{{Infobox university |name = Sibelius Academy |native_name = |image_name = Sibelius Academy building 12 July 2005.JPG |image_size = |image_alt = |caption = Sibelius Academy in central Helsinki |latin_name = |motto = |mottoeng = |established = 1882. It is among the biggest European music universities with roughly 1,700 enrolled students. It was founded in 1882 as ("Helsinki Music Institute") and was renamed in 1939

Degrees

The primary degree at the Sibelius Academy is the Master of Music (MMus) degree. The school also offers postgraduate degrees with artistic and research options. The postgraduate degrees are the Licentiate of Arts in Music Lic.A. (Mus.) and the doctoral degree of Doctor of Arts in Music D.A. (Mus.)

Degree programmes

The Academy offers the following degree programmes:

Degree Programme in Church Music

Degree Programme in Composition and Music Theory

Degree Programme in Folk Music

Degree Programme in Jazz Music

Degree Programme in Orchestral and Choral Conducting

Degree Programme in Music Education

Degree Programme in Music Technology

Degree Programme in Music Performance

Degree Programme in Vocal Music

Notable students and faculty (past and present)

Jean Sibelius, composer

Kim Borg, bass

Linda Brava, violinist

Victor Chestopal, pianist

Leo Funtek (1885–1965), violinist, conductor, arranger and music professor

Soile Isokoski, soprano

Paavo Lötjönen, cellist in the band Apocalyptica

Antero Manninen, cellist in the band Apocalyptica and cellist in the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra

Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, composer

Karita Mattila, soprano Olli Mustonen, pianist

Einojuhani Rautavaara, composer

Martti Rousi, cello teacher

Kaija Saariaho, composer

Arja Saijonmaa, singer

Aulis Sallinen, composer Matti Salminen, bass Soila Sariola, singer of the double platinum awarded and multiple gold winning vocal ensemble Rajaton

Leif Segerstam, conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic

Antti Siirala, winner of the Dublin, Leeds, and Beethoven international piano competitions

Eicca Toppinen, cellist in the band Apocalyptica

Tarja Turunen, former singer of the symphonic metal band Nightwish

Paula Vesala, singer of PMMP

Osmo Vänskä, conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra

Mikko Paananen, known as Mige, bassist of the band HIM

References

External links

Sibelius Academy

Effects of the Bologna Declaration on Professional Music Training in Europe

European Association of Conservatoires (AEC)

Category:Culture in Helsinki Category:Education in Helsinki Category:Music schools in Finland Category:Universities in Finland Category:Educational institutions established in 1882 Academy

Name	Ástor Piazzolla
Background	non_vocal_instrumentalist
Birth name	Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla
Born	March 11, 1921 Mar del Plata, Argentina
Died	July 04, 1992 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Genre	Nuevo tango
Occupation	Composer, Bandoneón player

Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla (March 11, 1921 – July 4, 1992) was an Argentine tango composer and bandoneón player. His oeuvre revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music. A virtuoso bandoneónist, he regularly performed his own compositions with different ensembles.

Biography

Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 1921 to Italian parents, Vicente Nonino Piazzolla and Asunta Manetti. His grandfather, a sailor and fisherman named Pantaleone Piazzolla, had immigrated to Mar del Plata from Trani, a seaport town in the southeastern Italian region of Apulia, at the end of the 19th century. Ástor Piazzolla spent most of his childhood with his family in New York City, where he was exposed to both jazz and the music of J. S. Bach at an early age. While there, he acquired fluency in four languages: Spanish, English, French, and Italian. He began to play the bandoneon after his father, nostalgic for his homeland, spotted one in a New York pawn shop. At the age of 13, he met Carlos Gardel, another great figure of tango, who invited the young prodigy to join him on his current tour. Much to his dismay, Piazzolla's father deemed that he was not old enough to go along. While he did play a young paper boy in Gardel’s movie El día que me quieras , this early disappointment of being kept from the tour proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it was on this tour that Gardel and his entire band perished in a plane crash. In later years, Piazzolla made light of this near miss, joking that had his father not been so careful, he wouldn't be playing the bandoneon—he'd be playing the harp.

He returned to Argentina in 1937, where strictly traditional tango still reigned, and played in night clubs with a series of groups including the orchestra of Anibal Troilo, then considered the top bandoneon player and bandleader in Buenos Aires. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein—then living in Buenos Aires—advised him to study with the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera. Delving into scores of Stravinsky, Bartók, Ravel, and others, he rose early each morning to hear the Teatro Colón orchestra rehearse while continuing a gruelling performing schedule in the tango clubs at night. In 1950 he composed the soundtrack to the film Bólidos de acero.

At Ginastera's urging, in 1953 Piazzolla entered his Buenos Aires Symphony in a composition contest, and won a grant from the French government to study in Paris with the legendary French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. In 1954 he and his first wife, the artist Dedé Wolff, left Buenos Aires and their two children (Diana aged 11 and Daniel aged 10) behind and travelled to Paris. The insightful Boulanger turned Piazzolla's life around in a day, as he related in his own words:

Piazzolla returned from New York to Argentina in 1955, formed the Octeto Buenos Aires with Enrico Mario Francini and Hugo Baralis on violins, Atilio Stampone on piano, Leopoldo Federico as second bandoneon, Horacio Malvicino on electric guitar, José Bragato on cello and Juan Vasallo on double bass to play tangos, and never looked back.

Upon introducing his new approach to the tango (nuevo tango), he became a controversial figure among Argentines both musically and politically. The Argentine saying "in Argentina everything may change — except the tango" suggests some of the resistance he found in his native land. However, his music gained acceptance in Europe and North America, and his reworking of the tango was embraced by some liberal segments of Argentine society, who were pushing for political changes in parallel to his musical revolution.

During the period of Argentine military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, Piazzolla lived in Italy, but returned many times to Argentina, recorded there, and on at least one occasion had lunch with the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. However, his relationship with the dictator might have been less than friendly, as recounted in Ástor Piazzolla, A manera de memorias (a comprehensive collection of interviews, constituting a memoir):

In 1990 he suffered thrombosis in Paris, and died two years later in Buenos Aires.

Among his followers, his own protégé Marcelo Nisinman is the best known innovator of the tango music of the new millennium, while Pablo Ziegler, pianist with Piazzolla's second quintet, has assumed the role of principal custodian of nuevo tango, extending the jazz influence in the style. The Brazilian guitarist Sergio Assad has also experimented with folk-derived, complex virtuoso compositions that show Piazzolla's structural influence while steering clear of tango sounds; and Osvaldo Golijov has acknowledged Piazzolla as perhaps the greatest influence on his globally oriented, eclectic compositions for classical and klezmer performers.

Musical style

around 1970.]] Piazzolla's nuevo tango was distinct from the traditional tango in its incorporation of elements of jazz, its use of extended harmonies and dissonance, its use of counterpoint, and its ventures into extended compositional forms. As Argentine psychoanalyst Carlos Kuri has pointed out, Piazzolla's fusion of tango with this wide range of other recognizable Western musical elements was so successful that it produced a new individual style transcending these influences. It is precisely this success, and individuality, that makes it hard to pin down where particular influences reside in his compositions, but some aspects are clear. The use of the passacaglia technique of a circulating bass line and harmonic sequence, invented and much used in 17th and 18th century baroque music but also central to the idea of jazz "changes", predominates in most of Piazzolla's mature compositions. Another clear reference to the baroque is the often complex and virtuosic counterpoint that sometimes follows strict fugal behavior but more often simply allows each performer in the group to assert his voice. A further technique that emphasises this sense of democracy and freedom among the musicians is improvisation that is borrowed from jazz in concept, but in practice involves a different vocabulary of scales and rhythms that stay within the parameters of the established tango sound-world. Pablo Ziegler has been particularly responsible for developing this aspect of the style both within Piazzolla's groups and since the composer's death.

With the composition of Adiós Nonino in 1959, Piazzolla established a standard structural pattern for his compositions, involving a formal pattern of fast-slow-fast-slow-coda, with the fast sections emphasizing gritty tango rhythms and harsh, angular melodic figures, and the slower sections usually making use of the string instrument in the group and/or Piazzolla's own bandoneón as lyrical soloists. The piano tends to be used throughout as a percussive rhythmic backbone, while the electric guitar either joins in this role or spins filigree improvisations; the double bass parts are usually of little interest, but provide an indispensable rugged thickness to the sound of the ensemble. The quintet of bandoneon, violin, piano, electric guitar and double bass was Piazzolla's preferred setup on two extended occasions during his career, and most critics consider it to be the most successful instrumentation for his works. This is due partly to its great efficiency in terms of sound - it covers or imitates most sections of a symphony orchestra, including the percussion which is improvised by all players on the bodies of their instruments - and the strong expressive identity it permits each individual musician. With a style that is both rugged and intricate, such a setup augments the compositions' inherent characteristics.

Despite the prevalence of the quintet formation and the ABABC compositional structure, Piazzolla consistently experimented with other musical forms and instrumental combinations. In 1965 an album was released containing collaborations between Piazzolla and Jorge Luis Borges where Borges's poetry was narrated over very avant-garde music by Piazzolla including the use of dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) rows, free non-melodic improvisation on all instruments, and modal harmonies and scales. In 1968 Piazzolla wrote and produced an "operita", María de Buenos Aires, that employed a larger ensemble including flute, percussion, multiple strings and three vocalists, and juxtaposed movements in Piazzolla's own style with several pastiche numbers ranging from waltz and hurdy-gurdy to a piano/narrator bar-room scena straight out of Casablanca.

By the 1970s Piazzolla was living in Rome, managed by the Italian agent Aldo Pagani, and exploring a leaner, more fluid musical style drawing on more jazz influence, and with simpler, more continuous forms. Pieces that exemplify this new direction include Libertango and most of the Suite Troileana, written in memory of the late Anibal Troilo. In the 1980s Piazzolla was rich enough, for the first time, to become relatively autonomous artistically, and wrote some of his most ambitious multi-movement works. These included Tango Suite for the virtuoso guitar duo Sergio and Odair Assad; Histoire du Tango, where a flutist and guitarist tell the history of tango in four chunks of music styled at thirty-year intervals; and La Camorra, a suite in three ten minute movements, inspired by the Neapolitan crime family and exploring symphonic concepts of large-scale form, thematic development, contrasts of texture and massive accumulations of ensemble sound. After making three albums in New York with the second quintet and producer Kip Hanrahan, two of which he described on separate occasions as "the greatest thing I've done", he disbanded the quintet, formed a sextet with an extra bandoneon, cello, bass, electric guitar, and piano, and wrote music for this ensemble that was even more adventurous harmonically and structurally than any of his previous works (Preludio y Fuga; Sex-tet). Had he not suffered an incapacitating stroke on the way to Notre Dame mass in 1990, it is likely that he would have continued to use his popularity as a performer of his own works to experiment in relative safety with even more audacious musical techniques, while possibly responding to the surging popularity of non-Western musics by finding ways to incorporate new styles into his own. In his musical professionalism and open-minded attitude to existing styles he held the mindset of an 18th century composing performer such as Handel or Mozart, who were anxious to assimilate all national "flavors" of their day into their own compositions, and who always wrote with both first-hand performing experience and a sense of direct social relationship with their audiences. This may have resulted in a backlash amongst conservative tango aficionados in Argentina, but in the rest of the West it was the key to his extremely sympathetic reception among classical and jazz musicians, both seeing some of the best aspects of their musical practices reflected in his work.

Musical career

Piazzolla, after leaving Troilo's orchestra in the 1940s, led numerous ensembles beginning with the 1946 Orchestra, the 1955 Octeto Buenos Aires, the 1960 "First Quintet", the 1971 Conjunto 9 ("Noneto"), the 1978 "Second Quintet" and the 1989 New Tango Sextet. As well as providing original compositions and arrangements, he was the director and Bandoneon player in all of them. He also recorded the album Summit with jazz baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. His numerous compositions include orchestral work such as the "Concierto para bandoneón, orquesta, cuerdas y percusión", "Doble concierto para bandoneón y guitarra", "Tres tangos sinfónicos" and "Concierto de Nácar para 9 tanguistas y orquesta", pieces for the solo classical guitar—the Cinco Piezas (1980), as well as song-form compositions that still today are well known by the general public in his country, like "Balada para un loco" (Ballad for a madman) and Adiós Nonino (dedicated to his father) which he recorded many times with different musicians and ensembles. Biographers estimate that Piazzolla wrote around 3,000 pieces and recorded around 500.

In the summer of 1985 he appeared with his Quinteto Tango Nuevo at the Almeida Theatre in London for a week-long engagement. On September 6, 1987, his quintet gave a concert in New York's Central Park, which was recorded and, in 1994, released in compact disk format as The Central Park Concert.

Discography

Two Argentinians in Paris (with Lalo Schifrin, 1955)

Sinfonía de Tango (Orquesta de Cuerdas, 1955)

Adiós Nonino (1960)

Piazzolla Interpreta A Piazzolla (Quinteto, 1961)

Piazzolla … O No? (canta Nelly Vazquez, Quinteto, 1961)

Nuestro Tiempo (canta Hector de Rosas, Quinteto, 1962)

Tango Contemporáneo (Nuevo Octeto, 1963)

Tango Para Una Cuidad (canta Héctor De Rosas, Quinteto, 1963)

Concierto en el Philharmonic Hall de New York (Quinteto, 1965)

El Tango. Jorge Luis Borges - Ástor Piazzolla (Orquesta and Quinteto, 1965)

La Guardia Vieja (1966)

La Historia del Tango. La Guardia Vieja (Orquesta, 1967)

La Historia del Tango. Época Romántica (Orquesta, 1967)

ION Studios (1968)

María de Buenos Aires (Orquesta, 1968)

Piazzolla En El Regina (Quinteto, 1970)

Original Tangos from Argentina Vol. 1 & 2 (solo bandeneon, 1970)

Pulsación (Orquesta, 1970)

Piazzolla-Troilo (Dúo de Bandoneones, 1970)

Concerto Para Quinteto (Quinteto, 1971)

La Bicicleta Blanca, (Amelita Baltar y Orquesta, 1971)

En Persona (recita Horacio Ferrer, Ástor Piazzolla, 1971)

Música Popular Contemporánea de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Vol.1 & 2 (Conjunto 9, 1972)

Roma (Conjunto 9, 1972)

Libertango (Orquesta, 1974)

Piazzolla and Amelita Baltar (1974)

Summit (Reunión Cumbre) with Gerry Mulligan (Orquesta, 1974)

Suite Troileana-Lumiere (Orquesta, 1975)

Buenos Aires (1976)

Il Pleut Sur Santiago (Orquesta, 1976)

Piazzolla & El Conjunto Electrónico (Conjunto Electrónico, 1976)

Piazzolla en el Olimpia de Paris (Conjunto Electrónico, 1977)

Lo Que Vendrá (Orquesta de Cuerdas and Quinteto Nuevo Tiempo, 1979)

Piazzolla-Goyeneche En Vivo, Teatro Regina (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1982)

Oblivion (Orquesta, 1982)

Suite Punta Del Este (Quinteto, 1982)

Live in Lugano (Quinteto, 1983)

SWF Rundfunkorchester (1983)

Concierto de Nácar - Piazzolla en el Teatro Colón (Conjunto 9 y Orquesta Filarmónica del Teatro Colón, 1983)

Live in Colonia (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1984)

Montreal Jazz Festival (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1984)

Live in Wien Vol.1 (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1984)

Enrico IV (sound track of film Enrico IV (film)Enrico IV, 1984)

Green Studio (1984)

Teatro Nazionale di Milano (1984)

El Nuevo Tango. Piazzolla y Gary Burton (Quinteto, 1986)

El Exilio de Gardel (soundtrack of film El Exilio de Gardel, Quinteto, 1986)

(Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1986)

Central Park Concert (Quinteto, 1987)

Concierto para Bandoneón - Tres Tangos with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Lalo Schifrin (conductor), Princeton University (1987)

Sur (soundtrack of film Sur, Quinteto, 1988)

Luna. Live in Amsterdam (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1989)

Lausanne Concert (Sexteto, 1989)

Live at the BBC (1989)

La Camorra (Quinteto Tango Nuevo, 1989)

Hommage a Liege: Concierto para bandoneón y guitarra/Historia del Tango (1988) with Liège Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leo Brouwer. The concerto was performed by Piazzolla with Cacho Tirao, the Historia by Guy Lukowski and Marc Grawels.

Bandoneón Sinfónico (1990)

The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night (Tango apasionado) (1991)

Five Tango Sensations (Ástor Piazzolla and Kronos Quartet, 1991)

Original Tangos from Argentina (1992)

Lausanne Concert(Sexteto, 1993)

Central Park Concert 1987 (Quinteto, 1994)

57 Minutos con la Realidad (Sexteto, 1996)

Tres Minutos con la Realidad (Sexteto, 1997)

See also

María de Buenos Aires, a tango opera by Piazzolla

Estaciones Porteñas, Piazzolla’s 4 Seasons

12 Monkeys, a movie whose soundtrack is derived and excerpted from Piazzolla's Suite Punta del Este

Ave Maria

References

External links

[ Ástor Piazzolla] in Allmusic

Piazzolla discography

Piazzolla.Org founded by John Buckman

Todo tango:Piazzolla Piazzolla Revolucionario Querido Ástor Piazzollazzo.com.ar E-Astoria.be (Ensemble Astoria). Astorpia.com (Astorpia Tango Quintet).

Piazzolla Sheet Music For Accordion

Ástor Piazzolla biography and discography at World Music Central

see also "Tangata" - the music of Astor Piazzolla...the Manny Bobenrieth Ensemble, R&L; Records ;Video recordings

Fuga Y Misterio Played by Classical Jam

Fracanapa Played by Classical Jam

Maria de Buenos Aires Played by Astorpia Tango Quintet.

Libertango Played by Ástor Piazzolla and Yo-Yo Ma.

Oblivion Played by Cellistanbul and Julian Lloyd Webber

Performance of Oblivion

Category:1921 births Category:1992 deaths Category:Argentine musicians Category:Argentine people of Italian descent Category:Argentine songwriters Category:Argentine bandoneonists Category:Bandoneonists Category:Argentine classical bandoneonists Category:Argentine composers Category:Argentine film score composers Category:People from Mar del Plata Category:20th-century classical composers Category:Tango musicians

Bgcolour	#EEDD82
Name	Michelangelo
Caption	Portrait of Michelangelo by Jacopino del Conte (after 1535) at the age of 60
Birthname	Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
Birthdate	March 06, 1475
Birth place	near Arezzo, Caprese, Tuscany
Deathdate	February 18, 1564
Deathplace	Rome, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Field	sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry
Training	Apprentice to Domenico Ghirlandaio
Movement	High Renaissance
Works	David, The Creation of Adam, Pietà
Signature	Michelangelo Signature2.svg

, 1546]] from the Sistine Chapel ceiling]] Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.

Biography

Early life

Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese near Arezzo, Tuscany. (Today, Caprese is known as Caprese Michelangelo). For several generations, his family had been small-scale bankers in Florence, but his father, Lodovico di Leonardo di Buonarroti di Simoni, failed to maintain the bank's financial status, and held occasional government positions. The Buonarrotis claimed to descend from the Countess Mathilde of Canossa; this claim remains unproven, but Michelangelo himself believed it. Several months after Michelangelo's birth, the family returned to Florence, where Michelangelo was raised. At later times, during the prolonged illness and after the death of his mother in 1481 when he was just six years old, Michelangelo lived with a stonecutter and his wife and family in the town of Settignano, where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. The young artist, however, showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of painters. When Michelangelo was only fourteen, his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay his apprentice as an artist, which was highly unusual at the time. When in 1489 Lorenzo de' Medici, de facto ruler of Florence, asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils, Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci. From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended the Humanist academy which the Medici had founded along Neo Platonic lines. Michelangelo studied sculpture under Bertoldo di Giovanni. At the academy, both Michelangelo's outlook and his art were subject to the influence of many of the most prominent philosophers and writers of the day including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano. At this time, Michelangelo sculpted the reliefs Madonna of the Steps (1490–1492) and Battle of the Centaurs (1491–1492). The latter was based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici. While both were apprenticed to Bertoldo di Giovanni, Pietro Torrigiano struck the 17 year old on the nose, and thus caused that disfigurement which is so conspicuous in all the portraits of Michelangelo.

Early adulthood

Lorenzo de' Medici's death on 8 April 1492 brought a reversal of Michelangelo's circumstances. Michelangelo left the security of the Medici court and returned to his father's house. In the following months he carved a wooden crucifix (1493), as a gift to the prior of the Florentine church of Santo Spirito, who had permitted him some studies of anatomy on the corpses of the church's hospital. Between 1493 and 1494 he bought a block of marble for a larger than life statue of Hercules, which was sent to France and subsequently disappeared sometime circa 18th century. During the half year he spent in Florence he worked on two small statues, a child St. John the Baptist and a sleeping Cupid. According to Condivi, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, for whom Michelangelo had sculpted St. John the Baptist, asked that Michelangelo "fix it so that it looked as if it had been buried" so he could "send it to Rome…pass [it off as] an ancient work and…sell it much better." Both Lorenzo and Michelangelo were unwittingly cheated out of the real value of the piece by a middleman. Cardinal Raffaele Riario, to whom Lorenzo had sold it, discovered that it was a fraud, but was so impressed by the quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome. This apparent success in selling his sculpture abroad as well as the conservative Florentine situation may have encouraged Michelangelo to accept the prelate's invitation. at the age of 21. On 4 July of the same year, he began work on a commission for Cardinal Raffaele Riario, an over-life-size statue of the Roman wine god, Bacchus. However, upon completion, the work was rejected by the cardinal, and subsequently entered the collection of the banker Jacopo Galli, for his garden.

In November of 1497, the French ambassador in the Holy See commissioned one of his most famous works, the Pietà and the contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. The contemporary opinion about this work — "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture" — was summarized by Vasari: "It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh."

In Rome, Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Loreto. Here, according to the legend, he fell in love with Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara and a poet. His house was demolished in 1874, and the remaining architectural elements saved by the new proprietors were destroyed in 1930. Today a modern reconstruction of Michelangelo's house can be seen on the Gianicolo hill. It is also during this period that skeptics allege Michelangelo executed the sculpture Laocoön and His Sons which resides in the Vatican.

Works

, completed by Michelangelo in 1504, is one of the most renowned works of the Renaissance.]]

Statue of David

Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1499–1501. Things were changing in the republic after the fall of anti-Renaissance Priest and leader of Florence, Girolamo Savonarola (executed in 1498) and the rise of the gonfaloniere Pier Soderini. He was asked by the consuls of the Guild of Wool to complete an unfinished project begun 40 years earlier by Agostino di Duccio: a colossal statue portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom, to be placed in the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Michelangelo responded by completing his most famous work, the Statue of David in 1504. This masterwork, created out of a marble block from the quarries at Carrara that had already been worked on by an earlier hand, definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination.

Also during this period, Michelangelo painted the Holy Family and St John, also known as the Doni Tondo or the Holy Family of the Tribune: it was commissioned for the marriage of Angelo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi and in the 17th century hung in the room known as the Tribune in the Uffizi. He also may have painted the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, known as the Manchester Madonna and now in the National Gallery, London.

Sistine Chapel ceiling

; the work took approximately four years to complete (1508–1512)]] In 1505 Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly elected Pope Julius II. He was commissioned to build the Pope's tomb. Under the patronage of the Pope, Michelangelo had to constantly stop work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. Because of these interruptions, Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years. The tomb, of which the central feature is Michelangelo's statue of Moses, was never finished to Michelangelo's satisfaction. It is located in the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.

During the same period, Michelangelo took the commission to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (1508–1512). According to Michelangelo's account, Bramante and Raphael convinced the Pope to commission Michelangelo in a medium not familiar to the artist. This was done in order that he, Michelangelo, would suffer unfavorable comparisons with his rival Raphael, who at the time was at the peak of his own artistry as the primo fresco painter. However, this story is discounted by modern historians on the grounds of contemporary evidence, and may merely have been a reflection of the artist's own perspective.

Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the 12 Apostles against a starry sky, but lobbied for a different and more complex scheme, representing creation, the Downfall of Man and the Promise of Salvation through the prophets and Genealogy of Christ. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel which represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church.

The composition eventually contained over 300 figures and had at its center nine episodes from the Book of Genesis, divided into three groups: God's Creation of the Earth; God's Creation of Humankind and their fall from God's grace; and lastly, the state of Humanity as represented by Noah and his family. On the pendentives supporting the ceiling are painted twelve men and women who prophesied the coming of the Jesus. They are seven prophets of Israel and five Sibyls, prophetic women of the Classical world.

Among the most famous paintings on the ceiling are the Creation of Adam, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood, the Prophet Isaiah and the Cumaean Sibyl. Around the windows are painted the ancestors of Christ.

Under Medici Popes in Florence

(centre) with Rachel and Leah on his sides.]] In 1513 Pope Julius II died and his successor Pope Leo X, a Medici, commissioned Michelangelo to reconstruct the façade of the basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence and to adorn it with sculptures. Michelangelo agreed reluctantly. The three years he spent in creating drawings and models for the facade, as well as attempting to open a new marble quarry at Pietrasanta specifically for the project, were among the most frustrating in his career, as work was abruptly cancelled by his financially strapped patrons before any real progress had been made. The basilica lacks a facade to this day.

Apparently not the least embarrassed by this turnabout, the Medici later came back to Michelangelo with another grand proposal, this time for a family funerary chapel in the basilica of San Lorenzo. Fortunately for posterity, this project, occupying the artist for much of the 1520s and 1530s, was more fully realized. . Saint Bartholomew is shown holding the knife of his martyrdom and his flayed skin. The face of the skin is recognizable as Michelangelo.]] In 1527, the Florentine citizens, encouraged by the sack of Rome, threw out the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city's fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in 1530 and the Medici were restored to power. Completely out of sympathy with the repressive reign of the ducal Medici, Michelangelo left Florence for good in the mid-1530s, leaving assistants to complete the Medici chapel.

Last works in Rome

The fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel was commissioned by Pope Clement VII, who died shortly after assigning the commission. Paul III was instrumental in seeing that Michelangelo began and completed the project. Michelangelo labored on the project from 1534 to October 1541. The work is massive and spans the entire wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel. The Last Judgment is a depiction of the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse; where the souls of humanity rise and are assigned to their various fates, as judged by Christ, surrounded by the Saints.

Once completed, the depictions of nakedness in the papal chapel was considered obscene and sacrilegious, and Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini (Mantua's ambassador) campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored, but the Pope resisted. After Michelangelo's death, it was decided to obscure the genitals ("Pictura in Cappella Ap.ca coopriantur"). So Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, was commissioned to cover with perizomas (briefs) the genitals, leaving unaltered the complex of bodies. When the work was restored in 1993, the conservators chose not to remove all the perizomas of Daniele, leaving some of them as a historical document, and because some of Michelangelo’s work was previously scraped away by the touch-up artist's application of “decency” to the masterpiece. A faithful uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, can be seen at the Capodimonte Museum of Naples. , although it was unfinished when he died.]] Censorship always followed Michelangelo, once described as "inventor delle porcherie" ("inventor of obscenities", in the original Italian language referring to "pork things"). The infamous "fig-leaf campaign" of the Counter-Reformation, aiming to cover all representations of human genitals in paintings and sculptures, started with Michelangelo's works. To give two examples, the marble statue of Cristo della Minerva (church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome) was covered by added drapery, as it remains today, and the statue of the naked child Jesus in Madonna of Bruges (The Church of Our Lady in Bruges, Belgium) remained covered for several decades. Also, the plaster copy of the David in the Cast Courts (Victoria and Albert Museum) in London, has a fig leaf in a box at the back of the statue. It was there to be placed over the statue's genitals so that they would not upset visiting female royalty.

In 1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, and designed its dome. As St. Peter's was progressing there was concern that Michelangelo would pass away before the dome was finished. However, once building commenced on the lower part of the dome, the supporting ring, the completion of the design was inevitable. Michelangelo died in Rome at the age of 88 (three weeks before his 89th birthday). His body was brought back from Rome for interment at the Basilica di Santa Croce, fulfilling the maestro's last request to be buried in his beloved Tuscany.

Last sketch found

On 7 December 2007, Michelangelo's red chalk sketch for the dome of St Peter's Basilica, his last before his death in 1564, was discovered in the Vatican archives. It is extremely rare, since he destroyed his designs later in life. The sketch is a partial plan for one of the radial columns of the cupola drum of Saint Peter's.

Disputed works

A number of works attributed to Michelangelo are disputed. These include the paintings, The Manchester Madonna, the London Deposition, and The Torment of Saint Anthony, newly acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum, USA (previously attributed to "Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio", and having had two previously unsuccessful attempts at attribution to the hand of Michelangelo). In addition, the Cupid sculpture "rediscovered" in the French Embassy in New York in 1996 (now on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art) has also been inconclusively attributed to Michelangelo.

Architectural work

, Florence]] Michelangelo worked on many projects that had been started by other men, most notably in his work at St Peter's Basilica, Rome. The Campidoglio, designed by Michelangelo during the same period, rationalized the structures and spaces of Rome's Capitoline Hill. Its shape, more a rhomboid than a square, was intended to counteract the effects of perspective. The major Florentine architectural projects by Michelangelo are the unexecuted façade for the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence and the Medici Chapel (Capella Medicea) and Laurentian Library there, and the fortifications of Florence. The major Roman projects are St. Peter's, Palazzo Farnese, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the Sforza Chapel (Capella Sforza) in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Porta Pia and Santa Maria degli Angeli.

Laurentian Library

Around 1530 Michelangelo designed the Laurentian Library in Florence, attached to the church of San Lorenzo. He produced new styles such as pilasters tapering thinner at the bottom, and a staircase with contrasting rectangular and curving forms.

Medici Chapel

Michelangelo designed the Medici Chapel and in fact used his own discretion to create its composition. The Medici Chapel has monuments in it dedicated to certain members of the Medici family. Michelangelo never finished the project, so his pupils later completed it. Lorenzo the Magnificent was buried at the entrance wall of the Medici Chapel. Sculptures of the "Madonna and Child" and the Medici patron saints Cosmas and Damian were set over his burial. The "Madonna and child" was Michelangelo's own work. The concealed corridor with wall drawings of Michelangelo under the New Sacristy discovered in 1976.

Personality

Michelangelo, who was often arrogant with others and constantly dissatisfied with himself, saw art as originating from inner inspiration and from culture. In contradiction to the ideas of his rival, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo saw nature as an enemy that had to be overcome. The figures that he created are forceful and dynamic, each in its own space apart from the outside world. For Michelangelo, the job of the sculptor was to free the forms that were already inside the stone. He believed that every stone had a sculpture within it, and that the work of sculpting was simply a matter of chipping away all that was not a part of the statue.

Several anecdotes reveal that Michelangelo's skill, especially in sculpture, was greatly admired in his own time. Another Lorenzo de Medici wanted to use Michelangelo to make some money. He had Michelangelo sculpt a Cupid that looked worn and old. Lorenzo paid Michelangelo 30 ducats, but sold the Cupid for 200 ducats. Cardinal Raffaele Riario became suspicious and sent someone to investigate. The man had Michelangelo do a sketch for him of a Cupid, and then told Michelangelo that while he received 30 ducats for his Cupid, Lorenzo had passed the Cupid off for an antique and sold it for 200 ducats. Michelangelo then confessed that he had done the Cupid, but had no idea that he had been cheated. After the truth was revealed, the Cardinal later took this as proof of his skill and commissioned his Bacchus. Another better-known anecdote claims that when finishing the Moses (San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome), Michelangelo violently hit the knee of the statue with a hammer, shouting, "Why don't you speak to me?"

In his personal life, Michelangelo was abstemious. He told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man." Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure" He may not have minded, since he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person. He had a reputation for being bizzarro e fantastico because he "withdrew himself from the company of men."

Sexuality

, accomplished.]] While clearly having a keen appreciation for the nude form resurgent in the Renaissance, fundamental to Michelangelo's art is his love of male beauty which seems to have particularly attracted him both aesthetically and emotionally. In part, this was an expression of the Renaissance idealization of masculinity. But in Michelangelo's art there is clearly a sensual response to this aesthetic.

The sculptor's expressions of love have been characterized as both Neoplatonic and openly homoerotic; recent scholarship seeks an interpretation which respects both readings, yet is wary of drawing absolute conclusions. One example of the conundrum is Cecchino dei Bracci, whose death, only a year after their meeting in 1543, inspired the writing of forty eight funeral , which by some accounts allude to a relationship that was not only romantic but physical as well: :{| |width=160px|La carne terra, e qui l'ossa mia, prive de' lor begli occhi, e del leggiadro aspetto fan fede a quel ch'i' fu grazia nel letto, che abbracciava, e' n che l'anima vive. |The flesh now earth, and here my bones, Bereft of handsome eyes, and jaunty air, Still loyal are to him I joyed in bed, Whom I embraced, in whom my soul now lives. |} According to others, they represent an emotionless and elegant re-imagining of Platonic dialogue, whereby erotic poetry was seen as an expression of refined sensibilities (Indeed, it must be remembered that professions of love in 16th century Italy were given a far wider application than now). Some young men were street wise and took advantage of the sculptor. Febo di Poggio, in 1532, peddled his charms—in answer to Michelangelo's love poem he asks for money. Earlier, Gherardo Perini, in 1522, had stolen from him shamelessly. Michelangelo defended his privacy above all. When an employee of his friend Niccolò Quaratesi offered his son as apprentice suggesting that he would be good even in bed, Michelangelo refused indignantly, suggesting Quaratesi fire the man.

The greatest written expression of his love was given to Tommaso dei Cavalieri (c. 1509–1587), who was 23 years old when Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57. Cavalieri was open to the older man's affection: I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man more than I love you, never have I wished for a friendship more than I wish for yours. Cavalieri remained devoted to Michelangelo until his death.

Michelangelo dedicated to him over three hundred sonnets and , constituting the largest sequence of poems that he composed. Some modern commentators assert that the relationship was merely a Platonic affection, even suggesting that Michelangelo was seeking a surrogate son. However, their homoerotic nature was recognized in his own time, so that a decorous veil was drawn across them by his grand nephew, Michelangelo the Younger, who published an edition of the poetry in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed. John Addington Symonds, the early British homosexual activist, undid this change by translating the original sonnets into English and writing a two-volume biography, published in 1893.

The sonnets are the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another, predating Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair youth by fifty years. {| | :I feel as lit by fire a cold countenance :That burns me from afar and keeps itself ice-chill; :A strength I feel two shapely arms to fill :Which without motion moves every balance. ::— (Michael Sullivan, translation) |}

Late in life he nurtured a great love for the poet and noble widow Vittoria Colonna, whom he met in Rome in 1536 or 1538 and who was in her late forties at the time. They wrote sonnets for each other and were in regular contact until she died.

It is impossible to know for certain whether Michelangelo had physical relationships (Condivi ascribed to him a "monk-like chastity"), but through his poetry and visual art we may at least glimpse the arc of his imagination.

See also

List of works by Michelangelo

Michelangelo phenomenon

Renaissance painting

Restoration of the Sistine Chapel frescoes

Medici Chapel

The asteroid 3001 Michelangelo and a crater on the planet Mercury were named after Michelangelo.

The 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy features the story of Michelangelo and his travails in painting the Sistine Chapel. He is portrayed in the film by Charlton Heston.

Portraits of Michelangelo

Footnotes

References

;Notes

Further reading

Einem, Herbert von (1973). Michelangelo. Trans. Ronald Taylor. London: Methuen.

Gilbert, Creighton (1994). Michelangelo On and Off the Sistine Ceiling. New York: George Braziller.

Hibbard, Howard (1974). Michelangelo. New York: Harper & Row.

Hirst, Michael and Jill Dunkerton. (1994) The Young Michelangelo: The Artist in Rome 1496–1501. London: National Gallery Publications.

Pietrangeli, Carlo, et al. (1994). The Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration. New York: Harry N. Abrams

Saslow, James M. (1991). The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Seymour, Charles, Jr. (1972). Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling. New York: W. W. Norton.

Summers, David (1981). Michelangelo and the Language of Art. Princeton University Press.

Tolnay, Charles de. (1964). The Art and Thought of Michelangelo. 5 vols. New York: Pantheon Books.

Wilde, Johannes (1978). Michelangelo: Six Lectures. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

External links

Where to find Michelangelo's works in Florence

"The Divine Michelangelo - Timeline of Michelangelo's Life and Major Works"

Michelangelo in the "A World History of Art"

Michelangelo in the "Vatican Secret Archives"

Photographs of details at the Campidoglio

The Digital Michelangelo Project

The BP Special Exhibition Michelangelo Drawings — closer to the master

Michelangelo's Drawings: Real or Fake? How to decide if a drawing is by Michelangelo.

Models he used to make his sculptures and paintings

}}, suggesting Michelangelo's coded use of his knowledge of anatomy.

"Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth"

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Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger (19 March 187311 May 1916) was a German composer, conductor, pianist, organist, and academic teacher.

Life

Born in Brand, Bavaria, Reger studied music in Munich and Wiesbaden with Hugo Riemann. From September 1901 he settled in Munich, where he obtained concert offers and where his rapid rise to fame began. During his first Munich season, Reger appeared in ten concerts as an organist, chamber pianist and accompanist. He continued to compose without interruption. From 1907 he worked in Leipzig, where he was music director of the university until 1908 and professor of composition at the conservatory until his death. In 1911 he moved to Meiningen where he got the position of Hofkapellmeister at the court of Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. In 1915 he moved to Jena, commuting once a week to teach in Leipzig. He died in May 1916 on one of these trips of a heart attack at age 43.

He had been also active internationally as a conductor and pianist. Among his students were Joseph Haas, Jaroslav Kvapil, Ruben Liljefors, George Szell and Cristòfor Taltabull.

Reger was the cousin of Hans von Koessler.

-Philharmonic-Organ, 1913.]]

Works

During a composing life of little more than 25 years, Reger produced an enormous output, nearly always in abstract forms, although few of his compositions are well known today. Many of his works are fugues or in variation form, including what is probably his best known orchestral work, the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart (based on the opening theme of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A major, K. 331). He also wrote a large amount of music for organ, including the Fantasy and Fugue on BACH (this piece, based on the BACH motif, is considered one of the most difficult and demanding in organ literature). He was particularly attracted to the fugal form his entire life. Once he remarked: "Other people write fugues - I live inside them". He created music in almost every genre, opera and the symphony being the two exceptions.

A firm supporter of absolute music, he saw himself as being part of the tradition of Beethoven and Brahms. His work often combines the classical structures of these composers with the extended harmonies of Liszt and Wagner, to which he added the complex counterpoint of Bach. His organ music, though also influenced by Liszt, was provoked by that tradition.

Of his orchestral pieces, his richly elaborate Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Hiller and Mozart Variations are still performed now and then; few others are. Among his chamber compositions the lighter-textured trios have retained a small place in the repertory, and the Clarinet Quintet, his swan-song, is widely admired. Some of the works for solo string instruments turn up often on recordings, though less regularly in recitals. His solo piano and two-piano music places him as a successor to Brahms in the central German tradition. He pursued intensively, and to its limits, Brahms's continuous development and free modulation, often also invoking, like Brahms, the aid of Bach-influenced polyphony.

He was a prolific writer of vocal works, Lieder, works for mixed chorus, men's chorus and female chorus, and extended choral works with orchestra such as Der 100. Psalm and Requiem. He composed texts of poets such as Otto Julius Bierbaum, Adelbert von Chamisso, Joseph von Eichendorff, Emanuel Geibel, Friedrich Hebbel, Nikolaus Lenau, Friedrich Rückert and Ludwig Uhland.

His works could be considered retrospective as they followed classical and baroque compositional techniques such as fugue and continuo. The influence of the latter can be heard in his chamber works which are deeply reflective and unconventional.

Media

See also

List of compositions by Max Reger

Bibliography

Liu, Hsin-Hung. (2004) A study on compositional structure in Max Reger Phantasie für Orgel über den Choral, "Hallelujah! Gott zu loben, bleibe meine Seelenfreud! D.M.A. Dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle.

Anderson, Christopher (2003). Max Reger and Karl Straube: Perspectives on an Organ Performing Tradition. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 0-7546-3075-7.

Bittmann, Antonius (2004). Max Reger and Historicist Modernisms. Baden-Baden: Koerner. ISBN 3-87320-595-5.

Cadenbach, Rainer (1991). Max Reger und Seine Zeit. Laaber, Germany: Laaber-Verlag. ISBN 3-89007-140-6.

Grim, William (1988). Max Reger: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-25311-0.

Sources

Geocities

External links

The Max Reger Foundation of America, New York City

Max-Reger-Institut, Karlsruhe, Germany (in German)

Max Reger Archive Meiningen (in German)

Piano recital without Pianist or Max Reger plays Max Reger

Recordings

Max Reger String Trio No.1 sound-bite and short bio

Performances of works for organ and solo viola by Max Reger in MP3 format at Logos Virtual Library

organ works of Max Reger played on virtual organs

organ works of Max Reger played on a real organ

Music scores

Category:1873 births Category:1916 deaths Category:People from the District of Tirschenreuth Category:People from the Kingdom of Bavaria Category:People from Saxe-Meiningen Category:20th-century classical composers Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in Germany Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:German composers Category:Felix Mendelssohn College of Music and Theatre faculty Category:German classical pianists Category:German classical organists Category:Composers for pipe organ Category:German musicians Category:Romantic composers Category:Historicist composers

Name	Eicca Matti Toppinen
Background	non_vocal_instrumentalist
Born	August 05, 1975
Origin	Vantaa, Finland
Genre	Cello rock, symphonic metal
Occupation	Musician, Composer, Songwriter
Instrument	Cello, Drums, Piano

Eino Matti "Eicca" Toppinen is a Finnish cellist, songwriter, producer, arranger, and (as a hobby) drummer. In 1993 he formed the quartet Apocalyptica.

Biography

Toppinen grew up in Vantaa's Hakunila and has three sisters and one brother all of which took instrument lessons while growing up. He started playing cello when he was nine.

He attended the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, where he met future Apocalyptica band members Paavo Lötjönen, Antero Manninen, and Max Lilja. After graduating, he played for several orchestras, including Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Avanti! chamber orchestra. He's also a founding member of the Sibelius Academy's Cellosextet. When attending Sibelius Academy, Eicca couldn't get an apartment or student support money because he lived too close to Helsinki, where the Academy resides., on the same night with His Infernal Majesty, later to be known as HIM. A week later, Kari Hynninen of Zen Garden Records contacted Eicca to discuss a deal to make their very first record, Plays Metallica by Four Cellos.

Toppinen married Kirsi Ylijoki, a Finnish actress, in 1997. They live in an expansive rural area in Sipoo, Finland. They have 2 children: Eelis, born in 1999, and Ilmari, born in 2002.

After first writing songs for Apocalyptica, Toppinen also became involved in the writing of music for various other projects, such as the theatrical performance of Paper Rain and the Finnish Film Milja.

In 2007, Toppinen composed the soundtrack for the Finnish movie Musta Jää (Black Ice). He has since been nominated and, on February 3, 2008, won a Jussi Award for writing the score. He also wrote the movie's main theme, sung by Hanna Pakarinen.

In December, 2007, Toppinen was invited to the Finnish Independence Day Presidential Reception in Helsinki. He attended with his wife, Kirsi, and was prominently featured in several news articles and interviews. Unfortunately, he had to miss Apocalyptica's sold-out show in Strasbourg, France, the first time he had ever missed a performance by his band in 14 years.

Toppinen says his biggest achievement is Apocalyptica.

Toppinen's Idols

Yo-Yo Ma

Tom Waits

Mstislav Rostropovich

James Hetfield

Equipment

;Cello

Lupot (1787) Postiglione (1857)

;Bow Guillaume A. Vigneron

;Strings Tomastik Infeld Spirocore

References

External links

Apocalyptica.com

Cellist.nl

Eicca Toppinen - photo-gallery

Interviews with Eicca Toppinen

Category:1975 births Category:Living people Category:Finnish cellists Category:Finnish heavy metal cellists Category:People from Vantaa