20th century | Musicosity

20th century

James Blood Ulmer

James "Blood" Ulmer (born February 2, 1942 in St. Matthews, South Carolina) is an American avant-garde and and . Ulmer's distinctive guitar sound has been described as "jagged" and "stinging." His singing has been called "raggedly soulful." Ulmer began his career playing with various ensembles, and first recorded with organist John Patton in 1969. After moving to New York in 1971, Ulmer played with Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Joe Henderson, Paul Bley, Rashied Ali and Larry Young.

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Paul Hindemith

Born in Hanau in 1895, Paul Hindemith was taught the violin as a child. He entered the Hoch'sche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main where he studied conducting, composition and violin under Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles, supporting himself by playing in dance bands and musical-comedy outfits. He led the Frankfurt Opera orchestra from 1915 to 1923 and played in the Rebner string quartet in 1921 in which he played second violin, and later the viola. In 1929 he founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and extensively toured Europe.

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Sally Beamish

Sally Beamish (born 26 August 1956, London) is a British composer of chamber, vocal, choral and orchestral music.
Beamish studied the viola at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she received lessons from Anthony Gilbert and Lennox Berkeley. She later studied in Germany with the Italian violinist Bruno Giuranna. As a violist in the Raphael Ensemble, she recorded four discs of string sextets.

Read more about Sally Beamish on Last.fm.

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Luigi Nono

Luigi Nono (29 January 1924 - 8 May 1990) was an Italian composer. He studied at the Venice Conservatoire where he became acquainted with . (He married Arnold Schönberg's daughter Nuria in 1955). He became a leading composer of instrumental and electronic music. In 1950, he attended the "Ferienkurse für neue Musik" in Darmstadt, where he met composers such as Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Works from this first period include: Polifonica-Monodica-Ritmica (1951), Epitaffio per Federico García Lorca (1952-1953), La victoire de Guernica (1954) and Liebeslied (1954).

Read more about Luigi Nono on Last.fm.

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Julia Wolfe

Julia Wolfe (born December 18, 1958) is an American composer. She was born in Philadelphia and works in New York. Wolfe's music is rhythmically vigorous and often clangorously dissonant. As a composer associated with the downtown style of new music she is not averse to drawing on rock and minimalism as primary influences. Her music, however, shows a good deal more rhythmic complexity than is generally found in these genres, hence her music can properly be considered and described as postminimalist.

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Zbigniew Preisner

Zbigniew Preisner (b. 1955) is one of Poland's leading film score composers, best known for his work with film director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Preisner was born on 20th May 1955 in Bielsko-Biała. He studied history and philosophy in Kraków; never having received formal music lessons, he taught himself about music by listening and transcribing parts from records. His compositional style represents a distinctively spare form of tonal neo-Romanticism.

Read more about Zbigniew Preisner on Last.fm.

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Benjamin Britten

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh, OM (22 November 1913–4 December 1976) was a British composer, conductor, and pianist. Life: Britten was born in Lowestoft in Suffolk, the son of a dentist and a talented amateur musician. He began composing prolifically as a child, and in 1927 began private lessons with Frank Bridge. He also studied, less happily, at the Royal College of Music under John Ireland and with some input from Ralph Vaughan Williams.

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