- published: 26 Apr 2007
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- Acoustic enhancement
- Adolf Mišek
- AFI (band)
- Amarillo, Texas
- André Previn
- Antonio Capuzzi
- Antonín Dvořák
- Arco
- Art Tatum
- Artificial harmonic
- Assjack
- Athol Guy
- Audio feedback
- Audition
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- Baroque music
- Barry Bales
- Bass clef
- Bass guitar
- Bass saxophone
- Bassline
- Bazantar
- Bebop
- Beethoven
- Benjamin Britten
- Bernhard Alt
- Bertold Hummel
- Bertram Turetzky
- Bill Black
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- Blue Note Records
- Bluegrass music
- Blues
- Bob Cranshaw
- Bohuslav Martinů
- Bovinae
- Bow (music)
- Brazilwood
- Camille Saint-Saëns
- Carbon fiber
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- Cello
- Charles Ives
- Charles Mingus
- Charles Wuorinen
- Charlie Haden
- Charlie Parker
- Chick Corea
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- Christian McBride
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- Colin Brumby
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- Country music
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Michigan
Michigan (
i/ˈmɪʃɨɡən/) is a state located in the Great Lakes region of the Midwestern United States. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake". Michigan is the 8th most populous of the 50 United States, with the 11th most extensive total area. Its capital is Lansing, and the largest city is Detroit. Michigan was admitted into the Union on January 26, 1837 as the 26th state.
Michigan has the longest freshwater coastline of any political subdivision in the world, being bounded by four of the five Great Lakes, plus Lake Saint Clair. Michigan is one of the leading U.S. states for recreational boating. The state has 64,980 inland lakes and ponds. A person in the state is never more than six miles (9.7 km) from a natural water source or more than 85 miles (137 km) from a Great Lakes shoreline. It is the largest state by total area east of the Mississippi River.
Michigan is the only state to consist of two peninsulas. The Lower Peninsula, to which the name Michigan was originally applied, is often noted to be shaped like a mitten. The Upper Peninsula (often referred to as "the U.P.") is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the Straits of Mackinac, a five-mile (8 km) channel that joins Lake Huron to Lake Michigan. The two peninsulas are connected by the Mackinac Bridge. The Upper Peninsula is economically important due to its status as a tourist destination. There is also a variety of natural resources to be found there, including a sizable amount of iron ore.
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Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize (Norwegian and Swedish: Nobels fredspris) is one of the five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel, along with the prizes in Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature. It is awarded to those who have "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
Per Alfred Nobel's will, the recipient is selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a 5-member committee appointed by the Parliament of Norway. Since 1990, the prize is awarded in Oslo City Hall on 10 December each year. The prize was formerly awarded in the Atrium of the University of Oslo Faculty of Law (1947–89), the Norwegian Nobel Institute (1905–46) and the Parliament (1901–04).
According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
wn.com/Nobel_Peace_Prize
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Adolf Mišek
Adolf Mišek (29 August 1875 - 20 October 1955) was a Czech double bassist and composer of the late romantic era.
Born in Modletín (then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), he left for Vienna at the age of 15 to study with Franz Simandl at the Vienna Conservatory. At the age of 23 Mišek joined the orchestra of the state opera in Vienna - a post he held concurrently with the professorship at the conservatory after the departure of Simandl in 1912 - until he left for Prague in 1918 to join the National Theatre as principal bassist and soloist. He held this position until his death in 1955.
Mišek's musical compositions are a common repertory item for contemporary bassists and are typical of the late romantic, early 20th century style. Some pieces that remain include his three sonatas for double bass and piano (in A major, E minor, and F major, respectively), the lyrical Legend, and the virtuosic Concert Polonaise. All of Mišek's pieces are highly idiomatic and show that he was a highly accomplished performer and a talented (if not brilliant) composer.
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André Previn
André George Previn, KBE (born Andreas Ludwig Priwin; April 6, 1929) is a German-American pianist, conductor, and composer. He is considered one of the most versatile musicians in the world and is the winner of four Academy Awards for his film work and ten Grammy Awards for his recordings.
Previn was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Charlotte (née Epstein) and Jack Previn, who was a lawyer, judge, and music teacher. He is said to be "a distant relative of" the composer Gustav Mahler. However, In a pre-concert public interview at the Lincoln Center, in May 2012, Previn laughed at the suggestion that he is related to Mahler. The year of his birth is uncertain. Whilst most published reports give 1929, Previn himself has stated that 1930 is his birth year. This situation is a consequence of his the family losing Previn's birth certificate when they left Germany in 1938.[citation needed] His elder brother was director Steve Previn.[citation needed] The Previn family, which was Jewish,[citation needed] emigrated to the United States in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime in Germany.[citation needed]
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Antonio Capuzzi
Giuseppe Antonio Capuzzi (August 1, 1755 – March 28, 1818) was an Italian violinist and composer.
Although popular in his day, most of his music is now forgotten. The most commonly performed piece today is his concerto for double bass. The concerto was found in the British Museum, and is dedicated to Kavalier Marcantonio Montenigo, who is assumed to have performed on that instrument. An arrangement of the second (andante) and third (rondo) movements of the concerto is also performed on tuba, euphonium, and trombone. Several of his string quintets are also performed by chamber groups.
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Antonín Dvořák
Antonín Leopold Dvořák (/ˈdvɔrʒɑːk/ DVOR-zhahk or /dɨˈvɔrʒæk/ di-VOR-zhak; Czech: [ˈantoɲiːn ˈlɛopolt ˈdvor̝aːk] (
listen); September 8, 1841 – May 1, 1904) was a Czech composer of late Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvořák’s own style is sometimes called "romantic-classicist synthesis". His works include symphonic, choral and chamber music, concerti, operas and many of other orchestral and vocal-instrumental pieces.
His best-known works include his New World Symphony, the Slavonic Dances, the Symphonic Variations, "American" String Quartet, Piano Quintet No 2, the opera Rusalka, Cello Concerto in B minor and choral works Stabat Mater, Requiem and Te Deum. Today, he is considered to be one of the most important composers of the Romantic era.
Dvořák was born on September 8, 1841, in the Bohemian village of Nelahozeves, near Prague (then part of Bohemia in the Austrian Empire, now Czech Republic), where he spent most of his life. He was baptized as a Roman Catholic in the church of St. Andrew in the village. Dvořák's years in Nelahozeves nurtured the strong Christian faith and love for his Bohemian heritage that so strongly influenced his music. His father, František Dvořák (1814–1894), was an innkeeper, professional player of the zither, and a butcher. Although his father wanted him to be a butcher as well, Dvořák pursued a career in music. He received his earliest musical education at the village school, which he entered in 1847, aged six. From 1857 to 1859 he studied music in Prague's only organ school, and gradually developed into an accomplished player of the violin and the viola. He wrote his first string quartet when he was 20 years old, two years after graduating.
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Art Tatum
Arthur "Art" Tatum, Jr. (October 13, 1909 – November 5, 1956) was an American jazz pianist and virtuoso who played with phenomenal facility despite being nearly blind since birth.
Tatum is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time and he was a major influence on later generations of jazz pianists. He was noted for the complexity and speed of his performances, which set a new standard for jazz piano virtuosity. Critic Scott Yanow wrote, "Tatum's quick reflexes and boundless imagination kept his improvisations filled with fresh (and sometimes futuristic) ideas that put him way ahead of his contemporaries ... Art Tatum's recordings still have the ability to scare modern pianists."
For a musician of such stature, there is very little published information available about Tatum's life. Only one full-length biography has been published, Too Marvelous for Words, by James Lester. Lester interviewed many of Tatum's contemporaries for the book and drew from many articles published about him.
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Athol Guy
Athol Guy (born 5 January 1940), is a member of the Australian pop music-folk music group The Seekers. Guy played the double bass. He was characterised by his wearing of black horn-rimmed glasses. During live performances, Guy also often acted as the group's compere.
After his time with the Seekers, Guy had his own variety series on Australia's 7 Network: "A Guy Called Athol." 1971 saw him elected as the Liberal member for Gisborne in the Victorian Legislative Assembly. One of its youngest members, he won three terms with an increasing majority before he returned to the commercial world as a corporate consultant.
In recent years, Guy has invested in a winery and a health and lifestyle centre.
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Barry Bales
Barry Turner Bales [1] (born August 23, 1969 in Kingsport, Tennessee) is the bass player and harmony vocalist for Alison Krauss and Union Station.
Barry grew up in Colonial Heights, Tennessee outside of Kingsport, Tennessee and attended Sullivan South High School (Tennessee). Early memories of music include listening to the records of Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Bob Wills, Buck Owens and Hank Thompson from his father's extensive collection. He started experimenting with various instruments at the age of 10, starting with guitar. By age 15, Barry had found the bass and was playing regionally in various groups. Bales attended East Tennessee State University, participating in the Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music program, as did future Union Station members Tim Stafford and Adam Steffey. [2] It was while performing with many of these musicians that he began traveling in ever-wider musical circles, eventually landing the bass job with Union Station in 1990.
Over the years, Barry has become one of the most in-demand session players in acoustic music. He has recorded and performed with such artists as Reba McEntire, Susan Ashton, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Bowman, the Cox family, Vince Gill, Dolly Parton, Dan Tyminski, Patty Loveless and many others.
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Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten,OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist; and one of the central figures of 20th century British classical music. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to international fame. For the next fifteen years he devoted much of his compositional attention to writing operas, establishing him as one of the leading 20th century figures in this genre.
Britten's interests as a composer were wide-ranging; he produced important music in such varied genres as orchestral, choral, solo vocal (much of it written for his life partner, tenor Peter Pears), chamber and instrumental, as well as film music. He also took a great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, and was an outstanding pianist and conductor.
Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 22 November 1913, the youngest of four children. His father, Robert, was a dentist, and his mother Edith, a talented amateur musician who gave Britten his first lessons in piano and notation. He showed musical gifts very early in life, making his first attempts at composition aged five, and thereafter composing prolifically as a child. He started piano lessons with a teacher from his pre-prep school when aged 7, and viola lessons with Audrey Alston when 10 years old.
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Bertold Hummel
Bertold Hummel (November 27, 1925 in Hüfingen – August 9, 2002 in Würzburg) was a German composer of modern classical music.
Bertold Hummel was born November 27, 1925 in Hüfingen (Baden). He studied at the Academy of Music in Freiburg from 1947 to 1954, taking composition with Harald Genzmer, and cello with Atis Teichmanis. He toured as a cellist and composer between 1954 and 1956, worked as choirmaster in Freiburg, as well as for the Südwestrundfunk Baden-Baden broadcasting station from 1956 to 1963. He became a teacher of composition at Würzburg in 1963 where he directed the Studio for New Music for the next 25 years. After becoming a professor in 1974, he was president of the Würzburg College of Music from 1979 to 1987 (and was an honorary president after 1988), and in 1982 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. Hummel travelled as a guest lecturer, and received performances of his work in countries all over the world. He died August 9, 2002 in Würzburg.
In 1956, he received a scholarship from the Federal Association of German Industry. In 1960, the city of Stuttgart awarded him a prize in composition. He was given the Robert Schumann prize in Düsseldorf in 1961. In 1968, he received a scholarship from the Cité des arts internationale of Paris. In 1988, the city of Würzburg awarded him a cultural prize. He won the Friedrich Baur Prize of the Bavarian Academy of the Fine Arts in 1996 and the Culture Prize of the German Catholics in 1998.
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Bertram Turetzky
Bertram Turetzky (b. February 14, 1933) is a contemporary American double bass (contrabass) soloist, teacher, and author of The Contemporary Contrabass (1974, 1989), a book that looked at a number of new and interesting ways of playing the double bass including featuring it as a solo performance vehicle with no other instrumental accompaniment.
Turetzky has performed and recorded more than 300 pieces written by and for him. He is a composer whose music has achieved some prominence, as have his interpretations of early music and composers like Domenico Dragonetti. Music critic Michael Steinberg has praised his continuo playing. Turetzky has appeared as a featured soloist in the major music centers of the world and is the most widely recorded solo doublebass player with seven albums on Advance, Ars Nova, Nonesuch, Takoma, Desto and Finnadar music labels.
Turetzky is a versatile musician, conversant in chamber music, baroque music, classical, jazz, renaissance music, improvisational music and many different genres of world music. He has also developed a special affinity for klezmer music.
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Bill Black
William Patton "Bill" Black, Jr. (September 17, 1926 – October 21, 1965) was an American musician who is noted as one of the pioneers of rockabilly music. Black was the bassist in Elvis Presley's early trio and the leader of Bill Black's Combo.
Black was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to a motorman for the Memphis Street Railway. He was the oldest of nine children His father played popular songs on the banjo and fiddle to entertain the family. Black learned to play music at the age of 14 on an instrument made by his father—a cigar box with a board nailed to it and strings attached. At the age of sixteen, Black was performing "honky-tonk" music on acoustic guitar in local bars.
During World War II, Black was stationed with the U.S. Army at Fort Lee in Virginia. While in the Army, he met Evelyn, who played guitar as the member of a musical family. They married in 1946 and returned to Memphis. Black worked at the Firestone plant.
Black began playing the upright bass fiddle. He modeled his "slap bass" technique after one of his idols, Fred Maddox of Maddox Brothers and Rose. Black also developed a "stage clown" persona in the same way that Maddox entertained audiences. Black performed as an exaggerated hillbilly with blacked-out teeth, straw hat and overalls. According to his son, Black said his goal was always to give his audience "a few moments of entertainment and maybe a little bit of humor that'll tickle 'em for a while."
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Bill Evans
William John Evans, known as Bill Evans (August 16, 1929–September 15, 1980) was an American jazz pianist. His use of impressionist harmony, inventive interpretation of traditional jazz repertoire, and trademark rhythmically independent, "singing" melodic lines influenced a generation of pianists. He is considered by some to be the most influential post-World War II jazz pianist. Evans had a distinct playing posture in which his neck would often be stooped very low, and his face parallel to the piano.
Evans is an inductee of the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.
Bill Evans was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, United States, to a mother of Rusyn ancestry and a father of Welsh descent. He received his first musical training at his mother's church. Evans' mother was an amateur pianist with an interest in modern classical composers, and Evans began classical piano lessons at age six. He also became a proficient flautist by age 13 and could play the violin.
At age 12, Evans filled in for his older brother Harry in Buddy Valentino's band. At this age he was able to interpret classical music, but he couldn't improvise. In the beginning, he played exactly what was written in the sheet, but soon started trying to improvise, while learning about harmonies in the songs and how to alter them. Meanwhile, he was playing dance music (and jazz) at home, in a recording studio he built in his family's basement.. In the late 1940s, Evans played boogie woogie in various New Jersey clubs. He attended Southeastern Louisiana University on a music scholarship, and in 1950 performed Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto on his senior recital there, graduating with a degree in piano performance and teaching. He was also among the founding members of SLU's Delta Omega Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, and played quarterback for the fraternity's football team, helping them win the school's 1949 intramural tournament.
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Bill Monroe
William Smith Monroe (September 13, 1911 – September 9, 1996) was an American musician who created the style of music known as bluegrass, which takes its name from his band, the "Blue Grass Boys," named for Monroe's home state of Kentucky. Monroe's performing career spanned 60 years as a singer, instrumentalist, composer and bandleader. He is often referred to as The Father of Bluegrass.
Monroe was born on his family's farm near Rosine, Kentucky, the youngest of eight children of James Buchanan "Buck" and Malissa (Vandiver) Monroe. His mother and her brother, Pendleton "Pen" Vandiver, were both musically talented, and Monroe and his family grew up playing and singing at home. Bill was of Scottish heritage. Because his older brothers Birch and Charlie already played the fiddle and guitar, Bill Monroe was resigned to playing the less desirable mandolin. He recalled that his brothers insisted he remove four of the mandolin's eight strings so he would not play too loudly.
Monroe's mother died when he was ten, followed by his father six years later. As his brothers and sisters had moved away, after bouncing among uncles and aunts, Monroe settled in with his disabled uncle Pendleton Vandiver, often accompanying him when Vandiver played the fiddle at dances. This experience inspired one of Monroe's most famous compositions, "Uncle Pen," recorded in 1950, and the 1972 album, "Bill Monroe's Uncle Pen." On that album, Monroe recorded a number of traditional fiddle tunes he had often heard performed by Vandiver. Uncle Pen has been credited with giving Monroe "a repertoire of tunes that sank into Bill's aurally trained memory and a sense of rhythm that seeped into his bones." Also significant in Monroe's musical life was Arnold Shultz, an influential fiddler and guitarist who introduced Monroe to the blues.
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Bob Cranshaw
Melbourne R. "Bob" Cranshaw (born December 10, 1932, in Evanston, Illinois) is an American jazz bassist. His career spans the heyday of Blue Note Records to his recent involvement with the Musicians Union. He is perhaps best known for his long association with Sonny Rollins. Cranshaw has been in Rollins's working band on and off for almost five decades, starting with the 1962 album The Bridge.
Some of his best-known performances include Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder and Grant Green's Idle Moments. Cranshaw also served as the sole session bassist to Sesame Street and The Electric Company songwriter and composer Joe Raposo, and played bass guitar on all songs, tracks, buttons and cues recorded by the Children's Television Workshop during Raposo's tenure.
Although he lacks the name recognition of other bassists, Cranshaw has performed and recorded with a wide range of leading jazz artists, including Ella Fitzgerald, Dexter Gordon, Grant Green, Coleman Hawkins, Jimmy Heath, Joe Henderson, Johnny Hodges, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, J. J. Johnson, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Thelonious Monk, James Moody, Lee Morgan, Wes Montgomery, Oscar Peterson, Buddy Rich, George Shearing, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Shirley Scott, Stanley Turrentine, McCoy Tyner, Sonny Rollins, George Benson, and Joe Williams.
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Bohuslav Martinů
Bohuslav Martinů (Czech pronunciation: [ˈboɦuslaf ˈmarcɪnuː] ( listen); December 8, 1890 – August 28, 1959) was a prolific Czech composer of modern classical music. Martinů wrote six symphonies, 15 operas, 14 ballet scores and a large body of orchestral, chamber, vocal and instrumental works. Martinů became a violinist in the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and taught music in his home town. In 1923 Martinů left Czechoslovakia for Paris, and deliberately withdrew from the Romantic style in which he had been trained. In the 1930s he experimented with expressionism and constructivism, and became an admirer of current European technical developments, exemplified by his orchestral works Half-time and La Bagarre. He also adopted jazz idioms, for instance in his Kuchyňské revue ("Kitchen Revue").
In the early 1930s he found his main font for composition style, the neo-classical as developed by Stravinsky. With this, he greatly expanded to become an amazingly prolific composer, composing volleys of well-crafted chamber, orchestral, choral and instrumental works, and was able to do this with amazing dispatch. His use of the piano obbligato became his signature. His Concerto Grosso and the Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano and Tympani are among his most powerful from this period. Among his operas, Juliette and The Greek Passion are considered the finest. He is compared with Prokofiev and Bartók in his innovative incorporation of Central European ethnomusicology into his music. He continued to use Bohemian and Moravian folk melodies throughout his oeuvre, usually nursery rhymes—for instance in Otvírání studánek ("The Opening of the Wells").
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Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives (October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an American modernistcomposer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original". Ives combined the American popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones, foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century.
Sources of Ives' tonal imagery are hymn tunes and traditional songs, the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.
Charles Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, the son of George Ives, a U.S. Army bandleader in the American Civil War, and his wife Mary Parmelee. A strong influence of Charles's may have been sitting in the Danbury town square, listening to his father's marching band and other bands on other sides of the square simultaneously. George Ives' unique music lessons were also a strong influence on Charles; George Ives took an open-minded approach to musical theory, encouraging his son to experiment in bitonal and polytonal harmonizations. It was from his father that Charles Ives also learned the music of Stephen Foster. Ives became a church organist at the age of 14 and wrote various hymns and songs for church services, including his Variations on 'America' .
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Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Jr. (April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979) was an American jazz musician, composer, bandleader, and civil rights activist.
Mingus's compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop and drew heavily from black gospel music while sometimes drawing on elements of Third stream, free jazz, and classical music. Yet Mingus avoided categorization, forging his own brand of music that fused tradition with unique and unexplored realms of jazz.
Mingus focused on collective improvisation, similar to the old New Orleans jazz parades, paying particular attention to how each band member interacted with the group as a whole. In creating his bands, Mingus looked not only at the skills of the available musicians, but also their personalities. Many musicians passed through his bands and later went on to impressive careers. He recruited talented and sometimes little-known artists whom he assembled into unconventional and revealing configurations. As a performer, Mingus was a pioneer in double bass technique, widely recognized as one of the instrument's most proficient players.
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Charles Wuorinen
Charles Peter Wuorinen (born June 9, 1938) is a prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer born and living in New York City. His catalog of more than 250 compositions includes works for orchestra, opera, chamber music, as well as solo instrumental and vocal works. In recent years he has dedicated attention to large-scale works for the stage, including collaborations with Salman Rushdie and Annie Proulx.
Wuorinen was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. His father, John H. Wuorinen, was chairman of the History department at Columbia University and a noted scholar of Scandinavian affairs who also worked for the Office of Strategic Services and was the author of five books on his native Finland. His mother, Alfhild Kalijarvi, received her MA in Biology from Smith College. Wuorinen excelled academically, graduating from Trinity School (New York City) as valedictorian in 1956, and received his Master’s Degree in Music from Columbia University in 1963. Wuorinen’s parents discouraged his pursuing a career in music. Early supporters included Jacques Barzun and Edgard Varèse. Wuorinen is gay.
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Charlie Haden
Charles Edward Haden (born August 6, 1937) is an American jazz musician. He is a double bassist, probably best known for his long association with saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Haden is also known for his signature lyrical bass lines.
Haden was born in Shenandoah, Iowa, and raised in a musical family, which often performed together on the radio playing country music and American folk songs. Haden made his professional debut as a singer when he was two years old, and continued singing with his family until he contracted a mild form of polio when he was 15. The polio damaged his throat muscles and vocal cords, and as a result, Haden was unable to control his pitch while singing. A few years before contracting polio, Haden had become interested in jazz, and began playing his older brother's double bass. Eventually he set his sights on Los Angeles, and to save money for the trip took a job as house bassist for ABC-TV's Ozark Jubilee in Springfield, Missouri.
Haden moved to Los Angeles in 1957. His first recordings were made that year with Paul Bley. He began recording with Ornette Coleman shortly after, including the important The Shape of Jazz to Come. Haden's folk-influenced style complemented the microtonal, Texas blues elements of Coleman. Haden would enter Keith Jarrett's trio and his 'American Quartet' from 1967 to 1976 with Paul Motian and Dewey Redman. He also played in the collective Old and New Dreams.
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Charlie Parker
Charles Parker, Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), also known as Yardbird and Bird, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.
Parker acquired the nickname "Yardbird" early in his career and the shortened form, "Bird", which continued to be used for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as "Yardbird Suite", "Ornithology", "Bird Gets the Worm", and "Bird of Paradise."
Parker was a highly influential jazz soloist and a leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and improvisation. Parker introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas, including rapidly passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. His tone ranged from clean and penetrating to sweet and somber. Many Parker recordings demonstrate virtuosic technique and complex melodic lines, combining jazz with other musical genres, including blues, Latin, and classical.
Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than an entertainer.
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Chick Corea
Armando Anthony "Chick" Corea (born June 12, 1941) is an American jazz pianist, keyboardist, and composer.
Many of his compositions are considered jazz standards. As a member of Miles Davis' band in the 1960s, he participated in the birth of the electric jazz fusion movement. In the 1970s he formed Return to Forever. Along with Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Keith Jarrett, he has been described as one of the major jazz piano voices to emerge in the post-John Coltrane era.
His career has been driven by his will to operate as a free agent and compulsively explore different avenues of music making. This hunger has positioned him as an important catalyst in the world of serious, mainstream acoustic jazz, and he is one of the most influential and widely studied figures in the last 40 years.
Corea continued to pursue other collaborations and to explore various musical styles throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He is also known for promoting and fundraising for a number of social issues, such as eradicating social illiteracy, and is a Scientologist.
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Christian McBride
Christian McBride (born May 31, 1972, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American jazz bassist. His father, Lee Smith, and his great uncle, Howard Cooper, are well known Philadelphia bassists who served as McBride's early mentors. He is regarded as a virtuoso, and is one of the most recorded musicians of his generation, having appeared on close to 300 recordings as a sideman before the age of 40.
After starting on bass guitar, McBride switched to double bass and studied at the Juilliard School.
He has performed and recorded with a huge number of jazz legends and ensembles, including Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, Diana Krall, Roy Haynes, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Wynton Marsalis, Hank Jones, Joshua Redman, and Ray Brown's "Superbass" with John Clayton, as well as with hip-hop, pop, soul, and classical musicians like The Roots,Kathleen Battle, Carly Simon, Sting, Bruce Hornsby, and James Brown.
In 1996, McBride contributed to the AIDS benefit album Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip produced by the Red Hot Organization.
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Chuck Berry
Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry (born October 18, 1926) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. With songs such as "Maybellene" (1955), "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958), Chuck Berry refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, with lyrics focusing on teen life and consumerism and utilizing guitar solos and showmanship that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music.
Born into a middle class family in St. Louis, Missouri, Berry had an interest in music from an early age and gave his first public performance at Sumner High School. While still a high school student he served a prison sentence for armed robbery between 1944 and 1947. On his release, Berry settled into married life and worked at an automobile assembly plant. By early 1953, influenced by the guitar riffs and showmanship techniques of blues player T-Bone Walker, he was performing in the evenings with the Johnnie Johnson Trio. His break came when he traveled to Chicago in May 1955, and met Muddy Waters, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. With Chess he recorded "Maybellene"—Berry's adaptation of the country song "Ida Red"—which sold over a million copies, reaching No. 1 on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart. By the end of the 1950s, Berry was an established star with several hit records and film appearances to his name as well as a lucrative touring career. He had also established his own St. Louis-based nightclub, called Berry's Club Bandstand. But in January 1962, Berry was sentenced to three years in prison for offenses under the Mann Act—he had transported a 14-year-old girl across state lines.
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Colin Brumby
Colin Brumby (born 18 June 1933) is an Australian composer and conductor.
He was born in Melbourne and studied at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, from which he graduated in 1957. He went to Spain to study advanced composition with Philipp Jarnach, and to London to study with Alexander Goehr. On his return to Australia, he joined the staff of the Music Department at the University of Queensland, and has been based in Brisbane ever since. He became Associate Professor with the University of Queensland, from which he retired in 1998.
Brumby was Musical Director of the Queensland Opera Company from 1968 to 1971. While there, he conducted the Australian premieres of works such as Joseph Haydn's L'infedeltà delusa and Georges Bizet's Le docteur Miracle. He also wrote a series of children's operettas. These toured throughout Queensland by the Queensland Opera Company.
In 1969 he won the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award. In 1971, he received his Doctorate of Music from the University of Melbourne. In 1972 he returned overseas to study composition with Franco Evangelisti in Rome. After his return to Australia, Musica Viva Australia commissioned Brumby to compose a work for the 1974 tour of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. This was The Phoenix and the Turtle for string orchestra and harpsichord.
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Colin Matthews
Colin Matthews OBE (born 13 February 1946) is an English composer of classical music.
Matthews was born in London in 1946; his older brother is the composer David Matthews. He read classics at the University of Nottingham, and then studied composition there with Arnold Whittall, and with Nicholas Maw. In the 1970s he taught at the University of Sussex, where he obtained a doctorate for his work on Mahler, an offshoot of his long collaboration with Deryck Cooke on the performing version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony. During this period he also worked at Aldeburgh with Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst. His music has been published principally by Faber Music since 1976.
In 1975 his orchestral Fourth Sonata (written 1974–75) won the Scottish National Orchestra's Ian Whyte Award. Subsequent orchestral works include the widely performed Night Music (1976), Sonata No. 5: Landscape (1977–81), and a First Cello Concerto, commissioned by the BBC for the 1984 Proms: these last two have been recorded by Unicorn-Kanchana. In 1989 Cortège was given its first performance by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under Bernard Haitink, and Quatrain by the London Symphony Orchestra and Michael Tilson Thomas. This was the first of a series of LSO commissions, followed by Machines and Dreams for their 1991 Childhood Festival, Memorial in 1993 with Mstislav Rostropovich as conductor, and a Second Cello Concerto for Rostropovich in 1996. Matthews was Associate Composer with the LSO from 1992 until 1999. The orchestral version of Hidden Variables was a joint commission for the LSO and the New World Symphony Orchestra, who gave the American première in Miami under Michael Tilson Thomas in 1992; in the same year the Cleveland Orchestra gave the American première of Machines and Dreams. Collins Classics released a CD of Matthews' LSO commissions in 1996 to celebrate his 50th birthday.
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Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud (French pronunciation: [daʁjys mijo]; 4 September 1892 – 22 June 1974) was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality. Darius Milhaud is to be counted among the modernist composers.
Born in Marseilles to a Jewish family from Aix-en-Provence, Milhaud studied in Paris at the Paris Conservatory where he met his fellow group members Arthur Honegger and Germaine Tailleferre. He studied composition under Charles Widor and harmony and counterpoint with André Gedalge. He also studied privately with Vincent d'Indy. As a young man he worked for a while in the diplomatic entourage of Paul Claudel, the eminent poet and dramatist, who was serving as French ambassador to Brazil.
On a trip to the United States in 1922, Darius Milhaud heard "authentic" jazz for the first time, on the streets of Harlem, which left a great impact on his musical outlook. The following year, he completed his composition "La création du monde" ("The Creation of the World"), using ideas and idioms from jazz, cast as a ballet in six continuous dance scenes.
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Dave Holland
Dave Holland (born October 1, 1946) is an English jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader who has been performing and recording for five decades. He has lived in the United States for 40 years.
His work ranges from pieces for solo performance to big band. Holland runs his own independent record label, Dare2, which he launched in 2005. He has explained his musical philosophy by quoting fellow jazz artist Sam Rivers. "Sam said, ‘Don’t leave anything out — play all of it,’ ”
Holland has played with some of the greatest names in jazz, and has participated in several classic recording sessions.
Born in Wolverhampton, England, Holland taught himself how to play stringed instruments, beginning at four on the ukulele, then graduating to guitar and later bass guitar. He quit school at the age of 15 to pursue his profession in a top 40 band, but soon gravitated to jazz. After seeing an issue of Down Beat where Ray Brown had won the critics' poll for best bass player, Holland went to a record store, and bought a couple of LPs featuring Brown backing pianist Oscar Peterson. He also bought two Leroy Vinnegar albums (Leroy Walks! and Leroy Walks Again) because the bassist was posed with his instrument on the cover. Within a week, Holland traded in his bass guitar for an acoustic bass and began practicing with the records. In addition to Brown and Vinnegar, Holland was drawn to the bassists Charles Mingus and Jimmy Garrison.
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Dizzy Gillespie
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (
/ɡɨˈlɛspi/; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer and, occasionally, singer.
Allmusic's Scott Yanow wrote, "Dizzy Gillespie's contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time (some would say the best), Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up copying Miles Davis and Fats Navarro instead, and it was not until Jon Faddis's emergence in the 1970s that Dizzy's style was successfully recreated . . . Arguably Gillespie is remembered, by both critics and fans alike, as one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time."
Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic complexity previously unknown in jazz. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks and his light-hearted personality were essential in popularizing bebop.
In the 1940s Gillespie, together with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz. He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Jon Faddis and Chuck Mangione.
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Domenico Dragonetti
Domenico Carlo Maria Dragonetti (April 7, 1763 – April 16, 1846) was an Italian double bass virtuoso and composer. He stayed for thirty years in his hometown of Venice, Italy and worked at the Opera Buffa, at the Chapel of San Marco and at the Grand Opera in Vicenza. By that time he had become notable throughout Europe and had turned down several opportunities, including offers from the Tsar of Russia. In 1794, he finally moved to London to play in the orchestra of the King's Theatre, and settled there for the remainder of his life. In fifty years, he became a prominent figure in the musical events of the English capital, performing at the concerts of the Philharmonic Society of London as well as in more private events, where he would meet the most influential persons in the country, like the Prince Consort and the Duke of Leinster. He was acquainted with composers Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven, whom he visited on several occasions in Vienna, and to whom he showed the possibilities of the double bass as a solo instrument. His ability on the instrument also demonstrated the relevance of writing scores for the double bass in the orchestra separate from that of the cello, which was the common rule at the time. He is also remembered today for the Dragonetti bow, which he evolved throughout his life.
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Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American composer, pianist, and big-band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions. In the opinion of Bob Blumenthal of The Boston Globe "In the century since his birth, there has been no greater composer, American or otherwise, than Edward Kennedy Ellington." A major figure in the history of jazz, Ellington's music stretched into various other genres, including blues, gospel, film scores, popular, and classical. His career spanned more than 50 years and included leading his orchestra, composing an inexhaustible songbook, scoring for movies, composing stage musicals, and world tours. Several of his instrumental works were adapted into songs that became standards. Due to his inventive use of the orchestra, or big band, and thanks to his eloquence and extraordinary charisma, he is generally considered to have elevated the perception of jazz to an art form on a par with other traditional genres of music. His reputation increased after his death and the Pulitzer Prize Board bestowed on him a special posthumous honor in 1999.
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Eddie Gomez
Edgar "Eddie" Gómez (born October 4, 1944) is a Puerto Rican jazz double bassist born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, perhaps most notable for his work done with the Bill Evans trio from 1966 to 1977.
Gómez emigrated with his family from Puerto Rico at a young age to New York, where he was raised. He started on double bass in the New York City school system at the age of eleven and at age thirteen went to the New York City High School of Music and Art. He played in the Newport Festival Youth Band (led by Marshall Brown) from 1959 to 1961, and graduated from Juilliard in 1963.
His résumé includes performances with jazz giants such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane, Benny Goodman, Buck Clayton, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Bruford, Scott LaFaro, Marian McPartland, Paul Bley, Bill Evans, Michael Brecker, Wayne Shorter, Steps Ahead, Steve Gadd, Ron Carter, Jeremy Steig, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Al Foster, Chick Corea, Eugenio Toussaint and Carli Muñoz. Time lauded: "Eddie Gómez has the world on his strings".[citation needed] He spent a total of eleven years with the Bill Evans Trio, which included performances throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, as well as dozens of recordings. Two of the Trio's recordings won Grammy awards. In addition, he was a member of the Manhattan Jazz Quintet.
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Edgar Meyer
Edgar Meyer (born November 24, 1960) is a prominent contemporary bassist and composer. His styles include classical, bluegrass, newgrass, and jazz. Meyer has worked as a session musician in Nashville, part of various chamber groups, a composer, and an arranger. His collaborators have spanned a wide range of musical styles and talents; among them are Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma, Jerry Douglas, Béla Fleck, Zakir Hussain, Sam Bush, James Taylor, Chris Thile, Mike Marshall, Mark O'Connor, Alison Krauss, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and the trio Nickel Creek.
Meyer grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He learned to play the double bass from his father, the late Edgar Meyer, Sr., who directed the string orchestra program for the local public school system. Meyer later went on to Indiana University to study with Stuart Sankey.
Meyer is noted for achieving virtuosity on an instrument of unusual technical difficulty. Following in the footsteps of other bass players like Gary Karr and Mark Bernat before him, he has tried a hand at performing music originally composed for other instruments, such as Bach's unaccompanied cello suites.
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Eduard Tubin
Eduard Tubin (June 18, 1905 – November 17, 1982) was an Estonian composer and conductor.
Tubin was born in Torila, Governorate of Livonia, Estonia. Both his parents were music lovers, and his father played trumpet and trombone in the village band. His first taste of music came at school where he learned flute and balalaika. Later, his father swapped a cow for a piano, and the young Eduard soon became known in the village for his playing. Tubin was also somewhat accomplished as a violinist, and wrote two concerti and numerous chamber works for the instrument.
Tubin entered the Tartu Teacher's College in the newly independent Estonia in 1920. It was here he began to take an interest in composition. He married a fellow student, Linda Pirn, in 1930 and their son Rein was born in 1932. He took up work conducting in the 'Vanemuine' theatre. During this time he conducted and made several trips abroad, on one occasion meeting Zoltán Kodály, who encouraged his interest in folk songs.
After the Soviet Union illegally annexed Estonia in 1944, Tubin fled to Stockholm, where he remained for the rest of his life, although he did return to Estonia on occasions. He was forced to take up whatever work came his way, although due to the large numbers of Estonian refugees in Sweden this often meant conducting choirs made up of Estonians. After a while Tubin moved to a suburb of Stockholm where he could devote himself entirely to composition. Here he wrote some of his greatest works, including much music for the choirs and symphonies 6-10. Towards the end of his life, Tubin slowly began to gain recognition, particularly after the conductor Neeme Järvi, also an Estonian, escaped to the USA in 1980. In the last year of his life his Tenth Symphony was performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra ([1]), and he received several awards from Swedish music organisations. He became ill in 1982 and remained in hospital until his death on November 17.
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Elliott Carter
Elliott Cook Carter Jr. (born December 11, 1908) is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer born and living in New York City. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s, and then returned to the United States. After a neoclassical phase, he went on to write atonal, rhythmically complex music. His compositions, which have been performed all over the world, include orchestral and chamber music as well as solo instrumental and vocal works.
He has been extremely productive in his later years, publishing more than 40 works between the ages of 90 and 100, and over 14 more since he turned 100 in 2008.
Carter's father, Elliott Carter Sr., was a businessman and his mother was the former Florence Chambers. The family was well-to-do. As a teenager, he developed an interest in music and was encouraged in this regard by the composer Charles Ives (who sold insurance to his family). In 1924, a galvanized 15-year-old Carter was in the audience when Pierre Monteux conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the New York première of The Rite of Spring, according to a 2008 report. Carter was again in attendance (see below) at Carnegie Hall, on the occasion of his 100th birthday in 2008, when the orchestra, now under the baton of James Levine, again performed the Stravinsky piece as part of its tribute to Carter. Although Carter majored in English at Harvard College, he also studied music there and at the nearby Longy School of Music. His professors included Walter Piston and Gustav Holst. He sang with the Harvard Glee Club. He did graduate work in music at Harvard, from which he received a Master's degree in music in 1932. He then went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger (as did many other American composers). Carter worked with Mlle Boulanger from 1932–35 and in 1935 he received a doctorate in music (D Mus) from the Ecole Normale in Paris. Later in 1935, he returned to the US where he wrote music for the Ballet Caravan.
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Erich Hartmann
Erich Alfred Hartmann (19 April 1922 – 20 September 1993), nicknamed "Bubi" (the hypocoristic form of "young boy") by his comrades and "The Black Devil" by his Soviet enemies, was a German World War II fighter pilot and is the highest-scoring fighter ace in the history of aerial warfare. He claimed 352 aerial victories (of which 345 were won against the Soviet Air Force, and 260 of which were fighters) in 1,404 combat missions. He engaged in aerial combat 825 times while serving with the Luftwaffe. During the course of his career, Hartmann was forced to crash-land his damaged fighter 14 times. This was due to damage received from parts of enemy aircraft he had just shot down or mechanical failure. Hartmann was never shot down or forced to land due to fire from enemy aircraft.
Hartmann, a pre-war glider pilot, joined the Luftwaffe in 1940 and completed his fighter pilot training in 1942. He was posted to Jagdgeschwader 52 (JG 52) on the Eastern front and was fortunate to be placed under the supervision of some of the Luftwaffe's most experienced fighter pilots. Under their guidance, Hartmann steadily developed his tactics, which earned him the coveted Ritterkreuz mit Eichenlaub, Schwertern und Brillanten (Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds) on 25 August 1944 for claiming 301 aerial victories.
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Erwin Schulhoff
Erwin Schulhoff (8 June 1894 – 18 August 1942) was a Czech composer and pianist.
Born in Prague of Jewish-German origin, Schulhoff was one of the brightest figures in a generation of European musicians whose successful careers were prematurely terminated by the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. Despite making important contributions to the development of European classical music during the early 20th century, their works have largely languished in obscurity, including Schulhoff's.
In his youth, Schulhoff studied composition and piano in Prague, Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne, where his teachers included Claude Debussy, Max Reger, Fritz Steinbach, and Willi Thern, among others. He was one of the first classical composers in Europe to find inspiration in the rhythms of jazz music.[citation needed] Schulhoff also embraced the avant-garde influence of Dadaism in his performance and writing after World War I.
Schulhoff occasionally performed as a pianist in the Osvobozené divadlo in Prague. He also toured Germany, France and England as a celebrated keyboard virtuoso.
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Esperanza Spalding
Esperanza Spalding (born October 18, 1984) is an American multi-instrumentalist best known as a jazz bassist and singer, who draws upon many genres in her own compositions. In 2011, she won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist at the 53rd Grammy Awards, making her the first jazz artist to win the award.
Spalding grew up in the King neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, a neighborhood she describes as "ghetto" and "pretty scary". Her mother raised her and her brother as a single parent. Spalding has a diverse ethnic background. Her father is African-American and her mother is of Welsh, Native American, and Hispanic descent. She also has an interest in the music of other cultures, including that of Brazil, commenting, "With Portuguese songs, the phrasing of the melody is intrinsically linked with the language, and it's beautiful."
Her mother shares Spalding's interest in music, having nearly become a touring singer herself. But while Spalding cites her mother as a powerful influence who encouraged her musical expansion, she attributes her inspiration for pursuing a life in music to watching classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma perform on an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood when she was four.
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Felix Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (German pronunciation: [ˈjaːkɔp ˈluːtvɪç ˈfeːlɪks ˈmɛndl̩szoːn baʁˈtɔldi]), born, and generally known in English-speaking countries, as Felix Mendelssohn (3 February 1809 – 4 November 1847) was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period.
The grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn was born into a prominent Jewish family, although initially he was raised without religion and was later baptised as a Lutheran Christian. Mendelssohn was recognised early as a musical prodigy, but his parents were cautious and did not seek to capitalise on his talent.
Early success in Germany, where he also revived interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, was followed by travel throughout Europe. Mendelssohn was particularly well received in Britain as a composer, conductor and soloist, and his ten visits there – during which many of his major works were premiered – form an important part of his adult career. His essentially conservative musical tastes, however, set him apart from many of his more adventurous musical contemporaries such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz. The Leipzig Conservatoire (now the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig), which he founded, became a bastion of this anti-radical outlook.
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Ferdinand Ries
Ferdinand Ries (b. Bonn, baptised 28 November 1784, d. Frankfurt am Main, 13 January 1838) was a German composer.
Born into a musical family of Bonn, Ries was a friend and pupil of Beethoven who published in 1838 a collection of reminiscences of his teacher, co-written with Franz Wegeler. He was also a composer who left eight symphonies, a violin concerto, eight piano concertos and numerous other works in many genres, including 26 string quartets. Of these, the symphonies, some chamber works—most of them with piano—and his piano concertos have been recorded, demonstrating a style which is not surprisingly somewhere between that of the Classic and early Romantic eras.
The French dissolved the Electoral court of Bonn and disbanded its orchestra, but in the early months of 1803 the penniless Ries managed to reach Vienna, with a letter of introduction to Beethoven, who had received some early instruction at Bonn from Ries's father, Franz Anton. Beethoven took great care of the young man, teaching him piano, sending him to Albrechtsberger for harmony and composition and securing for him positions as piano tutor in aristocratic households in Baden and Silesia. Ries made his public debut as a pianist in July 1804, playing Beethoven's C minor concerto, Op. 37, with his own cadenza, to glowing reviews.
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Ferdinand Troyer
Count Ferdinand Troyer (February 1, 1780 – July 23, 1851) was an Austrian noble, philanthropist, and amateur clarinettist.
Born in Brünn (Brno), Moravia, Troyer became the chief steward to Archduke Rudolf of Austria-Tuscany. It was noted that on 2 March 1817, Troyer played the obbligato to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Parto for the Vienna Philharmonic Society at the Large Ridotto Room. His sound was described as being "sensitive," with an "extremely tender handling" of the clarinet.
Because of the popularity of Ludwig van Beethoven's E-flat Septet, in early 1824, Troyer commissioned Franz Schubert to write a companion piece. Schubert accepted the commission but enriched the seven-part instrumentation of Beethoven's septet with an additional violin to create an octet. The octet was completed on 1 March 1824 and was first performed at Troyer's townhouse in Vienna where Troyer himself played the clarinet part. He died in Vienna.
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Franco Donatoni
Franco Donatoni (9 June 1927 – 17 August 2000) was an Italian composer.
Born in Verona, he started studying violin at the age of seven, and frequented the local Music Academy. Later he studied at the Milan Conservatory and Bologna Conservatory.
He taught composition at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Milan Conservatory, and several other Academies and summer courses such as Darmstädter Ferienkurse and Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena.[citation needed]
His compositions have been conducted by Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Salvatore Accardo, Alain Meunier, and many others.[citation needed]
At least three generations of composers studied with Donatoni. Among the Italian ones: Matteo D'Amico, Roberto Carnevale, Giulio Castagnoli, Ivan Fedele, Sandro Gorli, Luigi Manfrin, Giorgio Magnanensi, Luca Mosca, Riccardo Piacentini, Fausto Romitelli, Riccardo Nova, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Alessandro Solbiati, Piero Niro, Giovanni Verrando and among the foreigner ones: Gilles Bellemare, Pascal Dusapin, Javier Jacinto, Magnus Lindberg, Pierre Kolp, Javier Torres Maldonado, Katia Tiutiunnik, Juan Trigos.
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Frank Proto
Frank Proto American composer and bassist. Proto was born on July 18, 1941, Brooklyn, New York. Double Bass student of Fred Zimmermann and David Walter. Graduate of the Manhattan School of Music 1966 Master of Music. Self-taught composer. Proto has played and composed for a wide range of ensembles and soloists including Dave Brubeck, Eddie Daniels, Duke Ellington, Cleo Laine, Sherrill Milnes, Gerry Mulligan, Roberta Peters, Francois Rabbath, Ruggiero Ricci, Doc Severinsen and Richard Stoltzman.
Proto worked as a double bassist and composer-in-residence with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 1966 to 1997. The orchestra premiered over 25 new works including concertos and solo works for Violin, Cello, Double Bass, Clarinet, Trumpet, Tuba and Percussion. He also composed and arranged music for Young People's and Pops concerts including Casey at the Bat - an American Folk Tale for Narrator and Orchestra and A Carmen Fantasy for Trumpet and Orchestra.
Proto is among the most prolific composers of music for the double bass. His output includes 7 works with orchestra and over 30 solo and chamber music works. He has also composed extensively for the violin, viola and clarinet. His 2007 CD/DVD Bridges - Eddie Daniels plays the music of Frank Proto consisting of a series of works written for clarinet virtuoso Eddie Daniels was nominated for a Grammy Award.
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Franz Limmer
Franz Limmer (October 2, 1808 – January 19, 1857), was an Austrian composer, conductor and musical performer.
He was born in Matzleinsdorf, a suburb of Vienna, and died in Temeswar, the present-day Timişoara in the Banat district of Romania which was then part of Hungary, which in turn was a part of the Habsburg empire.
Franz Limmer was the only son of a businessman who owned a silk mill in Vienna. His father originally meant for him to take over the business, but as Franz was more interested in music than anything else, he was permitted to choose a musical career. From age 10 he studied the violin and guitar with a teacher named Klein, and when he left school he entered the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied the cello with Josef Hartinger (1811 – 1878) and the clarinet with Joseph Friedlowsky (ca. 1777 – 1859). On his graduation he received a silver honours medal with a portrait of Mozart, with his name and the date engraved on the back. This honour led to his immediate acceptance in the Viennese circle of performers. Encouraged by his success he took up the study of harmony, figured bass, composition and scoring with two teachers, Erasmus Kessler and Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried (1776–1841).
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Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁants ˈʃuːbɛɐ̯t]; 31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an Austrian composer.
Although he died at the age of 31, Schubert was a prolific composer, having written some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. Appreciation of Schubert's music during his lifetime was limited, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, among others, discovered and championed his works in the 19th century. Today, Schubert is seen as one of the leading exponents of the early Romantic era in music and he remains one of the most frequently performed composers.
Schubert was born in Himmelpfortgrund (now a part of Alsergrund), Vienna, on 31 January 1797. His father, Franz Theodor Schubert, the son of a Moravian peasant, was a parish schoolmaster; his mother, Elisabeth Vietz, was the daughter of a Silesian master locksmith, and had also been a housemaid for a Viennese family prior to her marriage. Of Franz Theodor's fourteen children (one illegitimate child was born in 1783), nine died in infancy; five survived. Their father was a well-known teacher, and his school in Lichtental, a part of Vienna's 9th district, was well attended. He was not a musician of fame or with formal training, but he taught his son some elements of music.
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Franz Simandl
Franz Simandl (August 1, 1840 - December 15, 1912) was a double-bassist and pedagogue most remembered for his book New Method for the Double Bass, known as the Simandl book, which is to this day used as a standard study of double bass technique and hand positions[citation needed].
His approach uses the first, second, and fourth fingers of the left hand (the third and fourth operating together as one digit) for stopping the strings in the lower register of the instrument and divides the fingerboard into various positions.
The second volume of the method looks at the use of thumb position using the thumb, first, second and third fingers, to play solo, high register work and again dividing the fingerboard up into a concept of positions. The second volume also delves extensively in to the playing of harmonics.
Simandl's "New Method" of playing, now over a century old, is still common among classical double bassists.[citation needed] Modern adaptations of, extensions to, and challenges to New Method doctrines are acknowledged.[citation needed]
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François Rabbath
François Rabbath (b. 1931 in Aleppo, Syria) is a contemporary French double-bass player, soloist, and composer.
He was born into a Syrian family of musicians but his only instruction came from a book written by a Parisian bassist Edouard Nanny. In 1955 he went to Paris, hoping to meet Nanny, who had died before he arrived, but he continued to study, and in 1964 recorded for the first time. Rabbath's playing has been well documented with CDs and DVDs.
Rabbath's major contribution to the field of bass pedagogy is represented in the three-volume Nouvelle technique de la contrebasse. The main differences in Rabbath's approach from that of the double bass method of Franz Simandl is Rabbath's use of the left hand and his detailed attention to the bow arm. In Simandl's system, first position (below thumb position) encompasses only a whole step. In Rabbath's method, the entire fingerboard is divided into only six positions, defined by the location of natural harmonics on the strings. Playing the bass with six positions is possible by using a technique called pivoting.
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Fred LaBour
Frederick LaBour (born June 3, 1948 Grand Rapids, Michigan), better known by his stage name Too Slim, is a Grammy award winning American musician, best known for his work with the Western swing musical and comedy group Riders in the Sky.
LaBour plays double bass and sings lead and background vocals. Prior to joining the Riders, he played with country singer Dickey Lee's band. With the Riders, he is billed as "a Righteous Tater" or "The Man of a Thousand Hats"). LaBour is the central core of the Rider's comedy, with bits that include impressions of Gabby Hayes, carrying on conversations with a cow's skull, rolling tumbleweeds across the stage, and peddling a necktie in the form of a cactus, that he calls a cac-tie. A long-standing gag in the Rider's concerts is LaBour mishearing a request to play the theme from the television program Bonanza on the bass, and instead playing it by slapping his face. LaBour's repertoire of character voices include the evil Swinburne Slocum; Side Meat, a feisty chuck wagon cook whose secret biscuit ingredient is cement; Freddy La, the Surfin' Cowboy; and an assortment of frontier salesmen hawking to the cattle trade.
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Fred Lerdahl
Alfred Whitford Lerdahl (Fred Lerdahl) (born March 10, 1943, in Madison, Wisconsin) is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, and a composer and music theorist best known for his work on pitch space and cognitive constraints on compositional systems or "musical grammar[s]." He has written many orchestral and chamber works, three of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Music: Time after Time in 2001, String Quartet No. 3 in 2010, and Arches in 2011.
Lerdahl's influences include Elliott Carter, late Sibelius, early Schoenberg, Bartok, and Stravinsky. Lerdahl has said he "always sought musical forms of [his] own invention," and to discover the correct form for the expression. His spiral form (implying both change and repetition), "in which a simple and stable musical idea is expanded on," has been described as a "recurrent motif of interweaving patterns."
Lerdahl studied with James Ming at Lawrence University, where he earned his BMus in 1965, and with Milton Babbitt, Edward Cone, Roger Sessions, and Earl Kim at Princeton University, where he earned his MFA in 1967. He then studied with Wolfgang Fortner at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg/Breisgau in 1968-69, on a Fulbright Scholarship. Lerdahl was awarded an honorary doctorate from Lawrence University in 1999, and previously taught at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Galina Ustvolskaya
Galina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya, also Ustwolskaja or Oustvolskaia (Russian: Гали́на Ива́новна Уство́льская, 17 June 1919, Petrograd – 22 December 2006 St Petersburg) was a Russian composer of classical music.
From 1937 to 1947 she studied at the college attached to the Leningrad Conservatory (later renamed the Rimsky Korsakov Conservatory). She subsequently became a postgraduate student and taught composition at the college. Her composition teacher Dmitri Shostakovich, said of her: I am convinced that the music of G. I. Ustvolskaya will achieve worldwide renown, to be valued by all who perceive truth in music to be of paramount importance.
On several occasions Shostakovich supported her in the Union of Soviet Composers against opposition from his colleagues. He sent some of his own as yet unfinished works to Ustvolskaya, attaching great value to her comments. Some of these pieces even contain quotations from his pupil’s compositions; for example, he employed the second theme of the Finale of her clarinet trio throughout the Fifth String Quartet and in the Michelangelo Suite (no. 9). The intimate spiritual and artistic relationship between the two composers has been compared to that of Schoenberg and Webern.
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Gary Karr
Gary Karr b. November 20, 1941 in Los Angeles, California, is an American classical double bass virtuoso and teacher.
Although he comes from seven generations of bassists, he was not encouraged by them to go into music. In an interview with ActiveBass magazine he said that he has no contact with the professional bassists in his family.
His major teachers include Herman Reinshagen and Stuart Sankey, with whom he studied at the Aspen Music Festival and the Juilliard School. Karr's breakthrough came in 1962, when he was featured as a soloist in a nationally televised New York Philharmonic Young People's Concert, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. On that famous telecast, Karr performed "The Swan" from Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns. Karr also recorded the piece with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. He has since appeared as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Simon Bolivar Orchestra, Jerusalem Symphony, Oslo Philharmonic, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, and with all the major orchestras of Australia. He has premiered new works written for him by Gunther Schuller (Concerto for Double Bass), Hans Werner Henze (Concerto for Double Bass), Vittorio Giannini (Psalm CXX), Alec Wilder (Sonata for Double Bass and Piano and Suite for Double Bass and Guitar), John Downey (Concerto for Double Bass), Ketil Hvoslef (Concerto for Double Bass), and Robert Xavier Rodriguez (Ursa, Four Seasons for Double Bass and Orchestra). Gary Karr is known as one of the best bassists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Gasparo da Salò
Gasparo da Salò (May 20, 1542, Salò - April 14, 1609) is the name given to Gasparo di Bertolotti, one of the earliest violin makers and expert double bass player of which many and very detailed historical records (about 100 documents and over 80 original instruments) exist.
He was born in Salò on Lake Garda, in a family with legal, artistic, musical and craft interests. His grandfather Santino, a land and flock owner, probably producer of musical gut strings, moved from Polpenazze to Salò, capital of the Riviera del Garda, to give more opportunities to the family. The art and music scene in Salò was very rich and vibrant. Gasparo is the son and grandson of two brothers musicians, players and composers of the highest professional level, Francesco and Agostino, specialized enough to be called in documents “the violì” or even in extended form, to avoid doubts, “ the violini”. [1]
Uncle Agostino in addition to being an expert in musical instruments [2], will become the first Kapellmeister of Salò and his son Bernardino, Gasparo's cousin, become a virtuoso musician (violinist and trombonist) working prior in Ferrara at the powerful Este music court, then in Mantua by Vincenzo Gonzaga I during Monteverdi presence, and then went to Rome as "Musician of His Holiness the Pope in the Castle of S.Angel. "
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Geoff Kresge
Geoff Kresge is a songwriter, guitarist, bassist, who played with AFI for most of their early career, from 1992 through 1997, and co-wrote the majority of their early material alongside frontman Davey Havok. During an AFI hiatus in 1993, he briefly moved to New York to join Blanks 77. He later went on to play with Canadian horror rock group The Forbidden Dimension and also a high-energy rock band, The Daggers, before subsequently joining Tiger Army. Though he played an electric bass in his previous bands, for Tiger Army he chose an upright bass.
Upon leaving Tiger Army in September 2004, Kresge formed the band Viva Hate with longtime friend Matt "Wedge" Wedgley (formerly of The Force). Before Viva Hate's permanent lineup had solidified, Kresge joined the HorrorPops on guitar, but continued writing songs with Wedge for Viva Hate. Ultimately Viva Hate began performing live whenever Kresge's schedule allowed for them to do so and subsequently the band completed a regional tour with one of Kresge's former bands, AFI.
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George Mraz
George Mraz (born Jiří Mráz on 9 September 1944 in Písek, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now Czech Republic) is a jazz bassist and alto saxophonist. He was a member of Oscar Peterson's group, and has worked with Stan Getz, Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Raney, Chet Baker and many other important jazz musicians. He also appears with Joe Lovano, Hank Jones, and Paul Motian on Lovano's records, I'm All for You and Joyous Encounter.
During the 1970s he was a member of the New York Jazz Quartet and in the 1980s a member of Quest.
With John Abercrombie
With Toshiko Akiyoshi
With Richard Beirach
With Art Farmer
With Stan Getz
With Dizzy Gillespie
With Urbie Green
With Andy LaVerne and Al Foster
With Elvin Jones
With Joe Lovano
With Charles Mingus
With Mike Nock
With Oscar Peterson
With Zoot Sims
With The Thad Jones / Mel Lewis Orchestra
With McCoy Tyner
With Mal Waldron
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Gerhard Stäbler
Gerhard Stäbler (born 1949 in Wilhelmsdorf, Baden-Württemberg) is a German contemporary composer.
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Giacinto Scelsi
Giacinto Scelsi (Italian pronunciation: [dʒaˈtʃinto ˈʃɛlsi]), Count of Ayala Valva (La Spezia, 8 January 1905 – Rome, 9 August 1988), was an Italian composer who also wrote surrealist poetry in French.
He is best known for writing music based around only one pitch, altered in all manners through microtonal oscillations, harmonic allusions, and changes in timbre and dynamics, as paradigmatically exemplified in his revolutionary Quattro Pezzi su una nota sola ["Four Pieces on a single note"] (1959). His musical output, which encompassed all Western classical genres except scenic music, remained largely undiscovered even within contemporary musical circles during most of his life. A series of concerts in the mid to late 1980s finally premièred many of his pieces to great acclaim, notably his orchestral masterpieces in October 1987 in Cologne, about a quarter of a century after those works had been composed and less than a year before the composer's death. Scelsi was able to attend the premières and personally supervised the rehearsals. The impact caused by the late discovery of Scelsi's works was described by Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich:
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Gian Carlo Menotti
Gian Carlo Menotti (pronounced [dʒan ˈkarlo meˈnɔtːi]) (July 7, 1911 – February 1, 2007) was an Italian-American composer and librettist. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship. He wrote the classic Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, among about two dozen other operas intended to appeal to popular taste. He won the Pulitzer Prize for two of them: The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1955). He founded the noted Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds) in 1958 and its American counterpart, Spoleto Festival USA, in 1977. In 1986 he commenced a Melbourne Spoleto Festival in Australia, but he withdrew after three years.
Born in Cadegliano-Viconago, Italy, near Lake Maggiore and the Swiss border, Menotti was the sixth of eight children of Alfonso and Ines Menotti, his father being a coffee merchant. Menotti began writing songs when he was seven years old, and at eleven wrote both the libretto and music for his first opera, The Death of Pierrot. He began his formal musical training at the Milan Conservatory in 1923.
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Gioachino Rossini
Gioachino Antonio Rossini (Italian pronunciation: [dʒoaˈkiːno anˈtɔːnjo rosˈsiːni] (Giovacchino Antonio Rossini in the baptismal certificate) (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, chamber music, songs, and some instrumental and piano pieces. His best-known operas include the Italian comedies Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) and La Cenerentola and the French-language epics Moïse et Pharaon and Guillaume Tell (William Tell). A tendency for inspired, song-like melodies is evident throughout his scores, which led to the nickname "The Italian Mozart". Until his retirement in 1829, Rossini had been the most popular opera composer in history.
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born into a family of musicians in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast of Italy which was then part of the Papal States. His father, Giuseppe, was a horn player and inspector of slaughterhouses. His mother, Anna, was a singer and a baker's daughter. Rossini's parents began his musical training early, and by the age of six he was playing the triangle in his father's musical group.
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Giovanni Bottesini
Giovanni Bottesini (22 December 1821 – 7 July 1889), was an Italian Romantic composer, conductor, and a double bass virtuoso.
Born in Crema, Lombardy, he was taught the rudiments of music by his father, an accomplished clarinetist and composer, at a young age and had played timpani in Crema with the Teatro Sociale before the age of eleven. He studied violin with Carlo Cogliati, and would have most likely continued on this instrument except for a unique turn of events. His father sought a place for him in the Milan Conservatory, but due to the Bottesini family's lack of money, Bottesini needed a scholarship. Only two positions were available: double bass and bassoon. He prepared a successful audition for the double bass scholarship in a matter of weeks. At the conservatory, he studied with Luigi Rossi, to whom he would later dedicate his Tre grandi duetti per contrabasso. Only four years later, a surprisingly short time by the standards of the day, he left with a prize of 300 francs for solo playing. This money financed the acquisition of an instrument of Carlo Antonio Testore, and a globe-trotting career as "the Paganini of the Double Bass" was launched.
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Gunther Schuller
Gunther Schuller (born November 22, 1925) is an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian, and jazz musician.
The son of a violinist with the New York Philharmonic, he studied at the Saint Thomas Choir School and became an accomplished horn player and flute player. At age 15 he played horn professionally with the American Ballet Theatre (1943) followed by an appointment as principal hornist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (1943–5), and then the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York, where he stayed until 1959. During his youth, he attended the Precollege Division at the Manhattan School of Music. He began his career in jazz by recording as a french horn player with Miles Davis (1949–50).
In 1955 Schuller and jazz pianist John Lewis founded the Modern Jazz Society, which gave its first concert in Town Hall, New York, that same year and later became known as the Jazz and Classical Music Society. While lecturing at Brandeis University in 1957 he coined the term "Third Stream" to describe music that combines classical and jazz techniques. He became an enthusiastic advocate of this style and wrote many works according to its principles, among them Transformation (1957, for jazz ensemble), Concertino (1959, for jazz quartet and orchestra; one of its movements, Progression in Tempo, has sometimes been performed separately), Abstraction (1959, for nine instruments), the opera The Visitation (1966), and Variants on a Theme of Thelonious Monk (1960, for 13 instruments), which was recorded by Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and Bill Evans. He also orchestrated Scott Joplin's only known surviving opera Treemonisha for the Houston Grand Opera's premier production of this work.
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Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler (German pronunciation: [ˈɡʊstaf ˈmaːlɐ]; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then the Austrian Empire, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic. Then his family moved to nearby Iglau (now Jihlava) where Mahler grew up.
As a composer, he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 the music was discovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.
Born in humble circumstances, Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner and Mozart. Late in his life he was briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
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Hank Williams III
Shelton Hank Williams, also known as Hank Williams III and Hank 3 (born December 12, 1972), is a singer, drummer, bassist, and guitarist. In addition to his honky tonk recordings, Williams' style alternates between country, punk and metal. He is the principal member of the punk metal band Assjack, the drummer for the Southern hardcore punk band Arson Anthem, and was the bassist for Pantera singer Phil Anselmo's band Superjoint Ritual. He has released seven studio albums, including five for Curb Records. Williams is the grandson of country music legend Hank Williams and the son of Hank Williams Jr.. Williams has dabbled in feature length films, most notably a small role in the famous Mark Wahlberg film "Shooter".
Hank spent much of his early career playing drums in punk rock bands during the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s. Williams signed a contract with Nashville, Tennessee, music industry giant Curb Records. Three Hanks: Men With Broken Hearts was issued shortly thereafter, which spliced together recordings to make it seem that three generations of Williams men were singing alongside one another. In the late 1980s, upon first meeting Hank Williams III, Minnie Pearl, a friend of the late Hank Williams Sr., reportedly said "Lord, honey, you're a ghost," as she was astonished by his striking resemblance to his grandfather.
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Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze (born 1 July 1926, Gütersloh, Westphalia) is a German composer of prodigious output best known for "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life". His music is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition.
Henze is also known for his political convictions. He left Germany for Italy in 1953 because of a perceived intolerance towards his leftist politics and homosexuality. He lives in the village of Marino in the central Italian region of Lazio, and still travels extensively, in particular to Britain and Germany, as part of his work. An avowed Marxist and member of the Communist Party of Italy, Henze has produced compositions honoring Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. The librettist of his requiem for Che Guevara, titled Das Floß der Medusa (The Raft of Medusa), was among several people arrested at the 1968 Hamburg premiere in the riot that followed the placing of a red flag on the stage. Henze spent a year teaching in Cuba, though he later became disillusioned with Castro.
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Harold Shapero
Harold Samuel Shapero (born 29 April 1920) is an American composer.
Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Shapero and his family later moved to nearby Newton. He learned to play the piano as a child, and for some years was a pianist in dance orchestras. With a friend, he founded the Hal Kenny Orchestra, a swing-era jazz band.
He was more interested in classical music, though. In his teens he studied with some famous teachers, including Nicolas Slonimsky (editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians) in 1936, and Ernst Krenek in 1937. At 18 he was ready to attend Harvard, where he studied composition with Walter Piston in 1938, and Paul Hindemith in 1940.
Tanglewood, a now cherished musical institution, was founded in the 1940s, and Shapero was one of its first students. When Igor Stravinsky was Norton Professor at Harvard in 1940, Shapero showed Stravinsky his Nine-Minute Overture.[citation needed] Shapero hoped to get the Overture played at Tanglewood in the summer of that year, but Hindemith ordered that no student compositions would be played that season. Fortunately, Aaron Copland hastily put together an Orchestra just to play student compositions deemed worthy, including Shapero's Overture.[citation needed] Shapero was awarded the Rome Prize in 1941 for his Nine-Minute Overture, but World War II prevented him from taking residency in Italy.
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Henry Brant
Henry Dreyfuss Brant (September 15, 1913 – April 26, 2008) was a Canadian-born American composer. An expert orchestrator with a flair for experimentation, many of Brant's works featured spatialization techniques.
Brant was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada of American parents in 1913, Henry Brant began composing at the age of eight, and studied first at the McGill Conservatorium (1926–29) and then in New York City (1929–34). The son of a professional violinist, Brant played violin, flute, tin whistle, piano, organ, and percussion at a professional level and was fluent with the playing techniques for all of the standard orchestral instruments. As a teenager, he was the youngest composer included in Henry Cowell's landmark book American Composers on American Music, demonstrating an early identification with the American experimental musical tradition. Brant was represented in Cowell's anthology by an essay on oblique harmony, an idea which presaged some techniques used in his mature spatial works. He composed, orchestrated, and conducted for radio, film, ballet, and jazz groups. The stylistic diversity of these professional experiences would also eventually contribute to stylistic polyphony of his mature works. Starting in the late 40s, he taught at Columbia University, the Juilliard School and, for 24 years, Bennington College. In the mid 1950’s Brant felt that “single-style music…could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities, and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit.” In pursuit of an optimal framework for the presentation of a music which embraced such a simultaneity of musical textures and styles, Brant made a series of experiments and compositions exploring the potential for the physical position of sounds in space to be used as an essential compositional element.
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Herbie Hancock
Herbert Jeffrey "Herbie" Hancock (born April 12, 1940) is an American pianist, keyboardist, bandleader and composer. As part of Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet, Hancock helped to redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section and was one of the primary architects of the "post-bop" sound. He was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace music synthesizers and funk music (characterized by syncopated drum beats). Hancock's music is often melodic and accessible; he has had many songs "cross over" and achieved success among pop audiences. His music embraces elements of funk and soul while adopting freer stylistic elements from jazz. In his jazz improvisation, he possesses a unique creative blend of jazz, blues, and modern classical music, with harmonic stylings much like the styles of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
Hancock's best-known solo works include "Cantaloupe Island", "Watermelon Man" (later performed by dozens of musicians, including bandleader Mongo Santamaría), "Maiden Voyage", "Chameleon", and the singles "I Thought It Was You" and "Rockit". His 2007 tribute album River: The Joni Letters won the 2008 Grammy Award for Album of the Year, only the second jazz album ever to win the award after Getz/Gilberto in 1965.
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Hermann Goetz
Hermann Gustav Goetz (December 7, 1840 – December 3, 1876) was a German composer.
Goetz was born in Königsberg, then in East Prussia. After studying in Berlin, he moved to Switzerland in 1863. After ten years spent as a critic, pianist and conductor as well, he spent the last three years of his life composing. The conductor Felix Weingartner found it "incomprehensible that his delightful opera comique, Der Widerspanstigen Zähmung, should have entirely disappeared from the repertoire."
Goetz, the son of a salesman, came into contact with music early in his life. However, he did not receive his first serious piano lesson until 1857 — although he already had begun to compose some years before. At the end of the 1850s, he began to study for a degree in mathematics, but broke this off after three terms to study at the Stern conservatory in Berlin, where he studied piano and composition with Hans von Bülow. In 1862 he successfully graduated from the conservatory.
In the following year, Goetz was appointed as city organist of Winterthur in Switzerland thanks to the assistance of Carl Reinecke, where he taught the piano and began to make his name as a composer. In 1868 he married, and two years later moved to the village of Hottingen, today a suburb of Zurich, but remained employed in Winterthur until 1872. Between 1870 and 1874, he wrote reviews for a music magazine.
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Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis (Greek pronunciation: [ˈʝanis kseˈnakis], Greek: Γιάννης Ξενάκης) (May 29, 1922 – February 4, 2001) was a Greek composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalized citizen of France. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances.
Among his most important works are Metastaseis (1953–4) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979); compositions that introduced spatialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis's UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes. Among the numerous theoretical writings he authored, the book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (1971) is regarded as one of his most important. As an architect, Xenakis is primarily known for his early work under Le Corbusier: the Sainte Marie de La Tourette, on which the two architects collaborated, and the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, which Xenakis designed alone.
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Jaco Pastorius
John Francis Anthony Pastorius III (December 1, 1951 – September 21, 1987), known as Jaco Pastorius, was an American jazz musician, composer, and electric bass player.
His playing style was noteworthy for containing intricate solos in the higher register and for the "singing" quality he achieved on the fretless bass. His innovations also included the use of harmonics. Pastorius suffered from mental illness including a substance-related disorder, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1982. He died in 1987 at age 35 following a violent altercation at a Fort Lauderdale bar.
Pastorius was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1988, one of only six bassists to be so honored (and the only electric bass guitarist). He is one of the most influential electric bass players of all time.
John Francis Pastorius III was born December 1, 1951 in Norristown, Pennsylvania to Jack Pastorius (big band singer and drummer) and Stephanie Katherine Haapala Pastorius, the first of their three children, Jaco Pastorius was of Finnish, German, Swedish and Irish ancestry.
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Jacob Druckman
Jacob Druckman (June 26, 1928 – May 24, 1996) was an American composer born in Philadelphia. A graduate of the Juilliard School, Druckman studied with Vincent Persichetti, Peter Mennin, and Bernard Wagenaar. In 1949 and 1950 he studied with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood and later continued his studies at the École Normale de Musique in Paris (1954–55). He worked extensively with electronic music, in addition to a number of works for orchestra or for small ensembles. In 1972 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his first large orchestral work Windows. He was composer-in-residence of the New York Philharmonic from 1982-1985. Druckman taught at Juilliard, The Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood, Brooklyn College, Bard College, and Yale University, among other appointments. He is Connecticut's state Composer laureate.
Druckman died of lung cancer at age 67. His music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. He is the father of percussionist Daniel Druckman.
Notable musicians who have recorded his works include David Zinman, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Zubin Mehta, Leonard Slatkin, Dawn Upshaw, Jan DeGaetani, and the American Brass Quintet.
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James Tenney
James Tenney (August 10, 1934 - August 24, 2006) was an American composer and influential music theorist.
Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College (B.A., 1958) and the University of Illinois (M.A., 1961). He studied piano with Eduard Steuermann and composition with Chou Wen-chung, Lionel Nowak, Paul Boepple, Henry Brant, Carl Ruggles, Kenneth Gaburo, Lejaren Hiller, John Cage, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varèse. He also studied information theory under Lejaren Hiller, and composed stochastic early computer music before turning almost completely to writing for instruments with the occasional tape delay, often using just intonation and alternative tunings. Tenney's notable students include John Luther Adams, John Bischoff, Peter Garland, Larry Polansky, Charlemagne Palestine, and Marc Sabat. He performed with John Cage, as well as with the ensembles of Harry Partch (in a production of Partch's The Bewitched in 1959), Steve Reich, and Philip Glass (the latter two in the late 1960s).
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Jan Ladislav Dussek
Jan Ladislav Dussek (baptized Václav Jan Dusík, his surname was written also Duschek or Düssek; February 12, 1760 in Čáslav – March 20, 1812 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye) was a Czech composer and pianist. He was an important representative of Czech music abroad in the second half of 18th century and the beginning of 19th century. In some of his piano writing, Dussek anticipated features of musical Romanticism.
Dussek was one of the first piano virtuosos to travel widely throughout Europe. He performed at courts and concert venues from London to Saint Petersburg and Milan, and was celebrated for his technical prowess. During a nearly ten-year stay in London, he was instrumental in extending the size of the pianoforte, and was the recipient of one of John Broadwood's first 6-foot (1.8-meter) pianos.
Neither his playing style nor his compositions, however, had any notable lasting impact. While it has been suggested that Franz Liszt was a successor to Dussek in the realm of piano virtuosity, much, if not all, of Liszt's performance and composition was done without any specific knowledge of Dussek. While his music continued to be somewhat popular in 19th-century Great Britain, it is now virtually unknown.
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Jean Françaix
Jean René Désiré Françaix (23 May 1912 in Le Mans – 25 September 1997 in Paris) was a French neoclassical composer, pianist, and orchestrator, known for his prolific output and vibrant style.
Françaix's natural gifts were encouraged from an early age by his family: his father, Director of the Conservatoire of Le Mans, was a musicologist, composer, and pianist, and his mother, a teacher of singing. He was only six when he took up composing, and his first publication, in 1922, caught the attention of a composer working for the publishing house who steered the gifted boy toward a gifted teacher, Nadia Boulanger. She encouraged Françaix's career, considering the young composer to be one of the best, if not the best, of her students. Noted pianist and pedagogue Isidor Philipp also taught him. Françaix himself often played his own works, to public acclaim; notably in the premier of his Concertino for Piano and Orchestra at the festival of Baden-Baden in 1932.
He was an accomplished pianist from an early age, earning a First Prize in Piano at the Paris Conservatory (his only formal musical qualification) and was sought after for accompanying as well as solo performances. He performed notably in a duo with the French cellist Maurice Gendron, and also performed the Poulenc Two Piano Concerto with Francis Poulenc for several engagements when Jacques Février was not available. His own Two Piano Concerto was written however for his daughters, both of whom were budding young pianists at the time of the composition.
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Jimmy Blanton
Jimmie Blanton (October 5, 1918 – July 30, 1942) was an influential American jazz double bassist. Blanton is credited with being the originator of more complex pizzicato and bowed bass solos in a jazz context than previous bassists.
Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Blanton originally learned to play the violin, but took up the bass while at Tennessee State University, performing with the Tennessee State Collegians from 1936 to 1937, and during the vacations with Fate Marable. After leaving university to play full time in St Louis with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra (with whom he made his first recordings), he joined Duke Ellington's band in 1939.
Though he stayed with Ellington for only two years, Blanton made an incalculable contribution in changing the way the double bass was used in jazz. Previously the double bass was rarely used to play anything but quarter notes in ensemble or solos but by soloing on the bass more in a 'horn like' fashion, Blanton began sliding into eighth- and sixteenth-note runs, introducing melodic and harmonic ideas that were totally new to jazz bass playing. His virtuosity put him in a different class from his predecessors, making him the first true master of the jazz bass and demonstrating the instrument's unsuspected potential as a solo instrument. Such was his importance to Ellington's band at the time, together with the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, that it became known as the Blanton–Webster band. Blanton also recorded a series of bass and piano duets with Ellington.
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Joe Buck
Joseph Francis "Joe" Buck (born April 25, 1969) is an American sportscaster and the son of legendary sportscaster Jack Buck. He has won numerous Sports Emmy Awards for his play-by-play work with Fox Sports.
Buck was born in St. Petersburg, Florida (where the St. Louis Cardinals, for whom his father broadcast, then conducted their spring training) and raised in St. Louis where he attended St. Louis Country Day School. Buck began his broadcasting career in 1989 while he was an undergraduate at Indiana University.
Buck called play-by-play for the then-Louisville Redbirds, a minor league affiliate of the Cardinals, and was a reporter for ESPN's coverage of the Triple-A All-Star Game. In 1991, Buck did reporting for St Louis' CBS affiliate KMOV. Also, in 1991 Joe followed in his father's footsteps by broadcasting for the Cardinals on local television and KMOX Radio, filling in while his father was working on CBS telecasts. In the 1992–95 season he was the color commentator for University of Missouri basketball broadcasts.
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Joel Quarrington
Joel Quarrington (born January 15, 1955), is a Canadian double bass player, soloist and teacher.
He was born in Toronto, and began playing the double bass at the age of eleven in order to complete a bluegrass trio with his brothers, Paul Quarrington and Tony Quarrington. At the age of thirteen, he began to study with Thomas Monohan, who was at the time the principal bassist of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He also studied under Peter Madgett, who is still a member of the TSO. After he received a degree in music from the University of Toronto, he went on to Austria and Italy to study under two renowned double bass pedagogues, respectively Ludwig Streicher and Franco Petracchi.
Quarrington has won numerous music competitions, including first prize in the CBC talent festival in 1976, and second prize in the Geneva International Competition in 1978 (first prize was not awarded that year). He played as principal bass with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra between 1979 and 1988, and the Canadian Opera Company between 1989 and 1991, and then proceeded to become principal bass of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Since September 2006, he has been the Principal Bass of the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Quarrington has played concerti with many North American orchestras, including the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the TSO and the NACO with Pinchas Zukerman. In April 2006, he played the world premiere of John Harbison's double bass concerto, which was commissioned by the International Society of Bassists.
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Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms (pronounced [joːˈhanəs ˈbʁaːms]; 7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene. In his lifetime, Brahms's popularity and influence were considerable; following a comment by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow, he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the Three Bs.
Brahms composed for piano, chamber ensembles, symphony orchestra, and for voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works; he also worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim. Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed many of his works and left some of them unpublished.
Brahms is often considered both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Baroque and Classical masters. He was a master of counterpoint, the complex and highly disciplined art for which Johann Sebastian Bach is famous, and also of development, a compositional ethos pioneered by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Brahms aimed to honour the "purity" of these venerable "German" structures and advance them into a Romantic idiom, in the process creating bold new approaches to harmony and melody. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers.
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John Harbison
John Harris Harbison (born December 20, 1938 in Orange, New Jersey) is an American composer, best known for his operas and large choral works.
John Harris Harbison was born to the historian Elmore Harris Harbison and Janet German Harbison. The Harbisons were a musical family; Elmore had studied composition in his youth and Janet wrote songs. Harbison's sisters Helen and Margaret were musicians as well. He won the prestigious BMI Foundation's Student Composer Awards for composition at the age of sixteen in 1954. He studied music at Harvard University (BA 1960), where he sang with the Harvard Glee Club, and later at the Berlin Musikhochschule and at Princeton (MFA 1963). He is an Institute Professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a former student of Walter Piston and Roger Sessions. His works include several symphonies, string quartets, and concerti for violin, viola, and bass viol (double bass).
He won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1987 for The Flight into Egypt, and in 1989 he received a $305,000 MacArthur Fellowship. In 1998 he was awarded the 4th Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities. In 2006 he was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance for his Mottetti di Montale.
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John Woolrich
John Woolrich (born Cirencester, UK, 1954) is a British composer. He was BBC Radio 3 'Composer of the Week' in March 2008, involving the broadcast of over 4 hours of his music in one week. He has been the Artistic Director of Dartington International Summer School since 2011.
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Jon Deak
Jon Deak (born April 27, 1943) is an American double bassist and composer. He is former associate principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic, a position he held from 1973-2009 after joining the Philharmonic in 1969 under Pierre Boulez, and a prominent contemporary composer of orchestral and chamber works. In addition to playing double bass he also serves as the Creative Education Associate of the New York Philharmonic, where he founded the Very Young Composers Program 13 years ago. He went to North Korea with the Philharmonic to play a concert after going on tour in Shanghai, China for several weeks in February, 2008.
Jon Deak was born in Hammond, Indiana and grew up in an artistic environment. His father and mother were sculptors and painters from Eastern Europe; he himself has worked in sculpture and was active in the "performance art" movement in New York's Soho district. He attended Oberlin College, The Juilliard School, the University of Illinois, and the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome as a fullbright scholar.
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Joseph Haydn
Franz Joseph Haydn (
/ˈdʒoʊzəf ˈhaɪdən/; German pronunciation: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈhaɪdən] ( listen); 31 March 1732 – 31 May 1809), known as Joseph Haydn, was an Austrian composer, one of the most prolific and prominent composers of the Classical period. He is often called the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet" because of his important contributions to these forms. He was also instrumental in the development of the piano trio and in the evolution of sonata form.
A lifelong resident of Austria, Haydn spent much of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Esterházy family on their remote estate. Isolated from other composers and trends in music until the later part of his long life, he was, as he put it, "forced to become original". At the time of his death, he was one of the most celebrated composers in Europe.
Joseph Haydn was the brother of Michael Haydn, himself a highly regarded composer, and Johann Evangelist Haydn, a tenor. He was also a close friend of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a teacher of Ludwig van Beethoven.
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Kaizers Orchestra
Kaizers Orchestra is a Norwegian alternative rock group formed on January 1, 2000. The two leading members, vocalist Janove Ottesen and guitarist Geir Zahl, had known each other for years, and first played together in a band called Blod, Snått & Juling (Blood, Snot & Beating) in 1989.
Kaizers Orchestra are notable for being among the first non-black metal Norwegian bands or artists singing in their native language to become popular beyond Scandinavia[citation needed]. To other Norwegians, the band is instantly recognizable both because of their unique, unpredictable style, and because of vocalist Ottesen's marked Jæren dialect, shared by four of the other band members.
In 1995, childhood friends Janove Ottesen and Geir Zahl released their only album by their band gnom called Mys. Of its 1000 copies, only 500 or so were sold the first year, and they were pretty much ignored. However, they were known well in the area around Stavanger in Norway, having played as the local band Blod, snått & juling, and one of the songs they wrote after Mys called "Bastard" got good crowd response. A line from "Bastard" ("A certain Mr. Kaizer took me in/He is the proud owner of the world's heaviest siamese cat") and the song's overall crowd response became a source of inspiration for Ottesen, and after gnom dissolved after disappointing record sales, he formed Kaizers Orchestra.
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Kalevi Aho
Kalevi Aho (born 9 March 1949 in Forssa, Finland) is a Finnish composer.
Born in Forssa, he studied composition at the Sibelius Academy under Einojuhani Rautavaara, receiving a diploma in 1971. He continued his studies for a year in Berlin with Boris Blacher. His teaching positions include music theory at the University of Helsinki from 1974 to 1988, and a professorship at the Sibelius Academy from 1988 to 1993. He became composer-in-residence for the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in 1992, and conductor Osmo Vänskä has recorded many of his recent large-scale works with the orchestra. Aho has worked as a freelance composer, with a state scholarship, since 1993. He lives in Helsinki.
Known principally as a composer of large-scale works, to date Aho has composed fifteen symphonies, eighteen concertos, four operas and several vocal works. His chamber music includes several quintets, quartets, sonatas and solo works. He first came to fame with his first symphony (1969) and second string quartet (1970). His works of this time showed such neo-classical traits as a preoccupation with counterpoint (particularly fugues), and stylized renderings of older forms, such as the waltz. In the following decade he wrote in modernist and post-modernist styles. His use of irony and juxtaposition of contrasting moods and musical styles and genres has been compared to Gustav Mahler and Alfred Schnittke. His work also shows the influence of Einojuhani Rautavaara (especially when evoking mysterious textures) and Dmitri Shostakovich. His music has been extensively recorded by BIS records and is published by Fennica Gehrman.
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Karim Haddad
Karim Haddad (Arabic: كريم حداد) Composer of contemporary music
Born on January 22, 1962 in Dar-el Mraisseh, Beirut, Lebanon.
He achieved his first musical studies at the National Conservatory of Beirut. He received B.A. of Philosophy and literature at the American University of Beirut. He left his war torn country in 1982 to settle in Paris (France).
In 1985 he received B.A. degree in musicology at the Sorbonne University. He then joined the Conservatoire de Paris. He mastered the essentials: Harmony, counterpoint, fugue, orchestration, analysis and composition with Edith Lejet (Harmony, Fugue), Bernard de Crepy (Counterpoint), Paul Mefano (Orchestration), Jacques Casterede and Alain Louvier (Analysis), and Alain Bancquart (Composition) where he obtained Six awards and the "Diplome Superieur" in Composition.
Between 1992 and 1994 he participates in the Ferienkurse fur Musik of Darmstadt where he worked with Brian Ferneyhough, and obtained the Stipendien Prize 94 in composition.
In 1995, he followed the computer music courses at the IRCAM and became a member of the IRCAM Forum where he contributed in 1999, by writing the Om2Csound library for controlling synthesis through OpenMusic environment. He then wrote OpenMusic's reference and tutorial.
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Kim Nekroman
Kim Nekroman is the bassist and lead singer for the psychobilly band Nekromantix and the lead guitarist of HorrorPops. He is married to Patricia Day, lead singer and bassist for HorrorPops.
He plays the upright bass (coffinbass) that he custom made from an actual childs-size coffin.
He is also the lead guitarist and performs backing vocals for the psychobilly group, the HorrorPops.
In 1991 the band toured extensively in Europe, releasing Curse of the Coffin, their second full-length album that same year. The Brought Back to Life LP appeared in 1992, and 4 years later Nekromantix offered their fourth disc, Demons Are a Girl's Best Friend. A tour in Japan followed, as well as a 1999 live set for Kick Music. Nekromantix signed with Epitaph for 2002's Return of the Loving Dead, and are still with the label through Dead Girls Don't Cry and 2005's Brought Back to Life Again, the latter of which was actually reissue of an out print 1992 release. Latest release on Hellcat is "Life is a Grave & I Dig it!".
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Lee Rocker
Lee Rocker (born Leon Drucker, August 3, 1961, Massapequa, New York) is an American rockabilly double bass player. He is the son of the classical clarinetists Stanley Drucker (the retired principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra) and Naomi Drucker. His sister Roseanne is a country music singer-songwriter. As a child, he played the cello, and later learned to play the electric bass.
Drucker's school friends included James McDonnell and Brian Setzer. The three of them played together regularly and widened their musical interests to include the blues and rockabilly. Drucker also learned to play the double bass to incorporate the sounds of blues and rockabilly on the acoustic instrument. The three of them formed the group The Stray Cats in 1979. McDonnell took on the stage name of "Slim Jim Phantom", and Drucker devised his own stage name of "Lee Rocker". Rocker evolved his own style of slap-bass playing with the group. Rocker and the Stray Cats sold nearly 10 million albums and garnered twenty three gold and platinum certified records worldwide, and made them a mainstay on MTV.[citation needed] In addition to Stray Cats, Lee Rocker and Phantom Rocker and Slick albums, Rocker has recorded or performed with Carl Perkins, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Willie Nelson, Leon Russell, Keith Richards, John Fogerty, and Scotty Moore. Rocker was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1982, as was his father, they are the second father-son duo to be nominated for a Grammy in the same year. He considered by many to be the greatest upright Bassist in Rock n' Roll
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Leo Fender
Clarence Leonidas "Leo" Fender (August 10, 1909 – March 21, 1991) was an American inventor who founded Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company, or "Fender" for short. He left the company in the late 1960s, and later founded two other musical instrument companies, MusicMan and G&L Musical Instruments.
The guitars, bass guitars, and amplifiers he designed from the 1940s on are still relevant: the Fender Telecaster (1950) was the first mass-produced electric guitar; the Fender Stratocaster (1954) is among the world's most iconic electric guitars; the Fender Precision Bass (1951) set the standard for electric bass guitars; and the Fender Bassman amplifier, popular enough in its own right, became the basis for later amplifiers (notably by Marshall and Mesa Boogie) that dominated rock and roll music.
Clarence Leonidas Fender ("Leo") was born on August 10, 1909, to Clarence Monte Fender and Harriet Elvira Wood, owners of a successful orange grove located between Anaheim and Fullerton, California.
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Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein ( /ˈbɜrnstaɪn/ US dict: bûrn′·stīn; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim. According to The New York Times, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."
His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, as well as Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town and his own Mass.
Bernstein was also the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. In addition, he was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.
As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and commercial success of West Side Story.
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Leopold Kozeluch
Leopold Kozeluch (Czech pronunciation: [ˈlɛopolt ˈkoʒɛlux], born Jan Antonín Koželuh, alternatively also Leopold Koželuh, Leopold Kotzeluch) (26 June 1747 – 7 May 1818) was a Czech composer and teacher of classical music. He was born in the town of Velvary, in Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic).
Kozeluch was the son of the shoemaker Antonín Bartholomäus Koželuh. The composer Jan Antonín Koželuh was his cousin and for a while his teacher. Later, the pianist Katharina Kozeluch was his daughter. To avoid confusion with his cousin, he changed his name in 1774. His teachers in the 1770s also included František Xaver Dušek.
In 1771 he contributed his first work, a ballet, to the National Theater in Prague, and in the coming seasons wrote 25 works for them. In 1778 he went to Vienna, and was likely for a short while a student of Johann Georg Albrechtsberger.
Already after this short while, Kozeluch had also entered the ranks of acclaimed pianists. The imperial court gave him the position that had belonged to Georg Christoph Wagenseil as teacher to the Archduchess Elisabeth, the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria. He was offered Wolfgang Mozart's position in Salzburg when Mozart left that office in 1781, but refused. He did however accept the position of court composer in Prague that Mozart's death left open in 1792.
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Leopold Mozart
Johann Georg Leopold Mozart (November 14, 1719 – May 28, 1787) was a German composer, conductor, teacher, and violinist. Mozart is best known today as the father and teacher of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and for his violin textbook Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule.
He was born in Augsburg, son of Johann Georg Mozart (1679–1736), a bookbinder, and his second wife Anna Maria Sulzer (1696–1766). From an early age he sang as a choirboy. He attended a local Jesuit school, the St. Salvator Gymnasium, where he studied logic, science, theology, graduating magna cum laude in 1735. He then moved on to a more advanced school, the St. Salvator Lyceum.
While a student in Augsburg, he appeared in student theatrical productions as an actor and singer, and became a skilled violinist and organist. He also developed an interest, which he retained, in microscopes and telescopes. Although his parents had planned a career for Leopold as a Catholic priest, this apparently was not Leopold's own wish. An old school friend told Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1777, "Ah he [Leopold] was a great fellow. My father thought the world of him. And how he hoodwinked the clerics about becoming a priest!"
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Les Claypool
Leslie Edward "Les" Claypool (born September 29, 1963) is an American musician and writer, best known as the lead vocalist and bassist in the band Primus. Claypool's playing style on the electric bass mixes tapping, flamenco-like strumming, whammy bar bends and slapping.
Claypool has also self produced and engineered his solo releases from his own studio "Rancho Relaxo". 2006 saw the release of a full-length feature film Electric Apricot written and directed by Claypool as well as a debut novel South of the Pumphouse.
Claypool was born September 29, 1963 in Richmond, California, but was raised in El Sobrante, California in a working class family with a history of working as auto mechanics. A close family friend, Rhys Hickman, taught him the basics of the slap bass technique, which he mastered throughout his educational period. His early education included Collins Elementary School and De Anza High School, where he was a personal friend of Kirk Hammett.
In 1986, after the death of Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, school friend Kirk Hammett encouraged Claypool to audition for Metallica as Burton's successor. In Metallica's Behind the Music, Claypool said that he jokingly asked the others if they wanted to "jam on some Isley Brothers tunes" during the audition, a reference to his little experience of the thrash metal scene. James Hetfield remarked that Claypool was not awarded the job because "he was too good" and "should do his own thing." Claypool would later admit that he wouldn't have fit in with the band and "would've looked like a freak". The bass slot was instead given to Jason Newsted, who played with Metallica until his departure in 2001. For several years before forming Primus, Claypool worked as a carpenter in El Sobrante. Claypool has cited Larry Graham, Chris Squire, Tony Levin, Geddy Lee, Paul McCartney, Geezer Butler, Bootsy Collins, Stanley Clarke, John Paul Jones, and Sting as his musical influences.
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Louis Jordan
Louis Thomas Jordan (July 8, 1908 – February 4, 1975) was a pioneering American jazz, blues and rhythm & blues musician, songwriter and bandleader who enjoyed his greatest popularity from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as "The King of the Jukebox", Jordan was highly popular with both black and white audiences in the later years of the swing era. In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked him #59 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
Jordan was one of the most successful African-American musicians of the 20th century, ranking fifth in the list of the all-time most successful black recording artists according to Billboard magazine's chart methodology. Though comprehensive sales figures are not available, he scored at least four million-selling hits during his career. Jordan regularly topped the R&B "race" charts, and was one of the first black recording artists to achieve a significant "crossover" in popularity into the mainstream (predominantly white) American audience, scoring simultaneous Top Ten hits on the white pop charts on several occasions. After Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Louis Jordan was probably the most popular and successful African-American bandleader of his day.
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Louise Farrenc
Louise Farrenc (31 May 1804 – 15 September 1875) was a French composer, virtuosa pianist and teacher. Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont in Paris, she was the daughter of Jacques-Edme Dumont, a successful sculptor, and sister to Auguste Dumont.
Louise Farrenc enjoyed a considerable reputation during her own lifetime, as a composer, a performer and a teacher. She began piano studies at an early age with a Senora Soria, a former student of Muzio Clementi, but when it became clear she had the talent of a professional pianist, she was also given lessons by such masters as Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Because she also showed great promise as a composer, her parents decided to let her study composition with Anton Reicha, at the time composition teacher at the Conservatoire. it is not yet clear if Louise Farrenc followed his classes there, as the composition class was at the time one of the classes opened only to men. She met Aristide Farrenc, a flute student ten years her senior, who performed at some of the concerts regularly given at the artists' colony of the Sorbonne, where Louise's family lived. She married him in 1821. She then interrupted her studies to concertize throughout France with her husband. He soon grew tired of the concert life and decided to open a publishing house in Paris, which as Éditions Farrenc, was one of France’s leading music publishers for nearly 40 years.
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Lowell Liebermann
Lowell Liebermann (born February 22, 1961 in New York City) is an American composer, pianist and conductor.
At the age of sixteen, Liebermann performed at Carnegie Hall, playing his Piano Sonata, op. 1. He studied at the Juilliard School of Music with David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti, gaining bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees.
His most recorded works are the Sonata for Flute and Piano (1987), the Gargoyles for piano (1989) and the Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1992). Other notable works include a sonata for flute and guitar (1988), four cello sonatas (most recently 2008) the second piano concerto (1992), the opera The Picture of Dorian Gray (1996), a second symphony (2000), a trumpet concerto (2000), a violin concerto (2001), Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for piano and orchestra (2001), and the opera Miss Lonelyhearts (2006) which was commissioned as part of the festivities surrounding the centennial of the Juilliard School. He was also commissioned by the Dranoff International Two Piano Foundation to compose "Three Lullabies" for two pianos.
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Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work (in particular his 1968 composition Sinfonia for voices and orchestra and his series of numbered solo pieces titled Sequenza) and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.
Berio was born at Oneglia (now part of Imperia). He was taught the piano by his father and grandfather who were both organists. During World War II he was conscripted into the army, but on his first day he injured his hand while learning how a gun worked, and spent time in a military hospital. Following the war, Berio studied at the Milan Conservatory under Giulio Cesare Paribeni and Giorgio Federico Ghedini. He was unable to continue studying the piano because of his injured hand, so instead concentrated on composition. In 1947 came the first public performance of one of his works, a suite for piano. Berio made a living at this time accompanying singing classes, and it was in doing this that he met American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, whom he married shortly after graduating (they divorced in 1964). Berio would write many pieces aimed at exploiting her very distinctive voice.
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Ludwig Manoly
Ludwig Manoly (1855–1932) was a Hungarian-born double bassist who studied in Vienna and upon completing his studies, spent his life in the United States. He was principal bass of the New York Philharmonic from 1892, after performing with the orchestra since 1880, and faculty at the National Coservatory, under the direction of Antonin Dvořák, and the Institute of Musical Art, which later became the Juilliard School.
Manoly originally came to Vienna as a boy soprano, who had an exceptional voice in choral music. Upon arriving in Vienna at the age of fifteen, he found his voice changing and unable to audition at the Conservatory. However, there was a scholarship to study the double bass which he took up. At the Vienna Conservatory, he studied double bass with Franz Simandl; harmony, counterpoint, and composition with Anton Bruckner; and conducting with Joseph Hellmesberger. Graduating in 1876, he moved to the United States where he performed with the Theodore Thomas Orchestra, the Mendelssohn Quintette Club of Boston, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He joined the Philharmonic Society of New York and the Philharmonic Club, which later turned into the New York Philharmonic in 1880, eventually becoming principal bass of the ensemble in 1892, and later performed with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Through his life, he came in contact with such individuals as Brahms, Liszt, Wagner, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Anton Rubinstein, Bruckner, Richard Strauss, Mahler, Max Bruch, Carl Goldmark, Verdi, Jacques Offenbach, Johann Strauss, and Eduard Strauss.
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Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (i/ˈlʊdvɪɡ væn ˈbeɪt.hoʊvən/; German pronunciation: [ˈluːtvɪç fan ˈbeːt.hoːfən] ( listen); baptized 17 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers.
Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of the Holy Roman Empire, Beethoven moved to Vienna in his early 20s, studying with Joseph Haydn and quickly gaining a reputation as a virtuoso pianist. His hearing began to deteriorate in his late twenties, yet he continued to compose, conduct, and perform, even after becoming completely deaf.
Beethoven was the grandson of a musician of Flemish origin named Lodewijk van Beethoven (1712–73) who moved at the age of twenty to Bonn. Lodewijk (Ludwig is the German cognate of Dutch Lodewijk) was employed as a bass singer at the court of the Elector of Cologne, eventually rising to become Kapellmeister (music director). Lodewijk had one son, Johann (1740–1792), who worked as a tenor in the same musical establishment, and gave lessons on piano and violin to supplement his income. Johann married Maria Magdalena Keverich in 1767; she was the daughter of Johann Heinrich Keverich, who had been the head chef at the court of the Archbishopric of Trier.
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Luigi Boccherini
Luigi Rodolfo Boccherini (Lucca, Italy, February 19, 1743 – Madrid, Spain, May 28, 1805) was an Italian classical era composer and cellist whose music retained a courtly and galante style while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. Boccherini is most widely known for one particular minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No. 5 (G 275), and the Cello Concerto in B flat major (G 482). The latter work was long known in the heavily altered version by German cellist and prolific arranger Friedrich Grützmacher, but has recently been restored to its original version. Boccherini composed several guitar quintets including the "Fandango" which was influenced by Spanish music.
Boccherini was born in Lucca, Italy, into a musical family. At a young age he was sent by his father, a cellist and double bass player, to study in Rome. In 1757 they both went to Vienna where they were employed by the court as musicians in the Burgtheater. In 1761 Boccherini went to Madrid, where he was employed by Infante Luis Antonio of Spain, younger brother of King Charles III. There he flourished under royal patronage, until one day when the King expressed his disapproval at a passage in a new trio, and ordered Boccherini to change it. The composer, no doubt irritated with this intrusion into his art, doubled the passage instead, leading to his immediate dismissal. Then he accompanied Don Luis to Arenas de San Pedro, a little town at the Gredos mountains; there and in the closest town of Candeleda, Boccherini wrote many of his most brilliant works.
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Mario Davidovsky
Mario Davidovsky (born March 4, 1934) is an Argentine-American composer. Born in Argentina, he emigrated in 1960 to the US, where he lives today. He is best known for his series of compositions called Synchronisms, which in live performance incorporate both acoustic instruments and electroacoustic sounds played from a tape.
Davidovsky was born in Médanos, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, a town nearly 600 km southwest of the city of Buenos Aires and close to the seaport of Bahía Blanca. He is a first-generation Argentinian, his family having emigrated there from Lithuania.[citation needed] Along with the surrounding South American culture, including a strong agrarian economy and Catholic faith, his family's European values and Jewish history shaped his growth and education.[citation needed] At seven he began his musical studies on the violin. At thirteen he began composing. He studied composition and theory under Guillermo Graetzer at the University of Buenos Aires, from which he eventually graduated.
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Marshall Lytle
Marshall Lytle (b. September 1, 1933, Old Fort, North Carolina), who also goes by the name Tommy Page, is an American rock and roll musician, best known for his work with the groups Bill Haley & His Comets and The Jodimars in the 1950s.
Lytle was a guitar player before joining Bill Haley's country music group, The Saddlemen, in 1951. But Lytle was hired to play double bass for the group, replacing departing musician Al Rex, so Haley taught Lytle the basics of slap bass playing. Lytle, who was only a teenager at the time, grew a moustache in order to look a little older, and became a full-time member of The Saddlemen and, in September 1952, he was with the group when they changed their name to Bill Haley & His Comets. Soon after, Lytle co-wrote with Haley the band's first national hit, "Crazy Man, Crazy" although he did not receive co-authorship credit for it (until 2002).
Lytle played on all of Haley's recordings between mid-1951 and the summer of 1955, including the epochal "Rock Around the Clock" in 1954 ( Marshall and Ambrose are the last living members to play on the 1954 Rock Around The Clock masterpiece). He played a late 1940s model Epiphone B5 upright double bass, purchased in October, 1951, for about $275. He used gut strings for the G and D strings while the A and E strings were wound. Lytle's style of playing, which involved slapping the strings to make a percussive sound, is considered one of the signature sounds of early rock and roll and rockabilly. The athletic Lytle also developed a stage routine, along with saxophone player Joey Ambrose, that involved doing acrobatic stunts with the bass fiddle, including throwing it in the air and riding it like a horse.[1] This became a signature performance for The Comets that later musicians working for Haley were instructed to emulate.
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McCoy Tyner
McCoy Tyner (born December 11, 1938) is a jazz pianist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, known for his work with the John Coltrane Quartet and a long solo career.
Tyner was born Alfred McCoy Tyner in Philadelphia as the oldest of three children. He was encouraged to study piano by his mother. He began studying the piano at age 13 and within two years music had become the focal point in his life. His early influences included Bud Powell, a Philadelphia neighbor. When he was 17, he converted to Islam through the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and changed his name to Sulieman Saud.
Tyner's first main exposure came with Benny Golson, being the first pianist in Golson's and Art Farmer's legendary Jazztet (1960). After departing the Jazztet, Tyner joined Coltrane's group in 1960 during its extended run at the Jazz Gallery replacing Steve Kuhn. (Coltrane had known Tyner for a while in Philadelphia, and featured one of the pianist's compositions, "The Believer", as early as 1958.) He appeared on the saxophonist's popular recording of "My Favorite Things" for Atlantic Records. The Coltrane Quartet, which consisted of Coltrane on tenor sax, Tyner, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, toured almost non-stop between 1961 and 1965 and recorded a number of classic albums, including Live at the Village Vanguard, Ballads, Live at Birdland, Crescent, A Love Supreme, and The John Coltrane Quartet Plays ..., on the Impulse! label.
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Mieczysław Weinberg
Mieczysław Weinberg (also Moisey or Moishe Vainberg, Moisey Samuilovich Vaynberg; Russian: Моисей Самуилович Вайнберг; Polish: Mieczysław Wajnberg; December 8, 1919 – February 26, 1996) was a Soviet composer of Polish-Jewish origin. From 1939 he lived in the Soviet Union and Russia and lost most of his family in the Holocaust.
He left a large body of work that included twenty-two symphonies and seventeen string quartets; according to one reviewer he ranked as, "the third great Soviet composer, along with Prokofiev and Shostakovich".
Much confusion has been caused by different renditions of the composer's names. In the Polish language (i.e. prior to his move to the USSR), his name was spelled as 'Mieczysław Wajnberg' whereas in the Russian language (i.e. after the move) he was and still is known as 'Моисей Самуилович Вайнберг' (Moisey Samuilovich Vaynberg). In the world of Yiddish theater of antebellum Warsaw he was known as Moishe Weinberg (Yiddish: משה װײַנבערג), which is analogous to the Russian Moisey. Among close friends he would also go by his Polish diminutive 'Mietek'. Re-transliteration of his surname from Cyrillic (Вайнберг) back into the Latin alphabet produced a variety of spellings, including 'Weinberg', 'Vainberg', and 'Vaynberg'. The form 'Weinberg' is now being increasingly used as the most frequent English-language rendition of this common Jewish surname, notably in the latest edition of Grove and by Weinberg's biographer, Per Skans.
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Mikhail Glinka
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (Russian: Михаи́л Ива́нович Гли́нка) (June 1 [O.S. May 20] 1804 – February 15 [O.S. February 3] 1857), was the first Russian composer to gain wide recognition within his own country, and is often regarded as the father of Russian classical music. Glinka's compositions were an important influence on future Russian composers, notably the members of The Five, who took Glinka's lead and produced a distinctive Russian style of music.
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Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion.
Miles Dewey Davis was born on May 26, 1926, to an affluent African American family in Alton, Illinois. His father, Dr. Miles Henry Davis, was a dentist. In 1927 the family moved to East St. Louis, Illinois. They also owned a substantial ranch in northern Arkansas, where Davis learned to ride horses as a boy.
Davis' mother, Cleota Mae (Henry) Davis, wanted her son to learn the piano; she was a capable blues pianist but kept this fact hidden from her son. His musical studies began at 13, when his father gave him a trumpet and arranged lessons with local musician Elwood Buchanan. Davis later suggested that his father's instrument choice was made largely to irk his wife, who disliked the trumpet's sound. Against the fashion of the time, Buchanan stressed the importance of playing without vibrato; he was reported to have slapped Davis' knuckles every time he started using heavy vibrato. Davis would carry his clear signature tone throughout his career. He once remarked on its importance to him, saying, "I prefer a round sound with no attitude in it, like a round voice with not too much tremolo and not too much bass. Just right in the middle. If I can’t get that sound I can’t play anything."Clark Terry was another important early influence.[citation needed]
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Missy Raines
Missy Raines (born April 6, 1962) is a bassist. She has achieved acclaim in the world of bluegrass, including seven International Bluegrass Music Association Bass Player of the Year awards. In addition to being one of the most awarded instrumentalists in her field, she is the only woman to win more than one instrumental award.
Raines has toured internationally with Jim Hurst and The Claire Lynch Band. She has formed a band, Missy Raines and the New Hip to explore fusions of jazz, bluegrass, pop and funk forms. She has signed with Compass Records, and Missy Raines & the New Hip will release several albums on that label, beginning with Inside Out which was released on February 10, 2009.
Hailing from Short Gap, WV, Raines began touring professionally as a teenager. She has performed and recorded with several first generation bluegrass legends, including Josh Graves, Kenny Baker and Jesse McReynolds. She is regarded for her ability to play both straight-ahead bluegrass and more progressive forms of music.
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Mohammed Fairouz
Mohammed Fairouz (born November 1, 1985) is an Arab American composer.
Having fulfilled many commissions and created a substantial body of frequently performed works, he is considered one of the most sought-after composers of the young generation. Fairouz began composing at an early age and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. His teachers included Gunther Schuller, Halim El-Dabh, György Ligeti, and John Heiss.
Mohammed Fairouz's music is published by Peermusic Classical.
Fairouz lives in New York City.
Fairouz first set poems of Oscar Wilde at the age of 7 and has gone on to write hundreds of art songs and over a dozen song cycles. In Poets & Writers Magazine, he described himself as being obsessed with text.
Three Fragments of Ibn Khafājah was commissioned by the Cygnus Ensemble and sets poetry by Arab Andalucian poet Ibn Khafajah.
Musicians for Harmony commissioned the song cycle Furia for baritone Randall Scarlata together with the Imani Winds and the Borromeo String Quartet and sets Western texts about the Middle East.
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Nikos Skalkottas
Nikos Skalkottas (Greek: Nίκος Σκαλκώτας) (21 March 1904 – 19 September 1949) was one of the most important Greek composers of 20th-century classical music. A member of the Second Viennese School, he drew his influences from both the classical repertoire and the Greek tradition.
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Nino Rota
Nino Rota (December 3, 1911, Milan – April 10, 1979, Rome) was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy, receiving for the latter the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1974.
During his long career Rota was an extraordinarily prolific composer, especially of music for the cinema. He wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions from the 1930s until his death in 1979—an average of three scores each year over a 46 year period, and in his most productive period from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s he wrote as many as ten scores every year, and sometimes more, with a remarkable thirteen film scores to his credit in 1954. Alongside this great body of film work, he composed ten operas, five ballets and dozens of other orchestral, choral and chamber works, the best known being his string concerto. He also composed the music for many theatre productions by Visconti, Zeffirelli and Eduardo de Filippo as well as maintaining a long teaching career at the Liceo Musicale in Bari, Italy, where he was the director for almost 30 years.
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Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman (born March 19, 1930) is an American saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s.
Coleman's timbre is easily recognized: his keening, crying sound draws heavily on blues music. His album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music.
Coleman was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, where he began performing R&B and bebop initially on tenor saxophone. Seeking a way to work his way out of his home town, he took a job in 1949 with a Silas Green from New Orleans traveling show and then with touring rhythm and blues shows. After a show in Baton Rouge, he was assaulted and his saxophone was destroyed.
He switched to alto, which has remained his primary instrument, first playing it in New Orleans after the Baton Rouge incident. He then joined the band of Pee Wee Crayton and travelled with them to Los Angeles. He worked at various jobs, including as an elevator operator, while still pursuing his musical career.
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Oscar Peterson
Oscar Emmanuel Peterson CC CQ OOnt (August 15, 1925 – December 23, 2007) was a Canadian jazz pianist and composer. He was called the "Maharaja of the keyboard" by Duke Ellington, "O.P." by his friends. He released over 200 recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, and received other numerous awards and honours over the course of his career. He is considered to have been one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, having played thousands of live concerts to audiences worldwide in a career lasting more than 60 years.
Peterson was born to immigrants from the West Indies; his father worked as a porter for Canadian Pacific Railway. Peterson grew up in the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy in Montreal, Quebec. It was in this predominantly black neighbourhood that he found himself surrounded by the jazz culture that flourished in the early 20th century. At the age of five, Peterson began honing his skills with the trumpet and piano. However, a bout of tuberculosis at age seven prevented him from playing the trumpet again, and so he directed all his attention to the piano. His father, Daniel Peterson, an amateur trumpeter and pianist, was one of his first music teachers, and his sister Daisy taught young Oscar classical piano. Young Oscar was persistent at practising scales and classical etudes daily, and thanks to such arduous practice he developed his astonishing virtuosity.
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Oscar Pettiford
Oscar Pettiford (30 September 1922 – 8 September 1960) was an American jazz double bassist, cellist and composer known particularly for his pioneering work in bebop.
Pettiford was born at Okmulgee, Oklahoma; his mother was Choctaw and his father was half Cherokee and half African American. Like many people with African American and Native American ancestry, his Native heritage was not generally known except to a few close friends, such as David Amram.
He grew up playing in the family band in which he sang and danced before switching to piano at the age of 12 then to double bass when he was 14. He is quoted as say he did not like the way people were playing the bass so he developed his own way of playing it. Despite being admired by the likes of Milt Hinton at the age of 14, he gave up in 1941 as he did not believe he could make a living. Five months later, he once again met Milt, who persuaded him to return to music.
In 1942 he joined the Charlie Barnet band and in 1943 gained wider public attention after recording with Coleman Hawkins on his "The Man I Love." He also recorded with Earl Hines and Ben Webster around this time. He and Dizzy Gillespie led a bop group in 1943. In 1945 Pettiford went with Hawkins to California, where he appeared in The Crimson Canary, a mystery movie known for its jazz soundtrack, which also featured Josh White. He then worked with Duke Ellington from 1945 to 1948 and for Woody Herman in 1949 before working mainly as a leader in the 1950s.
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Ottorino Respighi
Ottorino Respighi (Italian pronunciation: [ottoˈriːno resˈpiːɡi]; 9 July 1879 – 18 April 1936) was an Italian composer, musicologist and conductor. He is best known for his orchestral "Roman trilogy": Fountains of Rome (Le fontane di Roma); Pines of Rome (I pini di Roma); and Roman Festivals (Feste romane). His musicological interest in 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century music led him to also compose pieces based on the music of this period. He also wrote a number of operas, the best known being La fiamma.
Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna, Italy. He was taught piano and violin by his father, who was a local piano teacher. He went on to study violin and viola with Federico Sarti at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna, composition with Giuseppe Martucci, and historical studies with Luigi Torchi, a scholar of early music. A year after receiving his diploma in violin in 1899, Respighi went to Russia to be principal violist in the orchestra of the Russian Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg during its season of Italian opera. While there he studied composition for five months with Rimsky-Korsakov. He then returned to Bologna, where he earned a second diploma in composition. Until 1908 his principal activity was as first violin in the Mugellini Quintet. In 1908-09 he spent some time performing in Germany before returning to Italy and turning his attention entirely to composition. Many sources indicate that while he was in Germany he studied briefly with Max Bruch, but in her biography of the composer, Respighi's wife asserts that this is not the case.
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Pascal Dusapin
Pascal Dusapin (b. 29 May 1955) is a French composer born in Nancy. He is one of France's best-known living composers; his works have been performed worldwide.
He studied fine art, science and aesthetics at the Sorbonne in Paris. At the suggestion of Franco Donatoni he attended the seminars of Iannis Xenakis from 1974 until 1978. Both composers had a deep influence on his early works but he soon developed his own style based on the use of microtonality and the superposition of several atonal lines creating a kind of "atonal heterophony". Dusapin also uses archaic-sounding scales consisting of four notes filling in the interval of a perfect fifth e.g. A - Bb - D- E or C - D - F - G. In these scales, the 2nd and 3rd degrees are often a third apart which sets them apart from the traditional tetrachords. His melodies have a "vocal" quality even in purely instrumental works; hence Dusapin's predilection for instruments that can imitate the human voice (wind instruments and bowed string instruments). It also explains his reluctance to write for the piano in the early stages of his career.
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Patricia Day
Patricia Day is the bassist and lead singer for the Danish rockabilly band HorrorPops.
Day, originally from Copenhagen originally performed with punk rock band Peanut Pump Gun. She met Nekromantix singer and bassist, Kim Nekroman, at the 1996 POPKOMM festival in Cologne, Germany. Day would later marry Nekroman. The two formed a band in 1996 called Horrorpops. Day is the lead singer and also plays upright bass.
On tour, Day plays custom-created upright basses made for her by Nekroman. These basses weigh approximately half of what a normal bass does, have thinner bodies, and slimmer necks because her hands are much smaller than the average upright bass player. Day tends to use nylon strings and Gallien-Krueger 1001RB head and 410RBH cabs to push the slap sound while on tour. Her trademark is her heavily decorated white double bass, hand painted by tattoo artist Baby Lou Tattoo.
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Paul Chambers
Paul Laurence Dunbar Chambers, Jr. (April 22, 1935 – January 4, 1969) was a jazz bassist. A fixture of rhythm sections during the 1950s and 1960s, his importance in the development of jazz bass can be measured not only by the length and breadth of his work in this short period but also his impeccable time, intonation, and virtuosic improvisations.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on April 22, 1935, Chambers was raised in Detroit, Michigan following the death of his mother. He began playing music with several of his schoolmates; the baritone horn was his first instrument. Later he took up the tuba. "I got along pretty well, but it's quite a job to carry it around in those long parades, and I didn't like the instrument that much." Chambers became a string bassist around 1949. His formal bass training got going in earnest in 1952, when he began taking lessons with a bassist in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Chambers did some classical work himself, with a group called the Detroit String Band that was, in effect, a rehearsal symphony orchestra. Studying at Cass Technical High School off and on from 1952 to 1955, he played in Cass' own symphony, and in various other student groups, one of which had him playing baritone saxophone. By the time he left for New York at the invitation of tenor saxophonist Paul Quinichette, he had absorbed a working knowledge of many instruments.
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Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith (16 November 1895 – 28 December 1963) was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, music theorist and conductor.
Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt am Main, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child. He entered Frankfurt's Hoch’sche Konservatorium, where he studied violin with Adolf Rebner, as well as conducting and composition with Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles. At first he supported himself by playing in dance bands and musical-comedy groups. He became deputy leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra in 1914, and was promoted to leader in 1917. He played second violin in the Rebner String Quartet from 1914. In 1921 he founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and extensively toured Europe.
In 1922, some of his pieces were played in the International Society for Contemporary Music festival at Salzburg, which first brought him to the attention of an international audience. The following year, he began to work as an organizer of the Donaueschingen Festival, where he programmed works by several avant garde composers, including Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. From 1927 he taught composition at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Hindemith wrote the music for Hans Richter's 1928 avant-garde film Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuk), although the score was subsequently lost, and he also acted in the film.
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Peter Steele
Peter Thomas Ratajczyk (January 4, 1962 – April 14, 2010), better known by his stage name Peter Steele, was the lead singer, bassist, and composer for the gothic metal band Type O Negative. Before forming Type O Negative, he had created the metal group Fallout and the thrash band Carnivore.
As the frontman for Type O Negative, Steele was known for his vampiric affect, towering stature, rich bass-baritone vocals, and a dark, often self-deprecating sense of humor. His lyrics were often intensely personal, dealing with subjects including love, loss, and addiction. Steele credited Black Sabbath and The Beatles as his key musical inspirations.
Steele was born in Red Hook, Brooklyn to a Roman Catholic family of Polish, Danish, Icelandic and Russian (his grandparents lived in Russia) heritage and was raised in the Bensonhurst and Brighton Beach neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Steele was the youngest of six children, with five older sisters. His father fought in World War II and later worked at a shipyard. Steele started taking guitar lessons at age 12, moving on to bass six months later.
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Philip Glass
Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer. One of the highest profile composers writing "classical" music today, he is often said to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. His music is also often controversially described as minimalist, along with the work of the other "major minimalists" La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich.
He has lately distanced himself from the "minimalist" label, describing himself instead as a composer of "music with repetitive structures." Though his early mature music shares much with what is normally called "minimalist", he has since evolved stylistically. Currently, he describes himself as a "Classicist", pointing out that he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied such composers as Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger.
Glass is a prolific composer: he has written works for the musical group which he founded, the Philip Glass Ensemble (with which he still performs on keyboards), as well as operas, musical theatre works, ten symphonies, eleven concertos, solo works, chamber music including string quartets and instrumental sonatas, and film scores. Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards.
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Red Mitchell
Keith Moore "Red" Mitchell (September 20, 1927, New York City - November 8, 1992, Salem, Oregon, was an American jazz double-bassist, composer, lyricist, and poet. He was the brother of Whitey Mitchell.
Mitchell was raised in New Jersey by a father who was an engineer and loved music, and a mother who loved poetry. His first instruments were piano, alto saxophone, and clarinet. Although Cornell University awarded an engineering scholarship to Mitchell, by 1947 he was in the US Army playing bass. The next year he was in a jazz trio in New York City.
Mitchell became known for performing and/or recording with Mundell Lowe, Chubby Jackson, Charlie Ventura, Woody Herman, Red Norvo, Gerry Mulligan, and, after joining the West Coast jazz scene in the early 1950s, with Andre Previn, Shelly Manne, Hampton Hawes, Billie Holiday, Stan Seltzer, Ornette Coleman, and others. He also worked as a bassist in the TV and film studios around Los Angeles, occasionally appearing on screen. Mitchell also appeared in documentaries about Tal Farlow, and Zoot Sims.
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Reinhold Glière
Reinhold Glière (11 January 1875 [O.S. 30 December 1874] – 23 June 1956) was a Russian and Soviet composer of German–Polish descent.
His name has appeared in different forms:
Glière was born in Kiev, Russian Empire. He was the second son of the wind instrument maker Ernst Moritz Glier (1834–1896) from Saxony (Klingenthal), who emigrated to the Russian Empire and married Józefa (Josephine) Korczak (1849–1935), the daughter of his master, from Warsaw, Poland. His original name, as given in his baptism certificate, was Reinhold Ernest Glier. About 1900 he changed the spelling and pronunciation of his surname to Glière, which gave rise to the legend, stated by Leonid Sabaneyev for the first time (1927), of his French or Belgian descent.
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Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and other orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, An Alpine Symphony, and Metamorphosen. Strauss was also a prominent conductor throughout Germany and Austria.
Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.
Strauss was born on 11 June 1864, in Munich, the son of Franz Strauss, who was the principal horn player at the Court Opera in Munich. In his youth, he received a thorough musical education from his father. He wrote his first composition at the age of six, and continued to write music almost until his death.
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Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( /ˈvɑːɡnər/; German pronunciation: [ˈʁiçaʁt ˈvaːɡnɐ]; 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, conductor, theatre director and polemicist primarily known for his operas (or "music dramas", as he later called them). Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex texture, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs: musical themes associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements. Unlike most other opera composers, Wagner wrote both the music and libretto for every one of his stage works. Perhaps the two best-known extracts from his works are the Ride of the Valkyries from the opera Die Walküre, and the Wedding March (Bridal Chorus) from the opera Lohengrin.
Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works such as The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser which were broadly in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner transformed operatic thought through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"). This would achieve the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts and was announced in a series of essays between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realized this concept most fully in the first half of the monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. However, his thoughts on the relative importance of music and drama were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional operatic forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
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Richard Wernick
Richard Wernick (born January 16, 1934) in Boston, Massachusetts is an American composer. He is best known for his chamber and vocal works. His composition Visions of Terror and Wonder won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Wernick began his musical studies playing the piano at age 11. His high school music theory teacher took notice of his abilities, and introduced him to Irving Fine, who was a composition professor at Harvard University at the time. Wernick went on to complete his undergraduate studies with Fine at Brandeis University. While at Brandeis, Wernick also studied with Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, and Leonard Bernstein. His studies at Tanglewood included composition work with Ernst Toch, Aaron Copland, and Boris Blacher and conducting studies with Leonard Bernstein and Seymour Lipkin. Wernick also studied at Mills College with Leon Kirchner.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Wernick worked as a theater, film, television, and dance composer. His output during this time includes the film score for the short comedy A Bowl of Cherries.
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Ron Carter
Ron Carter (born May 4, 1937) is an American jazz double-bassist. His appearances on over 2,500 albums make him one of the most-recorded bassists in jazz history, along with Milt Hinton, Ray Brown and Leroy Vinnegar. Carter is also an acclaimed cellist who has recorded numerous times on that instrument.
Carter was born in Ferndale, Michigan. He started to play cello at the age of 10, but when his family moved to Detroit, he ran into difficulties regarding the racial stereotyping of classical musicians and instead moved to bass. He attended the historic Cass Technical High School in Detroit, and, later, the Eastman School of Music, where he played in its Philharmonic Orchestra. He gained his bachelor's degree at Eastman in 1959, and in 1961 a master's degree in double bass performance from the Manhattan School of Music.
His first jobs as a jazz musician were with Jaki Byard and Chico Hamilton. His first records were made with Eric Dolphy (another former member of Hamilton's group) and Don Ellis, in 1960. His own first date as leader, Where?, with Dolphy and Mal Waldron and a date also with Dolphy called Out There with George Duvivier and Roy Haynes and Carter on cello; its advanced harmonies and concepts were in step with the third stream movement.
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Scott LaFaro
Rocco Scott LaFaro (April 3, 1936 – July 6, 1961) was an influential American jazz bassist, perhaps best known for his work with the Bill Evans Trio.
Born in Irvington, New Jersey, LaFaro grew up in a musical family (his father played in many big bands). His family moved to parent's hometown of Geneva, New York when Scott was five years old. He started on piano while in elementary school, began on the bass clarinet in junior high school, changing to tenor saxophone when he entered high school. He only took up the double bass at 18, in the summer before he entered college, when he learned a string instrument was required for music education majors. About three months into his studies at Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY, LaFaro decided to concentrate on bass. He often played in groups at the College Spa and Joe's Restaurant on State Street in downtown Ithaca.
He entered college to study music but left during the early weeks of his sophomore year, when he joined Buddy Morrow and his big band. He left that organization in Los Angeles after a cross country tour and decided to try his luck in the Los Angeles music scene. There, he quickly found work and became known as one of the best of the young bassists. In 1959, after many gigs with such luminaries as Chet Baker, Victor Feldman, Stan Kenton, Cal Tjader, and Benny Goodman, LaFaro joined Bill Evans, who had recently left the Miles Davis Sextet. It was with Evans and drummer Paul Motian that LaFaro developed and expanded the counter-melodic style that would come to characterize his playing. LaFaro replaced Charlie Haden as Ornette Coleman's bassist in January, 1961.
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Scott Owen
Scott Bradley Owen (born 14 February 1975) plays the double bass in the Australian rock band The Living End. After playing the piano for many years, he decided that the keys would not work for a rockabilly band, so at age 17 he purchased and taught himself double bass, letting him play rockabilly with best friend and band mate, Chris Cheney.
During their live shows, Owen is known for pulling his "bass stunts", most notably standing on the bass (or letting Chris Cheney stand on it), tilting it on an angle, resting his right foot on the curve by the f-hole and his left foot over the belly of the bass near the bottom of the fingerboard.
Scott has two children, Harvey and Ginger, with his wife Emilie.
Owen has also written a number of tracks for The Living End including: "Flood The Sky", "I Want A Day", "What Would You Do?" and "Stay Away From Me". He also co-wrote "So Lonely" and "Black Cat" with Chris Cheney and "Short Notice" and "E-Boogie" with Chris Cheney and Andy Strachan.
He played double bass for Paul Kelly on his song Song Of The Old Rake and features in the filmclip, set in a Bendigo radio station.
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Serge Koussevitzky
Serge Koussevitzky (Russian: Сергей Александрович Кусевицкий; Sergey Aleksandrovich Kusevitsky) (July 26 [O.S. July 14] 1874 – June 4, 1951), was a Russian-born Jewish conductor, composer and double-bassist, known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949.
Koussevitzky was born into a poor Jewish family in Vyshny Volochyok, Tver Oblast, about 250 km northwest of Moscow, Russia. His parents were professional musicians who taught him violin, cello, and piano. He also learned trumpet. He was baptized at the age of fourteen, since Jews were not allowed to live in Moscow and he had received a scholarship to the Musico-Dramatic Institute of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, where he studied double bass with Rambusek and music theory. He excelled at the bass, joining the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra at the age of twenty, in 1894, and succeeded his teacher, Rambusek, as the principal bassist in 1901. That same year, according to some sources, he made his début (25 March) as a soloist in Moscow, although his biographer Moses Smith states he made his solo début earlier in 1896; he later won critical acclaim with his first recital in Berlin in 1903. In 1902 he married the dancer Nadezhda Galat. The same year, with Reinhold Glière's help, he wrote a popular concerto for the double bass, which he premiered in Moscow in 1905. In 1905, Koussevitzky divorced Galat and married Natalie Ushkov, the daughter of an extremely wealthy tea merchant. He soon resigned from the Bolshoi, and the couple moved to Berlin, where Serge studied conducting under Arthur Nikisch, using his new-found wealth to pay off his teacher's gambling debts.
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Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (Russian: Сергей Сергеевич Прокофьев; 23 April 1891 – 5 March 1953) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His best-known works include the March from The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet – from which "Dance of the Knights" is taken – and Peter and the Wolf. Besides many other works, Prokofiev also composed five piano concertos, nine completed piano sonatas and seven symphonies.
A graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev initially made his name as an iconoclastic composer-pianist, achieving notoriety with a series of ferociously dissonant and virtuosic works for his instrument and his first two piano concertos. Prokofiev's first major success breaking out of the composer-pianist mould was with his purely orchestral Scythian Suite, compiled from music originally composed for a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes; Diaghilev commissioned three further ballets from Prokofiev – Chout, Le pas d'acier and The Prodigal Son – which at the time of their original production were all highly successful. Prokofiev's greatest interest, however, was opera, and he composed several works in that genre, including The Gambler and The Fiery Angel. Prokofiev's one relative success in that genre during his lifetime was The Love for Three Oranges, composed for Chicago and subsequently performed over the following decade in Europe and Russia.
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Slam Stewart
Leroy Eliot "Slam" Stewart (September 21, 1914 – December 10, 1987) was an African American jazz bass player whose trademark style was his ability to bow the bass (arco) and simultaneously hum or sing an octave higher. He was originally a violin player before switching to bass at the age of 20.
Stewart was born in Englewood, New Jersey in 1914. While attending the Boston Conservatory, he heard Ray Perry singing along with his violin. This gave him the inspiration to follow suit with his bass. In 1937 Stewart teamed with Slim Gaillard to form the novelty jazz act Slim and Slam. The duo's biggest hit was "Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy)" in 1938 (see 1938 in music).
Stewart found regular session work throughout the 1940s with Lester Young, Fats Waller, Coleman Hawkins, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum, Johnny Guarnieri, Red Norvo, Don Byas, the Benny Goodman Sextet, and Beryl Booker, among others. One of the most famous sessions he played on took place in 1945, when Stewart played with Dizzy Gillespie's group (which featured Charlie Parker). Out of those sessions came some of the classics of bebop such as "Groovin' High" and "Dizzy Atmosphere."
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Sofia Gubaidulina
Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina, (Russian: Софи́я Асгатовна Губайду́лина, Tatar Cyrillic: София Әсгать кызы Гобәйдуллина, Latin: Sofia Äsğät qızı Ğöbäydullina) (born October 24, 1931) is a Russian composer of half Russian, half Tatar ethnicity.
Gubaidulina's music is marked by the use of unusual instrumental combinations. In Erwartung combines percussion (bongos, güiros, temple blocks, cymbals and tam-tams among others), bayan and saxophone quartet.
Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol, in the Tatar ASSR. She studied composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatory, graduating in 1954. In Moscow she undertook further studies at the Conservatory with Nikolay Peyko until 1959, and then with Shebalin until 1963. She was awarded with Stalin-fellowship. Her music was deemed "irresponsible" during her studies in Soviet Russia, due to its exploration of alternative tunings. She was supported, however, by Dmitri Shostakovich, who in evaluating her final examination encouraged her to continue down her "mistaken path". However, she was allowed to express her modernism in various scores she composed for documentary films, including the 1968 production, On Submarine Scooters, a 70mm film shot in the unique Kinopanorama widescreen format.
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Sonny Rollins
Theodore Walter "Sonny" Rollins (born September 7, 1930 in New York City) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Rollins is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. A number of his compositions, including "St. Thomas", "Oleo", "Doxy", and "Airegin", have become jazz standards.
Although Rollins was born in New York City, his parents were born in the United States Virgin Islands. Rollins received his first saxophone at age 13. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. He said that a concert by Frank Sinatra there, accompanied by a plea for racial harmony, changed his life.
Rollins started as a pianist, changed to alto saxophone, and finally switched to tenor in 1946. During his high-school years, he played in a band with other future jazz legends Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew and Art Taylor. He was first recorded in 1949 with Babs Gonzales ( J. J. Johnson was the arranger of the group). In his recordings through 1954, he played with performers such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.
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Stanley Clarke
Stanley Clarke (born June 30, 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American jazz musician and composer known for his innovative and influential work on double bass and electric bass as well as for his numerous film and television scores. He is best known for his work with the fusion band Return to Forever, and his role as a bandleader in several trios and ensembles.
Clarke was born in Philadelphia. He was introduced to the bass as a schoolboy when he arrived late on the day instruments were distributed to students and acoustic bass was one of the few remaining selections. He is a graduate of Roxborough High School in Philadelphia. Having graduated from the Philadelphia Musical Academy, (which was absorbed into the University of the Arts in 1985), he moved to New York City in 1971 and began working with famous bandleaders and musicians including Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Gato Barbieri, Joe Henderson, Chick Corea, Pharoah Sanders, Gil Evans and Stan Getz. He was an avid supporter of Scientology in his earlier musical productions, and referred to L. Ron Hubbard on most of his LP sleeves. His current association with Scientology is not known.
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Suzi Quatro
Susan Kay "Suzi" Quatro (born 3 June 1950) is a British-based American singer-songwriter, bass guitar player, and actor. She is the first female bass player to become a major rock star — this success in the 1970s empowered women (at a time when rock was dominated by men).
In the 1970s Quatro scored a string of hit singles that initially found greater success in Europe and Australia than in her homeland. But, following a recurring role as a female bass player on the popular American sitcom Happy Days, her duet "Stumblin' In" with Chris Norman reached number 4 in the USA.
Between 1973 and 1980 Quatro was awarded six Bravo Ottos. In 2010 she was voted into the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends online Hall of Fame.
She continues to create new albums, to perform, and to research/present new radio programmes.
Quatro played the bass guitar in the all-female bands The Pleasure Seekers and Cradle with her sisters Patti, Nancy, and Arlene. Also, according to her autobiography, her first bass guitar was a 1957 Fender Precision, given to her by her father.
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Sylvano Bussotti
Sylvano Bussotti (born 1 October 1931) is an Italian composer of contemporary music whose work is unusually notated and often creates special problems of interpretation.
Born in Florence, Bussotti learned to play the violin as a child, becoming a prodigy. Later he studied at the Florence Conservatory (where he developed an opposition to modernism), with Luigi Dallapiccola and with Max Deutsch in Paris. As a composer he was influenced by the twelve-tone music of Webern and later John Cage. Examples of his use of graphic notation in his pieces, often reflecting his personal life, include Lorenzaccio and La passion selon Sade. He pursues other disciplines including painting, graphic art, and journalism.
Bussotti is also a well-known film director, actor, and singer. His uncle Tono Zancanaro and his older brother Renzo Bussotti strongly influenced his style in painting. He has written most of the librettos of his Operas. As a writer, his style is considered one of the most refined among the Italian poets and novelists of 20th century. French culture has fascinated him since he was a boy. His great friend Cathy Berberian (Luciano Berio's wife) was one of his most famous interpreters. He was, or is, well acquainted with writers and film directors Aldo Palazzeschi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Derek Jarman, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Aldo Braibanti, Mario Zanzotto, Fabio Casadei Turroni, Dacia Maraini, Umberto Eco. Derek Jarman was the director of his opera L'Ispirazione, first staged in Florence in 1988. Rara Film is his most celebrated underground film. The film, according to the author's instructions, should be performed, together with the score, which includes from seven to eleven players. The music of Rara Film is not a strict counterpoint of the film, flowing without any relation to the images.
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Terry Plumeri
Terry Plumeri (born November 28, 1945) is an American classical composer, film composer, conductor, double bassist, lecturer, and producer.
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Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk (October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer considered one of the giants of American music. Monk had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "Epistrophy", "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser" and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second most recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed over 1,000 songs while Monk wrote about 70.
His compositions and improvisations are full of dissonant harmonies and angular melodic twists, and are consistent with Monk's unorthodox approach to the piano, which combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of silences and hesitations. This was not a style universally appreciated; poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin dismissed Monk as 'the elephant on the keyboard'.
Monk's manner was idiosyncratic. Visually, he was renowned for his distinctive style in suits, hats and sunglasses. He was also noted for the fact that at times, while the other musicians in the band continued playing, he would stop, stand up from the keyboard and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano.
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Tiger Army
Tiger Army is an American psychobilly band that was formed in 1995 in Berkeley, California. Its constant member and lead song writer is Nick 13. The band have released a total of four studio albums.
Tiger Army played their first show at the famous 924 Gilman Street venue in Berkeley, California, on March 29, 1996.
The band's first official release was a self-titled vinyl record EP, now referred to as the Temptation EP. The record was released by Chapter 11 Records. This EP caught the attention of Tim Armstrong, co-owner of Hellcat Records, who signed the band.
Tiger Army recorded their first full-length, the self-titled Tiger Army, in January 1999. It was released that October. Stand-up bassist Joel Day left Tiger Army before the band was signed, so the Quakes stand-up bassist Rob Peltier was hired to play on the album.
During the ensuing California mini-tour promoting the album, Nick 13 asked Geoff Kresge, one of his former bandmates from Influence 13, to join Tiger Army. Kresge accepted and joined as a permanent member a few months later. The band was asked to play on the Danzig and Samhain tour in 2000, where they befriended Samhain drummer London May. He joined the band when Adam Carson left.
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Todd Phillips
Todd Bunzl (born December 20, 1970) best known as Todd Phillips, is an American actor, film director, screenwriter, producer. He is best known for directing the comedy films Road Trip, Old School, The Hangover, Due Date & The Hangover Part II. He also produced Project X.
Phillips was born and raised in New York, and attended New York University Film School, but dropped out in order to focus on completing his first film, the feature-length documentary Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, about the life and death of punk rocker GG Allin. Around this time, he worked at Kim's Video and Music. He also appeared as one of the drivers in the first seasons of Taxicab Confessions on HBO. In a NY Times profile, Phillips claims to have gotten in trouble for shoplifting as a young man.
His first film was the feature-length documentary Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, about the life and death of punk rocker GG Allin. Phillips made the film while a junior at NYU and it went on to become one of the biggest grossing student films at the time, even getting a limited theatrical release. Phillips followed up Junkies with Frat House, a documentary about college fraternities that he produced and directed with then-partner Andrew Gurland. Frat House premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary features. It was produced by HBO, but never aired on its channel because many of the film's participants claimed they were paid to re-enact their activities. It was never proven either way.
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Vincent Persichetti
Vincent Ludwig Persichetti (June 6, 1915 – August 14, 1987) was an American composer, teacher, and pianist. An important musical educator and writer, Persichetti was a native of Philadelphia. He was known for his integration of various new ideas in musical composition into his own work and teaching as well as for training many noted composers in composition at the Juilliard School.
His students at Juilliard included Philip Glass, Michael Jeffrey Shapiro, Kenneth Fuchs, Richard Danielpour, Robert Dennis, Peter Schickele, Lowell Liebermann, Robert Witt, and Randell Croley. He also taught composition to conductor James DePreist at the Philadelphia Conservatory.
Persichetti was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1915 and remained a resident of that city throughout his life. Though neither of his parents were musicians, his musical education began early. Persichetti enrolled in the Combs College of Music at the age of five, where he studied piano, organ, double bass and later music theory and composition with Russel King Miller, whom he considered a great influence. By the time he reached his teens, he was paying for his own education by accompanying and performing. He continued to do so throughout high school, adding church organist, orchestral player and radio staff pianist to his experience. His first public performance of his own original works came at the age of 14. In addition to his musical talents, the young Persichetti attended art school and remained an avid sculptor until his death. He attended Combs for his undergraduate education as well. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1936 he was immediately offered a teaching position.
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Wenzel Pichl
Wenzel Pichl (25 September 1741 – 23 January 1805; known in his native language as Václav Pichl) was a classical Czech composer of the 18th Century. He was also a violinist, music director and writer.
Pichl was born at Bechyně, Bohemia. His first musical training was at Bechyne with the cantor Jan Pokorný. He served as a singer between the years 1752-1758 at the Jesuit college at Březnice. In Prague, he was a violinist at the Jesuit seminary of Saint Wenceslaus and his studies while at the university were philosophy, theology and law.
He was appointed to the post of first violinist of the Týn Church in 1762 and studied counterpoint with the organist J. N. Seger. In 1765 he was engaged by the composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf as a violinist for the private orchestra of Bishop Adam Patachich at Nagyvarad (now Oradea, Romania). The orchestra was dissolved in 1769 and Pichl became the music director for Count Ludwig Hartig in Prague.
In about 1770 he became first violinist of the Vienna court theatre and on the recommendation of the Empress Maria Theresa, he became music director for the Austrian governor of Lombardy at Milan, Archduke Ferdinand d'Este. Pichl went to Italy in 1777 and remained there until 1796 when the French invaded Lombardy, he then returned to Vienna where he stayed in the service of the archduke until his death (apart from a brief visit to Prague in 1802).
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Wes Montgomery
John Leslie "Wes" Montgomery (March 6, 1923 – June 15, 1968) was an American jazz guitarist. He is widely considered one of the major jazz guitarists, emerging after such seminal figures as Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian and influencing countless others, including Pat Martino, George Benson, Russell Malone, Emily Remler, Kenny Burrell, Pat Metheny, Steve Howe, and Jimi Hendrix.
Montgomery was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. According to NPR Jazz Profiles "The Life and Music Of Wes Montgomery," the nickname "Wes" was a child's abbreviation of his middle name, Leslie. He came from a musical family; his brothers, Monk (string bass and electric bass) and Buddy (vibraphone and piano), were jazz performers. The brothers released a number of albums together as the Montgomery Brothers. Although he was not skilled at reading music, he could learn complex melodies and riffs by ear. Montgomery started learning the six string guitar at the relatively late age of 20 by listening to and learning the recordings of his idol, guitarist Charlie Christian, however he had played a four string tenor guitar since age twelve. He was known for his ability to play Christian's solos note for note and was hired by Lionel Hampton for this ability.
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Willie Dixon
William James "Willie" Dixon (July 1, 1915 – January 29, 1992) was an American blues musician, vocalist, songwriter, arranger and record producer. A Grammy Award winner who was proficient on both the upright bass and the guitar and as a vocalist, Dixon is perhaps best known as one of the most prolific songwriters of his time. He is recognized as one of the founders of the Chicago blues sound. Dixon's songs have been recorded by countless musicians in many genres as well as by various ensembles in which he participated. A short list of the man's most famous compositions includes "Little Red Rooster", "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Evil", "Spoonful", "Back Door Man", "I Just Want to Make Love to You", "I Ain't Superstitious", "My Babe", "Wang Dang Doodle", and "Bring It On Home". These tunes were written during the peak of Chess Records, 1950–1965, and performed by Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter, influencing a worldwide generation of musicians.
Next to Muddy Waters, he was the most influential person in shaping the post World War II sound of the Chicago blues. He also was an important link between the blues and rock and roll, working with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley in the late 1950s. His songs were covered by some of the biggest artists of more recent times, including Styx, Bob Dylan, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Foghat, The Yardbirds, The Rolling Stones, Queen, Megadeth, The Doors, The Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead, and a posthumous duet with Colin James.
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Contrabass Saxophone
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:39
- Updated: 03 Jan 2013
Marcel W. Helland playing his ORSI Eb contrabass saxophone. Also, see www.kennellykeysmusic.com
http://wn.com/Contrabass_Saxophone
Marcel W. Helland playing his ORSI Eb contrabass saxophone. Also, see www.kennellykeysmusic.com
Mr Curly (contra bass clarinet)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:05
- Updated: 03 Jan 2013
Linsey Pollak plays "Mr Curly" (a contra bass clarinet made from garden hose) from his show "Passing Wind" as well as the feather duster clarinet.
http://wn.com/Mr_Curly_contra_bass_clarinet
Linsey Pollak plays "Mr Curly" (a contra bass clarinet made from garden hose) from his show "Passing Wind" as well as the feather duster clarinet.
- published: 04 Apr 2010
- views: 493638
- author: SquealyD
upright double bass (contrabass) solo (original♫)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:27
- Updated: 17 Dec 2012
If you like any of my music, join me & say hello, buy music or any questions at: facebook.com twitter.com soundcloud.com
http://wn.com/upright_double_bass_contrabass_solo_original♫
If you like any of my music, join me & say hello, buy music or any questions at: facebook.com twitter.com soundcloud.com
- published: 24 Mar 2009
- views: 42824
- author: Si Hayden
Bertram Turetzky and Friends: Music for Contrabass
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 88:18
- Updated: 01 Jan 2013
Contrabassist Bertram Turetzky, presents an evening of delightful surprises.These solo and chamber works include four premieres and several pieces that have made Turetzky famous. Series: "New Music from UCSD" [11/2000] [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 5295]
http://wn.com/Bertram_Turetzky_and_Friends_Music_for_Contrabass
Contrabassist Bertram Turetzky, presents an evening of delightful surprises.These solo and chamber works include four premieres and several pieces that have made Turetzky famous. Series: "New Music from UCSD" [11/2000] [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 5295]
- published: 31 Jan 2008
- views: 10537
- author: UCtelevision
Rinat Avisar | Permont Contrabass Concerto (solo) | World Premiere
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:28
- Updated: 23 Sep 2012
www.rinatavisar.com Prof. Haim Parmont Concerto Capriccioso Rinat Avisar - Contrabass Yaron Gottfried - Conductor Israel Kibbutz Orchestra Tel Aviv Museum of Art, March 2006
http://wn.com/Rinat_Avisar_|_Permont_Contrabass_Concerto_solo_|_World_Premiere
www.rinatavisar.com Prof. Haim Parmont Concerto Capriccioso Rinat Avisar - Contrabass Yaron Gottfried - Conductor Israel Kibbutz Orchestra Tel Aviv Museum of Art, March 2006
- published: 28 Apr 2008
- views: 19147
- author: layoram
Scott Robinson and Contrabass Sax on CNN 1997
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:41
- Updated: 29 Nov 2012
Scott Robinson and his Contrabass Sax on CNN.
http://wn.com/Scott_Robinson_and_Contrabass_Sax_on_CNN_1997
Scott Robinson and his Contrabass Sax on CNN.
- published: 27 Nov 2009
- views: 15256
- author: Marie Le Claire
Subcontrabass saxophone 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:18
- Updated: 02 Jan 2013
J'Elle Stainer Subcontrabass saxophone Instrument under test, an amateur musician.
http://wn.com/Subcontrabass_saxophone_1
J'Elle Stainer Subcontrabass saxophone Instrument under test, an amateur musician.
- published: 09 Jun 2011
- views: 1563154
- author: dlperalta
Berio - Psy for Contrabass
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:55
- Updated: 15 Dec 2012
Luciano Berio Psy for Contrabass performed by Nate West
http://wn.com/Berio_Psy_for_Contrabass
Luciano Berio Psy for Contrabass performed by Nate West
- published: 02 Nov 2008
- views: 14371
- author: dbassman09
You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch on Contrabass Sax
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:43
- Updated: 03 Jan 2013
You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch arranged by Ward Baxter, performed by Marcel W. Helland on the EEb Contrabass Saxophone with the Rainbow City Band of Seattle.
http://wn.com/You're_a_Mean_One,_Mr_Grinch_on_Contrabass_Sax
You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch arranged by Ward Baxter, performed by Marcel W. Helland on the EEb Contrabass Saxophone with the Rainbow City Band of Seattle.
- published: 22 Dec 2009
- views: 36676
- author: norweigy
Miloslav Gajdos on Contrabass Conversations
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:08
- Updated: 30 Dec 2012
Miloslav Gajdos plays and sings Mozart's "Per Questa Bella Mano" on the double bass. He was experiencing jet lag and playing on a borrowed bass, but one would never know if from watching this video! The bass in this video was provided by sonksenstrings.com. This trip was coordinated by Lyric Opera of Chicago and Northeastern Illinois bass professor Greg Sarchet in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the first bass recital in Chicago. Check out Greg at Bass Club Chicago (members.aol.com and visit www.contrabassconversations.com for more great episodes!
http://wn.com/Miloslav_Gajdos_on_Contrabass_Conversations
Miloslav Gajdos plays and sings Mozart's "Per Questa Bella Mano" on the double bass. He was experiencing jet lag and playing on a borrowed bass, but one would never know if from watching this video! The bass in this video was provided by sonksenstrings.com. This trip was coordinated by Lyric Opera of Chicago and Northeastern Illinois bass professor Greg Sarchet in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the first bass recital in Chicago. Check out Greg at Bass Club Chicago (members.aol.com and visit www.contrabassconversations.com for more great episodes!
- published: 17 Aug 2007
- views: 43001
- author: jasonheath
Contrabass Trombone: Saint-Saens
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:05
- Updated: 01 Jan 2013
The rare contrabass trombone is a very loud and powerful instrument. I'm convinced it can also be an instrument of warmth and beauty. In the few days I had access to one I wasn't able to fully achieve that beauty. Nonetheless, I think this video has a few glimpses of the richness possible from this unwieldy beast. For this video I adapted "The Swan" by Camille Saint-Saens. This piece is orginally for solo cello with a flowing accompaniment. It is from a larger work called "Carnival of the Animals." There are almost no recordings of contrabass trombone playing alone, so I wanted to post a video that would give people a chance to hear the instrument by itself when it isn't blasting from the depths of an opera pit. Playing Saint-Saens' wonderful solo line (down a few octaves) seemed like a nice way to try and share the gentler side of the contrabass trombone. In February 2010 I had a week-long opportunity to double on contrabass for the first time in my life! Adjusting to the instrument's different positions and very large mouthpiece was a welcome challenge. I made this recording on my fifth day with the instrument. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive my technical shortcomings. (This video does contain one audio edit at 0:54. The other camera changes are simply for visual effect, and to give viewers a better look at the instrument.) My orchestra rented this contrabass from Juilliard. It is a HAAG contrabass pitched in F. (Yes, the positions are different than ...
http://wn.com/Contrabass_Trombone_Saint-Saens
The rare contrabass trombone is a very loud and powerful instrument. I'm convinced it can also be an instrument of warmth and beauty. In the few days I had access to one I wasn't able to fully achieve that beauty. Nonetheless, I think this video has a few glimpses of the richness possible from this unwieldy beast. For this video I adapted "The Swan" by Camille Saint-Saens. This piece is orginally for solo cello with a flowing accompaniment. It is from a larger work called "Carnival of the Animals." There are almost no recordings of contrabass trombone playing alone, so I wanted to post a video that would give people a chance to hear the instrument by itself when it isn't blasting from the depths of an opera pit. Playing Saint-Saens' wonderful solo line (down a few octaves) seemed like a nice way to try and share the gentler side of the contrabass trombone. In February 2010 I had a week-long opportunity to double on contrabass for the first time in my life! Adjusting to the instrument's different positions and very large mouthpiece was a welcome challenge. I made this recording on my fifth day with the instrument. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive my technical shortcomings. (This video does contain one audio edit at 0:54. The other camera changes are simply for visual effect, and to give viewers a better look at the instrument.) My orchestra rented this contrabass from Juilliard. It is a HAAG contrabass pitched in F. (Yes, the positions are different than ...
- published: 21 Mar 2010
- views: 47145
- author: KarlWiederwohl
Contrabass Lyre
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:39
- Updated: 31 Dec 2012
Lyre maker Murray Wright improvises on the contrabass lyre he's just completed, before it is sent to its new owner in Ireland.
http://wn.com/Contrabass_Lyre
Lyre maker Murray Wright improvises on the contrabass lyre he's just completed, before it is sent to its new owner in Ireland.
- published: 04 Apr 2010
- views: 15437
- author: LyreWorks
Contrabass Dubstep by Moon Hooch
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:35
- Updated: 30 Dec 2012
A little excerpt from the show in Northampton.
http://wn.com/Contrabass_Dubstep_by_Moon_Hooch
A little excerpt from the show in Northampton.
- published: 20 Oct 2011
- views: 21483
- author: moonhooch
Bass Lesson 2- Improving Your Swing Feel
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:44
- Updated: 28 Dec 2012
Thomson Kneeland demonstrates how to improve your swing feel by interchanging a 4/4 swing feel with a 6/8 jazz/Afrocuban feel
http://wn.com/Bass_Lesson_2_Improving_Your_Swing_Feel
Thomson Kneeland demonstrates how to improve your swing feel by interchanging a 4/4 swing feel with a 6/8 jazz/Afrocuban feel
- published: 11 Oct 2008
- views: 29882
- author: bachfugue12
JBVanhal Kontrabass Konzert I. Allegro
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:31
- Updated: 10 Dec 2012
Edicson Ruiz
http://wn.com/JBVanhal_Kontrabass_Konzert_I_Allegro
F# Contrabass (Long Ago, Deep Within) - Native American Flute in a Tunnel, 2 (2 of 4)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:03
- Updated: 22 Dec 2012
(2008-9-7) Look out - it's the low, low laminated birch & black walnut F# contrabass flute from High Spirits filling the tunnel space with its deep, mellow, and resonant sounds. This is the first of two slow improvisations I did today. Hope it does something good for you! This tune is now called "Long Ago, Deep Within." It's included on my new CD, "Under Watchful Skies." Find it here: My website: www.allenbruceray.com High Spirits flutes www.highspirits.com The flute itself is made of laminated birch, and the mouthpiece, block, and decorative foot end ring are black walnut. Here are the dimensions Length: 36" exactly Inner bore diameter: 2" Mouthpiece to back of SAC exit hole: 5-1/8" SAC exit hole dimensions: 5/8" square Mouthpiece to wall (back of TSH): 6-9/16" TSH: 5/16" front-to-back, 11/16" side-to-side Hole diameters, top to bottom (north to south): #1: 9/16" #2: 9/16" #3: 7/16" #4: 7/16" #5: 3/8" #6: 5/16" Hole spacing from wall (back of TSH) to center of each hole: #1: 8-13/16" #2: 10-11/32" #3: 11-25/32" #4: 13-11/16" #5: 15-3/16" #6: 16-5/8" Mouthpiece hole diameter: 9/16"
http://wn.com/F_Contrabass_Long_Ago,_Deep_Within_Native_American_Flute_in_a_Tunnel,_2_2_of_4
(2008-9-7) Look out - it's the low, low laminated birch & black walnut F# contrabass flute from High Spirits filling the tunnel space with its deep, mellow, and resonant sounds. This is the first of two slow improvisations I did today. Hope it does something good for you! This tune is now called "Long Ago, Deep Within." It's included on my new CD, "Under Watchful Skies." Find it here: My website: www.allenbruceray.com High Spirits flutes www.highspirits.com The flute itself is made of laminated birch, and the mouthpiece, block, and decorative foot end ring are black walnut. Here are the dimensions Length: 36" exactly Inner bore diameter: 2" Mouthpiece to back of SAC exit hole: 5-1/8" SAC exit hole dimensions: 5/8" square Mouthpiece to wall (back of TSH): 6-9/16" TSH: 5/16" front-to-back, 11/16" side-to-side Hole diameters, top to bottom (north to south): #1: 9/16" #2: 9/16" #3: 7/16" #4: 7/16" #5: 3/8" #6: 5/16" Hole spacing from wall (back of TSH) to center of each hole: #1: 8-13/16" #2: 10-11/32" #3: 11-25/32" #4: 13-11/16" #5: 15-3/16" #6: 16-5/8" Mouthpiece hole diameter: 9/16"
- published: 07 Sep 2008
- views: 47404
- author: Allen Ray
Kinsa Trio: Himno al Sol (contrabass clarinet, cello & piano)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:16
- Updated: 28 Dec 2012
Mi página web: mazzini.clariperu.org ___________________________________ Join my Facebook fan page: www.facebook.com ___________________________________ This is actually my original arrangement which I prepared some years ago for Thelema Trio (www.thelematrio.com ). In this version, the baritone sax is replaced by the cello. We got together in a room of the Gent Conservatory and we performed this version of "Himno al Sol". Here and there you can hear a pianist and a clarinetist practicing in nearby rooms. I hope you like this "lower" version...the last minute contains some Kinsa Trio rehearsing moments. ________________________________________ In this video, Kinsa Trio is Aygul Pribylovskaya, cello Marco Antonio Mazzini, clarinet&bass; clarinet Ward De Vleeschhouwer, piano ________________________________________ Visit on the Internet: www.warddevleeschhouwer.com www.clariperu.org
http://wn.com/Kinsa_Trio_Himno_al_Sol_contrabass_clarinet,_cello_piano
Mi página web: mazzini.clariperu.org ___________________________________ Join my Facebook fan page: www.facebook.com ___________________________________ This is actually my original arrangement which I prepared some years ago for Thelema Trio (www.thelematrio.com ). In this version, the baritone sax is replaced by the cello. We got together in a room of the Gent Conservatory and we performed this version of "Himno al Sol". Here and there you can hear a pianist and a clarinetist practicing in nearby rooms. I hope you like this "lower" version...the last minute contains some Kinsa Trio rehearsing moments. ________________________________________ In this video, Kinsa Trio is Aygul Pribylovskaya, cello Marco Antonio Mazzini, clarinet&bass; clarinet Ward De Vleeschhouwer, piano ________________________________________ Visit on the Internet: www.warddevleeschhouwer.com www.clariperu.org
- published: 03 Oct 2007
- views: 36710
- author: Marco Antonio Mazzini
Bass Lesson 1 - Walking a Jazz Bassline -Blues Form
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:51
- Updated: 27 Dec 2012
Thomson Kneeland discusses some vital elements of creating a good jazz bassline: momentum and forward motion
http://wn.com/Bass_Lesson_1_Walking_a_Jazz_Bassline_-Blues_Form
Thomson Kneeland discusses some vital elements of creating a good jazz bassline: momentum and forward motion
- published: 10 Oct 2008
- views: 65019
- author: bachfugue12
Soprillo & Tubax Contrabass Saxophone Duet
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:54
- Updated: 03 Jan 2013
www.sax.co.uk Soprillo guru Nigel Wood playing with Sax.co.uk's Jim Cheek. The piece is called Jab Jab from Six Exotic Studies - Written and composed by Nigel Wood Jim is Playing an Eppelsheim Tubax Contrabass and Nigel is playing an Eppelsheim Soprillo saxophone
http://wn.com/Soprillo_Tubax_Contrabass_Saxophone_Duet
www.sax.co.uk Soprillo guru Nigel Wood playing with Sax.co.uk's Jim Cheek. The piece is called Jab Jab from Six Exotic Studies - Written and composed by Nigel Wood Jim is Playing an Eppelsheim Tubax Contrabass and Nigel is playing an Eppelsheim Soprillo saxophone
- published: 04 May 2012
- views: 21525
- author: saxcouk
Poucha Dass for solo contrabass
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:38
- Updated: 19 Oct 2012
homerecording with some reverb added
http://wn.com/Poucha_Dass_for_solo_contrabass
contrabass ocarina (自製10c自錄練習)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:50
- Updated: 06 Sep 2012
The range of this one is from C(130.81Hz) to d1(293.66). ((2009.OCT.16th amended)) . This song is named: buona notte e bonos annos (Italian) Please listen it again at www.ijigg.com And the notes I played are 233344332321 23344332321 5543235332321 5543235332321 5532353232321 5532353232321 4454332321 4454332321 23344332321 23344332321
http://wn.com/contrabass_ocarina_自製10c自錄練習
The range of this one is from C(130.81Hz) to d1(293.66). ((2009.OCT.16th amended)) . This song is named: buona notte e bonos annos (Italian) Please listen it again at www.ijigg.com And the notes I played are 233344332321 23344332321 5543235332321 5543235332321 5532353232321 5532353232321 4454332321 4454332321 23344332321 23344332321
- published: 16 Aug 2007
- views: 70501
- author: 欽章 范
A Rare Beast
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:42
- Updated: 27 Dec 2012
Murray Crewe describes the lineage of his very rare contrabass trombone in this video made during the intermission of a PSO concert.
http://wn.com/A_Rare_Beast
Murray Crewe describes the lineage of his very rare contrabass trombone in this video made during the intermission of a PSO concert.
- published: 23 May 2007
- views: 55697
- author: unidaddy
Contrabass Trombone
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:28
- Updated: 04 Nov 2012
There are almost no recordings of contrabass trombone playing alone, so I wanted to post a brief unaccompanied improvisation that would give people a chance to hear the instrument by itself when it isn't blasting from the depths of an opera pit. In February 2010 I had a week-long opportunity to double on contrabass for the first time in my life! Adjusting to the instrument's different positions and very large mouthpiece was a welcome challenge. I made this recording on my seventh day with the instrument. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive my technical shortcomings. My orchestra rented this contrabass from Juilliard. It is a HAAG contrabass pitched in F. (Yes, the positions are different than they are on bass trombone.) The mouthpiece is a "JK EXCLUSIVE KBP 1B" This improvisation is in A minor. The highest note is the A at the top of the bass clef staff, and the lowest note is three octaves lower. This means that the lowest note is the same as the last key on a standard piano keyboard. Every bass trombonist fantasizes about playing contrabass, so finally getting to play one after so many years of waiting was a dream come true. Many thanks to the folks at my orchestra who made this possible. I hope everyone enjoys hearing the contrabass trombone!!!
http://wn.com/Contrabass_Trombone
There are almost no recordings of contrabass trombone playing alone, so I wanted to post a brief unaccompanied improvisation that would give people a chance to hear the instrument by itself when it isn't blasting from the depths of an opera pit. In February 2010 I had a week-long opportunity to double on contrabass for the first time in my life! Adjusting to the instrument's different positions and very large mouthpiece was a welcome challenge. I made this recording on my seventh day with the instrument. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive my technical shortcomings. My orchestra rented this contrabass from Juilliard. It is a HAAG contrabass pitched in F. (Yes, the positions are different than they are on bass trombone.) The mouthpiece is a "JK EXCLUSIVE KBP 1B" This improvisation is in A minor. The highest note is the A at the top of the bass clef staff, and the lowest note is three octaves lower. This means that the lowest note is the same as the last key on a standard piano keyboard. Every bass trombonist fantasizes about playing contrabass, so finally getting to play one after so many years of waiting was a dream come true. Many thanks to the folks at my orchestra who made this possible. I hope everyone enjoys hearing the contrabass trombone!!!
- published: 10 Mar 2010
- views: 9498
- author: KarlWiederwohl
photo: AP / Emanuel Ekra
01 Jan 2013
INZA BAKAYOKO. Associated Press= ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) — A crowd stampeded after leaving a New Year's fireworks show early Tuesday in Ivory Coast's commercial center, killing 61 people — many of them youths — and injuring more than 200, rescue workers said. The death toll was expected to rise, the officials said ... Issa Sako of the fire department rescue team.....(size: 8.1Kb)
photo: AP / Ng Han Guan
02 Jan 2013
SEOUL -- In a domestically televised New Year's Day speech, North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un said he wanted to "remove confrontation" on this divided peninsula and called on "anti-reunification forces" in South Korea to cease their hostility toward the North. The lengthy address, which laid out the national goals for 2013, marked Mr ... Mr. Kim on Tuesday asked for a detente -- but with prerequisites that the conservative Ms ... ....(size: 3.2Kb)
photo: WN / Imran Nissar
03 Jan 2013
A gang of men accused of repeatedly raping a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in New Delhi in a deadly crime that repulsed the nation are to appear in court today for the first time. A British tourist join others in a candlelight vigil to mourn the death of a gang rape victim, in Kolkata, India Photo. AP. 3.52AM GMT 03 Jan 2013 ... Police have ordered a bone test to determine his age and whether he can stand trial in an adult court....(size: 11.3Kb)
photo: AP / Felicia Fonseca
01 Jan 2013
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. For good reason Mark Charles, a member of the Navajo Nation, is deeply offended that buried on page 45 of the 2010 Defense Appropriation Act (after pages on the maintenance and operation of the United States Military) is an "official" apology to Native American People ... political leaders and officials find it extremely difficult in expressing remorse for past mistakes ... Escorted by the U.S....(size: 5.6Kb)
photo: AP / Abdullah Al-Yasin
01 Jan 2013
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrians woke on New Year's Day to countrywide aerial bombardment, while President Bashar al-Assad's forces and rebels fighting to topple him clashed on the outskirts of the capital. Free Syrian Army fighters and civilians search for bodies under rubble after an air strike by a fighter jet loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo's al-Marja district December 31, 2012. REUTERS/Muzaffar Salman (SYRIA - Tags ... ....(size: 4.9Kb)
All About Jazz
01 Jan 2013
By GLENN ASTARITA, Glenn Astarita. Senior Contributor since 1997 Longtime contributor to AAJ and Downbeat, Jazz Review, EjazzNews, Radio DirectX. Recent articles (1,570 total) Into the Air Casting For Gravity Pershing Woman HBC Tiresian Symmetry. Track review of "Diana". In the liners to Little Bluedevil (Blue Rider Suite, Vol ... Personnel. Bill Noertker. contrabass; Jenny Maybee. piano; Annelise Zamula ... drums ... ....(size: 2.3Kb)
noodls
21 Dec 2012
(Source. City of Prague). A festive Christmas mass will be held on Monday 24th December at 10 p.m. in Wenceslas Square. It will be celebrated by pastor Antonín K. Dabrowski OFM. The service will be accompanied by Christmas carols with bagpipes and a contrabass. Adolf Lacina 21. December 2012. These days, people have the opportunity to light their own Betlehem Light under the statue of St. Wenceslas ... Wenceslas was introduced last year ... 21 ... (noodl....(size: 3.4Kb)
All About Jazz
21 Dec 2012
Immersed in the myths of ancient Greece, multi-reedman Jason Robinson underscores this major work based on the prophet Tiresias, who lived as both a man and woman. Nonetheless, Robinson has proven that change and risk-taking via the power of his pen and acute technical skills have become a de facto standard ... The leader's compositions convey a striking degree of contrasts ... alto clarinet, contrabass clarinet, tenor sax; Marty Ehrlich....(size: 2.8Kb)
Tampabay.com
20 Dec 2012
By Paulette Lash Ritchie, Times Correspondent. Paulette Lash RitchieTampa Bay Times In Print. Thursday, December 20, 2012. ADVERTISEMENT. ADVERTISEMENT. Story Tools Print this story Purchase reprints Contact the editor Email Newsletters ... Besides the bass clarinet, the Weeki Wachee High School junior plays the electric bass guitar and the giant contrabass clarinet ... In ninth grade, she was introduced to the contrabass. "Mr ... . Fast facts ... 410....(size: 4.2Kb)
Tampabay.com
19 Dec 2012
By Paulette Lash Ritchie, Times Correspondent. Paulette Lash RitchieTampa Bay Times In Print. Thursday, December 20, 2012. ADVERTISEMENT. ADVERTISEMENT. Story Tools Print this story Purchase reprints Contact the editor Email Newsletters ... Besides the bass clarinet, the Weeki Wachee High School junior plays the electric bass guitar and the giant contrabass clarinet ... In ninth grade, she was introduced to the contrabass. "Mr ... . Fast facts ... 410....(size: 4.2Kb)
The Quietus
17 Dec 2012
It's by turns sensual, blissful and disturbing, and often hints towards all three states at once ... “I was taking contrabass lessons in Berlin because I thought I had to learn to play an orchestral instrument to be a serious composer, which was just insane, I was just terrible at it! I took lessons from this Russian guy and I had to take two separate trains, it was a nightmare to get the bass there... Holly Herndon ... HH ... HH ... HH ... HH. Exactly ... ....(size: 17.0Kb)
The New York Times
16 Dec 2012
WASHINGTON — Jason Moran’s vision for jazz programming at the Kennedy Center here, since his appointment as an adviser to the center last year, has been playful and inclusive ... But it’s up to something else too. Enlarge This Image. Yassine El Mansouri ... Mr ... Mr ... Mr ... Braxton — next to an assembly of horns including the contrabass saxophone, taller than him in its tilted stand — overturned an hourglass on a table ... ....(size: 10.9Kb)
Jakarta Post
09 Dec 2012
Paper Edition . Page. 16. Music. The Goethe Institute will be presenting jazz performances by the Dieter Ilg Trio on Dec. 11 at the Langgeng Art Foundation in Yogyakarta; on Dec. 13 at the Balai Pertemuan Bumi Sangkurian in Bandung; and on Dec. 14 at the GoetheHause in Jakarta ... Ilg is a musician who has a deep love for the opera Otello by Giuseppe Verdi — something that audiences may detect and feel through his expressive contrabass playing....(size: 2.3Kb)
noodls
05 Dec 2012
Sixteen new elements inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity ... The new elements are from Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Côte d'Ivoire, Croatia, Ecuador, France, Hungary, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Mali, Morocco, Oman, Republic of Korea ... Cremonese violin craftsmanship is renowned for its traditional process of fashioning violins, violas, cellos and contrabasses ... (noodl....(size: 12.9Kb)
All About Jazz
28 Nov 2012
In 2009, Dutch flautist Mark Alban Lotz and bassist Meinrad Kneer initiated a monthly creative music series, titled U-EX(perimental), at Centraal Museum in Utrecht, presenting performances of spontaneous free improvisations ... All the improvisations are brief and seek to outline a musical idea with no attachment to further interplay ... piccolo, c-, alto-, bass flute, pvc contrabass flute, prepared flute, voice (1-9, 11-26); Meinrad Kneer....(size: 3.2Kb)
New Straits/Business Times
26 Nov 2012
VERSATILE ... JOHOR BARU ... Comprising 45 members aged between 8 and 15, 40 of them were string musicians including 26 violinists, four viola players, nine cellists and one contrabass player. The rest were pianists, percussionists and a guitarist ... Both Joyce and Antony had perfect timing throughout and they were backed up with a combination of sounds produced by the other violins, violas and the contrabass ... Pix by Syed Abdullah Syed Mohamed ... ....(size: 4.3Kb)
noodls
19 Nov 2012
CCM Choral Series Presents Culmination of 'Monteverdi Project'. The Nov ... Date. 11/19/2012 12.00.00 AM. By. Sara Kissinger. Other Contact. Curt Whitacre. Other Contact Phone ... Photos By ... Guest artist continuo members include Michael Leopold, theorbo; Elizabeth Motter, Baroque harp; Jennifer Roig-Francolí, Baroque violin; James Lambert, contrabass and gamba; Yaël Senamaud, Baroque violin; and Rodney Stucky, archlute and Baroque guitar ... 28....(size: 6.9Kb)
Buffalo News
16 Nov 2012
Who?. George Caldwell, piano; Bobby Militello, saxophone; Tim Clarke, trumpet; Cameron Kayne, contrabass; Darryl Washington, drums. What? ... Why? ... What’s next?. A concert at 6 p.m....(size: 0.8Kb)
"Contrabass" redirects here. For other uses, see Contrabass (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Acoustic bass guitar.
For the technique used in percussion, see Double bass drum.
 Side and front views of a modern double bass with a French-style bow |
|
| String instrument | |
|---|---|
| Other names | Bass, string bass, upright bass, acoustic bass, contrabass, bass violin, bass viol, bass fiddle, bull fiddle, doghouse bass, standup bass |
| Classification | String instrument (bowed or plucked) |
| Hornbostel–Sachs classification | 321.322-71 (Composite chordophone sounded by a bow) |
| Developed | 15th century |
| Playing range | |
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| Related instruments | |
| Musicians | |
The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, bass fiddle, bass violin, doghouse bass, contrabass, bass viol, or stand-up bass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2 (see standard tuning). The double bass is a standard member of the string section of the symphony orchestra[1] and smaller string ensembles[2] in Western classical music. In addition, it is used in other genres such as jazz, 1950s-style blues and rock and roll, rockabilly/psychobilly, traditional country music, bluegrass, tango and many types of folk music. A person who plays the double bass is usually referred to as a bassist.
The double bass stands around 180 cm (six feet) from scroll to endpin,[3] and is typically constructed from several types of wood, including maple for the back, spruce for the top, and ebony for the fingerboard. It is uncertain whether the instrument is a descendant of the viola da gamba or of the violin, but it is traditionally aligned with the violin family. While the double bass is nearly identical in construction to other violin family instruments, it also embodies features found in the older viol family.
Like many other string instruments, the double bass is played either with a bow (arco) or by plucking the strings (pizzicato). In orchestral repertoire and tango music, both arco and pizzicato are employed. In jazz, pizzicato is the norm, except for some solos and also occasional written parts in modern jazz that call for bowing. In other genres, such as blues and rockabilly, the bass is plucked.
When playing the double bass, the bassist either stands or sits on a high stool and leans the instrument against the bassist's body with the bass turned slightly inwards in order to more easily reach the strings. This stance is also a key reason for the bass's sloped shoulders, which mark it apart from the other members of the violin family, as the narrower shoulders facilitate playing of the strings in their higher registers.
The double bass is a transposing instrument and sounds one octave lower than notated.
History[link]
The double bass is generally regarded as a modern descendant of the string family of instruments that originated in Europe in the 15th century, and as such has been described as a bass Violin.[4] Before the 20th century many double basses had only three strings, in contrast to the five to six strings typical of instruments in the string family or the four strings of instruments in the violin family. Some existing instruments, such as those by Gasparo da Salò, were converted from 16th-century six-string contrabass violoni.[5]
The double bass's proportions are dissimilar to those of the violin and cello; for example, it is deeper (the distance from top to back is proportionally much greater than the violin). In addition, while the violin has bulging shoulders, most double basses have shoulders carved with a more acute slope, like members of the viol family. Many very old double basses have had their shoulders cut or sloped to aid playing with modern techniques. Before these modifications, the design of their shoulders was closer to instruments of the violin family.
The double bass is the only modern bowed string instrument that is tuned in fourths (like a viol), rather than fifths (see Tuning, below). The issue of the instrument's exact lineage is still a matter of some debate, and the supposition that the double bass is a direct descendant of the viol family is one that has not been entirely resolved.
In his A New History of the Double Bass, Paul Brun asserts, with many references, that the double bass has origins as the true bass of the violin family. He states that, while the exterior of the double bass may resemble the viola da gamba, the internal construction of the double bass is nearly identical to instruments in the violin family, and very different from the internal structure of viols.[6]
Terminology[link]
A person who plays this instrument is called a bassist, double bassist, double bass player, contrabassist, contrabass player, or bass player. The names contrabass and double bass refer the instrument's range and use in the contra octave below the cello, also called the 16' octave relative to the church organ.[7] The terms for the instrument among classical performers are contrabass (which comes from the instrument's Italian name, contrabbasso), string bass (to distinguish it from a brass bass instrument in a concert band), or simply bass.
In jazz and other genres outside of classical music, this instrument is commonly called the upright bass or acoustic bass to distinguish it from the electric bass guitar. In folk and bluegrass music, the instrument is also referred to as a bass fiddle or bass violin (or more rarely as doghouse bass or bull fiddle). Other colourful nicknames are found in other languages; in Hungarian, for instance, the double bass is sometimes called nagy bőgő, which roughly translates as "big crier," referring to its large voice.
Design[link]
In general there are two major approaches to the design outline shape of the double bass, these being the violin form (shown in the labelled picture to the right), and the viol da gamba form (shown in the header picture). A third less common design called the busetto shape can also be found, as can the even more rare guitar or pear shape. The back of the instrument can vary from being a round, carved back similar to that of the violin, or a flat and angled back similar to the viol family.
The double bass features many parts that are similar to members of the violin family including a bridge, f-holes, a tailpiece, a scroll and a sound post. Unlike the rest of the violin family, the double bass still reflects influence and can be considered partly derived from the viol family of instruments, in particular the violone, the bass member of the viol family.
The double bass also differs from members of the violin family in that the shoulders are typically sloped, the back is often angled (both to allow easier access to the instrument, particularly in the upper range), and machine tuners are always fitted. Lack of standardization in design means that one double bass can sound and look very different from another.
Construction[link]
The double bass is closest in construction to violins, but has some notable similarities to the violone (literally "large viol"), the largest and lowest member of the viola da gamba family. Unlike the violone, however, the fingerboard of the double bass is unfretted, and the double bass has fewer strings (the violone, like most viols, generally had six strings, although some specimens had five or four).
An important distinction between the double bass and other members of the violin family is the construction of the pegbox. While the violin, viola, and cello all use friction pegs for gross tuning adjustments, the double bass has metal machine heads. The key on the tuning machine turns a metal worm, which drives a worm gear that winds the string. While this development makes fine tuners unnecessary, a very small number of bassists use them nevertheless. At the base of the double bass is a metal rod with a spiked end called the endpin, which rests on the floor. This endpin is generally more robust than that of a cello, because of the greater mass of the double bass.
The materials most often used in double-bass construction are maple (back, neck, ribs), spruce (top), and ebony (fingerboard, tailpiece). Exceptions to this include less-expensive basses that have laminated (plywood) tops, backs, and ribs, and some newer mid-range basses made of willow. These basses are resistant to changes in heat and humidity, which can cause cracks in spruce tops. Plywood laminate basses, which are used in music schools, youth orchestras, and in popular and folk music settings, are very resistant to humidity and heat, as well to the physical abuse they are apt to encounter in a school environment (or, for blues and folk musicians, to the hazards of touring and performing in bars).
The soundpost and bass bar are components of the internal construction. All the parts of a double bass are glued together, except the soundpost, bridge and tailpiece, which are held in place by string tension, although the soundpost usually remains in place when the instrument's strings are loosened or removed. The metal tuning machines are attached to the sides of the pegbox with metal screws. While tuning mechanisms generally differ from the higher-pitched orchestral stringed instruments, some basses have non-functional, ornamental tuning pegs projecting from the side of the pegbox, in imitation of the tuning pegs on a cello or violin.
Famous double bass makers come from around the world and often represent varied national characteristics. The most highly sought (and expensive) instruments come from Italy and include basses made by Giovanni Paolo Maggini, Gaspar da Salo, the Testore family (Carlo Antonio, Carlo Giuseppe, Gennaro, Giovanni, Paulo Antonio), Celestino Puolotti, and Matteo Gofriller. French and English basses are also sought by players of the highest caliber.
Strings[link]
The history of the double bass is tightly coupled to the development of string technology, as it was the advent[7] of overwound gut strings, which first rendered the instrument more generally practicable, as wound strings attain low notes within a smaller overall string diameter than unwound strings.[8]
Prior to the mid-20th century,[citation needed] double bass strings were usually made of gut, but since that time, steel strings have largely replaced gut strings, because steel strings hold their pitch better and yield more volume when played with the bow.[9] Gut strings are also more vulnerable to changes of humidity and temperature, and they break much more easily than steel strings. Gut strings are nowadays mostly used by bassists who perform in baroque ensembles, rockabilly bands, traditional blues bands, and bluegrass bands. Gut strings provide the dark, "thumpy" sound heard on 1940s and 1950s recordings. The late Jeff Sarli, a blues upright bassist, said that, "Starting in the 1950s, they began to reset the necks on basses for steel strings."[10] Rockabilly and bluegrass bassists also prefer gut because it is much easier to perform the "slapping" upright bass style (in which the strings are percussively slapped and clicked against the fingerboard) with gut strings than with steel strings. (For more information on slapping, see the sections below on Modern playing styles, Double bass in bluegrass music, Double bass in jazz, and Double bass in popular music).
The change from gut to steel has also affected the instrument's playing technique over the last hundred years, because playing with steel strings allows the strings to be set up closer to the fingerboard, and, additionally, steel strings can be played in higher positions on the lower strings and still produce clear tone. The classic 19th century Franz Simandl method does not utilize the low E string in higher positions because with older gut strings set up high over the fingerboard, the tone was not clear in these higher positions. However, with modern steel strings, bassists can play with clear tone in higher positions on the low E and A strings, particularly when modern lighter-gauge, lower-tension steel strings are used.
Bows[link]
The double bass bow comes in two distinct forms (shown below). The "French" or "overhand" bow is similar in shape and implementation to the bow used on the other members of the orchestral string instrument family, while the "German" or "Butler" bow is typically broader and shorter, and is held in a "hand shake" position.
These two bows provide different ways of moving the arm and distributing force on the strings. Proponents of the French bow argue that it is more maneuverable, due to the angle at which the player holds the bow. Advocates of the German bow claim that it allows the player to apply more arm weight on the strings. The differences between the two, however, are minute for a proficient player, and modern players in major orchestras use both bows.
German bow[link]
The German bow (sometimes called the Butler bow) is the older of the two designs. The design of the bow and the manner of holding it descend from the older viol instrument family. With older viols, before screw threads were used to tighten the bow, players held the bow with two fingers between the stick and the hair to maintain tension of the hair.[11] Proponents of the use of German bow claim that the German bow is easier to use for heavy strokes that require a lot of power.
In comparison with the French bow, the German bow has a taller frog, and it is held with the palm angled upwards, as is done for the upright members of the viol family. When held in correct manner, the thumb applies the necessary power to generate the desired sound. The index finger meets the bow at the point where the frog meets the stick. The index finger is also used to apply an upward torque to the frog when tilting the bow. The little finger (or "pinky") supports the frog from underneath, while the ring finger and middle finger rest in the space between the hair and the shaft.
French bow[link]
The French bow was not widely popular until its adoption by 19th-century virtuoso Giovanni Bottesini. This style is more similar to the traditional bows of the smaller string family instruments. It is held as if the hand is resting by the side of the performer with the palm facing toward the bass. The thumb rests on the shaft of the bow, next to the frog while the other fingers drape on the other side of the bow. Various styles dictate the curve of the fingers and thumb, as do the style of piece; a more pronounced curve and lighter hold on the bow is used for virtuoso or more delicate pieces, while a flatter curve and sturdier grip on the bow sacrifices some power for easier control in strokes such as detaché, spiccato, and staccato.
Bow construction and materials[link]
Double bass bows vary in length, ranging from 60 cm (24") to 75 cm (30"). Pernambuco, also known as Brazilwood, is regarded as an excellent quality stick material, but due to its scarcity and expense, other materials are increasingly being used. Less expensive student bows may be constructed of solid fiberglass, or of less valuable varieties of brazilwood. Snakewood and carbon fiber are also used in bows of a variety of different qualities. The frog of the double bass bow is usually made out of ebony, although snakewood and buffalo horn are used by some luthiers. The wire wrapping is gold or silver in many quality bows, and the hair is usually horsehair.
The double bass bow is strung with either white or black horsehair, or a combination of the two (known as "salt and pepper"), as opposed to the customary white horsehair used on the bows of other string instruments. Some bassists argue that the slightly rougher black hair "grabs" the heavier, lower strings better.[citation needed] As well, some bassists and luthiers believe that it is easier to produce a smoother sound with the white variety.[citation needed] Red hair (chestnut) is also used by some bassists.[citation needed] Some of the lowest-quality student bows are made with synthetic hair.
Rosin[link]
String players apply rosin to the bow hair so it will "grip" the string and make it vibrate. Double bass rosin is generally softer and stickier than violin rosin to allow the hair to grab the thicker strings better, but players use a wide variety of rosins that vary from quite hard (like violin rosin) to quite soft, depending on the weather, the humidity, and the preference of the player. The amount used generally depends on the type of music being performed as well as the personal preferences of the player. Bassists may apply more rosin in works for large orchestra (e.g., Brahms symphonies) than for delicate chamber works.[citation needed] Some brands of rosin, such as Pop's double bass rosin, are softer and more prone to melting in hot weather. Other brands, such as Carlsson or Nyman Harts double bass rosin, are harder and less prone to melting.[citation needed]
Pitch[link]
The lowest note of a double bass is an E1 (on standard four-string basses) at approximately 41 Hz or a B0 (when five strings are used) at approximately 31 Hz, within about an octave above the lowest frequency that the average human ear can perceive as a distinctive pitch. The top of the instrument's fingerboard range is typically near the D two octaves and a fifth above the open pitch of the G string (G4) as shown in the range illustration found at the head of this article. Playing beyond the end of the fingerboard can be accomplished by pulling the string slightly to the side.
Many double bass symphony parts and virtuoso concertos employ harmonics (also called flageolet tones). Both natural harmonics and artificial harmonics, where the thumb stops the note and the octave or other harmonic is activated by lightly touching the string at the relative node point, extend the instrument's range considerably.
Orchestral parts rarely demand the double bass exceed a two-octave range (an example of an exception to this rule is Orff's Carmina Burana, which calls for three octaves and a perfect fourth). However, there is no hard limit to the upper range a virtuoso solo player can achieve using natural and artificial harmonics. The high harmonic in the range illustration found at the head of this article may be taken as representative rather than normative.
Five-string instruments have an additional string typically tuned to a low B below the E string. Occasionally, a higher string is added instead, tuned to the C above the G string.
Four-string instruments may feature the C extension extending the range of the E string downwards to C.
Traditionally, the double bass is a transposing instrument. Since much of the double bass's range lies below the standard bass clef, it is notated an octave higher than it sounds. This transposition applies even when reading the tenor and treble clef, which are used to avoid excessive ledger lines when notating the instrument's upper range. Other notational traditions do exist; Italian solo music is typically written at the sounding pitch, and the "old" German method sounded an octave below where notation except in the treble clef, where the music was written at pitch.
Tuning[link]
The double bass is generally tuned in fourths, in contrast to other members of the orchestral string family, which are tuned in fifths. The standard tuning (low to high) is E-A-D-G, starting from E below second low C (concert pitch). This is the same as the standard tuning of a bass guitar and is one octave lower than the four lowest-pitched strings of standard guitar tuning.
Throughout classical repertoire, there are notes that fall below the range of a standard double bass. Notes below low E appear regularly in the double bass parts found in later arrangements and interpretations of Baroque music. These parts are transpositions of parts written for other bass instruments used before the modern double bass became common and may actually lower the part an octave.
In the Classical era, the double bass typically doubled the cello part an octave below, occasionally requiring descent to C below the E of the four-string double bass. In the Romantic era and the 20th century, composers such as Wagner, Mahler, Beethoven, Busoni, and Prokofiev also requested notes below the low E. There are two common methods for making these notes available to the player. Major European orchestras generally use basses with a fifth string, tuned to B three octaves and a semitone below middle C.[12] Players with standard double basses (E-A-D-G) typically play the notes below "E" an octave higher.
In the United States, Canada and United Kingdom, most professional orchestral players use four-string double basses with a C extension, which extends the lowest string down as far as low C, an octave below the lowest note on the cello (more rarely, this string may be tuned to a low B[13]). The extension is an extra section of fingerboard mounted up over the head of the bass. There are several varieties of extensions.
In the simplest mechanical extensions, there are no mechanical aids attached to the fingerboard extension except a locking nut for the "E" note. To play the extension notes, the player reaches back over the pegs to press the string to the fingerboard. The advantage of this "fingered" extension is that the player can adjust the intonation of all of the stopped notes on the extension, and there are no mechanical noises from metal keys and levers. The disadvantage of the "fingered" extension is that it can be hard to perform rapid alternations between low notes on the extension and notes on the regular fingerboard, such as a bassline that quickly alternates between "G" and the low D.
The simplest type of mechanical aid is the use of wooden "fingers" that can be closed to press the string down and fret the C♯, D, Eb, or E notes. This system is particularly useful for basslines that have a repeating pedal point such as a low D, because once the note is locked in place with the mechanical "finger," the lowest string sounds a different note when played open (e.g., a low D).
The most complicated mechanical aid for use with extensions are mechanical lever systems nicknamed machines. These lever systems, which superficially resemble the mechanisms of reed instruments such as the bassoon, include levers mounted beside the regular fingerboard (near the nut, on the "E" string side), which remotely activate metal "fingers" on the extension fingerboard. The most expensive metal lever systems also give the player the ability to "lock" down notes on the extension fingerboard, as with the wooden "finger" system. One criticism of these devices is that they may lead to unwanted metallic clicking noises.
A small number of bass players tune their strings in fifths, like a cello but an octave lower (C-G-D-A low to high). This tuning was used by the jazz player Red Mitchell and is increasingly used by classical players, notably the Canadian bassist Joel Quarrington. In classical solo playing the double bass is usually tuned a whole tone higher (F♯-B-E-A). This higher tuning is called solo tuning, whereas the regular tuning is known as "orchestral tuning." String tension differs so much between solo and orchestral tuning that a different set of strings is often employed that has a lighter gauge. Strings are always labelled for either solo or orchestral tuning, and published solo music is arranged for either solo or orchestral tuning. Some popular solos and concerti, such as the Koussevitsky Concerto are available in both solo and orchestral tuning arrangements.
Many contemporary composers specify highly specialized scordatura. Berio, for example, asks the player to tune his strings E-G♯-A-G in Sequenza XIVb and Scelsi asks for both F-A-D-E and F-A-F-E in Nuits.
A variant and much less-commonly used form of solo tuning used in some Eastern European countries is (A-D-G-C), which uses three of the strings from orchestral tuning (A-D-G) and then adds a high "C" string. Some bassists with five-string basses use a high "C" string as the fifth string, instead of a low "B" string. Adding the high "C" string facilitates the performance of solo repertoire with a high tessitura (range). Another option is to utilize both a low C (or B) extension and a high C string.
When choosing a bass with a fifth string, the player must decide between adding a higher or lower-tuned string. Six-stringed instruments are generally regarded as impractical. To accommodate the additional string, the fingerboard is usually slightly wider, and the top slightly thicker to handle the increased tension. Some five-stringed instruments are converted four-string instruments. Because these don't have wider fingerboards, some players find them more difficult to finger and bow. Converted four-string basses usually require either a new, thicker top, or lighter strings to compensate for the increased tension.
Playing and performance considerations[link]
Body and hand position[link]
Double bassists either stand or sit to play the instrument. The instrument height is set by adjusting the endpin such that the player can reach the desired playing zones of the strings with bow or plucking hand.
Bassists who stand and bow sometimes set the endpin by aligning the first finger in either first or half position with eye level, although there is little standardization in this regard.
Players who sit generally use a stool about the height of the player's pants inseam length.
Traditionally, double bassists stood when playing solo and sat when they played in the orchestra or opera pit. Now, playing styles have become specialized to the point where one player rarely can satisfactorily perform both standing and sitting. Consequently, now many soloists sit (as with Joel Quarrington, Jeff Bradetich, Thierry Barbé and others) and orchestras often employ standing bassists.
When playing in the instrument's upper range (above the G below middle C), the player shifts their hand out from behind the neck and flattens it out, using the side of the thumb to press down the string. This technique—also used on the cello—is called thumb position. While playing in thumb position, few players use the fourth (little) finger, as it is too weak to produce a reliable tone (this is also true for cellists), although some extreme chords or extended techniques, especially in contemporary music, may necessitate its use.
Physical considerations[link]
Performing on bass can be physically demanding because the strings are large and thick. Also, the space between notes on the fingerboard is large due to the scale length and string spacing, so players have to shift positions frequently. The bass is usually discouraged for people with shorter arms and smaller hands due to the big note gaps and the thick strings. The increased use of playing techniques such as thumb position and modifications to the bass, such as the use of lighter-gauge strings at lower tension, have eased the difficulty of playing the instrument. Bass parts have relatively fewer fast passages, double stops, or large jumps in range. These parts are usually given to the cello section because it is a smaller instrument and are typically tuned together.
As with all non-fretted string instruments, performers must learn to place their fingers precisely to produce the correct pitch. The more frequent hand movement required by the instrument's size increases the likelihood of intonation errors. For bassists with smaller hands, the large spaces between pitches may present a significant challenge, especially in the lowest range, where the spaces between notes are largest.
Until the 1990s, child-sized double basses were not widely available, and the large size of the bass meant that children were not able to start playing the instrument until their hand size and height would allow them to play a 3/4-size model (the most commonly available size). Starting in the 1990s, smaller half, quarter, eighth and even sixteenth-sized instruments became more widely available, which meant that children could start at a younger age.
Volume[link]
Despite the size of the instrument, it is not as loud as many other instruments due to its low range. In a large orchestra, usually between four and eight bassists play in unison. In the largest orchestras, bass sections may have as many as ten or twelve players, but modern budget constraints make bass sections this large unusual.
When writing solo passages for the bass in orchestral or chamber music, composers typically ensure the orchestration is light so it doesn't obscure the bass. While amplification is rarely used in classical music, in some cases where a bass soloist performs a concerto with a full orchestra, subtle amplification called acoustic enhancement may be used. The use of microphones and amplifiers in a classical setting has led to debate within the classical community, as "...purists maintain that the natural acoustic sound of [Classical] voices [or] instruments in a given hall should not be altered."[14]
In many non-orchestral settings, such as jazz and blues, amplification via a specialized amplifier and loudspeakers is employed. Bluegrass and jazz players typically use less amplification than blues, psychobilly, or jam band players. In the latter cases, the high overall volume due to other amplifiers and instruments may lead to acoustic feedback, a problem exacerbated by the bass's large surface area and interior volume. The feedback problem has led to the development of instruments like the electric upright bass, whose playing characteristics mimic that of the double bass.
Transportation[link]
The double bass's large size and relative fragility make it cumbersome to handle and transport. Most bassists use soft cases, referred to as gig bags, to protect the instrument during transport. Basic, unpadded gig bags used by students cost under 100 USD, while thickly padded gig bags for professional players typically cost as much as 500 USD. Some more feature-filled examples with backpack straps retail for over 1000 USD. Some bassists carry their bow in a hard bow case. Players also may use a small cart or gig bag and end pin-attached wheels to move the bass.
Hard flight cases have cushioned interiors and tough exteriors of carbon fiber, graphite, fiberglass, or Kevlar. The cost of good hard cases—USD 500 to over USD 2500—tends to limit their use to touring professionals.
Classical repertoire[link]
Solo works for double bass[link]
1700s[link]
The double bass as a solo instrument enjoyed a period of popularity during the 18th century and many of the most popular composers from that era wrote pieces for the double bass. The double bass, then often referred to as the Violone used different tunings from region to region. The "Viennese tuning" (A1-D-F♯-A) was popular, and in some cases a fifth string or even sixth string was added (F1-A1-D-F♯-A).[15] The popularity of the instrument is documented in Leopold Mozart's second edition of his Violinschule, where he writes "One can bring forth difficult passages easier with the five-string violone, and I heard unusually beautiful performances of concertos, trios, solos, etc."
The earliest known concerto for double bass was written by Joseph Haydn ca.1763, and is presumed lost in a fire at the Eisenstadt library. The earliest known existing concertos are by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, who composed two concertos for the double bass and a Sinfonia Concertante for viola and double bass. Other composers that have written concertos from this period include Johann Baptist Vanhal, Franz Anton Hoffmeister (3 concertos), Leopold Kozeluch, Anton Zimmermann, Antonio Capuzzi, Wenzel Pichl (2 concertos), and Johannes Matthias Sperger (18 concertos). While many of these names were leading figures to the music public of their time, they are generally unknown by contemporary audiences. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's concert aria, Per Questa Bella Mano, K.612 for bass, double bass obbligato, and orchestra contains impressive writing for solo double bass of that period. It remains popular among both singers and double bassists today.
The double bass eventually evolved to fit the needs of orchestras that required lower notes and a louder sound. The leading double bassists from the mid-to-late 18th century, such as Josef Kämpfer, Friedrich Pischelberger, and Johannes Mathias Sperger employed the "Viennese" tuning. Bassist Johann Hindle (1792–1862), who composed a concerto for the double bass, pioneered tuning the bass in fourths, which marked a turning point for the double bass and its role in solo works. Bassist Domenico Dragonetti was a prominent musical figure and an acquaintance of Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. His playing was known all the way from his homeland Italy to the Tsardom of Russia and he found a prominent place performing in concerts with the Philharmonic Society of London.
Beethoven's friendship with Dragonetti may have inspired him to write difficult, separate parts for the double bass in his symphonies, such as the impressive passages in the third movement of the Fifth Symphony, the second movement of the Seventh Symphony, and last movement of the Ninth Symphony. These parts do not double the cello part. Dragonetti wrote ten concertos for the double bass and many solo works for bass and piano. During Rossini's stay in London in the summer of 1824, he composed his Duetto for cello and double bass for Dragonetti and the cellist David Salomons. Dragonetti frequently played on a three string double bass tuned G-D-A from top to bottom. The use of only the top three strings was popular for bass soloists and Principal bassists in orchestras in the 19th century, because it reduced the pressure on the wooden top of the bass, which was thought to create a more resonant sound. As well, the low "E" strings used during the 19th century were thick cords made of gut, which were difficult to tune and play.
1800s[link]
In the 19th century, the opera conductor, composer, and bassist Giovanni Bottesini was considered the "Paganini of the double bass" of his time. His compositions were written in the popular Italian opera style of the 19th century, which exploit the double bass in a way that was not seen beforehand. They require virtuosic runs and great leaps to the highest registers of the instrument, even into the realm of harmonics. These compositions were considered to be unplayable by many bassists in the early part of the 20th century, but are now frequently performed. During the same time, a prominent school of bass players in the Czech region arose, which included Franz Simandl, Theodore Albin Findeisen, Josef Hrabe, Ludwig Manoly, and Adolf Mišek. Simandl and Hrabe were also pedagogues whose method books and studies continue to be used in modern times.
1900s–present[link]
The leading figure of the double bass in the early 20th century was Serge Koussevitzky, best known as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who popularized the double bass in modern times as a solo instrument. Because of improvements to the double bass with steel strings and better set-ups, the bass is now played at a more advanced level than ever before and more and more composers have written works for the double bass. In the mid-century and in the following decades, many new concerti were written for the double bass, including Nikos Skalkottas's Concerto (1942), Eduard Tubin's Concerto (1948), Lars-Erik Larsson's Concertino (1957), Gunther Schuller's Concerto (1962), and Hans Werner Henze's Concerto (1966).
From the 1960s through the end of the century Gary Karr was the leading proponent of the double bass as a solo instrument and was active in commissioning or having hundreds of new works and concerti written especially for him. Karr was given Koussevitzky's famous solo double bass by Olga Koussevitsky and played it in concerts around the world for 40 years before, in turn, giving the instrument to the International Society of Bassists for talented soloists to use in concert. Another important performer in this period, Bertram Turetzky, commissioned and premiered more than 300 double bass works.
In the 1970s and 1980s, new concerti included Nino Rota's Divertimento for Double Bass and Orchestra (1973), Jean Françaix's Concerto (1975), Einojuhani Rautavaara's Angel Of Dusk (1980), Gian Carlo Menotti's Concerto (1983), Christopher Rouse's Concerto (1985), and Henry Brant's Ghost Nets (1988). In the first decade of the 21st century, new concerti include Kalevi Aho's Concerto (2005), John Harbison's Concerto for Bass Viol (2006), and André Previn's Double Concerto for violin, double bass, and orchestra (2007).
Reinhold Glière wrote an Intermezzo and Tarantella for double bass and piano, Op. 9, No. 1 and No. 2 and a Praeludium and Scherzo for double bass and piano, Op. 32 No.1 and No.2. Paul Hindemith wrote a rhythmically challenging Double Bass Sonata in 1949. In the Soviet Union, Mieczysław Weinberg wrote his Sonata No. 1 for double bass solo in 1971. Giacinto Scelsi wrote two double bass pieces called Nuits in 1972, and then in 1976, he wrote Maknongan, a piece for any low-voiced instrument, such as double bass, contrabassoon, or tuba. Vincent Persichetti wrote solo works—which he called "Parables"—for many instruments. He wrote Parable XVII for Double Bass, Op. 131 in 1974. Sofia Gubaidulina penned a Sonata for double bass and piano in 1975. In 1977 Dutch-Hungarian composer Geza Frid wrote a set of variations on The Elephant from Saint-Saëns' Le Carnaval des Animaux for scordatura Double Bass and string orchestra. In 1987 Lowell Liebermann wrote his Sonata for Contrabass and Piano Op.24. Fernando Grillo wrote the "Suite No.1" for double bass (1983/2005). Jacob Druckman wrote a piece for solo double bass entitled Valentine. US double bass soloist and composer Bertram Turetzky (born 1933) has performed and recorded more than 300 pieces written by and for him. He writes chamber music, baroque music, classical, jazz, renaissance music, improvisational music and world music
US minimalist composer Philip Glass wrote a prelude focused on the lower register that he scored for timpani and double bass. Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti, whose composing career spans from the 1930s to the first decade of the 21st century, wrote a solo work for bass in 1983 entitled Naked Angel Face per contrabbasso. Fellow Italian composer Franco Donatoni wrote a piece called Lem for contrabbasso in the same year. In 1989, French composer Pascal Dusapin (born 1955) wrote a solo piece called In et Out for double bass. In 1996, the Sorbonne-trained Lebanese composer Karim Haddad composed Ce qui dort dans l'ombre sacrée ("He who sleeps in the sacred shadows") for Radio France's Presence Festival. Renaud Garcia-Fons (born 1962) is a French double-bass player and composer, notable for drawing on jazz, folk, and Asian music for recordings of his pieces like Oriental Bass (1997). Two significant recent works written for solo bass include, Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms No.11 for double bass and electronic sounds and Elliott Carter's Figment III, for solo double bass. The German composer Gerhard Stäbler wrote Co-wie Kobalt (1989–90), "...a music for double bass solo and grand orchestra." Charles Wuorinen added several important works to the repertoire, Spinoff trio for double bass, violin and conga drums, and Trio for Bass Instruments doublebass, tuba and bass trombone, and in 2007 Synaxis for double bass, horn, oboe and clarinet with timpani and strings. The newest position in the repertoire is a suite "Seven Screen Shots" for double bass and piano (2005) by Ukrainian composer Alexander Shchetynsky with solo part that includes many unconventional methods of playing the double bass.
Chamber music with double bass[link]
Since there is no established instrumental ensemble that includes the double bass, its use in chamber music has not been as exhaustive as the literature for ensembles such as the string quartet or piano trio. Despite this, there is a substantial number of chamber works that incorporate the double bass in both small and large ensembles.
There is a small body of works written for piano quintet with the instrumentation of piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. The most famous is Franz Schubert's Piano Quintet in A major, known as "The Trout Quintet" for its set of variations in the fourth movement of Schubert's Die Forelle. Other works for this instrumentation written from roughly the same period include those by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, George Onslow, Jan Ladislav Dussek, Louise Farrenc, Ferdinand Ries, Franz Limmer, Johann Baptist Cramer, and Hermann Goetz. Later composers who wrote chamber works for this quintet include Ralph Vaughan Williams, Colin Matthews, Jon Deak, Frank Proto, and John Woolrich. Slightly larger sextets written for piano, string quartet, and double bass have been written by Felix Mendelssohn, Mikhail Glinka, Richard Wernick, and Charles Ives.
In the genre of string quintets, there are a few works for string quartet with double bass. Antonín Dvořák's String Quintet in G major, Op.77 and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Serenade in G major, K.525 ("Eine kleine Nachtmusik") are the most popular pieces in this repertoire, along with works by Darius Milhaud, Luigi Boccherini (3 quintets), Harold Shapero, and Paul Hindemith.
Slightly smaller string works with the double bass include six string sonatas by Gioachino Rossini, for two violins, cello, and double bass written at the age of twelve over the course of three days in 1804. These remain his most famous instrumental works and have also been adapted for wind quartet. Franz Anton Hoffmeister wrote four String Quartets for Solo Double Bass, Violin, Viola, and Cello in D Major.
Larger works that incorporate the double bass include Beethoven's Septet in E-flat major, Op.20, one of his most famous pieces during his lifetime, which consists of clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and bass. When the clarinetist Ferdinand Troyer commissioned a work from Franz Schubert for similar forces, he added one more violin for his Octet in F major, D.803. Paul Hindemith used the same instrumentation as Schubert for his own Octet. In the realm of even larger works, Mozart included the double bass in addition to 12 wind instruments for his "Gran Partita" Serenade, K.361 and Martinů used the double bass in his nonet for wind quintet, violin, viola, cello and double bass.
Other examples of chamber works that use the double bass in mixed ensembles include Serge Prokofiev's Quintet in G minor, Op.39 for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and double bass; Erwin Schulhoff's Concertino for flute/piccolo, viola, and double bass; Fred Lerdahl's Waltzes for violin, viola, cello, and double bass; Mohammed Fairouz's Litany for double bass and wind quartet; Mario Davidovsky's Festino for guitar, viola, cello, and double bass; and Iannis Xenakis's Morsima-Amorsima for piano, violin, cello, and double bass. There are also new music ensembles that utilize the double bass such as Time for Three and PROJECT Trio.
Orchestral passages and solos[link]
The double bass in the baroque and classical periods would typically double the cello part in orchestral passages. A notable exception would be Haydn, who composed solo passages for the double bass in his Symphonies No.6 Le Matin, No.7 Le midi, No.8 Le Soir, No. 31 Horn Signal, and No. 45 Farewell, but who otherwise would group the bass and cello parts together. Beethoven paved the way for separate double bass parts, which became more common in the romantic era. The scherzo and trio from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony are famous orchestral excerpts, as is the recitative at the beginning of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
While orchestral bass solos are somewhat rare, there are some notable examples. Johannes Brahms, whose father was a double bass player, wrote many difficult and prominent parts for the double bass in his symphonies. Richard Strauss assigned the double bass daring parts, and his symphonic poems and operas stretch the instrument to its limits. "The Elephant" from Camille Saint-Saëns' The Carnival of the Animals is a satirical portrait of the double bass, and American virtuoso Gary Karr made his televised debut playing "The Swan" (originally written for the cello) with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein. The third movement of Gustav Mahler's first symphony features a solo for the double bass that quotes the children's song Frere Jacques, transposed into a minor key. Sergei Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé Suite features a difficult and very high double bass solo in the "Romance" movement. Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra contains a prominent passage for the double bass section.
Double bass ensembles[link]
Ensembles made up entirely of double basses, though relatively rare, also exist, and several composers have written or arranged for such ensembles. Compositions for four double basses exist by Gunther Schuller, Jacob Druckman, James Tenney, Robert Ceely, Jan Alm, Bernhard Alt, Norman Ludwin, Frank Proto, Joseph Lauber, Erich Hartmann, Colin Brumby, Miloslav Gajdos and Theodore Albin Findeisen. Bertold Hummel wrote a Sinfonia piccola [2] for eight double basses. Larger ensemble works include Galina Ustvolskaya's Composition No. 2, "Dies Irae" (1973), for eight double basses, piano, and wooden cube, Jose Serebrier's George and Muriel (1986), for solo bass, double bass ensemble, and chorus, and Gerhard Samuel's What of my music! (1979), for soprano, percussion, and 30 double basses.
Active double bass ensembles include L'Orchestre de Contrebasses (6 members),[16] Bass Instinct (6 members),[17] Bassiona Amorosa (6 members),[18] the Chicago Bass Ensemble (4+ members),[19] The Bass Gang (4 members),[20] the London Double Bass Ensemble (6 members) founded by members of the Philharmonia Orchestra of London who produced the LP[21]Music Interludes by London Double Bass Ensemble on Bruton Music records, Brno Double Bass Orchestra (14 members) founded by the double bass professor at Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts and principal double bass player at Brno Philharmonic Orchestra - Miloslav Jelinek, and the ensembles of Ball State University (12 members), Shenandoah Conservatory, and the Hartt School of Music. The Amarillo Bass Base of Amarillo, Texas once featured 52 double bassists,[22][23] and The London Double Bass Sound, who have released a CD on Cala Records, have 10 players.[24]
In addition, the double bass sections of some orchestras perform as an ensemble, such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Wacker Consort.[25] There is an increasing number of published compositions and arrangements for double bass ensembles, and the International Society of Bassists regularly features double bass ensembles (both smaller ensembles as well as very large "mass bass" ensembles) at its conferences, and sponsors the biennial David Walter Composition Competition, which includes a division for double bass ensemble works.
Use in jazz[link]
See also: List of jazz bassists
Beginning around 1890, the early New Orleans jazz ensemble (which played a mixture of marches, ragtime, and Dixieland) was initially a marching band with a tuba or sousaphone (or occasionally bass saxophone) supplying the bass line. As the music moved into bars and brothels, the upright bass gradually replaced these wind instruments. Many early bassists doubled on both the brass bass and string bass, as the instruments were then often referred to. Bassists played "walking" bass lines—scale-based lines that outlined the harmony.
Because an unamplified upright bass is generally the quietest instrument in a jazz band, many players of the 1920s and 1930s used the slap style, slapping and pulling the strings so that they make a rhythmic "slap" sound against the fingerboard. The slap style cuts through the sound of a band better than simply plucking the strings, and allowed the bass to be more easily heard on early sound recordings, as the recording equipment of that time did not favor low frequencies.[26] For more about the slap style, see Modern playing styles, below.
Many upright bass players have contributed to the evolution of jazz. Examples include swing era players such as Jimmy Blanton, who played with Duke Ellington, and Oscar Pettiford, who pioneered the instrument's use in bebop. Paul Chambers (who worked with Miles Davis on the famous Kind of Blue album) achieved renown for being one of the first jazz bassists to play bebop solos with the bow. Terry Plumeri furthered the development of arco (bowed) solos, achieving horn-like technical freedom and a clear, vocal bowed tone, while Charlie Haden, best known for his work with Ornette Coleman, defined the role of the bass in Free Jazz.
A number of other bassists, such as Ray Brown, Slam Stewart and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, were central to the history of jazz. Notably, Charles Mingus was a highly regarded composer as well as a bassist noted for his technical virtuosity and powerful sound.[27] Scott LaFaro influenced a generation of musicians by liberating the bass from contrapuntal "walking" behind soloists instead favoring interactive, conversational melodies.[28]
While the electric bass guitar was used intermittently in jazz as early as 1951, beginning in the 1970s bassist Bob Cranshaw, playing with saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and fusion pioneers Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke began to commonly substitute the bass guitar for the upright bass. Apart from the jazz styles of jazz fusion and Latin-influenced jazz however, the upright bass is still the dominant bass instrument in jazz. The sound and tone of the plucked upright bass is distinct from that of the fretted bass guitar. The upright bass produces a different sound than the bass guitar, because its strings are not stopped by metal frets, instead having a continuous tonal range on the uninterrupted fingerboard. As well, bass guitars usually have a solid wood body, which means that their sound is produced by electronic amplification of the vibration of the strings, instead of the upright bass's acoustic reverberation.
Use in bluegrass and related genres[link]
The string bass is the most commonly used bass instrument in bluegrass music and is almost always plucked, though some modern bluegrass bassists have also used a bow. The bluegrass bassist is part of the rhythm section, and is responsible for keeping a steady beat, whether fast, slow, in 4/4 time, 2/4 or 3/4 time. The Engelhardt-Link (formerly Kay) brands of laminate basses have long been popular choices for bluegrass bassists. Most bluegrass bassists use the 3/4 size bass, but the full-size and 5/8 size basses are also used.
Early pre-bluegrass traditional music was often accompanied by the cello. The cellist Natalie Haas points out that in the US, you can find "...old photographs, and even old recordings, of American string bands with cello." However, "The cello dropped out of sight in folk music, and became associated with the orchestra."[29] The cello did not reappear in bluegrass until the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. Some contemporary bluegrass bands favor the electric bass, because it is easier to transport than the large and somewhat fragile upright bass. However, the bass guitar has a different musical sound. Many musicians feel the slower attack and percussive, woody tone of the upright bass gives it a more "earthy" or "natural" sound than an electric bass, particularly when gut strings are used.
Common rhythms in bluegrass bass playing involve (with some exceptions) plucking on beats 1 and 3 in 4/4 time; beats 1 and 2 in 2/4 time, and on the downbeat in 3/4 time (waltz time). Bluegrass bass lines are usually simple, typically staying on the root and fifth of each chord throughout most of a song. There are two main exceptions to this rule. Bluegrass bassists often do a diatonic walkup or walkdown, in which they play every beat of a bar for one or two bars, typically when there is a chord change. In addition, if a bass player is given a solo, they may play a walking bass line with a note on every beat or play a pentatonic scale-influenced bassline.
An early bluegrass bassist to rise to prominence was Howard Watts (also known as Cedric Rainwater), who played with Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys beginning in 1944.[30] The classical bassist Edgar Meyer has frequently branched out into newgrass, old-time, jazz, and other genres. "My all-time favorite is Todd Phillips," proclaimed Union Station bassist Barry Bales in April 2005. "He brought a completely different way of thinking about and playing bluegrass."
An upright bass was the standard bass instrument in traditional country western music. While the upright bass is still occasionally used in country music, the electric bass has largely replaced its bigger cousin in country music, especially in the more pop-infused country styles of the 1990s and 2000s, such as new country.
Slap-style bass[link]
Slap-style bass is sometimes used in bluegrass bass playing. When bluegrass bass players slap the string by pulling it until it hits the fingerboard or hit the strings against the fingerboard, it adds the high-pitched percussive "clack" or "slap" sound to the low-pitched bass notes, sounding much like the clacks of a tap dancer. Slapping is a subject of minor controversy in the bluegrass scene. Even slapping experts such as Mike Bub say, "Don't slap on every gig," or in songs where it is not appropriate. As well, bluegrass bassists who play slap-style on live shows often slap less on records. Bub and his mentor Jerry McCoury rarely do slap bass on recordings. While bassists such as Jack Cook slap bass on the occasional faster "Clinch Mountain Boys song," bassists such as Gene Libbea, Missy Raines, Jenny Keel, and Barry Bales [rarely] slap bass.[31]
Bluegrass bassist Mark Schatz, who teaches slap bass in his Intermediate Bluegrass Bass DVD acknowledges that slap bass "...has not been stylistically very predominant in the music I have recorded." He notes that "Even in traditional bluegrass slap bass only appears sporadically and most of what I've done has been on the more contemporary side of that (Tony Rice, Tim O'Brien)." Schatz states that he would be "... more likely to use it [slap] in a live situation than on a recording—for a solo or to punctuate a particular place in a song or tune where I wouldn't be obliterating someone's solo."[32] Another bluegrass method, Learn to Play Bluegrass Bass, by Earl Gately, also teaches bluegrass slap bass technique.
Use in popular music[link]
In 1952, the upright bass was a standard instrument in rock and roll music, Marshall Lytle of Bill Haley & His Comets being but one example. In the 1940s, a new style of dance music called rhythm and blues developed, incorporating elements of the earlier styles of blues and swing. Louis Jordan, the first innovator of this style, featured an upright bass in his group, the Tympany Five.[33] The upright bass remained an integral part of pop lineups throughout the 1950s, as the new genre of rock and roll was built largely upon the model of rhythm and blues, with strong elements also derived from jazz, country, and bluegrass. However, upright bass players using their instruments in these contexts faced inherent problems. They were forced to compete with louder horn instruments (and later amplified electric guitars), making bass parts difficult to hear. The upright bass is difficult to amplify in loud concert venue settings, because it can be prone to feedback howls. The upright bass is large and awkward to transport, which also created transportation problems for touring bands. In some groups, the slap bass was utilized as band percussion in lieu of a drummer; such was the case with Bill Haley & His Saddlemen (the forerunner group to the Comets), which did not use drummers on recordings and live performances until late 1952; prior to this the slap bass was relied on for percussion, including on recordings such as Haley's versions of Rock the Joint and Rocket 88.[34]
In 1951, Leo Fender independently released his Precision Bass, the first commercially successful electric bass guitar.[35] The electric bass was easily amplified with its built-in pickups, easily portable (less than a foot longer than an electric guitar), and easier to play in tune, thanks to the metal frets. In the 1960s and 1970s bands were playing at louder volumes and performing in larger venues. The electric bass was able to provide the huge, highly amplified stadium-filling bass tone that the pop and rock music of this era demanded, and the upright bass receded from the limelight of the popular music scene.
The upright bass began making a modest comeback in popular music in the mid-1980s, in part due to a renewed interest in earlier forms of rock and country music. In the 1990s, improvements in pickups and amplifier designs for electro-acoustic horizontal and upright basses made it easier for bassists to get a good, clear amplified tone from an acoustic instrument. Some popular bands decided to anchor their sound with an upright bass instead of an electric bass. A trend for "unplugged" performances further helped to enhance the public's interest in the upright bass and acoustic bass guitars.
Peter Steele, bassist/vocalist for the gothic metal band Type O Negative, was renowned for occasionally playing an upright bass held like a guitar. This feat was made possible only by his considerable height (6'8").
The upright bass is also favored over the electric bass guitar in many rockabilly and psychobilly bands. In such bands the bassist often plays with great showmanship, using slapping technique, sometimes spinning the bass around or even physically climbing onto the instrument while performing; this style was pioneered c. 1953 by Marshall Lytle, the bassist for Bill Haley & His Comets,[36] and modern performers of such stunts include Lee Rocker of the Stray Cats, Phil Bloomberg of The Polecats, Scott Owen from The Living End and Jimbo Wallace from The Reverend Horton Heat. Primus's Les Claypool used an upright bass for the song Mr. Krinkle, from Pork Soda, and for the song Over the Falls, from the Brown Album.
Athol Guy of the Australian folk/pop group The Seekers plays an upright bass. Shannon Burchell, of the Australian folk-rock group The John Butler Trio,[37] makes extensive use of upright basses, performing extended live solos in songs such as Betterman. On the 2008 album In Ear Park by the indie/pop band Department of Eagles, a bowed upright bass is featured quite prominently on the songs Teenagers and In Ear Park. Norwegian ompa-rock band Kaizers Orchestra use the upright bass exclusively both live and on their recordings.[38]
Hank Williams III's bass players (Joe Buck and Zach Shedd, most notably) have used upright basses for recording as well as during the country and Hellbilly sets of Hank III's live performances before switching to electric bass for the Assjack set.
Modern playing styles[link]
In popular music genres, the instrument is usually played with amplification and almost exclusively played with the fingers, pizzicato style. The pizzicato style varies between different players and genres. Some players perform with the sides of one, two, or three fingers, especially for walking basslines and slow tempo ballads, because this is purported to create a stronger and more solid tone. Some players use the more nimble tips of the fingers to play fast-moving solo passages or to pluck lightly for quiet tunes.The use of amplification allows the player to have more control over the tone of the instrument, because amplifiers have equalization controls that allow the bassist to accentuate certain frequencies (often the bass frequencies) while de-accentuating some frequencies (often the high frequencies, so that there is less finger noise).
An unamplified acoustic bass's tone is limited by the frequency responsiveness of the instrument's hollow body, which means that the very low pitches may not be as loud as the higher pitches. With an amplifier and equalization devices, a bass player can boost the low frequencies, which evens out the frequency response. In addition, the use of an amplifier can increase the sustain of the instrument, which is particularly useful for accompaniment during ballads and for melodic solos with held notes.
In traditional jazz, swing, polka, rockabilly, and psychobilly music, it is sometimes played in the slap style. This is a vigorous version of pizzicato where the strings are "slapped" against the fingerboard between the main notes of the bass line, producing a snare drum-like percussive sound. The main notes are either played normally or by pulling the string away from the fingerboard and releasing it so that it bounces off the fingerboard, producing a distinctive percussive attack in addition to the expected pitch. Notable slap style bass players, whose use of the technique was often highly syncopated and virtuosic, sometimes interpolated two, three, four, or more slaps in between notes of the bass line.
"Slap style" may have influenced electric bass guitar players who, from the mid-sixties (particularly Larry Graham of Sly and the Family Stone), developed a technique called slap and pop that used the thumb of the plucking hand to hit the string, making a slapping sound but still letting the note ring, and the index or middle finger of the plucking hand to pull the string back so it hits the fretboard, achieving the pop sound described above.
Double bassists[link]
Historical[link]
- Domenico Dragonetti (1763–1846) Virtuoso, composer, conductor
- Giovanni Bottesini (1821–1889) Virtuoso, composer, conductor
- Franz Simandl (1840–1912) Virtuoso, composer, pedagogue
- Edouard Nanny (1872–1943) Virtuoso, composer
- Serge Koussevitzky (1874–1951) Virtuoso, composer, conductor
Contemporary (1900s–present)[link]
Classical[link]
Some of the most influential contemporary classical double bass players are known as much for their contributions to pedagogy as for their performing skills, such as US bassist Oscar G. Zimmerman (1910–1987), known for his teaching at the Eastman School of Music and, for 44 summers at the Interlochen National Music Camp in Michigan and French bassist François Rabbath (b. 1931) who developed a new bass method that divided the entire fingerboard into six positions. Bassists noted for their virtuoso solo skills include Canadian player Gary Karr (b. 1941), Finnish composer Teppo Hauta-Aho (b. 1941), Italian composer Fernando Grillo, and US player-composer Edgar Meyer. For a longer list, see the List of contemporary classical double bass players.
Jazz[link]
Notable jazz bassists from the 1940s to the 1950s included bassist Jimmy Blanton (1918–1942) whose short tenure in the Duke Ellington Swing band (cut short by his death from tuberculosis) introduced new melodic and harmonic solo ideas for the instrument; bassist Ray Brown (1926–2002), known for backing Beboppers Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, and forming the Modern Jazz Quartet; hard bop bassist Ron Carter (born 1937), who has appeared on 3,500 albums make him one of the most-recorded bassists in jazz history, including LPs by Thelonious Monk and Wes Montgomery and many Blue Note Records artists; and Paul Chambers (1935–1969), a member of the Miles Davis Quintet (including the landmark modal jazz recording Kind of Blue) and many other 1950s and 1960s rhythm sections, was known for his virtuosic improvisations.
In the experimental post 1960s eras, which saw the development of free jazz and jazz-rock fusion, some of the influential bassists included Charles Mingus (1922–1979), who was also a composer and bandleader whose music fused hard bop with black gospel music, free jazz and classical music; free jazz and post-bop bassist Charlie Haden (born 1937) is best known for his long association with saxophonist Ornette Coleman and for his role in the 1970s-era Liberation Music Orchestra, an experimental group; Eddie Gomez and George Mraz, who played with Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson, respectively, and are both acknowledged to have furthered expectations of pizzicato fluency and melodic phrasing, fusion virtuoso Stanley Clarke (born 1951) is notable for his dexterity on both the upright bass and the electric bass, and Terry Plumeri, noted for his horn-like arco fluency and vocal tone. In the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, one of the new "young lions" was Christian McBride (born 1972), who has performed with a range of veterans ranging from McCoy Tyner to fusion gurus Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, and who has released albums such as 2003's Vertical Vision. Another young bassist of note is Esperanza Spalding (born 1984) who, at 27 years of age, already won a Grammy for Best New Artist. For a longer list, see the List of jazz bassists, which includes both double bass and electric bass players.
Other popular genres[link]
File:Scottowen-London2007.jpg
Scott Owen, double bass player for Australian rock band The Living End .
In addition to being a noted classical player, Edgar Meyer is well known in bluegrass and newgrass circles. Todd Phillips is another prominent bluegrass player. Well-known rockabilly bassists include Bill Black, Marshall Lytle (with Bill Haley & His Comets) and Lee Rocker (with 1980s-era rockabilly revivalists the Stray Cats). Notable rockabilly revivalists and psychobilly performers from the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century include Scott Owen (from the Australian band The Living End), Jimbo Wallace (from the US band Reverend Horton Heat), Kim Nekroman (Nekromantix), Patricia Day (HorrorPops), Geoff Kresge (Tiger Army, ex-AFI). Willie Dixon (1915–1992) was one of the most notable figures in the history of rhythm and blues. In addition to being an upright bassist, he wrote dozens of R&B hits and worked as a producer. He also plays bass on numerous Chuck Berry's rock and roll hits. Many other rockabilly bands like El Rio Trio (from the Netherlands) also use this instrument in their work.
Pedagogy and training[link]
The pedagogy and training for the double bass varies widely by genre and country. Classical double bass has a history of pedagogy dating back several centuries, including teaching manuals, studies, and progressive exercises that help students to develop the endurance and accuracy of the left hand, and control for the bowing hand. Classical training methods vary by country: many of the major European countries are associated with specific methods (e.g., the Edouard Nanny method in France or the Franz Simandl method in Germany). In classical training, the majority of the instruction for the right hand focuses on the production of bowing tone; little time is spent studying the varieties of pizzicato tone.
In contrast, in genres that mainly or exclusively use pizzicato (plucking), such as jazz and blues, a great deal of time and effort is focused on learning the varieties of different pizzicato styles used for music of different styles of tempi. For example, in jazz, aspiring bassists have to learn how to perform a wide range of pizzicato tones, including using the sides of the fingers to create a full, deep sound for ballads, using the tips of the fingers for fast walking basslines or solos, and performing a variety of percussive ghost notes by raking muted or partially muted strings.
Formal training[link]
Of all of the genres, classical and jazz have the most established and comprehensive systems of instruction and training. In the classical milieu, children can begin taking private lessons on the instrument and performing in children's or youth orchestras. Teens who aspire to becoming professional classical bassists can continue their studies in a variety of formal training settings, including colleges, conservatories, and universities. Colleges offer certificates and diplomas in bass performance.
Conservatories, which are the standard musical training system in France and in Quebec (Canada) provide lessons and amateur orchestral experience for double bass players. Universities offer a range of double bass programs, including Bachelor's degrees, Master of Music degrees, and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees. As well, there are a variety of other training programs such as classical summer camps and orchestral, opera, or chamber music training festivals, which give students the opportunity to play a wide range of music.
Bachelor's degrees in bass performance (referred to as B.Mus. or B.M) are four-year programs that include individual bass lessons, amateur orchestra experience, and a sequence of courses in music history, music theory, and liberal arts courses (e.g., English literature), which give the student a more well-rounded education. Usually, bass performance students perform several recitals of solo double bass music, such as concertos, sonatas, and Baroque suites.
Master of music degrees in double bass performance consist of private lessons, ensemble experience, coaching in playing orchestral double bass parts, and graduate courses in music history and music theory, along with one or two solo recitals. A Master's degree in music (referred to as an M.Mus. or M.M.) is often a required credential for people who wish to become a professor of double bass at a university or conservatory.
Doctor of Musical Arts (referred to as D.M.A., DMA, D.Mus.A. or A.Mus.D) degrees in double bass performance provide an opportunity for advanced study at the highest artistic and pedagogical level, requiring usually an additional 54+ credit hours beyond a Master's degree (which is about 30+ credits beyond a Bachelor's degree). For this reason, admission to candidacy is highly selective. Examinations in music history, music theory, ear training/dictation, plus an entrance examination/recital, are required to enter such a program of study. A number of recitals (around six), including a lecture-recital for which an accompanying doctoral dissertation is submitted, advanced coursework and a minimum B average are other typical requirements of a D.M.A program.
Throughout the early history of jazz, double bass players either learned the instrument informally, or from getting classical training early on, as in the case of Ron Carter and Charles Mingus. In the 1980s and 1990s, colleges and universities began to introduce diplomas and degrees in jazz performance. Students in jazz diploma or Bachelor of Music programs take individual bass lessons, get experience in small jazz combos with coaching from an experienced player, and play in jazz big bands. As with classical training programs, jazz programs also include classroom courses in music history and music theory. In a jazz program, these courses focus on the different eras of jazz history. such as Swing, Bebop, and fusion. The theory courses focus on the musical skills used in jazz improvisation and in jazz comping (accompanying) and the composition of jazz tunes. There are also jazz summer camps and training festivals/seminars, which offer students the chance to learn new skills and styles.
Informal training[link]
In other genres, such as blues, rockabilly, and psychobilly, the pedagogical systems and training sequences are not as formalized and institutionalized. There are not degrees in blues bass performance, or conservatories offering multiple-year diplomas in rockabilly bass. However, there are a range of books, playing methods, and, since the 1990s, instructional DVDs (e.g., on how to play rockabilly-style slap bass). As such, performers in these other genres tend to come from a variety of routes, including informal learning by using bass method books or DVDs, taking private lessons and coaching, and learning from records and CDs. In some cases, blues or rockabilly bassists may have obtained some initial training through the classical or jazz pedagogy systems (e.g., youth orchestra or high school big band). In genres such as tango, which use a lot of bowed passages and jazz-style pizzicato lines. the bassists tend to come from classical or jazz training routes.
Careers[link]
Careers in double bass vary widely by genre and by region or country. Most bassists earn their living from a mixture of performance and teaching jobs. The first step to getting most performance jobs is by playing at an audition. In some styles of music, such as jazz-oriented stage bands, bassists may be asked to sight read printed music or perform standard pieces (e.g., a jazz standard such as Now's the Time) with an ensemble. Similarly, in a rock or blues band, auditionees may be asked to play various rock or blues standards. An upright bassist auditioning for a blues band might be asked to play in a Swing-style walking bassline, a rockabilly-style "slapping" bassline (in which the strings are percussively struck against the fingerboard) and a 1950s ballad with long held notes. A person auditioning for a role as a bassist in some styles of pop or rock music may be expected to be able to demonstrate the ability to perform harmony vocals as a backup singer.
In classical music, bassists audition for playing jobs in orchestras and for admission into university or Conservatory programs or degrees. At a classical bass audition, the performer typically plays a movement from a Bach suite or a movement from a bass concerto and a variety of excerpts from the orchestral literature. Orchestral bass auditions are typically held in front of a panel that includes the conductor, the Concertmaster, the Principal bass player and possibly other principal players such as the Principal cellist. The most promising candidates are invited to return for a second or third round of auditions, which allows the conductor and the panel to compare the best candidates. Performers may be asked to sight read orchestral music. The final stage of the audition process in some orchestras is a test week, in which the performer plays with the orchestra for a week or two, which allows the conductor and principal players to see if the individual can function well in an actual performance setting.
Performance jobs include playing as a freelancer in small groups, large ensembles, or performing solo music, either live onstage or as a session player for radio or TV broadcasts or for recordings; and working as the employee of an orchestra, big band, or recording studio (as the studio's house bassist). Many bass players find extra work by substituting ("subbing") for bassists who are double-booked or ill. It is hard for bass players to be able to find full-time, full-year work at a single job. About the closest that a bass player can come to this is in the case of classical bass players who win an audition at a professional orchestra or the tiny number of top session pros that are hired by recording studios. Even full-time orchestra jobs do not usually last for the entire year. When the orchestra stops playing (which is often in the summer), orchestral bassists have to find other work, either as a teacher or coach, or in another group.
Teaching work for double bassist includes giving private lessons in the home or at colleges and universities; coaching bass players who are preparing for recordings or auditions; doing group coaching at music camps or for youth ensembles; and working as a high school music teacher.
In jazz, blues, rockabilly and other genres, most bassists cannot earn a living from playing in a single group (with the exception of the small number of bassists in top touring bands or groups with recording contracts), so they work in different bands and supplement their income with session playing and teaching. Due to the limited number of full-time orchestral jobs, many classical bassists are similarly not able to find full-time work with a single orchestra. Some bassists increase their employ-ability by learning several different styles, such as classical and jazz or rockabilly and bluegrass.
In some cases, bassists supplement their performing and teaching income with other related music jobs, such as working as a bass repairer (luthier); as a contractor who hires musicians for orchestras or big bands, composing music (e.g., Dave Holland), songwriting, conducting (e.g., David Currie) or acting as a bandleader (e.g., Charles Mingus). In some regions there may not be enough work in music to make a living, even if a bassist can play several styles and he or she does recordings and teaching. As such, in some regions, bassists may have to supplement their musical work with income from another field outside of music.
See also[link]
- Electric upright bass
- List of jazz bassists
- List of historical classical double bass players
- List of contemporary classical double bass players
- List of double bass concerti
- Octobass
- Piccolo bass
- Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suites Performed on Double Bass
- International Society of Bassists
- Bazantar
- Cello, the second largest bowed string instrument
References[link]
- ^ The Orchestra: A User's Manual, Andrew Hugill with the Philharmonia Orchestra
- ^ Chamber Music in the Vienna Double Bass Archive, Alfred Planyavsky
- ^ Double Bass Sizing FAQ, Bob Gollihur
- ^ The Double Bass, Jacob Head
- ^ Planyavsky 1998
- ^ A New History of the Double Bass, Paul Brun
- ^ a b A Brief History of the Double Bass, Lawrence Hurst, Professor of Double Bass, School of Music, Indiana University
- ^ Strings, standing waves and harmonics, Prof. Joe Wolfe, University of New South Wales
- ^ Article on bass strings by the Double Bass Workshop
- ^ Jeff Sarli
- ^ [1]
- ^ Bill Bentgen – 5 String Basses
- ^ A few works in the orchestral repertoire call for a low B, including Respighi's The Pines of Rome
- ^ Sound Systems- Why?!
- ^ David Chapman. "Historical and Practical Considerations for the Tuning of Double Bass Instruments in Fourths" - p.228-229, The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 56, (Jun., 2003), pp. 224–233.
- ^ [http://www.musicaguild.com/odbc/index.php?page=9&langue=anglais Official website of L'Orchestre de Contrebasses
- ^ LOVEFiLM.com: Bass Instinct – Live In Vienna by none on DVD
- ^ www.bassiona-amorosa.de
- ^ Chicago Bass Ensemble – Home
- ^ The Bass Gang, The Bass Gang, The Bass Gang, The Bass Gang, The Bass Gang,The Bass Gang
- ^ Music Interludes
- ^ http://home.mchsi.com/~donovan.stokes/volumeone.html
- ^ http://www.bassgirls.com/bass_wyrickinez.htm
- ^ Amazon.com: The London Double Bass Sound: Gary Karr, Ernest Bloch, Paul Desmond, Edward "Duke" Ellington, Jerome Kern, John & Paul McCartney Lennon, Niccolo Paganini, Cole Por...
- ^ Wacker Consort and Northwestern Music Faculty to Perform, NewsCenter, Northwestern University
- ^ Historic Jazz Fotos
- ^ Nat Hentoff, Gadfly Online, April 1999, http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/April99/archive-mingus.html, retrieved 3 November 2009.
- ^ Jazz Improv Magazine, http://www.jazzimprov.com/links/legends.cfm?legend_id=12, retrieved 3 November 2009. Scott Yanow, AllMusic Guide, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/p95770 retrieved 3 November 2009.
- ^ Looming Large: What's a cello got to do with a famous fiddler's tale? By Natalie Haas. Available at: http://www.allthingsstrings.com/article/default.aspx?articleid=21495
- ^ Howard "Cedric Rainwater" Watts, Stewart Evans
- ^ iBluegrass.com Article: The Low End February-02-2001 ©2001 iBluegrass.com. All rights reserved. By Kip Martin http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:opbTh79jK-8J:www.ibluegrass.com/vi_posting3.CFM%3Fp__i%3D1004%26p__r%3D%26p__a%3Dbass+bluegrass+%22slap+bass%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2
- ^ http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:0bSxq7Zh3tYJ:www.rockabillybass.com/markschatz.htm+bluegrass+%22slap+bass%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1
- ^ Dallas Bartley – Small town Boy: Playing in the bands, Special Collections and Archives Department, Missouri State University
- ^ BBC Radio 2, Just Keep on Rockin' , broadcast 17 April 2004. On this radio documentary, host Suzi Quatro expresses disbelief that no drums were played on the recording of Rock the Joint.
- ^ The Electric Guitar: How We Got From Andrés Segovia To Kurt Cobain, Monica M. Smith
- ^ Marshall Lytle: Granddaddy of the Doghouse, Rod Glaze
- ^ "In Australia, the John Butler Trio has established itself as one of the most successful independent acts in recent history. Their U.S. debut, Sunrise Over Sea, features gritty and soulful vocals, elements of hip-hop and Appalachian folk."http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4814948
- ^ Kaizers Orchestra official web page
External links[link]
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
Bertram Turetzky (b. February 14, 1933) is a contemporary American double bass (contrabass) soloist, teacher, and author of The Contemporary Contrabass (1974, 1989), a book that looked at a number of new and interesting ways of playing the double bass including featuring it as a solo performance vehicle with no other instrumental accompaniment.
Turetzky has performed and recorded more than 300 pieces written by and for him. He is a composer whose music has achieved some prominence, as have his interpretations of early music and composers like Domenico Dragonetti. Music critic Michael Steinberg has praised his continuo playing. Turetzky has appeared as a featured soloist in the major music centers of the world and is the most widely recorded solo doublebass player with seven albums on Advance, Ars Nova, Nonesuch, Takoma, Desto and Finnadar music labels.[1]
Turetzky is a versatile musician, conversant in chamber music, baroque music, classical, jazz, renaissance music, improvisational music and many different genres of world music. He has also developed a special affinity for klezmer music.
In addition to The Contemporary Contrabass, Turetzky has co-edited a book series called The New Instrumentation; seven of a planned eight volumes have been finished. Turetzky wrote an introduction to The Autobiography of Pops Foster: New Orleans Jazz Man which spoke to the early development of jazz bass playing.
Bernard Jacobson of the Chicago Daily News described Turestzky as "a virtuoso of caliber unsurpassed by any other practitioner of his instrument today."[1]
Contents |
Biography[link]
Turetzky was born in Norwich, Connecticut, United States, and grew up there. He received a masters degree in music history from the University of Hartford. In his youth, he was drawn to classic jazz music, playing professionally in that style at his first performances. His aspiration to be a jazz player was encouraged by many of the older swing stars. Turetzky continues to play classic jazz, and appears regularly at jazz festivals.
Turetzky first recorded in 1964, featuring the work of American composers George Perle, Edgard Varèse, Donald Martino, Kenneth Gabburo, Ben Johnston, and an early instrument and tape piece by Charles Whittenburg. Recording activities continued with records on labels Nonesuch, Son Nova, Ars Antigua, and Desto. He has worked with Charles Mingus, and has made a series of recent recordings on the Nine Winds label with improvisational musicians George Lewis, Vinny Golia, Wadada Leo Smith, Mike Wofford and others.
Turetzky is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.[1] His former students include bass virtuosos Mark Dresser and Karl E. H. Seigfried; Dresser now holds Turetzky's former UCSD faculty position, while Seigfried is working with Turetzky on the latter's autobiography.
He is married to flutist Nancy Turetzky, and they have two sons and a daughter, and live in Del Mar, California.
He also plays the guitar, piano, and banjo.
Selected discography[link]
- Recording (solo LP), Bertram Turetzky, "Contrabassist," in a Recital of New Music, Advance FGR-1, 1964.
- Recording (solo LP), Bertram Turetzky, The Virtuoso Double Bass, Medea Records, 1966.
- Recording, Music by Donald Erb, In No Strange Land, Nonesuch Records, 1968.
- Recording (solo LP), Bertram Turetzky, The New World of Sound, Ars Nova, 1969.
- Recording (solo LP), Bertram Turetzky, The Contemporary Contrabass, Music of John Cage, Ben Johnson, and Pauline Oliveros, Nonesuch Records, 1969-70.
- Recording, Five Poems for Narrator and 8 Instruments, by Netty Simons, CRI Records, 1973.
- Recording, Gorge, by Phil Winsor, at Mills College, Oakland, funded by a Ford Foundation Grant, 1973.
- Recording, Dragonetti Lives, Takoma Records, 1975.
- Recording, Strings, Standard School Broadcast: Music Makers, Chevron Research Company, 1975.
- Recording, Spectra, by Feiciano, CRI, 1975.
- Recording, Witold Szalonek Symphonia Concertante, solo contrabass and orchestra, Polska Musykna, 1975.
- Recording, Found Objects II, by Arthur Custer, Serenus, 1976.
- Recording (solo LP), Music by Donald Erb, J.M Mestres-Quadreny, Will Ogden, Netty Simons, Desto DC7128, 1976.
- Recording, Tree Music (principal soloist), Logs and Logs XVI, by Paul Chihara, CRI SD 269, 1976.
- Recording (solo LP), The Contemporary Contrabass, Nonesuch, 1976.
- Recording (solo LP), New Music for Contrabass, compositions by Charles Mingus, Boguslaw Schaffer, Joseph Julian, Bertram Turetzky and Donald Erb, Finnadar SR 9105, 1976.
- Recording, Piece for Four, by Olly Wilson, CRI SD 264, 1976.
- Recording, Trio for Two, by Donald Erb, and Points-Lines-Circles, by Dorrance Stalvey, ARS NOVA AN-1008, 1976.
- Recording, Modules, by Richard Moryl, Serenus, 1976.
- Recording, Inflections I, by Robert Hall Lewis (for solo contrabass), on New Music for Virtuoso/2, New World Records, Recorded Anthology of American Music, Inc., NW 254 Stereo, recorded December 4, 1977, released November 1978.
- Recording for ABC, Works by Hoffman, Turetzky, Mingus, and McCartney-Lennon, Sydney, AUSTRALIA, August 5, 1978.
- Recording for ABC, with Nancy Turetzky, recorded live, NSW Conservatorium, Sydney, AUSTRALIA, August 7, 1978.
- Recording for ABC, Concerto for Bass and Jazz Band, by Donald Hannah, Brian May, Conductor, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA, August 8, 1978.
- Recording, Playback, by Barry Cunyngham, The University of Melbourne, for Move Records, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA, August 9, 1978.
- Recording, Trio for Violin, Contrabass & Piano, by Leonid Hrabovsky, on 20th Century Ukrainian Violin Music 1987 cassette recording CYFP 2032 by Yevshan Corporation, Canada, Library of Congress Card no. 78-7509959 (first recorded in 1964, 1975 on ORION-ORS 79331), First western recording of music by Ukrainian composer Leonid Hrabovsky, recorded September 1978, released June 1979.
- Recording, Celestial Variations on Charles Ives' Serenity (1919), performed by Turetzky on 16-track tape, summer 1979. (Funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Grant), 1979.
- Recording, A Different View, Turetzky (solo contrabass). Turetzky, contrabass, LP, Folkways Records, New York City, 1982.
- Recording, Turetzky Featured Soloist in Phil Winsor's Gorge, written for Turetzky, Brewster Records, 1982.
- Recording, Turetzky settings and performance of selections from Sherley Anne Williams, Some Sweet Angel Chile, Blues Economique Records, September 25, 1984.
- Recording, Turetzky settings and performance of Jerome Rothenberg's, Poland 1931 and Dada Suite, Blues Economique Records, September 25, 1984.
- CD, Intersections, Bertram Turetzky and Vinny Golia, 9 Winds Label, NWCD0129 DDD, 1990.
- CD recording of San Diego Symphony Ensemble performing Roger Reynolds' Whispers Out of Time and Transfigured Wind, New World Records, 1990.
- CD, Ricercar a' 3, by Robert Erickson for solo contrabass, for CRI Records, November 1991.
- CD recording of Stuart Saunders Smith's' Notebook on CD titled Crux, O.O. Discs, USA, 1992.
- Recording, Second Avenue Klezmer Ensemble, Traditions and Transitions Second Avenue Productions, San Diego, 1992.
- CD recording of Stuart Saunders Smith's' Notebook on CD titled Crux, O.O. Discs, USA, 1992.
- CD recording of SONOR Ensemble of the University of California, San Diego, CRI CD 652, 1993.
- CD recording Compositions and Improvisations by Bertram Turetzky, Studio 101, 9 Winds Records, 1993.
- CD recording of Turetzky's Pacific Parable, winner of San Diego Music Award, Studio 101, Orphan Records, June 24, 1993.
- CD recording, Ais by Iannis Xenakis, Neuma Records, 1994.
- CD recording, Inflections I by Robert Hall Lewis, New World Records 80541-2, 1998.
- CD recording, Logs by Paul Chihara, CRI CD 815, 1999.
- CD recording, Three Pieces for Double Bass Alone, by Donald Erb, on CD titled Suddenly It's Evening, CRI CD 857, 1999.
Bibliography[link]
- Book, The Contemporary Contrabass, by Bertram Turetzky. The New Instrumentation, Vol. I, co-edited by Turetzky and Barney Childs, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1974.
- Book, The Avant Garde Flute by Thomas Howell. The New Instrumentation, Vol. II, co-edited by Turetzky and Barney Childs, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1975.
- Book, The Modern Trombone by Stuart Dempster, The New Instrumentation, Vol. III, co-edited by Turetzky and Barney Childs, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1975.
- Book, New Directions for Clarinet by Philip Rehfeldt. The New Instrumentation, Vol. IV, co-edited by Turetzky and Barney Childs, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1976.
- Book, The Contemporary Guitar, by John Schneider. The New Instrumentation, Vol. V, co-edited by Turetzky and Barney Childs, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1982.
- Book, Writing for Pedal Harp, by Lou Anne Neil. The New Instrumentation, Vol. VI, co-edited by Turetzky and Barney Childs, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1985.
- Book, The Contemporary Contrabass, by Bertram Turetzky. The New Instrumentation, Vol. VII, co-edited by Turetzky and Barney Childs, Berkeley: The University of California Press, Second Edition, Revised, 1989.
Notes and references[link]
- Applebaum, Samuel. The Way they Play, Paganiniana Publications, 1984.
- Anderson, E. Ruth. Contemporary American composers. A biographical dictionary, Second edition, G. K. Hall, 1982.
- Larkin, Colin. The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Guinness Publishing, 1992.
- Press, Jaques Cattell (Ed.). Who's who in American Music. Classical, First edition. R. R. Bowker, New York 1983.
- Sadie, Stanley; Hitchcock, H. Wiley (Ed.). The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1986.
External links[link]
- [1] from UCSD site
Interviews[link]
- Bertram Turetzky interview by Bruce Duffie
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Turetzky, Bertram |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | February 14, 1933 |
| Place of birth | |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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Wiki Summary
The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, bass fiddle, bass violin, doghouse bass, contrabass, bass viol, or stand-up bass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2 (see standard tuning). The double bass is a standard member of the string section of the symphony orchestra and smaller string ensembles in Western classical music. In addition, it is used in other genres such as jazz, 1950s-style blues and rock and roll, rockabilly/psychobilly, traditional country music, bluegrass, tango and many types of folk music. A person who plays the double bass is usually referred to as a bassist.
The double bass stands around 180 cm (six feet) from scroll to endpin, and is typically constructed from several types of wood, including maple for the back, spruce for the top, and ebony for the fingerboard. It is uncertain whether the instrument is a descendant of the viola da gamba or of the violin, but it is traditionally aligned with the violin family. While the double bass is nearly identical in construction to other violin family instruments, it also embodies features found in the older viol family.
