Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy (January 5, 1900 – January 15, 1955), known as Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.
Tanguy was born in Paris, France, the son of a retired navy captain. His parents were both of Breton origin. After his father's death in 1908, his mother moved back to her native Locronan, Finistère, and he ended up spending much of his youth living with various relatives.
In 1918, Yves Tanguy briefly joined the merchant navy before being drafted into the Army, where he befriended Jacques Prévert. At the end of his military service in 1922, he returned to Paris, where he worked various odd jobs. By chance, he stumbled upon a painting by Giorgio de Chirico and was so deeply impressed he resolved to become a painter himself in spite of his complete lack of formal training.
Tanguy had a habit of being completely absorbed by the current painting he was working on. This way of creating artwork may have been due to his very small studio which only had enough room for one wet piece.
Katherine Linn Sage (June 25, 1898 – January 8, 1963), usually known as Kay Sage, was an American Surrealist artist and poet.
Sage was born in Albany, New York, into a wealthy family that had made its money in the timber industry. Her father, Henry Manning Sage, was a state assemblyman at the time of her birth and later became a state senator. Her mother was Anne Wheeler Ward Sage. Sage had one slightly older sister, also called Anne.
Anne Wheeler Ward Sage, a free spirit with an unquenchable wanderlust, left her husband and older daughter soon after Katherine’s birth to live and travel in Europe with Katherine as her companion. She and Henry Sage divorced in 1908, but Henry Sage continued to support his ex-wife and younger daughter, and Katherine visited him and his new wife in Albany from time to time and wrote him frequent letters.
Katherine and her mother established a home in Rapallo, Italy, but visited many other places as well, including Paris. Katherine became fluent in French and Italian as well as English, speaking colloquial versions of these languages that she learned from the servants who helped to raise her. She attended a number of schools, including the Foxcroft School in Virginia (she and her mother returned to the United States during World War I), but did not stay at any of them very long.
Francis Dhomont (born Paris, France, 2 November 1926) is a French composer of electroacoustic / acousmatic music.
He studied composition under Ginette Waldmeier, Charles Koechlin and Nadia Boulanger. In the late 1940s he intuitively discovered with magnetic wire what Pierre Schaeffer at about the same time came to call musique concrète, consequently conducting solitary experiments with the musical possibilities of sound recording.
In 1963 he decided to dedicate his time to electroacoustic composition utilising natural sounds. Performances in public of his music are done using the French "diffusion" technique over multiple loudspeakers. His work consists exclusively of tape pieces using natural, or "found" sounds, exploring morphological interplay and the ambiguities between sound and the images it may create.
Dhomont's work has won many international awards including at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition (France), the Magisterium Prize in 1988, Prix Ars Electronica in 1992 (Linz, Austria) and others. In 1997, as the winner of the Canada Council for the Arts' Lynch-Staunton Prize, he was supported by the DAAD for a residence in Berlin. He was recently awarded a prestigious career grant by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec . Dhomont is the editor of several electroacoustic music journals, and has produced many radio programs for Radio-Canada and Radio-France.
Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his sonorous voice with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as famous as his works. His best-known works include the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night". Appreciative critics have also noted the craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my Craft or Sullen Art", and the rhapsodic lyricism in "And death shall have no dominion" and "Fern Hill".
Dylan Thomas was born in the Uplands area of Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales, on 27 October 1914 just a few months after the Thomas family had bought the house. Uplands was, and still is, one of the more affluent areas of the city.
His father, David John Thomas (1876–1952), had attained a first-class honours degree in English at University College, Aberystwyth, and was dissatisfied with his position at the local grammar school as an English master who taught English literature. His mother, Florence Hannah Thomas (née Williams) (1882–1958), was a seamstress born in Swansea. Nancy, Thomas's sister, (Nancy Marles 1906–1953) was nine years older than he. Their father brought up both children to speak only English, even though he and his wife were both bilingual in English and Welsh. David was even known to give Welsh lessons at home.
François Bayle (born 27 April 1932, Toamasina, Madagascar) is a composer of Musique concrète or acousmatic music.
In the 1950s he studied with Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1960 he joined the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, and in 1966 was put in charge of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). In 1975, the GRM was integrated with the new Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA) with Bayle as its head, which post he held until 1997. During these years he organized concerts, radio broadcasts, seminars and events celebrating individual composers, supported technological developments (Syter, GRM Tools, Midi Formers, Acousmographe) and was behind innovations such as the Acousmonium and the INA-GRM recordings label.
After leaving GRM in 1997, he founded his own electronic music studio, the Studio Magison, where he has devoted himself to research, writing and composition.
In the world of electronic art music, Bayle is regarded is one of the most distinguished composers; his influence is widespread (particularly in France, Europe and French-speaking Canada) and his music has earned some of the most prestigious musical prizes (SACEM Grand Prize for Composers, 1978; National Record Grand Prize, 1981; Ars Electronica Prize, Linz, 1989; City of Paris Grand Prize for Music, 1996; Homage by the CIME of São Paulo, 1997; Charles Cros Presidential Grand Prize, 1999). 18 CDs entirely of his music have been released, an exceptionally large number for one composer in the annals of electronic art music. French director Jérémie Carboni is working on a documentary with the composer.