The xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Like the glockenspiel, the xylophone essentially consists of a set of tuned wooden keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use.
The marimba is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars that are struck by mallets. Below each bar is a resonator pipe that amplifies particular harmonics of its sound. Compared to the xylophone, the timbre of the marimba is warmer, deeper, more resonant, and more pure. It also tends to have a lower range than that of a xylophone. Typically, the bars of a marimba are arranged chromatically, like the keys of a piano. The marimba is a type of idiophone.
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war contemporary classical music.
Jean-Henri-Alphonse Barraqué was a French composer and writer on music who developed an individual form of serialism which is displayed in a small output.
Pli selon pli is a piece of classical music by the French composer Pierre Boulez. It carries the subtitle Portrait de Mallarmé. It is scored for a solo soprano and orchestra and uses the texts of three sonnets of French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and single lines from two of his other poems. At over an hour, it is Boulez's longest work.
Johan Theodorus Loevendie is a Dutch composer and clarinet player.
In music, instrumentation is the particular combination of musical instruments employed in a composition, and the properties of those instruments individually. Instrumentation is sometimes used as a synonym for orchestration. This juxtaposition of the two terms was first made in 1843 by Hector Berlioz in his Grand traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes, and various attempts have since been made to differentiate them. Instrumentation is a more general term referring to an orchestrator's, composer's or arranger's selection of instruments in varying combinations, or even a choice made by the performers for a particular performance, as opposed to the narrower sense of orchestration, which is the act of scoring for orchestra a work originally written for a solo instrument or smaller group of instruments.
Stuart Saunders Smith is an American composer and percussionist. After having studied composition and music theory at three music institutions, Smith is currently based in Vermont, United States, with his wife Sylvia. He has produced almost 200 compositions, half of which were written for percussion instruments with a focus on the vibraphone.
Christophe Louis-Pascal Bertrand was a French composer of contemporary classical music.
Sinfonia (Symphony) is a composition by the Italian composer Luciano Berio which was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Composed in 1968–69 for orchestra and eight amplified voices, it incorporates musical quotations to represent an abstract and distorted history of culture. The eight voices are not incorporated classically but rather speak, whisper and shout excerpts from texts including Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked, Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings.
Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine is a cantata by Olivier Messiaen for women's voices, piano solo, onde Martenot, percussion battery, and small string orchestra, in three movements. Its libretto was written by Messiaen himself, who composed the work from 1943 to 1944.
Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil is a Polish composer and music educator.
"Epitaphium" is a short chamber-music composition by Igor Stravinsky, for flute, clarinet, and harp. The score was composed in 1959 and is inscribed in German, "Für das Grabmal des Prinzen Max Egon zu Fürstenberg". A performance last for less than two minutes.
Rolf Hind is a British pianist and composer. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Pierre Froidebise was a Belgian organist, composer, and musicologist.
Poèmes pour Mi is a song cycle for dramatic soprano and piano or orchestra by Olivier Messiaen, composed in 1936 and 1937 and dedicated to his first wife, Claire Delbos. The text are poems by the composer based on the New Testament.
Oiseaux exotiques is a piece for piano and small orchestra by Olivier Messiaen. It was written between 5 October 1953 and 3 January 1956 and was commissioned by Pierre Boulez. It is dedicated to Yvonne Loriod, the composer's wife.
Réveil des oiseaux is a work by Olivier Messiaen for piano and orchestra written in 1953. Messiaen invoked birdsong in this composition, as he had in the earlier Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941). In Réveil des oiseaux he used bird song motifs throughout.
