1615 – Sethus Calvisius (German music theorist, composer, chronologer, astronomer & teacher)
1650 – Manuel Cardoso (Portuguese composer & organist)
1722 – Johann Adam Reincken (Dutch organist & composer, active in Germany)
1842 – Pehr Frigel (Swedish composer)
1944 – Václav Štěpán (Czech pianist, composer, music critic, musicologist & teacher)
1946 – Alfonso Broqua (Uruguayan composer)
1948 – Raoul [von] Koczalski (Polish pianist & composer)
1956 – Guido Cantelli (Italian conductor)
1970 – Evgeny Tikotsky [Яўген Цікоцкі ; Евге́ний Тико́цкий] (Belarusian composer & pianist)
1972 – Hall Overton (American composer, jazz pianist & teacher)
1985 – Big Joe Turner (American blues singer, "Boss of the Blues")
1990 – Bülent Arel (Turkish composer, teacher, painter & sculptor)
1991 – Freddie Mercury [Farrokh Bulsara] (Zanzibar-born British rock singer, songwriter & pianist of Parsi ancestry, Queen)
In this post we remember two awe-inspiring singers, Big Joe Turner and Freddie Mercury, as well as Guido Cantelli, the promising young conductor who might well have become music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958 (rather than Leonard Bernstein) had he not been killed in a plane crash in 1956. It's said that the elderly and ailing Arturo Toscanini, who himself passed away only two months later, was somehow sheltered from the news of Cantelli's tragic demise in order to spare him the grief, in his last days, that this artist in whom Toscanini had placed so many hopes for the future had been taken away at such an early age.
Perhaps you'll remember that we already remembered Portuguese composer Manuel Cardoso, back when we were remembering a fellow pupil of Manuel Mendes, Duarte Lôbo, and Manuel Mendes himself, as well as Tomás Luis de Victoria, whom we've been remembering all year this year since it marks the 400th anniversary of his death.
Well, here's a strange coincidence: In that same previous post, we also remembered the great Turkish singer Zeki Müren, and via Zeki we touched on another Turkish singer with androgynous qualities, Bülent Ersoy. Well, in today's post, we remember another Turk by the name of Bülent, electronic composer Bülent Arel! I don't know how common a given name Bülent is in Turkey, but it's all making sense today here at YiDM...
