Vienna Philharmonic
The Vienna Philharmonic, founded in 1842, is an orchestra considered to be one of the finest in the world. The Vienna Philharmonic is based at the Musikverein in Austria, its members are selected from the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera. Selection involves a lengthy process, with each musician demonstrating his or her capability for a minimum of three years' performance for the opera and ballet. After this probationary period, the musician may request an application for a position in the orchestra from the Vienna Philharmonic's board; until the 1830s, orchestral performance in Vienna was done by ad hoc orchestras, consisting of professional and amateur musicians brought together for specific performances. In 1833, Franz Lachner formed the forerunner of the Vienna Philharmonic, the Künstlerverein – an orchestra of professional musicians from the Vienna Court Opera; the Vienna Philharmonic itself arose nine years in 1842, hatched by a group who met at the inn'Zum Amor', including the poet Nikolaus Lenau, newspaper editor August Schmidt, critic Alfred Becker, violinist Karlz Holz, Count Laurecin, composer Otto Nicolai, the principal conductor of a standing orchestra at a Viennese theater.
Mosco Carner wrote in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that "Nicolai was the least enthusiastic about the idea, had to be persuaded by the others. The orchestra was independent, consisted of members of the Hofoper orchestra, made all of its decisions by a democratic vote of its members. Nicolai and the orchestra gave only 11 concerts in the ensuing five years, when Nicolai left Vienna in 1847, the orchestra nearly folded. Between 1854 and 1857, Karl Eckert – the first permanent conductor of the Vienna Court Opera – led the Vienna Philharmonic in a few concerts. In 1857, Eckert was made Director of the Hofoper – the first musician to have been given the post. Since that time, writes Vienna Philharmonic violinist and president Clemens Hellsberg, "the'Philharmonic Concerts' have been staged without interruption." In 1860, the orchestra elected Otto Dessoff to be the permanent conductor. According to Max Kalbeck, the Vienna-based music critic, newspaper editor, biographer, the fame and excellence of the Vienna Philharmonic resulted from Dessoff's "energy and sense of purpose."
Clemens Hellsberg gives specifics, writing that during the Dessoff years, the Vienna Philharmonic's "repertoire was enlarged, important organizational principles were introduced and the orchestra moved to its third new home, the newly built Goldener Saal in the Musikverein building in Vienna, which has proved to be the ideal venue, with its acoustical characteristics influencing the orchestra's style and sound." After fifteen years, in 1875, Dessoff was "pushed out of his position in Vienna through intrigue", he left Vienna to become conductor of the Badische Staatskapelle in Karlsruhe, Germany. In Karlsruhe the next year, he fulfilled the request of his friend Johannes Brahms to conduct the first performance of his Symphony no. 1. In 1875, the orchestra chose Hans Richter to take Dessoff's place as subscription conductor, he remained until 1898, except for the season 1882/1883, when he was in dispute with the orchestral committee. Richter led the VPO in the world premieres of Brahms's Second Symphony, Tragic Overture, Symphony no.
3, the Violin Concerto of Tchaikovsky, in 1892 the 8th symphony of Anton Bruckner. It was Richter who in 1881 appointed Arnold Rosé as concertmaster, to become Gustav Mahler's brother-in-law and was concertmaster until the Anschluss in 1938. In order to be eligible for a pension, Richter intended to remain in his position for 25 years, he might have done so, given that the orchestra unanimously re-elected him in May 1898, but he resigned on 22 September, citing health reasons, although biographer Christopher Fifield argues that the real reasons were that he wanted to tour, that "he was uneasy as claques in the audience formed in favour of Gustav Mahler". Richter recommended Ferdinand Löwe to the orchestra as his replacement. In 1898, on 24 September, the orchestra elected Gustav Mahler. Under Mahler's baton, the Vienna Philharmonic played abroad for the first time at the 1900 Paris World Exposition. While Mahler had strong supporters in the orchestra, he faced dissension from other orchestral members, criticism of his re-touchings of Beethoven, arguments with the orchestra and over new policies he imposed.
He resigned on 1 April 1901, citing health concerns as a
Chilean Army
The Chilean Army is the land arm of the Military of Chile. This 50,000 army is organized into a special operations brigade and an air brigade. In recent years, after several major re-equipment programs, the Chilean Army has become the most technologically advanced and professional army in Latin America; the Chilean Army is supplied with equipment from Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, Israel and Spain. The National Army of Chile was created on December 2, 1810, by order of the First National Government Junta; the army was involved in the Independence War, fought against royalist troops in battles such as Yerbas Buenas, San Carlos, Rancagua and Maipú. During this period, national figures such as José Miguel Carrera, Bernardo O'Higgins and Argentinian General José de San Martín commanded the army toward definitive victory over the Spanish forces achieving independence for the country; the Army's first commander-in-chief was José Miguel Carrera. After obtaining independence from Spain, the newly formed Republic reorganized its military structure by creating the Military Academy of Chile, founded by General O'Higgins in 1817.
Diego Portales set up a civil militia, the Guardia Nacional, to end one of the worst stages of militarism in Chilean history. The militia was created in 1825 Portales developed this parallel army to compensate the army's might; the Chilean Conscription Law of 1900 marked the beginning of the end of the Guardia Nacional. During the War of the Pacific, many high-ranking officers won valuable insights into the state of the army and became aware that the army required rebuilding. Losses, material destruction, organizational flaws regarding strategic planning and officer training, were noted by officers like Emilio Sotomayor and Patricio Lynch, who approached President Santa María arguing the need of good schools and technical departments for the military. Other factor that supported the emulation, the deliberate systematic imitation of the military technology and doctrine of one country by another was the danger of war with Argentina; the emulation was backed by a broad coalition of military leaders.
Chile hired a French military training mission in 1858, the Chilean legation in Berlin was instructed to find a training mission during the War of the Pacific in 1881. But large-scale emulation of the Prussian Army began in 1886 with the appointment of Captain Emil Körner, a graduate of the renowned Kriegsakademie in Berlin. Appointed were 36 Prussian officers to train officer cadets in the Chilean Military Academy; the training occurred in three phases. The emulation was focused in armaments, officer recruitment and instruction, general staff organization as well as military doctrine, it was extended into military logistics and medical services, retirement, salary regulation and uniforms, marching styles, helmets and military music. Armaments: Prior to 1883, the army was equipped with a variety of rifles French and Belgian origin. From 1892 to 1902, the Chilean-Argentine Arms Race, marked the peak of Chilean arms purchase. 100,000 Mauser rifles and new Krupp artillery was bought for 3,000,000 DM in 1893, 2,000,000 DM in 1895 and 15,000,000 DM in 1898.
Ammunition factories and small arms manufacturing plants were established. Conscription: Like others armies in South America, Chile had had a small army of long-term service officers and soldiers. In 1900 Chile became the first country in Latin America to enforce a system of compulsory military service, whereby training five to eighteen months, took place in zones of divisional organization in order to create a solid military structure that could be doubled with well-trained and combat-ready reserve forces. Budgetary restrictions prevented the full impact of the law: the service fell disproportionately on the lower classes, no more than 20% of the contingent was incorporated annually, former conscripts were not retrained periodically. Officer education and training: The beginning of the German mission were dedicated exclusively to the organization and implementation of a standardized, technically oriented military education with the essence of Moltke's German military system of continuous study of artillery, cartography, topography, tactics, etc. for a modern and technically trained officer corps.
In 1886, the "Academia de Guerra" was founded "to elevate the level of technical and scientific instruction of army officers, in order that they be able, in case of war, to utilize the advantages of new methods of combat and new armaments." The best alumni were candidates for general staff service. By the mid-1890s Körner organized the courses for a Noncommissioned Officers' School. During the 1891 Chilean Civil War Körner was removed from duty by José Manuel Balmaceda, he and his followers set sail north to join the Congressional forces in Iquique. He became chief architect of the new army and, though Estanislao del Canto formally was commander-in-chief, Körner led the rebel forces in the major clashes of the civil war. Chile had had a General Staff during the War of the Pacific. Körner turned his attention to a permanent institution in 1893-94 that should replace the old "Inspector General del Ejército", but with control over military affairs in peacetime and wartime, it had four sections: Instruction and Discipline, Military
Radetzky March (novel)
Radetzky March is a 1932 novel by Joseph Roth chronicling the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire via the story of the Trotta family. Radetzkymarsch is an early example of a story that features the recurring participation of a historical figure, in this case the Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria. Roth continues his account of the Trotta family to the time of the Anschluss in his The Emperor's Tomb; the novel was published in English translation in 1933, in a new, more literal, translation in 1995. Radetzky March relates the stories of three generations of the Trotta family, professional Austro-Hungarian soldiers and career bureaucrats of Slovenian origin — from their zenith during the empire to the nadir and breakup of that world during and after the First World War. In 1859, the Austrian Empire was fighting the Second War of Italian Independence, against French and Italian belligerents: Napoleon III of France, the Emperor of the French, the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. In northern Italy, during the Battle of Solferino, the well-intentioned, but blundering, Emperor Franz Joseph I, is killed.
To thwart snipers, Infantry Lieutenant Trotta topples the Emperor from his horse. The Emperor ennobles him. Elevation to the nobility leads to the Trotta family’s ruination, paralleling the imperial collapse of Austria-Hungary. Following his social elevation Lt. Trotta, now Baron Trotta, is regarded by his family — including his father — as a man of superior quality. Although he does not assume the airs of a social superior, everyone from the new baron’s old life perceives him as a changed person, as a nobleman; the perceptions and expectations of society compel his reluctant integration into the aristocracy, a class amongst whom he feels temperamentally uncomfortable. As a father, the first Baron Trotta is disgusted by the historical revisionism that the national school system is teaching his son's generation; the school history textbook presents as fact a legend about his battlefield rescue of the Emperor. He finds galling the misrepresentation that infantry lieutenant Trotta was a cavalry officer.
The Baron appeals to the Emperor to have the school book corrected. The Emperor considers however that such a truth would yield an uninspiring, pedestrian history, useless to Austro-Hungarian patriotism. Therefore, whether or not history textbooks report Infantry Lt. Trotta’s battlefield heroism as legend or as fact, he orders the story deleted from the official history of Austria-Hungary; the subsequent Trotta family generations misunderstand the elder generation’s reverence for the legend of Lt. Trotta’s saving the life of the Emperor and consider themselves to be rightful aristocrats; the disillusioned Baron Trotta opposes his son’s aspirations to a military career, insisting he prepare to become a government official, the second most respected career in the Austrian Empire. The son becomes a district administrator in a Moravian town; as a father, the second Baron Trotta sends his own son to become a cavalry officer. The cavalry officer’s career of the third Baron Trotta comprises postings throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a dissipated life of wine, song and dueling, off-duty pursuits characteristic of the military officer class in peace-time.
Following a fatal duel the young Trotta transfers from the elite Uhlans to a less prestigious jager regiment. Baron Trotta’s infantry unit suppresses an industrial strike in a garrison town. Awareness of the aftermath of his professional brutality begins Lieutenant Trotta's disillusionment with empire, he is killed, bravely but pointlessly, in a minor skirmish with Russian troops during the opening days of World War I. His lonely and grieving father, the District Commissioner, dies immediately after Franz Joseph two years later. Two mourners at the funeral conclude that the second von Trotta could not have survived the old Emperor, that neither could have survived the dying Empire. Radetzky March is Joseph Roth's best-known work, it was critically acclaimed after being first published in German in 1932 and translated to English in 1933. In 2003, the German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki included it in Der Kanon of the most important German-language literary novels, it is a novel of the ironies and humour inherent in the well-intentioned actions that led to the decline and fall of a family and an empire.
The novel's title derives from the Radetzky March, Op. 228, by Johann Strauss Sr. which honors the Austrian Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky von Radetz. It is a symbolic musical composition heard at critical narrative junctures of the Trotta family history. During an interview on the United States TV show Charlie Rose, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa ranked The Radetzky March as the best political novel written; when time passed, the multi-generation family saga Radetzky March brought its author an acclaim and recognition as "one of the greatest German-language writers of the 20th century." The first German edition of the novel, was published in 1932 by Verlag Kiepenheuer in Berlin. In 2010, it was re-issued with epilogue and commentary by Werner Bellmann, Stuttgart: Reclam, 2010. Radetz
MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open data music database, similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database, a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become a structured open online database for music. MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, the length of each track; these entries are maintained by volunteer editors. Recorded works can store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata; as of 21 September 2018, MusicBrainz contained information about 1.4 million artists, 2 million releases, 19 million recordings. End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.
MusicBrainz allows contributors to upload cover art images of releases to the database. Internet Archive provides the bandwidth and legal protection for hosting the images, while MusicBrainz stores metadata and provides public access through the web and via an API for third parties to use; as with other contributions, the MusicBrainz community is in charge of maintaining and reviewing the data. Cover art is provided for items on sale at Amazon.com and some other online resources, but CAA is now preferred because it gives the community more control and flexibility for managing the images. Besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz allows looking up recordings by their acoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, must be used for this. In 2000, MusicBrainz started using Relatable's patented TRM for acoustic fingerprint matching; this feature allowed the database to grow quickly. However, by 2005 TRM was showing scalability issues as the number of tracks in the database had reached into the millions.
This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP, replacing TRM with MusicDNS. TRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008. In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired by AmpliFIND; some time after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service began having intermittent problems. Since the future of the free identification service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought; the Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis for AcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský. While AcoustID and Chromaprint are not MusicBrainz projects, they are tied with each other and both are open source. Chromaprint works by analyzing the first two minutes of a track, detecting the strength in each of 12 pitch classes, storing these 8 times per second. Additional post-processing is applied to compress this fingerprint while retaining patterns; the AcoustID search server searches from the database of fingerprints by similarity and returns the AcoustID identifier along with MusicBrainz recording identifiers if known.
Since 2003, MusicBrainz's core data are in the public domain, additional content, including moderation data, is placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license. The relational database management system is PostgreSQL; the server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products. In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye. On 20 January 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was the Barcelona, Spain-based Linkara in their Linkara Música service. On 28 June 2007, BBC announced that it has licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music Web pages; the BBC online music editors will join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database. On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.
Amarok – KDE audio player Banshee – multi-platform audio player Beets – automatic CLI music tagger/organiser for Unix-like systems Clementine – multi-platform audio player CDex – Microsoft Windows CD ripper Demlo – a dynamic and extensible music manager using a CLI iEatBrainz – Mac OS X deprecated foo_musicbrainz component for foobar2000 – Music Library/Audio Player Jaikoz – Java mass tag editor Max – Mac OS X CD ripper and audio transcoder Mp3tag – Windows metadata editor and music organizer MusicBrainz Picard – cross-platform album-oriented tag editor MusicBrainz Tagger – deprecated Microsoft Windows tag editor puddletag – a tag editor for PyQt under the GPLv3 Rhythmbox music player – an audio player for Unix-like systems Sound Juicer – GNOME CD ripper Zortam Mp3 Media Studio – Windows music organizer and ID3 Tag Editor. Freedb clients can access MusicBrainz data through the freedb protocol by using the MusicBrainz to FreeDB gateway service, mb2freedb. List of online music databases Making Metadata: The Case of Mus
Bernardo O'Higgins
Bernardo O'Higgins Riquelme was a Chilean independence leader who freed Chile from Spanish rule in the Chilean War of Independence. He was a wealthy landowner of Irish ancestry. Although he was the second Supreme Director of Chile, he is considered one of Chile's founding fathers, as he was the first holder of this title to head a independent Chilean state. Bernardo O'Higgins, a member of the O'Higgins family, was born in the Chilean city of Chillán in 1778, the illegitimate son of Ambrosio O'Higgins, 1st Marquis of Osorno, a Spanish officer born in County Sligo, who became governor of Chile and viceroy of Peru, his mother was a prominent local. O'Higgins spent his early years with his mother's family in central-southern Chile and was never acknowledged by his father, he lived with the Albano family, who were his father's commercial partners, in Talca. At age 15, O'Higgins was sent to Lima by his father, he had a distant relationship with Ambrosio, who supported him financially and was concerned with his education, but the two never met in person.
At the time of his son's birth, Ambrosio was only a junior military officer. Two years Isabel married Don Félix Rodríguez, a friend of her father. O'Higgins used his mother's surname until the death of his father in 1801. Bernardo's father became Viceroy of Peru. There, studying history and the arts, O'Higgins became acquainted with American ideas of independence and developed a sense of nationalist pride, he met Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan idealist and believer in independence, joined a Masonic Lodge established by Miranda, dedicated to achieving the independence of Latin America. In 1798 O'Higgins went to Spain from Great Britain, his return to the Americas delayed by the French Revolutionary Wars, his father died in 1801, leaving O'Higgins a large piece of land, the Hacienda Las Canteras, near the Chilean city of Los Ángeles. O'Higgins returned to Chile in 1802, adopted his biological father's surname, began life as a gentleman farmer. In 1806, he was appointed to the cabildo as the representative of Laja.
In 1808 Napoleon took control of Spain. In Chile, the commercial and political elite decided to form an autonomous government to rule in the name of the imprisoned king Ferdinand VII. On 18 September 1810, O'Higgins joined the revolt against the now French dominated Spanish government; the criollo leaders in Chile did not support Joseph Bonaparte's rule in Spain, a limited self-government under the Government Junta of Chile was created, with the aim of restoring the legitimate Spanish throne. This date is now recognized as Chile's Independence Day. O'Higgins was a close friend of Juan Martínez de Rozas, an old friend of his father, one of the more radical leaders. O'Higgins recommended that a national congress be created, was elected a deputy to the first National Congress of Chile in 1811 as a representative of the Laja district. Tensions between the royalist and pro-independence factions, to which O'Higgins remained attached as a junior member, continued to grow; the anti-Royalist camp in Chile was split along lines of patronage and personality, by political beliefs, by geography.
The Carrera family had seized power several times in different coups, supported a Chilean nationalism, as opposed to the broader Latin American focus of the Lautaro Lodge grouping, which included O'Higgins and the Argentine José de San Martín. José Miguel Carrera, the most prominent member of the Carrera family, enjoyed a power base in Santiago; as a result, O'Higgins was to find himself in political and military competition with Carrera—although early on, O'Higgins was nowhere near as prominent as his rival. De Rozas appointed O'Higgins to a minor military position in 1812 because of his illegitimate origins, poor health, or lack of military training. Much of O'Higgins' early military knowledge stemmed from Juan Mackenna, an immigrant of Irish descent and a former client of Ambrosio's, whose advice centered on the use of cavalry. In 1813, when the Spanish government made its first attempt to reconquer Chile—sending an expedition led by Brigadier Antonio Pareja—Carrera, as a former national leader and now Commander in Chief of the Army, was by far the more prominent figure of the two, a natural choice to lead the military resistance.
O'Higgins was back on his estates in Laja, having retired from the Army the previous year due to poor health, when news came of the invasion. O'Higgins mobilised his local militia and marched to Concepcion, before moving on to Talca, meeting up with Carrera, to take command of the new army. Carrera sent O'Higgins to cut the Spanish off at Linares; the unsuccessful Siege of Chillan followed, where O'Higgins produced a brave, but unspectacular, performance. O'Higgins continued to campaign against the royalists, fighting with a reckless courage that would make him famous. In October, fighting at the Battle of El Roble under Carrera, O'Higgins took effective comman
Biblioteca Nacional de España
The Biblioteca Nacional de España is a major public library, the largest in Spain, one of the largest in the world. It is located on the Paseo de Recoletos; the library was founded by King Philip V in 1712 as the Palace Public Library. The Royal Letters Patent that he granted, the predecessor of the current legal deposit requirement, made it mandatory for printers to submit a copy of every book printed in Spain to the library. In 1836, the library's status as Crown property was revoked and ownership was transferred to the Ministry of Governance. At the same time, it was renamed the Biblioteca Nacional. During the 19th century, confiscations and donations enabled the Biblioteca Nacional to acquire the majority of the antique and valuable books that it holds. In 1892 the building was used to host the Historical American Exposition. On March 16, 1896, the Biblioteca Nacional opened to the public in the same building in which it is housed and included a vast Reading Room on the main floor designed to hold 320 readers.
In 1931 the Reading Room was reorganised, providing it with a major collection of reference works, the General Reading Room was created to cater for students and general readers. During the Spanish Civil War close to 500,000 volumes were collected by the Confiscation Committee and stored in the Biblioteca Nacional to safeguard works of art and books held until in religious establishments and private houses. During the 20th century numerous modifications were made to the building to adapt its rooms and repositories to its expanding collections, to the growing volume of material received following the modification to the Legal Deposit requirement in 1958, to the numerous works purchased by the library. Among this building work, some of the most noteworthy changes were the alterations made in 1955 to triple the capacity of the library's repositories, those started in 1986 and completed in 2000, which led to the creation of the new building in Alcalá de Henares and complete remodelling of the building on Paseo de Recoletos, Madrid.
In 1986, when Spain's main bibliographic institutions - the National Newspaper Library, the Spanish Bibliographic Institute and the Centre for Documentary and Bibliographic Treasures - were incorporated into the Biblioteca Nacional, the library was established as the State Repository of Spain's Cultural Memory, making all of Spain's bibliographic output on any media available to the Spanish Library System and national and international researchers and cultural and educational institutions. In 1990 it was made an Autonomous Entity attached to the Ministry of Culture; the Madrid premises are shared with the National Archaeological Museum. The Biblioteca Nacional is Spain's highest library institution and is head of the Spanish Library System; as the country's national library, it is the centre responsible for identifying, preserving and disseminating information about Spain's documentary heritage, it aspires to be an essential point of reference for research into Spanish culture. In accordance with its Articles of Association, passed by Royal Decree 1581/1991 of October 31, 1991, its principal functions are to: Compile and conserve bibliographic archives produced in any language of the Spanish state, or any other language, for the purposes of research and information.
Promote research through the study and reproduction of its bibliographic archive. Disseminate information on Spain's bibliographic output based on the entries received through the legal deposit requirement; the library's collection consists of more than 26,000,000 items, including 15,000,000 books and other printed materials, 4,500,000 graphic materials, 600,000 sound recordings, 510,000 music scores, more than 500,000 microforms, 500,000 maps, 143,000 newspapers and serials, 90,000 audiovisuals, 90,000 electronic documents, 30,000 manuscripts. The current director of the Biblioteca Nacional is Ana Santos Aramburo, appointed in 2013. Former directors include her predecessors Glòria Pérez-Salmerón and Milagros del Corral as well as historian Juan Pablo Fusi and author Rosa Regàs. Given its role as the legal deposit for the whole of Spain, since 1991 it has kept most of the overflowing collection at a secondary site in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid; the Biblioteca Nacional provides access to its collections through the following library services: Guidance and general information on the institution and other libraries.
Bibliographic information about its collection and those held by other libraries or library systems. Access to its automated catalogue, which contains close to 3,000,000 bibliographic records encompassing all of its collections. Archive consultation in the library's reading rooms. Interlibrary loans. Archive reproduction. Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, digital library launched in 2008 by the Biblioteca Nacional de España List of libraries in Spain Media related to Biblioteca Nacional de España at Wikimedia Commons Official site Official web catalog
March (music)
A march, as a musical genre, is a piece of music with a strong regular rhythm which in origin was expressly written for marching to and most performed by a military band. In mood, marches range from the moving death march in Wagner's Götterdämmerung to the brisk military marches of John Philip Sousa and the martial hymns of the late 19th century. Examples of the varied use of the march can be found in Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, in the Marches Militaires of Franz Schubert, in the Marche funèbre in Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor, in the Dead March in Handel's Saul. Marches can be written in any time signature, but the most common time signatures are 44, 22, or 68. However, some modern marches are being written in 24 time; the modern march tempo is around 120 beats per minute. Many funeral marches conform to the Roman standard of 60 beats per minute; the tempo matches the pace of soldiers walking in step. Both tempos achieve the standard rate of 120 steps per minute; each section of a march consists of 16 or 32 measures, which may repeat.
Most a march consists of a strong and steady percussive beat reminiscent of military field drums. A military music event where various marching bands and units perform is called tattoo. Marches change keys once, modulating to the subdominant key, returning to the original tonic key. If it begins in a minor key, it modulates to the relative major. Marches have counter-melodies introduced during the repeat of a main melody. Marches have a penultimate dogfight strain in which two groups of instruments alternate in a statement/response format. In most traditional American marches, there are three strains; the third strain is referred to as the "trio". The march tempo of 120 beats or steps per minute was adapted by Napoleon Bonaparte so that his army could move faster. Since he planned to occupy the territory he conquered, instead of his soldiers carrying all of their provisions with them, they would live off the land and march faster; the French march tempo is faster than the traditional tempo of British marches.
Traditional American marches use the quick march tempo. There are two reason for this: First, U. S. military bands adopted the march tempos of France and other continental European nations that aided the U. S. during its early wars with Great Britain. Second, the composer of the greatest American marches, John Philip Sousa, was of Portuguese and German descent. Portugal used the French tempo exclusively—the standard Sousa learned during his musical education. A military band playing or marching at the traditional British march tempo would seem unusually slow in the United States. March music originates from the military, marches are played by a marching band; the most important instruments are various drums, fife or woodwind instruments and brass instruments. Marches and marching bands have today a strong connection to military, both to drill and parades. Marches, which are played at paces with multiples of normal heartbeat, can have a hypnotic effect on the marching soldiers, rendering them into a trance, This effect was known in the 16th century, was employed to lead the soldiers in closed ranks against the enemy fire in the 16th and 17th century wars.
March music is important for ceremonial occasions. Processional or coronation marches, such as the popular coronation march from Le prophète by Giacomo Meyerbeer and the many examples of coronation marches written for British monarchs by English composers, such as Edward Elgar, Edward German, William Walton, are all in traditional British tempos. Marches weren't notated until the late 16th century. With the extensive development of brass instruments in the 19th century, marches became popular and were elaborately orchestrated. Composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Gustav Mahler wrote marches incorporating them into their operas, sonatas, or symphonies; the popularity of John Philip Sousa's band marches was unmatched. The style of the traditional symphony march can be traced back to symphonic pieces from renaissance era, such as pieces written for nobility. Many European countries and cultures developed characteristic styles of marches. British marches move at a more stately pace, have intricate countermelodies, have a wide range of dynamics, use full-value stingers at the ends of phrases.
The final strain of a British march has a broad lyrical quality to it. Archetypical British marches include "The British Grenadiers" and those of Kenneth Alford, such as the well-known "Colonel Bogey March" and "The Great Little Army". Scottish bagpipe music makes extensive use of marches played at a pace of 90 beats per minute. Many popular marches are traditional and of unknown origin. Notable examples include Highland Laddie, Bonnie Dundee and Cock of the North. Retreat marches are set in 3/4 time, such as The Green Hills of Tyrol; the bagpipe make use of slow marches such as the Skye Boat Song and the Cradle Song. These are set in 6/8 time and are played at around 60 beats per minute. German marches move at a strict tempo of 110 beats per minute, have a strong oom-pah polka-like/folk-like quality resulting f
