Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short life, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works, seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include the art songs Erlkönig, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Ave Maria; the Trout Quintet, the unfinished Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the "Great" Symphony No. 9 in C major, the String Quartet No. 14 "Death and the Maiden", a String Quintet, the two sets of Impromptus for solo piano, the three last piano sonatas, the Fantasia in F minor for piano four hands, the opera Fierrabras, the incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang.
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.
Larks are passerine birds of the family Alaudidae. Larks have a cosmopolitan distribution with the largest number of species occurring in Africa. Only a single species, the horned lark, occurs in North America, and only Horsfield's bush lark occurs in Australia. Habitats vary widely, but many species live in dry regions. When the word "lark" is used without specification, it often refers to the Eurasian skylark (Alauda arvensis).
Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire", commonly known simply as Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter who delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.
A chanson is generally any lyric-driven French song. The term is most commonly used in English to refer either to the secular polyphonic French songs of late medieval and Renaissance music or to a specific style of French pop music which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. The genre had origins in the monophonic songs of troubadours and trouvères, though the only polyphonic precedents were 16 works by Adam de la Halle and one by Jehan de Lescurel. Not until the ars nova composer Guillaume de Machaut did any composer write a significant number of polyphonic chansons.
An art song is a Western vocal music composition, usually written for one voice with piano accompaniment, and usually in the classical art music tradition. By extension, the term "art song" is used to refer to the collective genre of such songs. An art song is most often a musical setting of an independent poem or text, "intended for the concert repertory" "as part of a recital or other relatively formal social occasion". While many vocal music pieces are easily recognized as art songs, others are more difficult to categorize. For example, a wordless vocalise written by a classical composer is sometimes considered an art song and sometimes not.
Eighth Blackbird is an American contemporary music sextet based in Chicago, composed of flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello. Their name derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens' poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
The Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg published four string quartets, distributed over his lifetime: String Quartet No. 1 in D minor, Op. 7 (1905), String Quartet No. 2 in F♯ minor, Op. 10 (1908), String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30 (1927), and the String Quartet No. 4, Op. 37 (1936).
Bethany Beardslee is an American soprano and grandmother to ex-model Ella Winham. She is particularly noted for her collaborations with major 20th-century composers, such as Igor Stravinsky, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, George Perle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and her performances of great contemporary classical music by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern. Her legacy amongst mid-century composers was as a "composer's singer"—for her commitment to the highest art of new music. Milton Babbitt said of her "She manages to learn music no one else in the world can. She can work, work, work." In a 1961 interview for Newsweek, Beardslee flaunted her unflinching repertoire and disdain for commercialism: "I don't think in terms of the public... Music is for the musicians. If the public wants to come along and study it, fine. I don't go and try to tell a scientist his business because I don't know anything about it. Music is just the same way. Music is not entertainment."
Kenneth Slowik is an American cellist, viol player, and conductor. Curator of Musical Instrument Collection at the National Museum of American History and Artistic Director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society. He took an interest in music and organology from an early age. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Musical College, the Peabody Conservatory, the Salzburg Mozarteum and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the Vienna Hochschule für Musik, guided by Howard Mayer Brown, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Antonio Janigro, Edward Lowinsky, and Frederik Prausnitz.
Betty Allen was an American operatic mezzo-soprano who had an active international singing career during the 1950s through the 1970s. In the latter part of her career her voice acquired a contralto-like darkening, which can be heard on her recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was known for her collaborations with American composers, such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Ned Rorem, and Virgil Thomson among others.
In Western classical music tradition, Lied is a term for setting poetry to classical music to create a piece of polyphonic music. The term is used for any kind of song in contemporary German and Dutch, but among English and French speakers, lied is often used interchangeably with "art song" to encompass works that the tradition has inspired in other languages as well. The poems that have been made into lieder often center on pastoral themes or themes of romantic love.
Four Orchestral Songs, Op. 22, is a composition by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, scored for soprano and large orchestra.
Gertrud Bertha Schoenberg was an Austrian opera librettist. She was the second wife of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, whom she married in 1924, and the sister of his pupil, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch.
"An Sylvia", D 891; Op. 106, No. 4, is a Lied for voice and piano composed by Franz Schubert in 1826 and published in 1828. Its text is a German translation by Eduard von Bauernfeld of "Who is Silvia?" from act 4, scene 2, of The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare. "An Sylvia" was composed during a peak in Schubert's career around the time he was writing the Ninth Symphony "Great", two years before his death.
Roswitha Trexler is a German operatic soprano and mezzo-soprano who became internationally known especially as an interpreter of the music of Hans Eisler and for her commitment to avantgarde vocal music.
The aron quartet is a string quartet ensemble which was founded in 1998 by Ludwig Müller, Barna Kobori, Georg Hamann and Christophe Pantillon, four musicians working in Vienna. Their artistic careers have been decisively influenced by the members of the Alban Berg Quartet as well as by Ernst Kovacic and Heinrich Schiff. Further decisive impulses for her musical career came from Isaac Stern, Max Rostal, William Primrose, Mischa Maisky, Ralph Kirshbaum and Sandor Végh.
Marjanne Kweksilber was a Dutch soprano, who became famous as an interpreter of Neue Musik as well as baroque and renaissance music.
The Wiener Tonkünstler-Orchester was an orchestra association in Vienna, which existed until 1933.
