Most fossils are of teeth, often in large numbers, partial skeletons and even complete fossilized remains have been discovered. Estimates suggest that sharks grow tens of thousands of teeth over a lifetime, the teeth consist of easily fossilized calcium phosphate, an apatite. When a shark dies, the decomposing skeleton breaks up, scattering the apatite prisms, preservation requires rapid burial in bottom sediments. Among the most ancient and primitive sharks is Cladoselache, from about 370 million years ago, which has been found within Paleozoic strata in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee
16.
Robbery
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Robbery is the crime of taking or attempting to take anything of value by force, threat of force or by putting the victim in fear. At common law, robbery is defined as taking the property of another, with the intent to deprive the person of that property. Precise definitions of the offence may vary between jurisdictions, under English law, most forms of theft are triable either way, whereas robbery is triable only on indictment. The word rob came via French from Late Latin words of Germanic origin, among the types of robbery are armed robbery involving use of a weapon and aggravated robbery involving use of a deadly weapon or something that appears to be a deadly weapon. Highway robbery or mugging takes place outside or in a place such as a sidewalk, street. Carjacking is the act of stealing a car from a victim by force, extortion is the threat to do something illegal, or the offer to not do something illegal, in the event that goods are not given, primarily using words instead of actions. Criminal slang for robbery includes blagging or stick-up, and steaming, in Canada, the Criminal Code makes robbery an indictable offence, subject to a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. If the accused uses a restricted or prohibited firearm to commit robbery, there is a minimum sentence of five years for the first offence. Robbery is an offence in the Republic of Ireland. Robbery is an offence in England and Wales. Aggravated theft Robbery is the offence of aggravated theft. Aggravated robbery There are no offences of aggravated robbery and this requires evidence to show a theft as set out in section 1 of the Theft Act 1968. In R v Robinson the defendant threatened the victim with a knife in order to recover money which he was actually owed and his conviction for robbery was quashed on the basis that Robinson had an honest, although unreasonable, belief in his legal right to the money. See also R v Skivington 1 QB166,2 WLR655,131 JP265,111 SJ72,1 All ER483,51 Cr App R167, CA. It was argued that the theft should be regarded as complete by this time, and R v Gomez, should apply, the threat or use of force must take place immediately before or at the time of the theft. Force used after the theft is complete will not turn the theft into a robbery, the words or immediately after that appeared in section 23 of the Larceny Act 1916 were deliberately omitted from section 8. The book Archbold said that the facts in R v Harman and it was held in R v Dawson and James that force is an ordinary English word and its meaning should be left to the jury. This approach was confirmed in R v Clouden and Corcoran v Anderton, stealing may involve a young child who is not aware that taking other persons property is not in order
17.
Murder
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A murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human being with malice aforethought. This state of mind may, depending upon the jurisdiction, distinguish murder from other forms of unlawful homicide, manslaughter is a killing committed in the absence of malice, brought about by reasonable provocation, or diminished capacity. Involuntary manslaughter, where it is recognized, is a killing that lacks all but the most attenuated guilty intent, in most countries, a person convicted of murder generally faces a long-term prison sentence, possibly a life sentence where permitted. In many common law jurisdictions, a convicted of murder will receive a mandatory life sentence. In jurisdictions where capital punishment exists, the penalty may be imposed for such an act, however. The modern English word murder descends from the Proto-Indo-European mrtró which meant to die, the Middle English mordre is a noun from Anglo-Saxon morðor and Old French murdre. Middle English mordre is a verb from Anglo-Saxon myrdrian and the Middle English noun, the elements of common law murder are, Unlawful killing through criminal act or omission of a human by another human with malice aforethought. Killing – At common law life ended with cardiopulmonary arrest – the total, with advances in medical technology courts have adopted irreversible cessation of all brain function as marking the end of life. Сriminal act or omission – Killing can be committed by an act or an omission. of a human – This element presents the issue of life begins. At common law, a fetus was not a human being, life began when the fetus passed through the vagina and took its first breath. By another human – In early common law, suicide was considered murder, the requirement that the person killed be someone other than the perpetrator excluded suicide from the definition of murder. With malice aforethought – Originally malice aforethought carried its everyday meaning – a deliberate, Murder necessarily required that an appreciable time pass between the formation and execution of the intent to kill. The courts broadened the scope of murder by eliminating the requirement of actual premeditation and deliberation as well as true malice, all that was required for malice aforethought to exist is that the perpetrator act with one of the four states of mind that constitutes malice. The four states of mind recognized as constituting malice are, Under state of mind, intent to kill, thus, if the defendant intentionally uses a deadly weapon or instrument against the victim, such use authorizes a permissive inference of intent to kill. In other words, intent follows the bullet, examples of deadly weapons and instruments include but are not limited to guns, knives, deadly toxins or chemicals or gases and even vehicles when intentionally used to harm one or more victims. In Australian jurisdictions, the risk must amount to a foreseen probability of death. Under state of mind, the doctrine, the felony committed must be an inherently dangerous felony, such as burglary, arson, rape. Importantly, the underlying felony cannot be a lesser included offense such as assault, as with most legal terms, the precise definition of murder varies between jurisdictions and is usually codified in some form of legislation
18.
Arson
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Arson is a crime of intentionally, deliberately and maliciously setting fire to buildings, wildland areas, abandoned homes, vehicles or other property with the intent to cause damage. It may be distinguished from other such as spontaneous combustion, accidental fires. Arson often involves fires deliberately set to the property of another or to own property in order to collect insurance compensation. A person who commits this crime is called an arsonist, more often than not, arsonists use accelerants to ignite, propel and directionalize fires. It is not required that the defendant acted intentionally or willfully for the purpose of burning a dwelling, burning – at common law charring to any part of dwelling was sufficient to satisfy this element. No significant amount of damage to the dwelling was required, any injury or damage to the structure caused by exposure to heat or flame is sufficient. Of the dwelling – dwelling refers to a place of residence, the destruction of an unoccupied building was not considered arson, since arson protected habitation, the burning of an unoccupied house did not constitute arson. Dwelling includes structures and outbuildings within the curtilage, dwellings were not limited to houses. A barn could be the subject of arson if it was occupied as a dwelling, moreover, for purposes of common law arson, possession or occupancy rather than title determines whose dwelling the structure is. Thus a tenant who sets fire to his house would not be guilty of common law arson. In many states, arson is divided into degrees, depending sometimes on the value of the property but more commonly on its use, first-degree arson – The act in which the arsonist sets fire to an occupied domain or building such as a school. Second-degree arson – The act in which the arsonist sets fire to a building such as an empty barn. Third-degree arson – The act in which the arsonist sets fire to a building or an abandoned area of space such as a field. Many statutes vary the degree of the according to the criminal intent of the accused. In the United States, the common law elements of arson are often varied in different jurisdictions, for example, the element of dwelling is no longer required in most states, and arson occurs by the burning of any real property without consent or with unlawful intent. Arson is prosecuted with attention to degree of severity in the alleged offense, first degree arson generally occurs when persons are harmed or killed in the course of the fire, while second degree arson occurs when significant destruction of property occurs. While usually a felony, arson may also be prosecuted as a misdemeanor, criminal mischief, burglary also occurs, if the arson involved a breaking and entering. A person may be sentenced to death if arson occurred as a method of homicide, as was the case in California of Raymond Lee Oyler, in New York, arson is charged in five degrees
19.
Kurt Gerron
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Kurt Gerron was a German Jewish actor and film director. Born Kurt Gerson into a merchant family in Berlin, he studied medicine before being called up for military service in World War I. After being seriously wounded he was qualified as a doctor in the German Army. After the war Gerron turned to a career, becoming a theatre actor under director Max Reinhardt in 1920. He appeared in roles in several silent films and began directing film shorts in 1926. Gerrons popular cinema breakthrough came with The Blue Angel opposite Marlene Dietrich, with the shows international success, Gerrons name and recorded voice became well known across Europe. After the 1933 seizure of power by the Nazis, Gerron left Nazi Germany with his wife and parents, traveling first to Paris and he continued work there as an actor at the Stadsschouwburg and directed several movies. Several times he was offered employment in Hollywood through the agency of Peter Lorre and Josef von Sternberg, after the Wehrmacht occupied the Netherlands, Gerron was first interned in the transit camp at Westerbork before being sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. There he was forced by the SS to stage the cabaret review, Karussell, in which he reprised Mack the Knife, as well as compositions by Martin Roman and other imprisoned musicians and artists. In 1944, Gerron was coerced into directing a Nazi propaganda film intended to be viewed in neutral nations showing how humane conditions were at Theresienstadt. Once filming was finished, Gerron and members of the Jazz pianist Martin Romans Ghetto Swingers were deported on the final train transport to Auschwitz. Gerron and his wife were gassed immediately upon arrival, along with the entire performing entourage. The next day. All known complete prints of Gerrons final film, which was to have been called Theresienstadt, ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, and which is also referred to as Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt, were destroyed in 1945. Twenty minutes of footage were discovered in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet. The narrator in Kurt Gerrons Karussell, which stars Ute Lemper, is Roy Kift, the play is published in The Theatre of the Holocaust, edited by Professor Robert Skloot and published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Prisoner of Paradise by PBS,2003,100 mins, not rated, fictional biography by Charles Lewinsky Gerron,2011, French translation Retour indésirable, Grasset,2013. Kurt Gerron at the Internet Movie Database Photographs of Kurt Gerron
20.
Barrel organ
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A barrel organ is a mechanical musical instrument consisting of bellows and one or more ranks of pipes housed in a case, usually of wood, and often highly decorated. The pieces of music are encoded onto wooden barrels, which are analogous to the keyboard of the pipe organ. There are many names for the organ, such as hand organ, cylinder organ, box organ, street organ, grinder organ. While many of these refer to the physical operation of the crank. The term hurdy-gurdy is sometimes applied to a small, portable barrel organ that was frequently played by organ grinders and buskers. Although the hurdy-gurdy is also powered by a crank and often used by street performers, another key difference is that the hurdy-gurdy player is free to play any tune he or she desires, while the barrel organist is generally confined to pre-programmed tunes. Some also confuse the barrel organ with the organ or calliope. In the United Kingdom barrel pianos, particularly those played in the streets, are frequently called barrel organs, the pieces of music are encoded onto the barrel using metal pins and staples. Pins are used for notes, and staples of varying lengths for longer notes. Each barrel usually carried several different tunes, pinning such barrels was something of an art form, and the quality of the music produced by a barrel organ is largely a function of the quality of its pinning. The organ barrels must be sturdy to maintain precise alignment over time, damage to the barrel, such as warpage, would have a direct effect on the music produced. The size of the barrel will depend on the number of notes in the organ, the more notes, the longer the barrel. The longer the tune, the greater the diameter, since the music is hard-coded onto the barrel, the only way for a barrel organ to play a different set of tunes is to replace the barrel with another one. While not an operation, barrels are unwieldy and expensive. A set of levers called keys is positioned just above the surface of the barrel, each key corresponds to one pitch. A rod is connected to the rear of each key, the other end of the rod is a metal pin which operates a valve within the wind chest. When the instrument is played, offsets on the crank shaft cause bellows to open, a reservoir/regulator maintains a constant pressure. A worm gear on the crank shaft causes the barrel to rotate slowly and its pins and staples lift the fronts of the keys
21.
Catherine Sauvage
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Catherine Sauvage was a French singer and actress. Born Marcelle Jeanine Saunier in Nancy, France, she moved with her family in 1940 to the Free Zone in Annecy, after high school, she turned to the theater, performing under the name Janine Saulnier. After eight years of studying piano, singing and drama, in 1950 she met Léo Ferré, in 1952 she sang his Paris canaille, which became a hit. In 1954, she won the Grand Prix du Disque, a famous French reward, for the song LHomme, on tour in Canada, she made the acquaintance of Gilles Vigneault, who wrote Mon Pays, Le Corbeau, la Manikoutai for her. The chance of life allowed me to be presented to Moyses, I sang him some stuff like that, recited two or three poems. As a result, Moyses hired me the next day, I used a directory with songs including Marianne Oswald. I stayed two months at the Boeuf sur le Toit --- afterwards, I sang at the Quod Libet and she also performed at the cabarets LArlequin at 131 bis, boulevard Saint-Germain, then at LÉcluse at 15, Quai des Grands Augustins, in the 6th arrondissement. She met Léo Ferré, whom she helped in bringing recognition to his music, as a happiness never comes alone, they say, Jacques Canetti came to hear me a beautiful evening. He was always looking for artists for the company of which he was the artistic director. Jacques Canetti hired her in 1953 and 1954 to work at Les Trois Baudets, so I visited that cabaret on Rue Coustou for two years. Later I was featured at the Olympia, and received a prize for record LHomme with Léo Ferré. She died in 1998, aged 68, in Bry-sur-Marne, Val-de-Marne and she has always given preference to poetry set to music. Léo Ferré and Gilles Vigneault have said they considered Sauvage their best performer, aragon, one of her favorite poets, wrote about her, And suddenly with her voice, like a gift, every word makes complete sense. Joan by Bernard Shaw, in French, directed by Gabriel Monnet, open air production August 1956, newspaper Radio TV,29 August 1974
22.
Single (music)
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In music, a single or record single is a type of release, typically a song recording of fewer tracks than an LP record, an album or an EP record. This can be released for sale to the public in a variety of different formats, in most cases, a single is a song that is released separately from an album, although it usually also appears on an album. Typically, these are the songs from albums that are released separately for promotional uses such as digital download or commercial radio airplay and are expected to be the most popular, in other cases a recording released as a single may not appear on an album. As digital downloading and audio streaming have become prevalent, it is often possible for every track on an album to also be available separately. Nevertheless, the concept of a single for an album has been retained as an identification of a heavily promoted or more popular song within an album collection. Despite being referred to as a single, singles can include up to as many as three tracks on them. The biggest digital music distributor, iTunes, accepts as many as three tracks less than ten minutes each as a single, as well as popular music player Spotify also following in this trend. Any more than three tracks on a release or longer than thirty minutes in total running time is either an Extended Play or if over six tracks long. The basic specifications of the single were made in the late 19th century. Gramophone discs were manufactured with a range of speeds and in several sizes. By about 1910, however, the 10-inch,78 rpm shellac disc had become the most commonly used format, the inherent technical limitations of the gramophone disc defined the standard format for commercial recordings in the early 20th century.26 rpm. With these factors applied to the 10-inch format, songwriters and performers increasingly tailored their output to fit the new medium, the breakthrough came with Bob Dylans Like a Rolling Stone. Singles have been issued in various formats, including 7-inch, 10-inch, other, less common, formats include singles on digital compact cassette, DVD, and LD, as well as many non-standard sizes of vinyl disc. Some artist release singles on records, a more common in musical subcultures. The most common form of the single is the 45 or 7-inch. The names are derived from its speed,45 rpm. The 7-inch 45 rpm record was released 31 March 1949 by RCA Victor as a smaller, more durable, the first 45 rpm records were monaural, with recordings on both sides of the disc. As stereo recordings became popular in the 1960s, almost all 45 rpm records were produced in stereo by the early 1970s
23.
Louis Armstrong
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Louis Armstrong, nicknamed Satchmo or Satch, was an American trumpeter, composer, singer and occasional actor who was one of the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades, from the 1920s to the 1960s and he was also skilled at scat singing. Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers to cross over and he rarely publicly politicized his race, often to the dismay of fellow African Americans, but took a well-publicized stand for desegregation in the Little Rock crisis. His artistry and personality allowed him socially acceptable access to the upper echelons of American society which were restricted for black men of his era. Armstrong often stated that he was born on July 4,1900, although he died in 1971, it was not until the mid-1980s that his true birth date, August 4,1901, was discovered by the researcher Tad Jones through the examination of baptismal records. Armstrong was born into a family in New Orleans, Louisiana. He spent his youth in poverty, in a neighborhood known as the Battlefield. His father, William Armstrong, abandoned the family when Louis was an infant and his mother, Mary Mayann Albert, then left Louis and his younger sister, Beatrice Armstrong Collins, in the care of his grandmother, Josephine Armstrong, and at times his uncle Isaac. At five, he moved back to live with his mother, her relatives and he attended the Fisk School for Boys, where he most likely had early exposure to music. He hung out in dance halls close to home, where he observed everything from licentious dancing to the quadrille, after dropping out of the Fisk School at age eleven, Armstrong joined a quartet of boys who sang in the streets for money. He also started to get into trouble, Cornet player Bunk Johnson said he taught Armstrong to play by ear at Dago Tonys Tonk in New Orleans, although in his later years Armstrong gave the credit to Oliver. It has given me something to live for and he also worked for a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant family, the Karnofskys, who had a junk-hauling business and gave him odd jobs. They took him in and treated him like family, knowing he lived without a father and he later wrote a memoir of his relationship with the Karnofskys, Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La. the Year of 1907. Armstrong wore a Star of David pendant for the rest of his life and wrote about what he learned from them, how to live—real life, professor Peter Davis instilled discipline in and provided musical training to the otherwise self-taught Armstrong. Eventually, Davis made Armstrong the band leader, the home band played around New Orleans and the thirteen-year-old Louis began to draw attention by his cornet playing, starting him on a musical career. At fourteen he was released from the home, living again with his father and new stepmother, Gertrude, Armstrong got his first dance hall job at Henry Ponces, where Black Benny became his protector and guide. He hauled coal by day and played his cornet at night, later, he played in brass bands and riverboats of New Orleans, and began traveling with the well-regarded band of Fate Marable, which toured on a steamboat up and down the Mississippi River. He described his time with Marable as going to the University, in 1919, Joe Oliver decided to go north and resigned his position in Kid Orys band, Armstrong replaced him
24.
A-side and B-side
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The terms A-side and B-side refer to the two sides of 78,45, and 33 1/3 rpm phonograph records, whether singles, extended plays, or long-playing records. Creedence Clearwater Revival had hits with both A-side and B-side releases, others took the opposite approach, producer Phil Spector was in the habit of filling B-sides with on-the-spot instrumentals that no one would confuse with the A-side. With this practice, Spector was assured that airplay was focused on the side he wanted to be the hit side, the earliest 10-inch,78 rpm, shellac records were single sided. Double-sided recordings, with one song on side, were introduced in Europe by Columbia Records. There were no record charts until the 1930s, and radio stations did not play recorded music until the 1950s, in this time, A-sides and B-sides existed, but neither side was considered more important, the side did not convey anything about the content of the record. The term single came into use with the advent of vinyl records in the early 1950s. At first, most record labels would randomly assign which song would be an A-side, under this random system, many artists had so-called double-sided hits, where both songs on a record made one of the national sales charts, or would be featured on jukeboxes in public places. As time wore on, however, the convention for assigning songs to sides of the record changed. By the early sixties, the song on the A-side was the song that the company wanted radio stations to play. It was not until 1968, for instance, that the production of albums on a unit basis finally surpassed that of singles in the United Kingdom. In the late 1960s stereo versions of pop and rock songs began to appear on 45s. The majority of the 45s were played on AM radio stations, by the early 1970s, double-sided hits had become rare. Album sales had increased, and B-sides had become the side of the record where non-album, non-radio-friendly, with the advent of cassette and compact disc singles in the late 1980s, the A-side/B-side differentiation became much less meaningful. With the decline of cassette singles in the 1990s, the A-side/B-side dichotomy became virtually extinct, as the dominant medium. However, the term B-side is still used to refer to the tracks or coupling tracks on a CD single. With the advent of downloading music via the Internet, sales of CD singles and other media have declined. B-side songs may be released on the record as a single to provide extra value for money. There are several types of material released in this way, including a different version, or, in a concept record
25.
Phonograph record
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The groove usually starts near the periphery and ends near the center of the disc. The phonograph disc record was the medium used for music reproduction until late in the 20th century. It had co-existed with the cylinder from the late 1880s. Records retained the largest market share even when new formats such as compact cassette were mass-marketed, by the late 1980s, digital media, in the form of the compact disc, had gained a larger market share, and the vinyl record left the mainstream in 1991. The phonograph record has made a resurgence in the early 21st century –9.2 million records were sold in the U. S. in 2014. Likewise, in the UK sales have increased five-fold from 2009 to 2014, as of 2017,48 record pressing facilities remain worldwide,18 in the United States and 30 in other countries. The increased popularity of vinyl has led to the investment in new, only two producers of lacquers remains, Apollo Masters in California, USA, and MDC in Japan. Vinyl records may be scratched or warped if stored incorrectly but if they are not exposed to heat or broken. The large cover are valued by collectors and artists for the space given for visual expression, in the 2000s, these tracings were first scanned by audio engineers and digitally converted into audible sound. Phonautograms of singing and speech made by Scott in 1860 were played back as sound for the first time in 2008, along with a tuning fork tone and unintelligible snippets recorded as early as 1857, these are the earliest known recordings of sound. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, unlike the phonautograph, it was capable of both recording and reproducing sound. Despite the similarity of name, there is no evidence that Edisons phonograph was based on Scotts phonautograph. Edison first tried recording sound on a paper tape, with the idea of creating a telephone repeater analogous to the telegraph repeater he had been working on. The tinfoil was wrapped around a metal cylinder and a sound-vibrated stylus indented the tinfoil while the cylinder was rotated. The recording could be played back immediately, Edison also invented variations of the phonograph that used tape and disc formats. A decade later, Edison developed a greatly improved phonograph that used a wax cylinder instead of a foil sheet. This proved to be both a better-sounding and far more useful and durable device, the wax phonograph cylinder created the recorded sound market at the end of the 1880s and dominated it through the early years of the 20th century. Berliners earliest discs, first marketed in 1889, but only in Europe, were 12.5 cm in diameter, both the records and the machine were adequate only for use as a toy or curiosity, due to the limited sound quality
26.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
27.
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
28.
Columbia Records
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Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, Inc. the United States division of Sony Corporation. It was founded in 1887, evolving from an enterprise named the American Graphophone Company. Columbia is the oldest surviving brand name in the sound business. Columbia Records went on to release records by an array of singers, instrumentalists. It is one of Sony Musics three flagship record labels alongside RCA Records and Epic Records, rather, as above, it was connected to CBS, a broadcasting media company which had purchased the company in 1938, and had been co-founded in 1927 by Columbia Records itself. Though Arista Records was sold to Bertelsmann Music Group, it would become a sister label of Columbia Records through its mutual connection to Sony Music. The Columbia Phonograph Company was founded in 1887 by stenographer, lawyer and New Jersey native Edward Easton and it derived its name from the District of Columbia, where it was headquartered. At first it had a monopoly on sales and service of Edison phonographs and phonograph cylinders in Washington. As was the custom of some of the regional companies, Columbia produced many commercial cylinder recordings of its own. Columbias ties to Edison and the North American Phonograph Company were severed in 1894 with the North American Phonograph Companys breakup, thereafter it sold only records and phonographs of its own manufacture. In 1902, Columbia introduced the XP record, a brown wax record. According to Gracyk, the molded brown waxes may have sold to Sears for distribution. Columbia began selling records and phonographs in addition to the cylinder system in 1901, preceded only by their Toy Graphophone of 1899. For a decade, Columbia competed with both the Edison Phonograph Company cylinders and the Victor Talking Machine Company disc records as one of the top three names in American recorded sound. In order to add prestige to its catalog of artists. The firm also introduced the internal-horn Grafonola to compete with the extremely popular Victrola sold by the rival Victor Talking Machine Company, during this era, Columbia used the famous Magic Notes logo—a pair of sixteenth notes in a circle—both in the United States and overseas. Columbia was split into two companies, one to make records and one to make players, Columbia Phonograph was moved to Connecticut, and Ed Easton went with it. Eventually it was renamed the Dictaphone Corporation, in late 1923, Columbia went into receivership
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Coronet Records
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Coronet Records is the name of at least three different record companies. One was based in San Francisco in the 1940s and was responsible for the first recordings of Dave Brubeck, brubecks Coronet Records disbanded when it couldnt pay its bills and its recordings were taken over by what became Fantasy Records. The second, a division of Premier Albums, issued a range of inexpensive LP records in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. The third was a label in Australia, based in Sydney. It operated from the early 1950s until around 1962 and was recognizable by its octagonal label, in 1960 ARC was taken over by CBS Records and the Coronet label was phased out in favour of the new CBS Australia label, which used the CBS/Columbia walking eye logo. Coronet Records discography - Global Dog Productions MILESAGO, The Australian Record Company List of record labels
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Songwriter
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A songwriter is an individual who writes the lyrics, melodies and chord progressions for songs, typically for a popular music genre such as rock or country music. A songwriter can also be called a composer, although the term tends to be used mainly for individuals from the classical music genre. The pressure from the industry to produce popular hits means that songwriting is often an activity for which the tasks are distributed between a number of people. For example, a songwriter who excels at writing lyrics might be paired with a songwriter with a gift for creating original melodies, pop songs may be written by group members from the band or by staff writers – songwriters directly employed by music publishers. Some songwriters serve as their own publishers, while others have outside publishers. The old-style apprenticeship approach to learning how to write songs is being supplemented by university degrees and college diplomas, a knowledge of modern music technology, songwriting elements and business skills are necessary requirements to make a songwriting career in the 2010s. Several music colleges offer songwriting diplomas and degrees with music business modules, the legal power to grant these permissions may be bought, sold or transferred. This is governed by international copyright law, song pitching can be done on a songwriters behalf by their publisher or independently using tip sheets like RowFax, the MusicRow publication and SongQuarters. Skills associated with song-writing include entrepreneurism and creativity, songwriters who sign an exclusive songwriting agreement with a publisher are called staff writers. In the Nashville country music scene, there is a staff writer culture where contracted writers work normal 9-to-5 hours at the publishing office and are paid a regular salary. This salary is in effect the writers draw, an advance on future earnings, the publisher owns the copyright of songs written during the term of the agreement for a designated period, after which the songwriter can reclaim the copyright. In an interview with HitQuarters, songwriter Dave Berg extolled the benefits of the set-up, unlike contracted writers, some staff writers operate as employees for their respective publishers. Under the terms of work for hire agreements, the compositions created are fully owned by the publisher. In Nashville, young writers are often encouraged to avoid these types of contracts. Staff writers are common across the industry, but without the more office-like working arrangements favored in Nashville. All the major publishers employ writers under contract, songwriter Allan Eshuijs described his staff writer contract at Universal Music Publishing as a starter deal. His success under the arrangement eventually allowed him to found his own publishing company, so that he could. keep as much as possible, songwriters are also often skilled musicians. In addition to selling their songs and musical concepts for other artists to sing, songwriters need to create a number of elements for a song
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Marc Blitzstein
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Marcus Samuel Marc Blitzstein, was an American composer, lyricist, and librettist. He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock and he is known for The Cradle Will Rock and for his Off-Broadway translation/adaptation of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His works also include the opera Regina, an adaptation of Lillian Hellmans play The Little Foxes, the Broadway musical Juno, based on Seán OCaseys play Juno and the Paycock, and No for an Answer. He completed translation/adaptations of Brechts and Weills musical play Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and of Brechts play Mother Courage and Her Children with music by Paul Dessau. Blitzstein also composed music for films, such as Surf and Seaweed and The Spanish Earth, Marc Blitzstein was born in Philadelphia on March 2,1905, the son of affluent parents. Blitzsteins musical gifts were apparent at an age, he had performed a Mozart piano concerto by the time he was seven. He went on to study piano with Alexander Siloti, and made his concerto debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Liszts E-flat Piano Concerto when he was 21. After studying composition at the Curtis Institute of Music, he went to Europe to continue his studies in Berlin with Arnold Schoenberg, and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. Despite his later political beliefs, he was, in the years of his career, a self-proclaimed and unrepentant artistic snob. He was vociferous in denouncing composers—in particular Respighi, Ravel, and Kurt Weill—who, he felt and these early works were far removed from the Schoenberg style. The dramatic premiere of the pro-union The Cradle Will Rock took place at the Venice Theater on June 16,1937, there, without costumes or sets, they performed the work concert-style, actors and musicians alike, sitting among the audience with Blitzstein narrating from the piano. In 1939, Leonard Bernstein led a revival of the play at Harvard, Blitzstein attended the performance, after which he and Bernstein became close friends, Bernstein would later say that Blitzsteins contribution to the American musical theatre was incalculable. The 1999 film Cradle Will Rock was based on this event, in the film, Blitzstein is portrayed as gaining inspiration through ghostly appearances by his idol Brecht and his late anorexic wife. Additional major compositions include the autobiographical radio song play Ive Got the Tune, The Airborne Symphony, Regina, Reuben, Reuben, and Juno. This was followed by the work Blitzstein intended to be his magnum opus, both Tales of Malamud and Sacco and Vanzetti were completed posthumously, with the approval of Blitzsteins estate, by composer Leonard Lehrman. Lehrmans long-awaited Marc Blitzstein, A Bio-Bibliography, published in 2005 by Praeger, is the longest published biographical bibliography of any American composer at 645 pages, in 1958, Blitzstein was subpoenaed to appear before the U. S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. He was recalled for a public session, but after a day sitting anxiously in a waiting room he was not called to testify. During a visit to Martinique in 1964, at the age of 58 and his first lover was the conductor Alexander Smallens, with whom he traveled to Europe in 1924
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Turk Murphy
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Melvin Edward Alton Turk Murphy was a trombonist and bandleader who played traditional and Dixieland jazz. Murphy served in the Navy during World War II, during which he played and recorded with Lu Watters, in 1952, he headed Turk Murphys Jazz Band, which included pianist Wally Rose, clarinetist Bob Helm, banjoist Dick Lammi, and tubaist Bob Short. They played at the Italian Village at Columbus and Lombard in San Franciscos North Beach, the band appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show twice, in 1959 and 1965. In 1979 Bob Schulz began a stint with the band. Murphy was the singer for the 1971 Sesame Street cartoon shorts, The Alligator King and they were animated and produced by his friend Bud Luckey. Murphy arranged and performed on many of Luckeys other Sesame Street animated shorts and he was friend of trombonist and Disney animator Ward Kimball, who created many memorable caricatures of Murphy and Charles Addams, creator of the Addams Family. Murphys band played his nightclub, Earthquake McGoons, which opened in 1960, in January 1987, he played Carnegie Hall
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Translation
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Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. While interpreting—the facilitating of oral or sign-language communication between users of different languages—antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature, there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh into Southwest Asian languages of the second millennium BCE. Translators always risk inappropriate spill-over of source-language idiom and usage into the target-language translation, on the other hand, spill-overs have imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched the target languages. Indeed, translators have helped substantially to shape the languages into which they have translated, because of the laboriousness of translation, since the 1940s engineers have sought to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator. The rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for services and has facilitated language localization. Translation studies systematically study the theory and practice of translation, the English word translation derives from the Latin word translatio, which comes from trans, across + ferre, to carry or to bring. Thus translatio is a carrying across or a bringing across, in this case, the Germanic languages and some Slavic languages have calqued their words for the concept of translation on translatio. The Romance languages and the remaining Slavic languages have derived their words for the concept of translation from an alternative Latin word, traductio, the Ancient Greek term for translation, μετάφρασις, has supplied English with metaphrase — as contrasted with paraphrase. Metaphrase corresponds, in one of the more recent terminologies, to formal equivalence, nevertheless, metaphrase and paraphrase may be useful as ideal concepts that mark the extremes in the spectrum of possible approaches to translation. Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity, the ancient Greeks distinguished between metaphrase and paraphrase. Literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed, Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of imitation, i. e. of adapted translation, When a painter copies from the life. He has no privilege to alter features and lineaments, despite occasional theoretical diversity, the actual practice of translation has hardly changed since antiquity. The grammatical differences between languages and free-word-order languages have been no impediment in this regard. The particular syntax characteristics of a source language are adjusted to the syntactic requirements of the target language. When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a language, translators have borrowed those terms. However, due to shifts in ecological niches of words, an etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. For example, the English actual should not be confused with the cognate French actuel, the Polish aktualny, the Swedish aktuell, the translators role as a bridge for carrying across values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. The translators role is, however, by no means a passive, mechanical one, the main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics such as Cicero
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Pocketknife
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A pocketknife is a foldable knife with one or more blades that fit inside the handle that can still fit in a pocket. It is also known as a jackknife or jack-knife, a typical blade length is 5 to 15 centimetres. Pocket knives are tools, and may be used for anything from opening an envelope, to cutting twine. The earliest known pocketknives date to at least the early Iron Age, a pocketknife with a bone handle was found at the Hallstatt Culture type site in Austria, dating to around 600-500 BCE. Iberian folding-blade knives made by artisans and craftsmen and dating to the pre-Roman era have been found in Spain. Some peasant knives used a bolster or tensioning screw at the blade to apply friction to the tang in order to keep the blade in the open position. The smallest Opinel knives are an example of the peasant knife, the knifes low cost made it a favorite of small farmers, herdsmen, and gardeners in Europe and the Americas during the late 19th and early 20th century. Most pocket knives for light duty are slipjoints and this means that the blade does not lock but, once opened, is held in place by tension from a flat bar or leaf-type backspring that allows the blade to fold if a certain amount of pressure is applied. Slipjoints tend to be smaller than other typical pocket knives and these new varieties often incorporate a pair of pliers and other tools in conjunction with one or more knife blade styles, either locking or non-locking. Multitool knives often have more than one blade, including an assortment of knife blade edges as well as a myriad of tools such as bottle openers, corkscrews. A large tool selection is the signature of the Swiss Army Knife and these knives are produced by Victorinox and Wenger and issued to military services and sold to the public. Similar to the Swiss Army knife is the German Army knife, military utility knife, issued by the United States Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, was made for many years by the Camillus Cutlery Company and Imperial Schrade as well as many other companies. It was originally produced with steel blades and brass liners. Another style of folding, non-locking knife is the friction-folder and these use simple friction between the blade and scales to hold the blade in place once opened, an example is the Japanese higonokami. An electricians knife typically has a locking screwdriver blade but a knife blade. The two-blade Camillus Electricians knife was the inspiration for the development of the linerlock, a credit card knife is a very thin knife that is the shape and size of a credit card. It is designed to be carried in the wallet along with credit cards. Some credit card knives can contain other tools, such as tweezers
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Swing music
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Swing music, or simply swing, is a form of American music that dominated in the 1930s and 1940s. The name swing came from the swing feel where the emphasis is on the off–beat or weaker pulse in the music, Swing bands usually featured soloists who would improvise on the melody over the arrangement. The danceable swing style of big bands and bandleaders such as Benny Goodman was the dominant form of American popular music from 1935 to 1946, the verb to swing is also used as a term of praise for playing that has a strong groove or drive. Notable musicians of the era include Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Woody Herman. Swing has roots in the late 1920s as larger ensembles began using written arrangements, a typical song played in swing style would feature a strong, anchoring rhythm section in support of more loosely tied wind and brass. The most common style consisted of having a soloist take center stage, Swing music began to decline in popularity during World War II because of several factors. By the late 1940s, swing had morphed into traditional pop music, or evolved into new styles such as jump blues, Swing music saw a revival in the late 1950s and 1960s with pop vocalists such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald. Swing blended with other genres to create new styles, in country music, artists such as Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican and Bob Wills introduced many elements of swing along with blues to create a genre called western swing. Gypsy swing is an outgrowth of Venuti and Langs jazz violin swing, in the 1970s, and 1980s, fans of big band music attended swing music performances at supper clubs. In the late-1980s a trendier, more urban-styled swing-beat emerged called new jack swing, in the late 1990s and into the 2000s there was a swing revival, led by Squirrel Nut Zippers, Brian Setzer, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Lavay Smith. In Canada, some of the early 2000s records by The JW-Jones Blues Band included swing revival elements, the 1920s saw parallel trends in jazz and popular music that would later converge into the swing style. New Orleans style jazz was based on a meter and contrapuntal improvisation led by a trumpet or cornet, typically followed by a clarinet. The rhythm section consisted of a tuba and drums, and sometimes a banjo, by the early 1920s guitars and pianos sometimes substituted for the banjo and a string bass sometimes substituted for the tuba. Further innovations in small ensemble playing led to development of the Chicago style identified with Louis Armstrong, a stint with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra familiarized him with arranged ensemble playing that differed from the New Orleans style, in which saxophones became the dominant sound among the reeds. Armstrong brought those back to his smaller ensembles, the soloist played over an ensemble relegated to a supporting role in the background. The string bass also lent itself to playing in a 4/4 rhythm rather than the 2/4 rhythm dictated by the tuba. The new format gave the soloist the opportunity to play with more rhythmic freedom, but playing with swing remained the province of the soloist, not the ensemble. The late 1920s saw increasingly sophisticated arrangements used by bigger ensembles, some arrangements used call-response between horn sections to build the melody
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Lotte Lenya
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Lotte Lenya was an Austrian singer, diseuse, and actress, long based in the United States. In the German-speaking and classical music world she is best remembered for her performances of the songs of her husband, in English-language cinema, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as a jaded aristocrat in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. She also played the murderous and sadistic Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love. In 1922 Lenya was seen by her husband, German composer Kurt Weill, during an audition for his first stage score Zaubernacht but because of his position behind the piano. She was cast but owing to her loyalty to her coach she declined the role. She accepted the part of Jenny in the first performance of The Threepenny Opera in 1928, during the last years of the Weimar Republic, she was busy in film and theatre, and especially in Brecht-Weill plays. She made several recordings of Weills songs, with the rise of National Socialism in Germany, left-leaning artists were not appreciated and although not Jewish, she left the country, having become estranged from Weill. In March 1933, she moved to Paris where she sang the part in Brecht-Weills sung ballet. Lenya and Weill settled in New York City on 10 September 1935, during this period Lenya had a love affair with playwright Paul Green. During World War II, Lenya did a number of performances, recordings and radio performances. After a badly received part in her husbands musical The Firebrand of Florence in 1945 in New York, after Weills death in 1950, she was coaxed back to the stage. She appeared on Broadway in Barefoot in Athens and married editor George Davis, in 1956 she won a Tony Award for her role as Jenny in Marc Blitzsteins English version of The Threepenny Opera, the only time an Off-Broadway performance has been so honored. Lenya went on to record a number of songs from her time in Berlin and her voice had deepened with age. When she was to sing the part in Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Seven Deadly Sins. Sprechstimme was used in some songs in the Brecht-Weill plays. Lenya was aware of this as a problem, in other contexts and she founded the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, to administer incomes and issues regarding rights, and to spread knowledge about Weills work. She was present in the studio when Louis Armstrong recorded Brecht-Weills Mack the Knife, Armstrong improvised the line Look out for Miss Lotte Lenya. and added her name to the list of Macks female conquests in the song. In 1963, she was cast as the SPECTRE agent Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love starring Sean Connery, in 1966, Lenya originated the role of Fräulein Schneider in the original Broadway cast of the musical Cabaret
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Broadway theatre
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Along with Londons West End theatres, Broadway theatres are widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. The Theater District is a popular tourist attraction in New York City, the great majority of Broadway shows are musicals. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggars Opera, in 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice, the company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, by the 1840s, P. T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in lower Manhattan. In 1829, at Broadway and Prince Street, Niblos Garden opened, the 3, 000-seat theatre presented all sorts of musical and non-musical entertainments. In 1844, Palmos Opera House opened and presented opera for four seasons before bankruptcy led to its rebranding as a venue for plays under the name Burtons Theatre. The Astor Opera House opened in 1847, booth played the role for a famous 100 consecutive performances at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1865, and would later revive the role at his own Booths Theatre. Other renowned Shakespeareans who appeared in New York in this era were Henry Irving, Tommaso Salvini, Fanny Davenport, lydia Thompson came to America in 1868 heading a small theatrical troupe, adapting popular English burlesques for middle-class New York audiences. Thompsons troupe called the British Blondes, was the most popular entertainment in New York during the 1868–1869 theatrical season, the six-month tour ran for almost six extremely profitable years. Theatre in New York moved from downtown gradually to midtown beginning around 1850, in 1870, the heart of Broadway was in Union Square, and by the end of the century, many theatres were near Madison Square. Broadways first long-run musical was a 50-performance hit called The Elves in 1857, New York runs continued to lag far behind those in London, but Laura Keenes musical burletta The Seven Sisters shattered previous New York records with a run of 253 performances. It was at a performance by Keenes troupe of Our American Cousin in Washington, the production was a staggering five-and-a-half hours long, but despite its length, it ran for a record-breaking 474 performances. The same year, The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post was the first show to call itself a musical comedy, Tony Pastor opened the first vaudeville theatre one block east of Union Square in 1881, where Lillian Russell performed. Comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart produced and starred in musicals on Broadway between 1878 and 1890, with book and lyrics by Harrigan and music by his father-in-law David Braham. They starred high quality singers, instead of the women of repute who had starred in earlier musical forms. Plays could run longer and still draw in the audiences, leading to better profits, as in England, during the latter half of the century, the theatre began to be cleaned up, with less prostitution hindering the attendance of the theatre by women
