Paul Harlan Collins, more often known as Harlan Collins, is a composer, arranger, musician, and writer. His daily feature, "Today's Chuckle", which was started by his father Tom in 1948, is the most widely syndicated front-page feature in the world.
He became one of the first pop artists signed to Beatles manager Brian Epstein's cutting-edge label, Nemperor Records. He has composed and arranged music for Sesame Street , Robin Hood, Highlander, Fighting Words, One Tough Cop and the cult classic This Is Spinal Tap , and wrote "Wrap Me in Your Arms" for Olivia Newton-John, a song included on her 1976 Come On Over . He was a musical guest during the first season of Saturday Night Live . More recently he and Roger Bellon wrote Highlander – A Celtic Opera. He is the author/composer of half a dozen other musicals, as well.
In addition to these activities, Collins has worked extensively in language localization (subtitling and dubbing) and content creation for the entertainment business, serving as VP at Global Media Transfer, Media Concepts, VITAC Corporation, The Movie Treasury, Shadowbox Interactive and Hot Hits and as Creative Director for VoxWorks Technologies, SDI and Western Bell Communications.
Collins attended New York University, majoring in film and drama.
Collins is the author of Today's Chuckle: 2500 Great One-Liners for Every Occasion ( ISBN 0-399-51810-X), a 1993 paperback collecting many one-liners from the column started by his father.
Collins is divorced and has a daughter, Molly who was born in 1989.
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Giacomo Puccini was an Italian composer known primarily for his operas. Regarded as the greatest and most successful proponent of Italian opera after Verdi, he was descended from a long line of composers, stemming from the late-Baroque era. Though his early work was firmly rooted in traditional late-19th-century Romantic Italian opera, he later developed his work in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents.
Henry Purcell was an English composer of Baroque music.
Philip Glass is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimalism, being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting layers. Glass describes himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures", which he has helped evolve stylistically.
A libretto is the text used in, or intended for, an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata or musical. The term libretto is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as the Mass, requiem and sacred cantata, or the story line of a ballet.
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, a member of the group of composers known as The Five. He was a master of orchestration. His best-known orchestral compositions—Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade—are staples of the classical music repertoire, along with suites and excerpts from some of his 15 operas. Scheherazade is an example of his frequent use of fairy-tale and folk subjects.
Amilcare Ponchielli was an Italian opera composer, best known for his opera La Gioconda. He was married to the soprano Teresina Brambilla.
Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini was an Italian composer and cellist of the Classical era whose music retained a courtly and galante style even while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. He is best known for a minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No. 5, and the Cello Concerto in B flat major. 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.
Sir Edward German was an English musician and composer of Welsh descent, best remembered for his extensive output of incidental music for the stage and as a successor to Arthur Sullivan in the field of English comic opera. Some of his light operas, especially Merrie England, are still performed.
Louis Spohr, baptized Ludewig Spohr, later often in the modern German form of the name Ludwig, was a German composer, violinist and conductor. Highly regarded during his lifetime, Spohr composed ten symphonies, ten operas, eighteen violin concerti, four clarinet concerti, four oratorios, and various works for small ensemble, chamber music, and art songs. Spohr invented the violin chinrest and the orchestral rehearsal mark. His output spans the transition between Classical and Romantic music, but fell into obscurity following his death, when his music was rarely heard. The late 20th century saw a revival of interest in his oeuvre, especially in Europe.
Philip Arnold Heseltine, known by the pseudonym Peter Warlock, was a British composer and music critic. The Warlock name, which reflects Heseltine's interest in occult practices, was used for all his published musical works. He is best known as a composer of songs and other vocal music; he also achieved notoriety in his lifetime through his unconventional and often scandalous lifestyle.
Adolphe Charles Adam was a French composer, teacher and music critic. A prolific composer for the theatre, he is best known today for his ballets Giselle (1841) and Le corsaire (1856), his operas Le postillon de Lonjumeau (1836) and Si j'étais roi (1852) and his Christmas carol "Minuit, chrétiens!".
The history of opera in the English language commences in the 17th century.
Albert Victor Young was an American composer, arranger, violinist and conductor.
Edwin DuBose Heyward was an American author best known for his 1925 novel Porgy. He and his wife Dorothy, a playwright, adapted it as a 1927 play of the same name. The couple worked with composer George Gershwin to adapt the work as the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. It was later adapted as a 1959 film of the same name.
EugenFrancis Charles d'Albert was a Scottish-born pianist and composer.
The music of The Lord of the Rings film series was composed, orchestrated, conducted and produced by Howard Shore between 2000 and 2004 to support Peter Jackson's film trilogy based on J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel of the same name. It is notable in terms of length of the score, the size of the staged forces, the unusual instrumentation, the featured soloists, the multitude of musical styles and the number of recurring musical themes used.
Siegmund von Hausegger was an Austrian composer and conductor.
Adam Danger Quinn is an American bagpipe player, instructor, and composer of bagpipe music, who resides in Clearwater, Florida. He was previously a member of the grade one Simon Fraser University Pipe Band, and is currently the front-man of the Celtic fusion band, Lucid Druid.
Roger Bellon is a French film, television, theatre and opera composer, conductor, orchestrator and producer.
Harold Vincent Milligan was an American professional musician and musical writer. He is best known for his biography about the life of Stephen Foster.