Sampler

Sampler may refer to:

Music

See also

Sampler (Cardiacs album)

Sampler is a compilation album by the English rock band Cardiacs, released in 1995.

The album was intended as a budget introduction to the band's music, and was released as part of the general 1995 reissue of the Cardiacs back catalogue. Each track is taken from a different album in the reissue series. Most of the tracks are performed by Cardiacs, but the album also features two tracks performed by Cardiacs spin-off projects: The Sea Nymphs ("Christ Alive") and Tim Smith's Extra Special OceanLandWorld ("Veronica In Ecstasy"). Sampler features two of Cardiacs' singles/lead tracks - the charting version of "Is This The Life?" and a live version of the title track from the "Big Ship" mini-album.

Track listing

Sampler album

A sampler is a type of compilation album generally offered at a reduced price to showcase a selection of artists signed to a particular record label. The format became popular in the late 1960s as record labels sought to promote artists whose work was primarily available in album rather than single format, and therefore had little opportunity to gain exposure through singles-dominated radio airplay. Most samplers showcased already-released material so that as well as sampling the artist they sampled the albums from which the tracks were drawn.

Elektra Records

The first record sampler was A Folk Music Sampler released by Elektra Records in the USA in 1954, initially for radio stations and later reissued for retail sales. Jac Holzman of Elektra wrote:

At the time the term "sampler" was mainly used for a demonstration of needlework, and this was the first time the word had been applied to a musical compilation. Holzman was enthusiastic for the format, and Elektra regularly issued budget-priced samplers of its folk catalogue in the USA throughout the 1950s and 60s. In the UK, Elektra's office decided to use issue samplers to try to position the label in the marketplace, and issued the folk sampler Fantastic Folk (1968) before the more rock-oriented Select Elektra (1968). However, these British discs were full price issues.

The Four Seasons (Vivaldi)

The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written about 1723 and were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention").

The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music—music with a narrative element.

Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. In the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections. His arrangement is as follows:

Spring (company)

Spring is the Australian arm of FremantleMedia Australia and was formed in 2011.

Current Programmes

References

External links

Spring (Rachmaninoff)

Spring (Vesna), Op. 20, is a single-movement cantata for baritone, chorus and orchestra, written by Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1902.

The work was finished after the famous Second Piano Concerto. Rachmaninoff intended to revise the cantata's orchestration but never did so.

Programme

The work is based on a poem by Nikolay Nekrasov and describes the return of the Zelyoniy shum, or "green rustle". The poem tells of a husband who, fraught with murderous thoughts towards his unfaithful wife during the winter season, is ultimately freed from his frustration and choler by the return of spring.

References