Boulanger, Lili (1893–1918)
Lili Boulanger was a French composer and the first woman to win the Prix de Rome in musical composition. Born into a musical family and…
Search Results 1 - 25 of 48
Blanco, Juan (1919–2008)
Juan Blanco was a Cuban composer known for his work in the field of electroacoustic music. He did not limit himself to electroacoustic music composition,…
Atonality
Atonality refers to the complete absence of tonality in a musical composition. In music, it is often claimed that modernism stands in opposition to classicism…
Tremblay, Gilles (1932--)
Composer and musical pedagogue Gilles Tremblay made significant contributions to the development of musical composition in Quebec in the second half of the twentieth century.…
Gandini, Gerardo (1936–2013)
Gerardo Gandini was an Argentinean composer and pianist. Disciple and assistant of Alberto Ginastera in the late 1950s and 1960s, he obtained international recognition for…
Cordero, Roque Jacinto (1917–2008)
Roque Cordero was a Panamanian composer, conductor, and educator, and the only twentieth-century Panamanian composer to gain international recognition. During the 1940s he studied composition…
Maeterlinck, Maurice (1862–1949)
Maurice Maeterlinck was a Flemish francophone writer, who spent most of his life in France and whose prolific oeuvre entails poetry, plays, and essays. In…
Expressionism
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Orrego-Salas, Juan (1919--)
Juan Orrego-Salas was a Chilean composer and musicologist. Born in Santiago, Chile on January 1919, he began his music education in Santiago, while also pursuing…
Gillespie, Dizzy (1917–93)
Dizzy Gillespie was an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader. Over the course of his artistic career Gillespie was based in New York City, where…
Leitmotif
A leitmotif (from the German Leitmotiv: ‘guiding motif’) in its original sense is a musical theme that appears multiple times over the course of a…
Hula
Hula, as the Native Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Pukui (1895–1986) noted, is a general name for Hawaii’s folk dances. While it is impossible to point…
Serialism/Twelve-Tone Technique
Serialism or the twelve-tone technique is a way of composing music that involves replacing major and minor scales with a fixed ordering of the pitches…
Monk, Thelonious (1917–1982)
Thelonious Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer. One of the earliest performers in the bebop movement of modern jazz dating from the mid-twentieth…
Lutyens, Elisabeth (1906–1983)
(Agnes) Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE, was an English composer, credited with helping to establish the twelve-tone method of serialism in Britain. Lutyens’s first major composition using…
Foulds, John (1880–1939)
John Herbert Foulds (1880–1939) was an English composer of classical music who found popularity with his light music and theatrical scores, but also created more…
Paik, Nam June (1932–2006)
Nam June Paik was a Korean-born American artist who achieved international notoriety for his destructive, neo-dada activities and visionary, esthetic experiments with electronic media. Born…
Mingus, Charles (1922–1979)
Charles Mingus (1922–1979) was an American jazz bassist, composer, and bandleader. He held strong social and political views and composed songs on civil rights, such…
Zorn, John (1953--)
John Zorn is an American avant-garde saxophonist and composer. Zorn performs on alto saxophone and is one of the leading figures in New York City’s…
Kaprow, Allan (1927–2006)
Allan Kaprow was an American artist whose oeuvre included painting, assemblage, and “environments.” He is best known as the originator of “happenings,” a term he…
Video Art
The term “video art” is used to describe art made using video technology. Not to be confused with experimental cinema or art film, video art…
Barraine, Elsa Jacqueline (1910–99)
Elsa Barraine’s precocious musical talents were recognized at an early age, and she entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of twelve. She studied composition…
Der Sturm
Der Sturm (Storm) was the fulcrum of the international avant-garde in Berlin from 1910 to 1932. Herwarth Walden (born Georg Levin, 1878–1941) founded the journal…
Caro, Anthony (1924–2013)
Anthony Caro played a pivotal role in the development of sculpture in the 20th century. He began his career as an assistant to Henry Moore,…
Modernism and Latin American Classical Music
The idea of musical modernism in the Latin American classical music world was a particular aesthetically-oriented instance of a broader discourse that has been described…