It's all about the classical music composers and their works from the last 400 years and much more about music. Hier erfahren Sie alles über die klassischen Komponisten und ihre Meisterwerke der letzten vierhundert Jahre und vieles mehr über Klassische Musik.
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Friedrich Smetana was born on March 2, 1824 in Leitomischl, Austria and passed away on May 12, 1884 in Prague/CSSR. Smetana was the son...
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– it’s a direct link from heart to heart’ Conductor Vasily Petrenko: “To understand classical music you need no language – it’s a d...
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Bela Bartok was born on March 25, 1881 in Southern Hungary and passed away on September 26, 1945 as migrant in New York. His father had bee...
Thursday, January 11, 2024
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Wednesday, January 10, 2024
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Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Aaron Copland - his music and his life
Aaron Copland managed the difficult feat of becoming a popular classical composer while retaining the respect of critics and the ‘serious musical establishment'.
Born in a humble street in Brooklyn, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, Copland is generally regarded as the first indisputably great American composer. The piano came easily to him and, after he’d graduated from the local high school, he had lessons in harmony and counterpoint from the eminent (though conservative) teacher and composer Rubin Goldmark. His first published piece, The Cat and the Mouse, appeared in 1920.
He was able to scrape together enough to go to Paris to study with the doyenne of European teachers, Nadia Boulanger. Here, during his four years at the New School for Americans at Fontainebleau (1921-25), Copland was introduced to an enormous range of musical influences, all of which he was encouraged to absorb: jazz, the neo-classicism of Stravinsky and the whimsicality of Les Six made a particularly strong impression on him and colour the first period of his mature compositions. With a thorough grounding in composition and orchestration under his belt, he returned to America where he became involved in a wide range of musical activities, working as a pianist in a hotel, as a lecturer and as an organiser of various musical societies, as well as composing.
Conductor, publisher and patron of music Serge Koussevitzky became an influential champion of his music throughout his tenure as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, an incalculable boost to Copland’s growing reputation. Between 1930 and 1936 he entered a phase of experimental and dissonant writing (Variations and the Piano Sonata, for instance, are difficult works) before discovering the power of American folk idioms. Here his music is as essentially American as Mussorgky’s or Stravinsky’s is Russian – El Salón México, the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring are as American as apple pie. His Lincoln Portrait, using texts from Lincoln’s speeches and letters, has been performed (for better or worse, but generally worse) by world leaders. His patriotic Fanfare for the Common Man (1942) has been used for the opening of every type of formal ceremony. Some of Copland’s film music (The Red Pony, for example, Our Town and Of Mice and Men) is among the most distinguished ever written (he won an Oscar in 1950 for the score of The Heiress). In a nutshell, Copland managed the difficult feat of becoming a popular classical composer while retaining the respect of critics and the ‘serious musical establishment’. In his later works, Copland reverted to serial techniques, writing in a far less approachable, more austere manner.
Whatever one thinks of his virtually unknown middle- and late-period music, Copland has to be admired for his steadfast independence and unwillingness to court popularity for its own sake.
YESTERDAY WHEN I WAS YOUNG - Shirley Bassey (Lyrics)
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Iosif Ivanovici - Waves of the Danube
Sinead O'Connor died of 'natural causes', UK coroner rules
AT A GLANCE
The Grammy award-winning singer, best known for her 1990 cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U", was found unresponsive at her south London home last July. She was 56.
LONDON (AFP) - Irish musician Sinead O'Connor died last year of "natural causes", a London coroner announced Tuesday.
The Grammy award-winning singer, best known for her 1990 cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U", was found unresponsive at her south London home last July. She was 56.
London police said at the time that officers were not treating it as suspicious as an autopsy was carried out to determine the cause of her death.
A short statement by Southwark Coroner's Court in south London said: "This is to confirm that Ms O'Connor died of natural causes. The coroner has therefore ceased their involvement in her death."
O'Connor's death prompted an outpouring of sympathy from her legions of fans including other musicians and celebrities around the world, particularly in her homeland of Ireland.
Hundreds lined the route of her cortege in Bray, the Irish town 20 kilometres (13 miles) south of Dublin that she called home for 15 years, on the day of her funeral last August.
The willingness of the musician, who rose to international fame in the 1990s, to criticise the Catholic Church in particular saw her vilified by some and praised as a trailblazer by others.
O'Connor's agents revealed she had been completing a new album and planning a tour as well as a movie based on her autobiography "Rememberings" before she died.
The musician had also spoken publicly about her mental health, telling the US television host Oprah Winfrey in 2007 that she struggled with thoughts of suicide and had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
More recently she had shunned the limelight, in particular following the death of her son Shane from suicide in 2022 aged 17.