Edgard Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was a French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes rhythm, he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded", he conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?"Although his complete surviving works only last about three hours, he has been recognised as an influence by several major composers of the late 20th century. Varèse saw potential in using electronic media for sound production, his use of new instruments and electronic resources led to his being known as the "Father of Electronic Music" while Henry Miller described him as "The stratospheric Colossus of Sound".
Varèse promoted performances of works by other 20th-century composers and founded the International Composers' Guild in 1921 and the Pan-American Association of Composers in 1926. Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was born in Paris. There he developed a strong attachment to his maternal grandfather, Claude Cortot, his affection for his grandfather outshone anything. After being reclaimed by his parents in the late 1880s, in 1893 young Edgard was forced to relocate with them to Turin, Italy, in part, to live amongst his paternal relatives, since his father was of Italian descent, it was here that he had his first real musical lessons, with the long-time director of Turin's conservatory, Giovanni Bolzoni. In 1895, he composed Martin Pas, which has since been lost. Now in his teen years, Varèse, influenced by his father, an engineer, enrolled at the Polytechnic of Turin and started studying engineering, as his father disapproved of his interest in music and demanded an absolute dedication to engineering studies.
This conflict grew greater and greater after the death of his mother in 1900, until in 1903 Varèse left home for Paris. In 1904, he commenced his studies at the Schola Cantorum, where his teachers included Albert Roussel. Afterwards, he went to study composition with Charles-Marie Widor at the Paris Conservatoire. In this period, he composed a number of ambitious orchestral works, but these were only performed by Varèse in piano transcriptions. One such work was his Rhapsodie romane, from about 1905, inspired by the Romanesque architecture of the cathedral of St. Philibert in Tournus. In 1907, he moved to Berlin, in the same year, he married the actress Suzanne Bing, with whom he had one child, a daughter, they divorced in 1913. During these years, Varèse became acquainted with Erik Satie and Richard Strauss, as well as with Claude Debussy and Ferruccio Busoni, who influenced him at the time, he gained the friendship and support of Romain Rolland and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose Œdipus und die Sphinx he began setting as an opera, never completed.
On 5 January 1911, the first performance of his symphonic poem Bourgogne was held in Berlin. The only one of his early orchestral works to be properly performed in his lifetime, it caused a scandal. After being invalided out of the French Army during World War I, he moved to the United States in December 1915. In 1918, Varèse made his debut in America conducting the Grande messe des morts by Berlioz, he spent the first few years in the United States, where he was a Romany Marie's café regular in Greenwich Village, meeting important contributors to American music, promoting his vision of new electronic art music instruments, conducting orchestras, founding the short-lived New Symphony Orchestra. In New York, he met other composers exploring the boundaries of electronic music, it was about this time that Varèse began work on his first composition in the United States, Amériques, finished in 1921 but would remain unperformed until 1926, when it was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.
All the works he had written in Europe were either lost or destroyed in a Berlin warehouse fire, so in the U. S. he was starting again from scratch. The only surviving work from his early period appears to be the song Un grand sommeil noir, a setting of Paul Verlaine. At the completion of this work, Varèse, along with Carlos Salzedo, founded the International Composers' Guild, dedicated to the performances of new compositions of both American and European composers; the ICG's manifesto in July 1921 included the statement, "he present. They have realised the necessity of banding together and fighting for the right of each individual to secure a fair and free presentation of his work." In 1922, Varèse visited Berlin. Varèse contributed a poem to the Dadaist magazine 391 after an evening of drinking with Francis Picabia on the Brooklyn Bridge; the same magazine claimed that he was orchestrating a "Cold Faucet Dance". That year, he met Louise
Boston
Boston is the capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city proper covers 48 square miles with an estimated population of 685,094 in 2017, making it the most populous city in New England. Boston is the seat of Suffolk County as well, although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999; the city is the economic and cultural anchor of a larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest such area in the country. As a combined statistical area, this wider commuting region is home to some 8.2 million people, making it the sixth-largest in the United States. Boston is one of the oldest cities in the United States, founded on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by Puritan settlers from England, it was the scene of several key events of the American Revolution, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Siege of Boston.
Upon gaining U. S. independence from Great Britain, it continued to be an important port and manufacturing hub as well as a center for education and culture. The city has expanded beyond the original peninsula through land reclamation and municipal annexation, its rich history attracts many tourists, with Faneuil Hall alone drawing more than 20 million visitors per year. Boston's many firsts include the United States' first public park, first public or state school and first subway system; the Boston area's many colleges and universities make it an international center of higher education, including law, medicine and business, the city is considered to be a world leader in innovation and entrepreneurship, with nearly 2,000 startups. Boston's economic base includes finance and business services, information technology, government activities. Households in the city claim the highest average rate of philanthropy in the United States; the city has one of the highest costs of living in the United States as it has undergone gentrification, though it remains high on world livability rankings.
Boston's early European settlers had first called the area Trimountaine but renamed it Boston after Boston, England, the origin of several prominent colonists. The renaming on September 7, 1630, was by Puritan colonists from England who had moved over from Charlestown earlier that year in quest for fresh water, their settlement was limited to the Shawmut Peninsula, at that time surrounded by the Massachusetts Bay and Charles River and connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus. The peninsula is thought to have been inhabited as early as 5000 BC. In 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's first governor John Winthrop led the signing of the Cambridge Agreement, a key founding document of the city. Puritan ethics and their focus on education influenced its early history. Over the next 130 years, the city participated in four French and Indian Wars, until the British defeated the French and their Indian allies in North America. Boston was the largest town in British America until Philadelphia grew larger in the mid-18th century.
Boston's oceanfront location made it a lively port, the city engaged in shipping and fishing during its colonial days. However, Boston stagnated in the decades prior to the Revolution. By the mid-18th century, New York City and Philadelphia surpassed Boston in wealth. Boston encountered financial difficulties as other cities in New England grew rapidly. Many of the crucial events of the American Revolution occurred near Boston. Boston's penchant for mob action along with the colonists' growing distrust in Britain fostered a revolutionary spirit in the city; when the British government passed the Stamp Act in 1765, a Boston mob ravaged the homes of Andrew Oliver, the official tasked with enforcing the Act, Thomas Hutchinson the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. The British sent two regiments to Boston in 1768 in an attempt to quell the angry colonists; this did not sit well with the colonists. In 1770, during the Boston Massacre, the army killed several people in response to a mob in Boston.
The colonists compelled the British to withdraw their troops. The event was publicized and fueled a revolutionary movement in America. In 1773, Britain passed the Tea Act. Many of the colonists saw the act as an attempt to force them to accept the taxes established by the Townshend Acts; the act prompted the Boston Tea Party, where a group of rebels threw an entire shipment of tea sent by the British East India Company into Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party was a key event leading up to the revolution, as the British government responded furiously with the Intolerable Acts, demanding compensation for the lost tea from the rebels; this led to the American Revolutionary War. The war began in the area surrounding Boston with the Battles of Concord. Boston itself was besieged for a year during the Siege of Boston, which began on April 19, 1775; the New England militia impeded the movement of the British Army. William Howe, 5th Viscount Howe the commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America, led the British army in the siege.
On June 17, the British captured the Charlestown peninsula in Boston, during the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British army outnumbered the militia stationed there, but it was a Py
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east side of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park. Designed by architect William Burnet Tuthill and built by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1891, it is one of the most prestigious venues in the world for both classical music and popular music. Carnegie Hall has its own artistic programming and marketing departments, presents about 250 performances each season, it is rented out to performing groups. The hall has not had a resident company since 1962, when the New York Philharmonic moved to Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall. Carnegie Hall has 3,671 seats, divided among its three auditoriums. Carnegie Hall contains three separate performance spaces; the Isaac Stern Auditorium seats 2,804 on five levels and was named after violinist Isaac Stern in 1997 to recognize his efforts to save the hall from demolition in the 1960s.
The hall is enormously high, visitors to the top balcony must climb 137 steps. All but the top level can be reached by elevator; the main hall was home to the performances of the New York Philharmonic from 1892 until 1962. Known as the most prestigious concert stage in the U. S. all of the leading classical music and, more popular music performers since 1891 have performed there. After years of heavy wear and tear, the hall was extensively renovated in 1986; the Ronald O. Perelman Stage is 42 feet deep; the five levels of seating in the Stern Auditorium begin with the Parquet level, which has twenty-five full rows of thirty-eight seats and four partial rows at stage level, for a total of 1,021 seats. The First Tier and Second Tier consist of sixty-five boxes. Second from the top is the Dress Circle, seating 444 in six rows. At the top, the balcony seats 837. Although seats with obstructed views exist throughout the auditorium, only the Dress Circle level has structural columns. Zankel Hall, which seats 599, is named after Arthur Zankel.
Called Recital Hall, this was the first auditorium to open to the public in April 1891. Following renovations made in 1896, it was renamed Carnegie Lyceum, it was leased to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1898, converted into a cinema, which opened as the Carnegie Hall Cinema in May 1961 with the film White Nights by Luchino Visconti and was reclaimed for use as an auditorium in 1997. The reconstructed Zankel Hall is flexible in design and can be reconfigured in several different arrangements to suit the needs of the performers, it opened in September 2003. The 599 seats in Zankel Hall are arranged in two levels; the Parterre level seats a total of 463 and the Mezzanine level seats 136. Each level has a number of seats which are situated along the side walls, perpendicular to the stage; these seats are designated as boxes. The boxes on the Parterre level are raised above the level of the stage. Zankel Hall is accessible and its stage is 44 feet wide and 25 feet deep—the stage occupies one fifth of the performance space.
The Joan and Sanford I. Weill Recital Hall seats 268 and is named after Sanford I. Weill, a former chairman of the board, his wife Joan; this auditorium, in use since the hall opened in 1891, was called Chamber Music Hall. The Weill Recital Hall is the smallest of the three performance spaces, with a total of 268 seats; the Orchestra level contains fourteen rows of fourteen seats, a total of 196, the Balcony level contains 72 seats in five rows. The building contains the Carnegie Hall Archives, established in 1986, the Rose Museum, which opened in 1991; until 2009 studios above the Hall contained working spaces for artists in the performing and graphic arts including music, dance, as well as architects, literary agents and painters. The spaces were unusual in being purpose-designed for artistic work, with high ceilings and large windows for natural light. In 2007 the Carnegie Hall Corporation announced plans to evict the 33 remaining studio residents, some of whom had been in the building since the 1950s, including celebrity portrait photographer Editta Sherman and fashion photographer Bill Cunningham.
The organization's research showed that Andrew Carnegie had always considered the spaces as a source of income to support the hall and its activities. The space has been re-purposed for corporate offices. Carnegie Hall is one of the last large buildings in New York built of masonry, without a steel frame; the exterior is rendered in narrow Roman bricks of a mellow ochre hue, with details in terracotta and brownstone. The foyer avoids typical 19th century Baroque theatrical style with the Florentine Renaissance manner of Filippo Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel: white plaster and gray stone form a harmonious system of round-headed arched openings and Corinthian pilasters that support an unbroken cornice, with round-headed lunettes above it, under a vaulted ceiling; the famous white and gold auditorium interio
Quincy Jones
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. is an American record producer, musician and film producer. His career spans six decades in the entertainment industry with a record 80 Grammy Award nominations, 28 Grammys, a Grammy Legend Award in 1992. Jones came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor, before moving on to work in pop music and film scores. In 1969, Jones and his songwriting partner Bob Russell became the first African-Americans to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, for "The Eyes of Love" from the film Banning. Jones was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work on the 1967 film In Cold Blood, making him the first African-American to be nominated twice in the same year. In 1971, he became the first African-American to be the musical director and conductor of the Academy Awards ceremony. In 1995, he was the first African-American to receive the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, he has tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the second most Oscar-nominated African-American, with seven nominations each.
Jones was the producer, with Michael Jackson, of Jackson's albums Off the Wall and Bad, as well as the producer and conductor of the 1985 charity song "We Are the World", which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia. In 2013, Jones was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as the winner, alongside Lou Adler, of the Ahmet Ertegun Award, he was named one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time magazine. Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, the son of Sarah Frances, a bank officer and apartment complex manager, Quincy Delight Jones Sr. a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter from Kentucky. Jones' paternal grandmother was an ex-slave in Louisville, Jones would discover that his paternal grandfather was Welsh. With the help of the author Alex Haley in 1972 and Mormon researchers in Salt Lake City, Jones discovered that his mother's ancestors included James Lanier, a relative of poet Sidney Lanier. Jones said, "He had a baby with my great-grandmother, my grandmother was born there.
We traced this all the way back to the Laniers, the same family as Tennessee Williams." Learning that the Lanier immigrant ancestors were French Huguenots who had court musicians among their ancestors, Jones attributed some of his musicianship to them. For the 2006 PBS television program African American Lives, Jones had his DNA tested, genealogists researched his family history again, his DNA revealed he is African but is 34% European in ancestry, on both sides of his family. Research showed that he has English, French and Welsh ancestry through his father, his mother's side is of West and Central African descent the Tikar people of Cameroon. His mother had European ancestry, such as Lanier male ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, making him eligible for Sons of Confederate Veterans. Among his ancestors is Betty Washington Lewis, a sister of president George Washington. Jones is a direct descendant of Edward I of England, whose ancestors included French, Polish and Swiss nobility. Jones' family moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration.
Jones had a younger brother, who became an engineer for the Seattle television station KOMO-TV and died in 1998. Jones was introduced to music by his mother, who always sang religious songs, by his next-door neighbor, Lucy Jackson; when Jones was five or six, Jackson played stride piano next door, he would listen through the walls. Lucy recalled; when Jones was young, his mother suffered from a schizophrenic breakdown and was admitted to a mental institution. His father divorced his mother and married Elvera Jones, who had three children of her own named Waymond and Katherine. Elvera and Quincy Sr. had three children together: Jeanette and future U. S. District Judge Richard. In 1943, Jones and his family moved to Bremerton, where his father got a wartime job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. After the war, the family moved to Seattle. In high school, he developed his skills as a arranger, his classmates included Charles Taylor, who played saxophone and whose mother, Evelyn Bundy, was one of Seattle's first society jazz band leaders.
Jones and Taylor began playing music together, at the age of 14 they played with a National Reserve band. Jones has said he got much more experience with music growing up in a smaller city because he otherwise would have faced too much competition. At age 14, Jones introduced himself to 16-year-old Ray Charles after watching him play at the Black Elks Club. Jones cites Charles as an early inspiration for his own music career, noting that Charles overcame a disability to achieve his musical goals, he has credited his father's sturdy work ethic with giving him the means to proceed and his loving strength with holding the family together. Jones has said his father had a rhyming motto: "Once a task is just begun, never leave until it's done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all." In 1951, Jones earned a scholarship to Seattle University, where a young Clint Eastwood—also a music major—watched him play in the college band. After one semester, Jones transferred to what is now the Berklee College of Music in Boston on another scholarship.
While studying at Berklee, he played at Izzy Ort's Bar & Grille with Bunny Campbell and Preston Sandiford, whom he cited as important musical influences. He left his studies after receiving an offer to tour as a trumpeter, p
Rochester, New York
Rochester is a city on the southern shore of Lake Ontario in western New York. With a population of 208,046 residents, Rochester is the seat of Monroe County and the third most populous city in New York state, after New York City and Buffalo; the metropolitan area has a population of just over 1 million people. It is about 73 miles east of Buffalo and 87 miles west of Syracuse. Rochester was one of America's first boomtowns due to the fertile Genesee River Valley, which gave rise to numerous flour mills, as a manufacturing hub. Several of the region's universities have renowned research programs. Rochester is the site of many important innovations in consumer products; the Rochester area has been the birthplace to Kodak, Western Union, French's, Bausch & Lomb and Xerox, which conduct extensive research and manufacturing of industrial and consumer products. Until 2010, the Rochester metropolitan area was the second-largest regional economy in New York State, after the New York City metropolitan area.
Rochester's GMP has since ranked just below Buffalo, New York, while exceeding it in per-capita income. The 25th edition of the Places Rated Almanac rated Rochester as the "most livable city" in 2007, among 379 U. S. metropolitan areas. In 2010 Forbes rated Rochester as the third-best place to raise a family in the United States. In 2012 Kiplinger rated Rochester as the fifth-best city in the United States for families, citing low cost of living, top public schools, a low jobless rate. Rochester is a Global city with Sufficiency status; the Seneca tribe of Native Americans lived in and around Rochester until they lost their claim to most of this land in the Treaty of Big Tree in 1797. Settlement before the Seneca tribe is unknown. Development of Rochester followed the American Revolution, forced cession of their territory by the Iroquois after the defeat of Great Britain. Allied with the British, four major Iroquois tribes were forced out of New York; as a reward for their loyalty to the British Crown, they were given a large land grant on the Grand River in Canada.
Rochester was founded shortly after the American Revolution by a wave of English-Puritan descended immigrants from New England who were looking for new agricultural land. They would be the dominant cultural group in Rochester for over a century. On November 8, 1803, Col. Nathaniel Rochester, Maj. Charles Carroll, Col. William Fitzhugh, Jr. all of Hagerstown, purchased a 100-acre tract from the state in Western New York along the Genesee River. They chose the site because its three cataracts on the Genesee offered great potential for water power. Beginning in 1811, with a population of 15, the three founders surveyed the land and laid out streets and tracts. In 1817, the Brown brothers and other landowners joined their lands with the Hundred Acre Tract to form the village of Rochesterville. By 1821, Rochesterville was the seat of Monroe County. In 1823, Rochesterville consisted of 1,012 acres and 2,500 residents, the Village of Rochesterville became known as Rochester. In 1823, the Erie Canal aqueduct over the Genesee River was completed, the Erie Canal east to the Hudson River was opened.
In the early 20th century, after the advent of railroads, the presence of the canal in the center city was an obstacle. By 1830, Rochester's population was 9,200 and in 1834, it was re-chartered as a city. Rochester was first known as "the Young Lion of the West", as the "Flour City". By 1838, Rochester was the largest flour-producing city in the United States. Having doubled its population in only 10 years, Rochester became America's first "boomtown". In 1830-31, Rochester experienced one of the nation's biggest Protestant revivalist movements, led by Charles Finney; the revival has been noted as inspiring other revivals of the Second Great Awakening. A leading pastor in New York, converted in the Rochester meetings gave the following account of the effects of Finney's meetings in that city: "The whole community was stirred. Religion was the topic of conversation in the house, in the office and on the street; the only theater in the city was converted into a livery stable. Grog shops were closed.
Nurseries ringed the city, the most famous of, started in 1840 by immigrants Georg Ellwanger from Germany and Patrick Barry from Ireland. In 1847, Frederick Douglass founded the abolitionist newspaper The North Star in Rochester. Douglass, a former slave and an antislavery speaker and writer, gained a circulation of over 4,000 readers in the United States and the Caribbean; the North Star served as a forum for abolitionist views. The Douglass home burnt down in 1872, but a marker for it is found in Highland Park off South Avenue. Susan B. Anthony, a national leader of the women's suffrage movement, was from Rochester; the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guaranteed the right of women to vote in 1920, was known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment because of her work toward its passage, which she did not live to see. Anthony's home is a National Historic Landmark known as the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House. At the end of the 19th century, anarchi
Henry Cowell
Henry Dixon Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, teacher and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s: Henry Cowell's music covers a wider range in both expression and technique than that of any other living composer, his experiments begun three decades ago in rhythm, in harmony, in instrumental sonorities were considered by many to be wild. Today they are the Bible of the young and still, to the conservatives, "advanced."... No other composer of our time has produced a body of works so radical and so normal, so penetrating and so comprehensive. Add to this massive production his long and influential career as a pedagogue, Henry Cowell's achievement becomes impressive indeed. There is no other quite like it. To be both fecund and right is given to few. Born in rural Menlo Park, California, to two bohemian writers—his father was an Irish immigrant and his mother, a former schoolteacher, had relocated from Iowa—Cowell demonstrated precocious musical talent and began playing the violin at the age of five.
After his parents' divorce in 1903, he was raised by his mother, Clarissa Dixon, author of the early feminist novel Janet and Her Dear Phebe. His father, with whom he maintained contact, introduced him to the Irish music that would be a touchstone for Cowell throughout his career. While receiving no formal musical education, he began to compose in his mid-teens. By the summer of 1914, Cowell was writing individualistic works, including the insistently repetitive Anger Dance; that fall, the self-taught Cowell was admitted to the University of California, Berkeley, as a protégé of Charles Seeger. There he studied harmony and other subjects under Seeger and Edward Griffith Stricklen and counterpoint under Wallace Arthur Sabin. After two years at Berkeley, Cowell pursued further studies in New York where he encountered Leo Ornstein, the radically "futurist" composer-pianist. Still a teenager, Cowell wrote the piano piece Dynamic Motion, his first important work to explore the possibilities of the tone cluster.
It requires the performer to use both forearms to play massive secundal chords and calls for keys to be held down without sounding to extend and intensify its dissonant cluster overtones. Cowell soon returned to California, where he had become involved with a theosophical community, led by the Irish poet John Varian, who fueled Cowell's interest in Irish folk culture and mythology. In 1917, Cowell wrote the music for Varian's stage production The Building of Banba. In years, Cowell would claim that the piece had been composed around 1912, in an evident attempt to make his musical innovations appear more precocious than they were. Beginning in the early 1920s, Cowell toured in North America and Europe as a pianist, playing his own experimental works, seminal explorations of atonality, polytonality and non-Western modes, it was on one of these tours that in 1923, his friend Richard Buhlig introduced Cowell to young pianist Grete Sultan in Berlin. They worked together—an aspect vital to Grete Sultan's personal and artistic development.
Cowell made such an impression with his tone cluster technique that Béla Bartók requested his permission to adopt it. Another novel method advanced by Cowell, in pieces such as Aeolian Harp, was what he dubbed "string piano"—rather than using the keys to play, the pianist reaches inside the instrument and plucks and otherwise manipulates the strings directly. Cowell's endeavors with string piano techniques were the primary inspiration for John Cage's development of the prepared piano. In early chamber music pieces, such as Quartet Romantic and Quartet Euphometric, Cowell pioneered a compositional approach he called "rhythm-harmony": "Both quartets are polyphonic, each melodic strand has its own rhythm," he explained. "Even the canon in the first movement of the Romantic has different note-lengths for each voice."In 1919, Cowell had begun writing New Musical Resources, which would be published after extensive revision in 1930. Focusing on the variety of innovative rhythmic and harmonic concepts he used in his compositions, it would have a powerful effect on the American musical avant-garde for decades after.
Conlon Nancarrow, for instance, would refer to it years as having "the most influence of anything I've read in music."Cowell's interest in harmonic rhythm, as discussed in New Musical Resources, led him in 1930 to commission Léon Theremin to invent the Rhythmicon, or Polyrhythmophone, a transposable keyboard instrument capable of playing notes in periodic rhythms proportional to the overtone series of a chosen fundamental pitch. The world's first electronic rhythm machine, with a photoreceptor-based sound production system proposed by Cowell, it could produce up to sixteen different rhythmic patterns complete with optional syncopation. Cowell wrote several original compositions for the instrument, including an orchestrated concerto, Theremin built two more models. Soon, the Rhythmicon would be forgotten, remaining so until the 1960s, when progressive pop music producer Joe Meek experimented with its rhythmic concept. Cowell pursued a radical compositional approach through the mid-1930s, with solo piano pieces remaining at the heart
Boston Symphony Orchestra
The Boston Symphony Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts. It is one of the five major American symphony orchestras referred to as the "Big Five". Founded in 1881, the BSO plays most of its concerts at Boston's Symphony Hall and in the summer performs at Tanglewood. Andris Nelsons is the current music director of the BSO. Bernard Haitink holds the title of conductor emeritus of the BSO, Seiji Ozawa has the title of BSO music director laureate; the BSO was founded in 1881 by Henry Lee Higginson. Its first conductor was George Henschel, a noted baritone as well as conductor, a close friend of Johannes Brahms. For the orchestra, Henschel devised innovative orchestral seating charts and sent them to Brahms, who replied approvingly and commented on the issues raised by horn and viola sections in a letter of mid-November 1881; the orchestra's four subsequent music directors were all trained in Austria, including the seminal and influential Hungarian-born conductor Arthur Nikisch, in accordance with the tastes of Higginson.
Wilhelm Gericke served twice, from 1884 to 1889 and again from 1898 to 1906. According to Joseph Horowitz's review of correspondence, Higginson considered 25 candidates to replace Gericke after receiving notice in 1905, he decided not to offer the position to Gustav Mahler, Fritz Steinbach, Willem Mengelberg but did not rule out the young Bruno Walter if nobody more senior were to accept. He offered the position to Hans Richter in February 1905, who declined, to Felix Mottl in November, engaged, to previous director Nikisch, who declined, he was conductor until 1908 and again from 1912 to 1918. The music director 1908–12 was Max Fiedler, he conducted the premiere of Ignacy Jan Paderewski's Symphony in B minor "Polonia" in 1909. During World War I, was arrested, shortly before a performance of the St. Matthew Passion in 1918, interned in a prison camp without trial or charge until the end of the war, when he was deported, he vowed never to return, conducted thereafter only in Europe. The BSO's next two titled conductors were French: Henri Rabaud, who took over from Muck for a season, Pierre Monteux from 1919 to 1924.
Monteux, because of a musician's strike, was able to replace 30 players, thus changing the orchestra's sound. The orchestra's reputation increased during the music directorship of Serge Koussevitzky. One million radio listeners tuned in when Koussevitzky and the orchestra were the first to perform a live concert for radio broadcast, which they did on NBC in 1926. Under Koussevitzky, the orchestra gave regular radio broadcasts and established its summer home at Tanglewood, where Koussevitzky founded the Berkshire Music Center, now the Tanglewood Music Center; those network radio broadcasts ran from 1926 through 1951, again from 1954 through 1956. The orchestra continues to make regular live radio broadcasts to the present day; the Boston Symphony has been involved with Boston's WGBH Radio as an outlet for its concerts. Koussevitzky commissioned many new pieces from prominent composers, including the Symphony No. 4 of Sergei Prokofiev, George Gershwin's Second Rhapsody and the Symphony of Psalms by Igor Stravinsky.
They gave the premiere of Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the instigation of Fritz Reiner and Joseph Szigeti. Koussevitzky started a tradition of commissions that the orchestra continued, including new works by Heitor Villa-Lobos and Henri Dutilleux for its 75th anniversary, Roger Sessions, Andrzej Panufnik, for the 100th, for the 125th works by Leon Kirchner, Elliott Carter, Peter Lieberson. Other BSO commissions have included John Corigliano's Symphony No. 2 for the 100th anniversary of Symphony Hall. Hans Werner Henze dedicated his Eighth Symphony to the orchestra. Although Koussevitsky recommended his protégé Leonard Bernstein to be his successor after he retired in 1949, the BSO awarded the position to the Alsatian maestro Charles Munch. Munch had made his Boston conducting debut in 1946, he led orchestra on its first overseas tour, produced their first stereo recording in February 1954 for RCA Victor. In 1952, Munch appointed the first woman to hold a principal chair in a major U.
S. orchestra, flutist Doriot Anthony Dwyer. Erich Leinsdorf became music director in 1962 and held the post until 1969. William Steinberg was music director from 1969 to 1972. Steinberg was "ill and ailing" according to composer/author Jan Swafford, "for four years he was indisposed much of the time." After Steinberg's retirement, according to BSO trustee John Thorndike the symphony's board spoke to Colin Davis and "investigated thoroughly" his appointment, but Davis's commitments to his young family did not allow his moving to Boston from England. As the search continued, Leonard Bernstein met with four board members and recommended Michael Tilson Thomas, Assistant Conductor and Associate Conductor under Steinberg, for the directorship, but the young conductor "did not have sufficient support among the BSO players," according to journalist Jeremy Eichler; the committee chose Seiji Ozawa, who became Music Director in 1973 and held the post until 2002, the longest tenure of any Boston Symphony conductor.
(Bernard Haitink served as principal g
