08-21: Wesley Willis Greatest Hits Vol 2 - O Estranho Mundo de Raul Seixas 1973-89 - Bismillah Khan Shenai Nawaz - Mozart Nozze di Figaro Levine 1990

In sort-of-but-not-really chronological order. Tagged image here.

1627 – Jacques Mauduit (French composer)
1772 – Alessandro Felici (Italian composer)
1772 – Johann Andreas Giulini (German composer & church musician)
1812 – Silverius Müller (Austrian composer & Latin instructor)
1824 – Santiago Ferrer (Spanish composer)
1856 – Peter Joseph von Lindpaintner (German opera composer & conductor)
1898 – Niccolò van Westerhout (Italian composer)
1932 – Frederick Corder (English composer, teacher & pianist)
1935 – Josef Cyril Sychra (Czech composer, conductor & teacher)
1940 – Paul Juon (Russian-German violinist & composer)
1949 – Gerhard von Keussler (German conductor, composer, philosopher & poet)
1951 – Constant Lambert (English composer & conductor)
1958 – Stevan Hristić (Serbian composer)
1958 – Walter Schumann (American film, television & stage composer & conductor)
1970 – Timothy Mather Spelman (American composer, active in Italy)
1981 – Hermann Schey (German-Dutch concert & oratorio bass-baritone)
1988 – Teddy Diaz (Filipino rock guitarist & songwriter, The Dawn)
1989 – Raul Seixas (Brazilian rock singer, songwriter, guitarist & producer)
1993 – Tatiana Troyanos (American operatic mezzo-soprano)
1999 – Juan Carlos Zorzi (Argentine composer & conductor)
2000 – Tomata du Plenty (American painter & synthpunk singer, The Screamers)
2003 – Wesley Willis (American visual artist & street musician, singer & keyboardist)
2005 – Martin Dillon (American operatic tenor)
2006 – Ustad Bismillah Khan (Indian shehnai master)
2008 – Jerry Finn (American punk & alternative rock record producer)
2009 – Dean Turner (Australian rock bassist, singer & producer, Magic Dirt)

Well, as all two of you may have noticed, I'm three days behind now! So for the time being I'm going to be posting just the essentials of the content here: the image-collage, the list, and that extra-special text you find at the end. I'll probably be in this mode for a few days, until I can get caught up. So, check back later to see if I might by chance have said something mildly interesting. Thanks for reading, and looking, and above all listening! – Papa Pic

P.S. Actually, there is one comment I'd like to add off the top of my head Re: Constant Lambert. For God sakes, man, can't you wait until the orchestra goes on break before lighting up?

08-13: Massenet Werther Plasson - King Curtis Blues At Montreux - Cage / Tudor Indeterminacy - Dissection Maha Kali

Ordered chronologically. Trouble identifying them? Click here for a somewhat tagged image.

1808 – Henri Hardouin (French composer, organist & choirmaster, Reims Cathedral)
1841 – Bernhard Romberg (German cellist & composer)
1886 – Adolph von Doss (German Jesuit priest & composer)
1908 – Ira D. Sankey (American gospel singer & hymn composer)
1912 – Jules Massenet (French composer)
1916 – Fritz Steinbach (German conductor & composer, Brahms specialist)
1924 – Julián Aguirre (Argentine composer)
1928 – Fernand de La Tombelle (French composer, organist, actor & photographer)
1933 – Paul Hillemacher (French composer & pianist)
1946 – Valery Zhelobinsky (Russian composer & pianist)
1947 – Tobias Norlind (Swedish musicologist, ethnologist & music museum curator)
1953 – Dimitri Arakishvili (Georgian composer & ethnomusicologist)
1954 – Hermann von Waltershausen (German musicologist, composer & conductor)
1970 – Viktor Trambitsky (Belarusian composer)
1971 – King Curtis (American R&B, soul jazz & rock saxophonist)
1982 – Joe Tex American soul & funk singer & songwriter)
1996 – David Tudor (American pianist & experimental composer)
1998 – Nino Ferrer (Italian-born French singer, actor & jazz musician)
2000 – Nazia Hassan (Pakistani pop singer)
2003 – Ed Townsend (American attorney, songwriter & producer)
2006 – Jon Nödtveidt (Swedish black metal singer & guitarist, Dissection)
2011 – Topi Sorsakoski (Finnish popular singer)

Well, yesterday's "launch" sorta wiped me out. I'm gonna try to keep it shorter and sweeter from now on... but don't worry, I'll still be turning you on to interminable symphonies chock-full of sour dissonances.

Google gave me a bit of a surprise when I did an image search on "Henri Hardouin" because it was sure what I meant to type was "Henri Bardouin." So, I got images of a brand of Pastis, the anise-flavored liqueur the French drink on hot summer days. Funny, I was only just learning about this aperitif a few weeks ago from my French friend Steve on Facebook. Pastis is the traditional drink of Provence, in southeastern France, but M. Hardouin played the organ in the north of France, at Reims Cathedral, the traditional site where the kings of France were crowned. The region Reims is in - Champagne-Ardenne - has a traditional libation of its own, doesn't it? I'm thinking that's probably why they held the coronations there.

Ira D. Sankey was a singer, an early figure in Southern gospel music, and a writer of many hymns. He was associated with the Methodist evangelist minister Dwight L. Moody, and the two traveled throughout much of the United States, preaching and singing the gospel. On the evening of October 8th, 1871, they were holding a revival in Chicago when - well, I suppose what happened is that Mrs. O'Leary's cow was so overcome by the spirit, she kicked over a lantern right there in the hay-barn. Sankey and Moody barely escaped the ensuing conflagration with their lives, and watched most of Chicago burn to the ground from a rowboat in Lake Michigan.

Fernand de La Tombelle was one of those sickening people you just wanna slap - a Renaissance man living many decades after the concepts of "specialization" and "division of labor" had become pretty much standard for most of us mere mortals. Not only gifted as an organist and composer, he also did some work in the theater, wrote poetry, worked in the plastic arts, was an amateur astronomer, and, as you can see, also did some photography. That's kind of an interesting picture, isn't it? A photographer is photographing La Tombelle photographing something else. Maybe that something else is another photographer photographing the original photographer who's photographing La Tombelle. Nah... that'd be stupid.

Paul Joseph Guillaume Hillemacher was a composer who wrote more than a dozen operas in collaboration with his brother, Lucien Joseph Edouard Hillemacher. Lucien Joseph Edouard Hillemacher was not a librettist, though - he was also a composer. They wrote the music of their operas together, to librettos by others. The Hillemacher brothers composed these works under the name "P.L. Hillemacher."

I couldn't find an image of Viktor Trambitsky, so I just used one of a Russian edition of the play The Storm (1859) by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. The Storm has been an extremely popular play in most of Eastern Europe, and the subject of many musical and film adaptations. Tchaikovsky wrote a concert overture based on it. And Viktor Trambitsky wrote an opera based on it, which was produced in 1941. It's a bit of a coincidence, since we just remembered Leoš Janáček yesterday. He wrote his own opera based on The Storm in 1921: It was called Katya Kabanova. And now for yesterday's featured poopers: