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| Ordered chronologically. Tagged image here. |
1777 – Giuseppe Sellitto (Italian composer)
1802 – Corona Schröter (German singer, composer, actress, pianist, guitarist & artist)
1825 – Amos Bull (American church choirmaster & hymntune composer)
1839 – Charles Philippe Lafont (French violinist & composer)
1878 – Adolf Fredrik Lindblad (Swedish composer)
1898 – Joseph Robinson (Irish composer, conductor & singer)
1902 – Teresa Stolz (Bohemian dramatic soprano, active in Italy & possible mistress of Verdi)
1924 – Heinrich Berté (Austro-Hungarian operetta composer)
1937 – Albert Roussel (French composer)
1943 – Paul Zilcher (German composer)
1944 – Nikolai Roslavets (Russian composer)
1960 – Oscar Hammerstein II (American Broadway librettist)
1962 – Irving Fine (American composer, pianist & conductor)
1963 – Glen Gray (American jazz saxophonist & bandleader, Casa Loma Orchestra)
1971 – Gisela Hernández (Cuban composer & teacher)
1972 – Balys Dvarionas (Lithuanian composer, pianist, conductor & teacher)
1986 – Marcos Cubas (Cuban-born tenor, active in Argentina & the Canary Islands)
1987 – Siegfried Borris (German composer, musicologist & teacher)
1990 – David Rose (English-born American songwriter, composer, arranger, pianist & conductor, "The Stripper")
1994 – Fisher Tull (American composer, teacher & trumpeter)
1995 – Dwayne Goettel (Canadian industrial & electronic musician, keyboards & samplers for Skinny Puppy)
1996 – Jurriaan Andriessen (Dutch composer)
2006 – Maynard Ferguson (Canadian jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist & bandleader)
Still catching up, and still need to do write-ups for some previous posts, but I'll go ahead and finalize this one, just because... I dunno, I feel like I'm in the groove! I'll post links back to the unfinished posts as I finish them, m'kay?
Orthography. Don't really think about it much, do we? Well, unless you're a nut like me. See, we take how words are written and spelled for granted, but prior to the 18th century, when things like dictionaries started to be widely published, spellings for words weren't so standardized as they are now... there were just one or more common ways of spelling them. Shakespeare will spell the same word more than one way, even in the same play! And peoples' names are no exception. Take the first cat on our list, Antoine Moucqué. I had a hard time locating anything about the guy at first, because the name I was searching on was "Mouque." Turns out, there are at least four different ways of spelling that name. This is a problem I'm having all the time with early musicians, especially the lesser-known ones.
Now, take another guy who comes near the end of our list: Siegfried Borris. Siegfried Borris was a German composer and musicologist who died on August 23rd, 1987. But there was another German musician (a violinist, who was concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic in the 30s) named Siegfried Borries, who died on August 12th, 1980. So, there was a little confusion at first. But here's the problem: Siegfried Borries didn't make it onto my list for August 12th (the day I started this blog), because I didn't know about him! My... "sources"... didn't mention him. And on that same day, I got something else wrong: I should have had Les Paul a day later, on August 13th! So, you see, I'm getting things wrong around here now and again because of inaccuracies or discrepancies in my information, so I hope you can appreciate that, and , you know, cut me some slack...
Charles Philippe Lafont was apparently an amazing violinist. He received his first lessons from his mother, and later studied with both Rodolphe Kreutzer and Pierre Rode (who wrote all those Etudes every violinist has to play while training). Kreutzer and Rode taught him the classical French technique of the Viotti school, which he made even more brilliant. In 1816, he had a little cutting contest with Niccolò Paganini, by reputation the greatest violinist who ever lived. It's said that neither violinist really won, but since the contest was held at La Scala in Milan, the audience was naturally more sympathetic to Paganini.
Adolf Fredrik Lindblad was a Swedish composer of more than 200 songs, an opera, and some instrumental music. At one point Lindblad was mentoring soprano Jenny Lind, who would later become world-famous as the "Swedish Nightingale." His great affection for Lind was so obvious that his wife, Sophie, offered to divorce him so that he could marry the singer. He did not. I tell you, that Sophie Lindblad... helluva woman, there! You made a wise decision, Adolf Fredrik Lindblad.
Nikolai Roslavets. He was a committed Modernist in the Soviet Union, who was greatly influenced by the Russian Futurist artists and the late works of Alexander Scriabin, and developed a compositional technique similiar to Schoenberg's 12-tone system, which he called a "new system of sound organisation" that was based on "synthetic chords." Well naturally, Roslavets was officially censured by the Soviet government from the 1930s onward. Past a certain point, he could obtain no official job. Then he had a stroke and lived the last few years of his life in poverty as an invalid. But his forward-looking and original works have started to enjoy a revival of interest in recent years. See you on the other side of the Iron Curtain...
Orthography. Don't really think about it much, do we? Well, unless you're a nut like me. See, we take how words are written and spelled for granted, but prior to the 18th century, when things like dictionaries started to be widely published, spellings for words weren't so standardized as they are now... there were just one or more common ways of spelling them. Shakespeare will spell the same word more than one way, even in the same play! And peoples' names are no exception. Take the first cat on our list, Antoine Moucqué. I had a hard time locating anything about the guy at first, because the name I was searching on was "Mouque." Turns out, there are at least four different ways of spelling that name. This is a problem I'm having all the time with early musicians, especially the lesser-known ones.
Now, take another guy who comes near the end of our list: Siegfried Borris. Siegfried Borris was a German composer and musicologist who died on August 23rd, 1987. But there was another German musician (a violinist, who was concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic in the 30s) named Siegfried Borries, who died on August 12th, 1980. So, there was a little confusion at first. But here's the problem: Siegfried Borries didn't make it onto my list for August 12th (the day I started this blog), because I didn't know about him! My... "sources"... didn't mention him. And on that same day, I got something else wrong: I should have had Les Paul a day later, on August 13th! So, you see, I'm getting things wrong around here now and again because of inaccuracies or discrepancies in my information, so I hope you can appreciate that, and , you know, cut me some slack...
Charles Philippe Lafont was apparently an amazing violinist. He received his first lessons from his mother, and later studied with both Rodolphe Kreutzer and Pierre Rode (who wrote all those Etudes every violinist has to play while training). Kreutzer and Rode taught him the classical French technique of the Viotti school, which he made even more brilliant. In 1816, he had a little cutting contest with Niccolò Paganini, by reputation the greatest violinist who ever lived. It's said that neither violinist really won, but since the contest was held at La Scala in Milan, the audience was naturally more sympathetic to Paganini.
Adolf Fredrik Lindblad was a Swedish composer of more than 200 songs, an opera, and some instrumental music. At one point Lindblad was mentoring soprano Jenny Lind, who would later become world-famous as the "Swedish Nightingale." His great affection for Lind was so obvious that his wife, Sophie, offered to divorce him so that he could marry the singer. He did not. I tell you, that Sophie Lindblad... helluva woman, there! You made a wise decision, Adolf Fredrik Lindblad.
Nikolai Roslavets. He was a committed Modernist in the Soviet Union, who was greatly influenced by the Russian Futurist artists and the late works of Alexander Scriabin, and developed a compositional technique similiar to Schoenberg's 12-tone system, which he called a "new system of sound organisation" that was based on "synthetic chords." Well naturally, Roslavets was officially censured by the Soviet government from the 1930s onward. Past a certain point, he could obtain no official job. Then he had a stroke and lived the last few years of his life in poverty as an invalid. But his forward-looking and original works have started to enjoy a revival of interest in recent years. See you on the other side of the Iron Curtain...
