20th century | Musicosity

20th century

Krzysztof Penderecki

Krzysztof Penderecki (born November 23, 1933 in D?bica) is a Polish composer and conductor. His 1960 avant-garde Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra brought him to international attention, and this success was followed by acclaim for his choral St. Luke Passion. Both these works exhibit novel compositional techniques. Since the 1970s Penderecki's style has changed to encompass a post-Romantic idiom.

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Alexander Scriabin

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin(Александр Николаевич Скрябин) (1872-1915, Moscow) was a Russian composer and pianist. Many of Scriabin's works are written for the piano; the earliest pieces resemble Frédéric Chopin and include music in many forms that Chopin himself employed, such as the etude, the prelude and the mazurka. Later works, however, are strikingly original, employing very unusual harmonies and textures.

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Anonymous 4

Anonymous 4 is a female quartet, based in New York City. Their main performance genre is music, although they have also premiered works by living composers such as John Tavener and Steve Reich. Anonymous 4 has performed in cities throughout North America, and have been regulars at major international festivals. They decided to make the 2003-2004 season their last as a full-time recording and touring ensemble, although special projects (such as their Gloryland CD and their "Long Time Traveling" Tour) continue to bring them together on occasion.

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Helmut Lachenmann

Lachenmann was born in Stuttgart. He studied piano with Jürgen Uhde and composition and theory with Johann Nepomuk David at the Stuttgarter Musikhochschule from 1955 to 1958 and was the first private student of Luigi Nono in Venice from 1958 to 1960. From Nono, he acquired the belief that music should aim to serve a message of social relevance. He also worked briefly at the electronic music studio at the University of Ghent in 1965, but thereafter focused almost exclusively on purely instrumental music.

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Kenneth Leighton

Kenneth Leighton (b. Wakefield, October 2, 1929, d. Edinburgh, August 24, 1988) was an English composer. Leighton was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire and was a chorister at Wakefield Cathedral from 1937 to 1942. He earned the LRAM Piano Performer's Diploma in 1946. In 1947 he went to The Queen's College, Oxford on a Hastings Scholarship in Classics. In 1950, he graduated with both BA in Classics and in 1951 with a BMus (having studied with Bernard Rose). In the same year he won the Mendelssohn Scholarship and went to Rome to study with the Italian avant garde composer Goffredo Petrassi.

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Lawrence Casserley

Active in electro-acoustic composition and performance since the 1960s, Lawrence Casserley has earned a reputation as a first-rate improviser with signal-processing electronics alongside such names as Evan Parker and Barry Guy. In the early 1990s, he became one of the first musicians to work with IRCAM's Signal Processing Workstation, and much of his current work involves Max/msp software. On a slightly less academic front, he is also one of the directors of the Colourscape organization...

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Alarm Will Sound

Alarm Will Sound is a U.S. twenty-member contemporary-music chamber orchestra. Members of the ensemble began playing together while studying at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and have diverse experience in composition, improvisation, jazz, popular styles, early music, and various traditional musics from around the world. Alarm Will Sound's repertoire ranges from European to American works, from the arch-modernist to the pop-influenced.

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