The celesta or celeste, also called a bell-piano, is a struck idiophone operated by a keyboard. It looks similar to an upright piano, albeit with smaller keys and a much smaller cabinet, or a large wooden music box (three-octave). The keys connect to hammers that strike a graduated set of metal plates or bars suspended over wooden resonators. Four- or five-octave models usually have a damper pedal that sustains or damps the sound. The three-octave instruments do not have a pedal because of their small "table-top" design. One of the best-known works that uses the celesta is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from The Nutcracker.
The Pomp and Circumstance Marches are a series of five marches for orchestra composed by Edward Elgar, together with a sixth march created from sketches. The marches were dedicated to his friends including composer Granville Bantock and organists George Robertson Sinclair, Ivor Atkins and Percy Hull.
"Lillibullero" is a march attributed to Henry Purcell that became popular in England at the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
"The East Is Red" is a Chinese Communist Party revolutionary song that was the de facto national anthem of the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. The lyrics of the song were attributed to Li Youyuan (李有源), a farmer from Shaanbei, and the melody was derived from a local peasant love song from the Loess Plateau entitled "Bai Ma Diao" 《白马调》, also known as "Zhima You" 《芝麻油》, which was widely circulated in the area around Yan'an in the 1930s. The farmer allegedly got his inspiration upon seeing the rising sun in the morning of a sunny day.
The Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107, was composed in 1959 by Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich wrote the work for his friend Mstislav Rostropovich, who committed it to memory in four days. He premiered it on October 4, 1959, at the Large Hall of the Leningrad Conservatory with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky. The first recording was made in two days following the premiere by Rostropovich and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Aleksandr Gauk.
Antiformalist Rayok, also known as Learner's Manual, without opus number, is a satirical cantata for four voices, chorus, and piano by Dmitri Shostakovich. It is subtitled As an aid to students: the struggle of the realistic and formalistic directions in music. It satirizes the conferences that resulted from the Zhdanov decree of 1948 and the anti-formalism campaign in Soviet arts which followed it.
Petrushka is a ballet by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1911 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Michel Fokine and stage designs and costumes by Alexandre Benois, who assisted Stravinsky with the libretto. The ballet premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 13 June 1911 with Vaslav Nijinsky as Petrushka, Tamara Karsavina as the lead ballerina, Alexander Orlov as the Moor, and Enrico Cecchetti the charlatan.
The NBC chimes are a sequence of three tones played on National Broadcasting Company (NBC) broadcasts. Originally developed in 1927 as seven notes, they were standardized to the current three-note version by the early 1930s, and possibly as early as 1929. The chimes were originally employed as an audible programming cue, used to alert network control engineers and the announcers at NBC's radio network affiliates. They soon became associated with NBC programming in general, and are an early example of an "interval signal" used to help establish a broadcaster's identity with its audience.
The Prince of Denmark's March, commonly called the Trumpet Voluntary, was written around 1700 by the English composer Jeremiah Clarke, the first organist of the then newly-rebuilt St Paul's Cathedral.
Voice of Korea is the international broadcasting service of North Korea. It broadcasts primarily information in Chinese, Spanish, German, English, French, Russian, Japanese and Arabic. Until 2002 it was known as Radio Pyongyang. The interval signal is identical to that of Korean Central Television.
John Vincent Lawless Hogan, often John V. L. Hogan, was a noted American radio pioneer.
Gediminas Gelgotas is a Lithuanian composer, conductor and self-performing artist.
Novorossiysk Chimes, Op. 111b, was written by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1960 for the war memorial in the city of Novorossiysk. The piece consists, mainly, of material Shostakovich had originally written in 1943 as an entry in a contest to compose a new national anthem for the U.S.S.R.
Joseph Schwantner: New Morning for the World; Nicolas Flagello: The Passion of Martin Luther King is a classical music album by the Oregon Symphony under the artistic direction of James DePreist, released by Koch International Classics in 1995. Recorded at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon, in September 1994, the album is a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and was released in his honor on the following holiday in his name.
Symphony No. 10 is the tenth symphony by the American composer Philip Glass. The work was commissioned by the Orchestre Français des Jeunes and premiered August 9, 2012, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Orchestre Français des Jeunes at the Grand Théâtre de Provence in Aix-en-Provence. The piece had its United Kingdom premiere July 31, 2013 at The Proms in Royal Albert Hall.
Symphony No. 4 is an orchestral composition in two movements by the American composer Christopher Rouse. The work was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, for which Rouse was then composer-in-residence. The piece was completed June 30, 2013 and was premiered on June 5, 2014, in Avery Fisher Hall, New York City, by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Alan Gilbert.
The Symphony in E minor is the first symphony written by the American composer Florence Price. The work was completed in 1932 and was first performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Frederick Stock in June 1933. The piece was Price's first full-scale orchestral composition and was the first symphony by a Black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra.
David Vassall Cox was a British composer and writer on music who for most of his professional life was music coordinator for the BBC World Service. Among his arrangements was Lillibullero, which introduced hourly World Service news broadcasts.
