Johan Sebastian-Bach
Composer
Johann Sebastian Bach was born to a musical family in Thuringia , Ernestine Saxon Duchies in 1685 and became a superbly well-rounded musician. From 1700 he held positions as singer, violinist, and organist.
His first major appointment, in 1708, was as organist at the ducal court at Weimar. This was followed by a six-year stay between 1717 and 1723 as kapellmeister at the princely court of Köthen, which was in turn followed by his appointment as cantor at the great church of St. Thomas in Leipzig, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Imbued with the northern German contrapuntal style from early childhood, he encountered the lively Italian style, especially in the works of Antonio Vivaldi about 1710, and much of his music embodies an immensely convincing melding of the two styles. At St. Thomas he wrote more than two hundred church cantatas. His orchestral works include the six Brandenburg Concertos, four orchestral suites, and many harpsichord concertos, a genre he invented. His solo keyboard works include the great didactic set The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722 and 1742), the superb Goldberg Variations (1742), the massive but unfinished Art of the Fugue (1749), numerous suites, and many organ preludes and fugues. His surviving choral works include (in addition to the sacred cantatas) more than thirty secular cantatas, two monumental Passions, and the Mass in B Minor.
His works, never widely known in his lifetime, went into near-total eclipse after his death, and only in the early 19th century were they revived, to enormous acclaim. He was perhaps the most accomplished organist and harpsichordist of his time. Today, Bach is regarded as the greatest composer of the Baroque era, and, by many, as the greatest composer of all time.
Radiohead
Musicians
Radiohead are an English alternative rock band from Oxfordshire. The band is composed of Thom Yorke (lead vocals, rhythm guitar, piano, electronics), Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar, other instruments), Ed O'Brien (guitar, backing vocals), Colin Greenwood (bass guitar, synthesisers) and Phil Selway (drums, percussion). Radiohead have released seven albums and have sold over 23 million records throughout their career.
Radiohead released their first single , " Creep ", in 1992, and their debut album, Pablo Honey, in 1993. Though initially unsuccessful, "Creep" was a worldwide hit when reissued a year later. Radiohead's popularity in the United Kingdom increased with the release of their second album, The Bends (1995). The band's textured guitar atmospheres and Yorke's falsetto singing were warmly received by critics and fans. With the release of OK Computer (1997), Radiohead were propelled to greater fame worldwide. Featuring an expansive sound and themes of alienation from the modern world, OK Computer has often been acclaimed as a landmark record of the 1990s.
The release of Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001) saw Radiohead reach their peak popularity, although the albums divided critical opinion. This period marked a change in Radiohead's musical style, with their incorporation of avant-garde electronic music , Krautrock and jazz influences. Hail to the Thief (2003), Radiohead's sixth album, blended styles from throughout the band's career, mixing guitar-driven rock, electronic influences and contemporary lyrics. Radiohead subsequently left their record label , EMI , and released their seventh album, In Rainbows (2007), through their own website as a digital download for which customers selected their own price.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Composer
Born in Kamsko-Votkinsk, the 7th of May 1840, Tchaikovsky was the second eldest of six children. At the age of six he could read French and German and at seven wrote verses in French and began piano lessons. In 1850, Tchaikovsky began attending the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, becoming a clerk in the Ministry of Justice in 1859. He studied with Nicolai Zaremba until the opening of the new St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1862, to which he transferred. The next year, Tchaikovsky left his job in the Ministry of Justice to study full time at the Conservatory.
Graduating after four years, he went on to teach for twelve years at the Moscow Conservatory, where he began to compose. In his first two years there he had already written his first symphony and the opera Voyevoda. In 1868, he met with the famous group of young Russian composers "The Five" - Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Although he greatly admired them and wrote his second symphony in response to their fervor, he never joined the group.
From 1869 to 1875, he wrote three more operas, and became music critic for Russkiye Vedomosti in 1872. In 1877, Tchaikovsky composed Eugene Onegin and had a short-lived marriage with Antonina Milyukova, one of his pupils. The marriage lasted only nine weeks, with Tchaikovsky fleeing and suffering a nervous breakdown. It was at this time that Tchaikovsky came under the patronage of Madame Nadezhda von Meck who gave him a yearly allowance permitting him to give up teaching and devote his time to composition. They never met each other, but their correspondence was extensive and frank. He wrote his fourth symphony in dedication to Madame von Meck.
Tchaikovsky became well regarded in Russia, Britain and the United States. In 1885 he moved to a country house in Klin where he lived in virtual isolation and wrote Manfred. 1888 and 1889 brought tours as a conductor to Germany, France and England. After the production of The Sleeping Beauty in 1890, Tchaikovsky went to Florence to work on his opera The Queen of Spades, which was produced in St. Petersburg later that year. This was also the time when his sponsorship by Mme. von Meck ended, and although he no longer relied on her financial support, this was a dreadful blow to Tchaikovsky’s self esteem from which he never recovered.
1891 brought the very successful tour of the United States and Tchaikovsky's appearance at the opening of the Music Hall (renamed Carnegie Hall), followed the next year with the premiere of The Nutcracker. In 1893, he received an honorary doctorate of music from CambridgeUniversity. His sixth symphony was completed in 1893, and while Tchaikovsky believed it to be his best work, the critics were not too kind. A few days later after its inaugural performance, Tchaikovsky died of cholera, probably the result of drinking a glass of unboiled water.
Segei Prokofiev
Composer
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was born in 1891 in Sontsovka, Ukraine and is considered one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.
He showed precocious talent as a pianist and composer and had lessons from Glier from 1902. In 1904 he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov and Tcherepnin were among his teachers. He had made his début as a pianist in 1908, quickly creating something of a sensation as an enfant terrible, unintelligible and ultra-modern - an image he was happy to cultivate. In 1914 he left the conservatory and travelled to London, where he heard Stravinsky’s works and gained a commission from Dyagilev: the resulting score was, however, rejected (the music was used to make the Scythian Suite); a second attempt, Chout, was not staged until 1921.
Meanwhile, his gifts had exploded in several different directions. In 1917 he finished an opera on Dostoyevsky's Gambler, a violently involved study of obsession far removed from the fantasy of his nearly contemporary Chicago opera The Love for Three Oranges, written in 1919. Nor does either of these scores have much to do with his 'Classical' Symphony, self-consciously 18th-century in manner, and again quite distinct from his lyrical Violin Concerto no.1, written at the same period and in the same key. There were also piano sonatas based on old notebooks alongside the more adventurous Visions fugitives, all dating from 1915 to 1919. Towards the end of this rich period, in 1918, he left for the USA, then from 1920, France became his base. His productivity slowed while he worked at his opera The Fiery Angel, an intense, symbolist fable of good and evil (it had no complete performance until after his death, and he used much of its music in Symphony no.3). After this he brought the harsh, heavy and mechanistic elements in his music to a climax in Symphony no.2 and in the ballet Le pas d'acier, while his next ballet, L'enfant prodigue, is in a much gentler style: the barbaric and the lyrical were still alternatives in his music and not fused until the 1930s, when he began a process of reconciliation with the Soviet Union.
The renewed relationship was at first tentative on both sides. Romeo and Juliet was commissioned for the Bolshoi, but had its premiere in Czechoslovakia 1938, and only later became a staple of the Soviet repertory. Following its Russian premiere at the Kirov in Leningrad in 1940. Its themes of aggression and romantic love provided, as also did the Eisenstein film Alexander Nevsky, a receptacle for Prokofiev's divergent impulses. Meanwhile his own impulse to remain a Westerner was gradually eroded and in 1936 he settled in Moscow, where initially his concern was with the relatively modest genres of song, incidental music, patriotic cantata and children's entertainment (Peter and the Wolf, 1936). He had, indeed, arrived at a peculiarly unfortunate time, when the drive towards socialist realism was at its most intense; and his first work of a more ambitious sort, the opera Semyon Kotko was not liked.
With the outbreak of war, however, he perhaps found the motivation to respond to the required patriotism: implicitly in a cycle of three piano sonatas (nos.6-8) and Symphony no.5, more openly in his operatic setting of scenes from Tolstoy's War and Peace, which again offered opportunities for the two extremes of his musical genius to be expressed. He also worked at a new full-length ballet, Cinderella. In 1946 he retired to the country suffering from increasing ill health and though he went on composing, the works of his last years have been regarded as a quiet coda to his output. He died on 5 March 1953, ironically within minutes of Stalin’s death.
Franz Liszt
Composer
Born in Hungary in 1811, Franz Liszt was a revered composer of the Romantic era. A piano virtuoso from an early age, Liszt made a living performing and teaching, going on to create innovative works for both piano and orchestra. Liszt is famous for his unconventional approach to large-scale works, choosing to abandon traditional four-movement symphonic structures in favour of long single-movement pieces, which he referred to as symphonic poems. His most famous works include Faust Symphony and Hungarian Rhapsodies.
Alvin Curran
Musician
Alvin Curran co-founded the group Musica Electonica Viva with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum in 1965, with over 200 concerts and commercial recordings to their name. In the early 70s, he worked on a poetic series of solo-performance works for synthesizer, voice, taped environmental sounds and found objects, which were performed all over Europe and the U.S. He went on to develop a series of concert events to be given on lakes, in ports, parks, buildings, quarries and caves, which have evolved into large scale musical choreographic works such as Oh Brass on the Grass Alas and simultaneous radio concerts with live musicians in multiple countries. Moving into digital recording processes and musique concrete, he made several recordings, created the Maritime Rites radio series for NPR and worked on a series of sound installations with artist Melissa Gould as well as expanding into chamber music. His work has been performed around the world, and other achievements include collaborations with Trisha Brown, Margie Jenkins, Yoshiko Chuma, Joan Jonas, Achim Freyer, June Watanabe, Kristin Jones, and The Living Theater as well as periods teaching at National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome and MillsCollege and publishing several articles.
He has received the following awards: the Bearns Prize, BMI award (1963), National Endowment for the Arts, National Public Radio Satellite Distribution Project Award, DAAD, Ars Acoustica International Prize Prix Italia, Premio Novecento, Fromm Foundation, Hass Family Award, Guggenheim Foundation, Ars Electronica, Phonurgia Nova, and the