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| Ordered chronologically. Trouble identifying them? Click here for a somewhat tagged image. |
1588 – Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder (Italian composer, active in England)
1612 – Giovanni Gabrieli (Italian composer & organist)
1633 – Jacopo Peri (Italian composer & singer, wrote 1st operas)
1797 – Ignaz Franz Xaver Kürzinger (German composer & music scholar)
1812 – Jean-Joseph Rodolphe (Alsatian hornist, violinist & composer)
1830 – Franz de Paula Roser (Austrian composer & music director)
1918 – Anna Held (Polish-born American actress & singer)
1928 – Leoš Janáček (Czech composer)
1943 – Georges Martin Witkowski (Algerian-born French conductor & composer)
1982 – Helvi Leiviskä (Finnish composer, writer & teacher)
1984 – Lenny Breau (American jazz guitarist)
1985 – Marcel Mihalovici (Romanian-born French composer)
1985 – Kyu Sakamoto (Japanese singer & actor, "Ue o muite arukō")
1992 – John Cage (American experimental composer)
1994 – Gene Cherico (American jazz bassist)
1997 – Luther Allison (American blues guitarist & singer)
2005 – John Loder (English audio engineer & record producer)
2008 – Christie Allen (English-born Australian pop singer)
2009 – Les Paul (American guitarist, solid-body guitar inventor & studio pioneer)
2010 – Richie Hayward (American rock drummer, Little Feat)
Welcome to my blog. The text at right explains pretty well what it's all about, I think, so let's jump right in, shall we? Before I get to yesterday's most prominent figures, I'll address some of the others.
Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder (father of, you guessed it, Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger) was a composer who settled in London as a teenager in 1562, finding work at the court of Elizabeth I. In addition to writing much sacred music, he was for virtually the remainder of his life the sole composer of madrigals living in England. The same year he died - following the publication by Nicholas Yonge of the collection Musica Transalpina - the madrigal became an overnight sensation in England. Ferrabosco didn't live to see most of the craze, but his prior work had proved to be formative. While in England, Ferrabosco (who was very well-paid for a court musician) made a number of trips to Italy. Some have speculated that his business there was more than just musical - that Betty I was using him to spy on the Papal Court, at a time when England was at war with Roman Catholic countries. The Spying Madrigalist. There's a really awful novel (and an even worse film adaptation) in there somewhere.
Jacopo Peri was the first composer ever to write a work we now think of as an opera. This was Dafne (1597), a pastoral work with libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini. The work is now lost, but an illustration of Peri himself in costume for the role of Apollo in it does survive (see above). Peri also wrote the first opera which does still survive, Euridice (1600). The subject of Eurydice, and her hubby Orpheus, was very popular fodder in early opera; during the 17th century alone, at least 20 such operas were composed. After Peri's work, Giulio Caccini wrote his own Euridice in 1602, to the very same Rinuccini libretto Peri had used. Then Caccini rushed out to get his opera published before Peri's could hit the presses. That certainly wasn't the source of any bad blood. But the most famous of the early Orphean operas was L'Orfeo (1607) by Claudio Monteverdi. This was the first true masterpiece of opera, and we are unanimous in that.
Jean-Joseph Rodolphe helped to popularize the horn (when we say "the horn" we mean what most people call "the French horn") as a solo instrument. He's also thought to be the first hornist, in Paris at least, to use the technique of hand-stopping on the instrument. Horn players, even today, routinely keep their right hand inside the bell of the instrument, to help control pitch. The farther you put your hand in, the sharper the pitch is, so you can put it in a bit if you find you're a bit flat. But if you put your hand all the way in, you can raise the pitch an entire semitone. When Rodolphe used stopping, it was on the natural horn - the valve horn hadn't yet been invented - and so he was using the technique to get notes he couldn't get any other way. Unlike on a valved instrument, a natural brass instrument can play only the notes of the harmonic series, and thus has many gaps in the scale of notes it can play. With stopping you can get all those notes, plus all the notes a semitone higher as well. Hand-stopping on the horn has another effect, aside from raising the pitch: it gives the instrument a nasal, muted timbre. Even after the valve horn had become standard, and there was really no need for players to use full hand-stopping anymore, composers (especially Richard Wagner and all the many who fell under his sway) specified stopped horns purely for their uniquely distant, menacing effect.
Let's see... Anna Held was the common-law wife of Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, of Follies fame. Helvi Leiviskä was a Finnish composer of three symphonies, and other works. I love her old-style upright piano with its set-up of candles! Brilliant idea... at least until someone has one viina too many and sets the Chopin Mazurkas on fire. Lenny Breau was a fingerstyle guitarist who was very influenced by Chet Atkins, and like Chet he could play in just about any style. Kyu Sakamoto was the singer who had a huge international hit with "Ue o muite arukō" in 1963. What, never heard of it? That's because Pye Records in England (and later His Master's Voice, and Capitol in America) released it under a different title. They called it "Sukiyaki." Drummer Richie Hayward left us just last year, leaving Bill Payne as the only founding member of Little Feat still in the band (frontman Lowell George pooped in 1979, and bassist Roy Estrada left Little Feat to play with Captain Beefheart in 1971). And now for our four featured euphonious stiffs...
