Tag Archives: Frederick Delius

Composers ~ H

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Halle

Adam de la Halle, also known as Adam le Bossu (“Adam the Hunchback’) lived from around 1237 to around 1286. He was a poet and composer, born in Arras, France. He was court poet and musician to Robert II of Artois, and followed him to Naples in 1283. He was the originator of French comic opera, with Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, and the partly autobiographical composition Jeu de la fuelle (Play of the Greensward). He also wrote poems in mediaeval verse forms.

Hamlisch

Marvin Hamlisch, American pianist, composer and arranger of popular music. He helped revitalize Ragtime with his musical arrangements in the movie, The Sting.

Hammerstein

1895 – Oscar (Greeley Clendenning) Hammerstein II lived from 1895 until 1960. He was a lyricist and songwriter with Richard Rodgers. Some of their best known musicals are Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, Flower Drum Song and Sound of Music.

Handel

George Frederick Handel lived between 1685 and 1759. He is considered to be an important baroque composer. Handel had a lot in common with Bach. They were both born in Germany, the same year and both were organists and composers. Handel moved to England and spent 40 years there. While he was there he began writing music for the British royal family and he directed and composed operas as director of the Academy of Music.

“Largo” is a musical term for “very slow” and it is also the title of Handel’s most famous single melody. Largo is from an opera called Xerxes about a Persian king with that name and had it’s premiere in London in 1738.

Handel’s nickname was “The Thunderbolt”, given to him by Mozart because he composed so much music.

One of Handel’s most popular works is The Sarabande from Suite Number 11 since it was made popular in the 1975 Stanley Kubrick movie Barry Lyndon, based on the novel by Thackery. This sarabande is part of a dance suite. Suites such as this were very popular with amateur players during Handel’s day.

He is most famous for the Messiah. This oratorio, composed in 1742, brought the entire baroque tradition to its climax. Handel’s enormous work included over 40 operas, about 20 oratorios, cantatas, sacred music, and orchestral, instrumental, and vocal works.

Handy

W. C. Handy was known as the Father of the Blues. His compositions “Memphis Blues” (1912) and “St. Louis Blues” (1914) made the blues popular in the United States.

Hanson, Howard

Howard Hanson lived from 1896 until 1981. He was a composer, conductor, educator; born in Wahoo, Nebraska. He studied and taught in the U.S.A. before winning the Rome Prize in 1921. He returned from Italy in 1924 to become director of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., remaining there until retirement in 1964. His compositions, including seven symphonies and the opera Merry Mount (1934), typically reflect both his Swedish family background and a conservative, Romantic spirit. He was also an important conductor and promoter of American composers, both conservative and innovative.

Hanson, Raymond

Raymond Hanson lived from 1913 until 1976. He was a composer and teacher, born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He studied at the New South Wales Conservatory, to which he returned to lecture from 1948 until his death. His Trumpet Concerto is well known, and was one of the first Australian recordings to be released internationally. Other works include operas, a ballet, a symphony, four concertos, chamber music, and film scores.

Hanson-Dyer, Louise Berta Mosson

Louise Berta Mosson Hanson-Dyer lived from 1884 until 1962. She was a music publisher and patron, born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She studied in Edinburgh and at the Royal College of Music, London, and became the centre of Melbourne’s musical life, helping establish the British Music Society there in 1921. She established Editions du Oiseau-Lyre, a music-publishing business in Paris in 1927, which set a new standard of music printing, and she became a leader in the revival of early music. Later resident in France, she maintained her links with Australia, and published the works of leading Australian composers. Her considerable Australian estate was left to Melbourne University for music research.

Hart

Lorenz Hart was born in New York City and lived from 1895 until 1943. He was a lyricist;. He studied journalism and wrote poetry at Columbia University and translated plays for the Shuberts before meeting composer Richard Rodgers in 1918. They collaborated on four songs for Poor Little Ritz Girl (1920) and did their first complete score for The Garrick Gaities (1925).

During the next 18 years they collaborated on a string of successful Broadway and Hollywood musicals–among them On Your Toes (1936), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), and Pal Joey (1940). Although they created many popular songs, including “With a Song in My Heart” (1929), “Blue Moon” (1934), and “My Funny Valentine” (1937), Hart’s show lyrics were distinguished by their clever wordplay, intricate internal rhymes, and often sardonic attitude.

Haydn

Joseph Haydn lived between 1732 and 1809 and was born in Austria. He is considered to be a classical composer. Haydn was born in Rohrau, Austria and is often called the father of the modern symphony. Most of his career was spent conducting an orchestra and composing music for a rich Hungarian family, the Esterházys, who not only maintained a magnificent palace in Eisenstadt, but kept a string quartet and an entire opera company in residence.

Haydn created the form of the classical symphony and string quartet as we know them today. He became one of the most important figures in the development of Classical music during the eighteenth century.

Haydn wrote 104 symphonies, more than 40 piano sonatas, over 20 operas, many string quartets, trios, masses and songs.

The Creation is one of his oratorios and has been compared to Handel’s Messiah.

Henderson

Roy Henderson was a baritone famed for his performances of Frederick Delius’ works and a teacher of Kathleen Ferrier. When he died Thursday March 11, 2000, he was 100.

Henderson learned to sing while serving with the Artists Rifles during World War I.

He studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and got his first major break in 1925 in a performance of Delius’ “Mass of Life,” which he sang at short notice at a Royal Philharmonic concert.

From then on, Henderson was regarded as the ideal Delius baritone. He sang on the first recording of Delius’ “Sea Drift” and in the premiere of “Idyll.”

He also performed all the Elgar oratorios and choral works, and sang Count Almaviva in “The Marriage of Figaro” at the 1934 opening night of the Glyndebourne summer opera festival.

Henderson’s last singing performance was on March 29, 1952 in the role of Christus in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” at Southwark Cathedral, the Anglican cathedral on the south bank of the Thames in London.

Henderson met Ferrier in 1942,and she later asked Henderson to teach her. She went on to become one of Britain’s renowned voices of the century.

Hill

Mildred Hill, born in 1859, American organist and pianist, composer of “Happy Birthday”. When it was granted a copywrite in 1893, it’s original title was “Goodmorning to All”.

Hindemith

Paul Hindemith lived from 1895 until 1963. He was a German composer who used many techniques of composition from the 1700’s therefore, bringing a neoclassical element to contemporary music.

Holst

Gustav Theodore Holst, English Composer, was born in Cheltenham, England in 1874 and died in London in 1934. He was of the same era as Elgar, but, like Pachelbel, is really only famous for one piece, his Planets’ Suite. This is a series of seven “movements”, one for each of the non~Earth planets known in Holst’s day (i.e., all of the planets but Earth and Pluto). The music reflects the character of the Greco-Roman divinity associated with each planet, with the opening Mars, Bringer of War, being a ferocious, menacing portrait indeed.

One of the themes to Jupiter was subsequently used as the basis for rather a patriotic hymn (I vow to thee my country), in much the same way as one of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches was turned into Land of Hope and Glory.

Horowitz

Destined to become one of the world’s greatest pianists, Vladimir Horowitz was born in 1903 in Kiev, Russia. While most young children were playing games, Vladimir was playing with the ivories. His time was well spent as he was fully capable of performing publicly by the time he was sixteen.

Within four years, the young piano virtuoso was entertaining audiences at recitals throughout Leningrad – 23 performances in one year, where he played over 200 different works of music, never repeating a composition. After Leningrad, Horowitz played in concerts in Berlin, Hamburg and Paris.

In 1928, the Russian pianist traveled to the United States to play with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Arturo Toscanini chose Horowitz to perform his first solo with the New York Philharmonic. It was there that Horowitz met his bride-to-be, Toscanini?s daughter, Wanda. The two were wed in Milan in 1933. New York became Horowitz? permanent home in 1940. He became a U.S. citizen a few years later, devoting the rest of his career to benefit performances, and helping young, aspiring artists.

His return to the concert stage in May of 1965 was a triumphant success, as was his television recital, Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall.

Just three years before his death, Vladimir Horowitz returned to his homeland to perform once again for the Russian people on April 20, 1986. They felt he had been away far too long … close to sixty years.

Horn

Paul Horn was born in 1930. He is a composer, jazz musician, playing reeds. SOme of his most famous works are: Green Jelly Beans, Dancing Children, Inside [recorded in Taj Mahal]. His TV documentary was The Story of a Jazz Musician.

Hovhaness

Alan Hovhaness, (1911 until 2000) was a a prolific composer who melded Western and Asian musical styles.

Hovhaness wrote more than 400 pieces, including at least nine operas, two ballets, more than 60 symphonies, and more than 100 chamber pieces.

His works include “Lousadzak” (1944), for piano and orchestra; “Wind Drum” (1962), a music-dance drama; “And God Created the Great Whales” (1970); and “The Way of Jesus” (1974), a folk mass.

His early compositions were thoroughly Western. But the influences of Eastern musical styles became more evident after he attended Bohuslav Martinu’s master class in composition in 1942 at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood.

Hovhaness was the first Western composer asked to write music for an orchestra comprised entirely of Indian instruments. He served for six months as composer-in-residence at the University of Hawaii and became a composer-in-residence with the Seattle Symphony in 1966.

Howe

Julia Ward Howe was a U.S. author and lecturer best known for her “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In 1843 she married Samuel Gridley Howe of Boston, reformer and teacher of the blind. The “Battle Hymn”, composed to the rhythm of the folksong “John Brown’s Body”, was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862.

Huang

Dr. Hao Huang was a Leonard Bernstein Music scholarship recipient at Harvard University (AB cum laude), a piano scholarship Master’s student at the Juilliard School (MM in piano performance), and a Graduate Council Fellow at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (DMA). He has studied with Seymour Bernstein, Leon Fleisher, Claude Frank, Beveridge Webster and Gilbert Kalish. He is currently a piano professor at Scripps College and the Claremont Graduate School, and has taught at the Hochschule fur Musik “Franz Liszt” in Weimar and the School of Music at Converse College.

Composers – D

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Dallapiccola

Luigi Dallapiccola was an Italian composer known for his lyrical twelve-tone compositions.

Debussy

Claude Debussy lived between 1862 and 1918. He is considered to be a impressionistic composer, because he tried to capture the mood of the action instead of the action itself, and was known as the Father of Impressionistic Music. Debussy’s work influenced another Impressionistic composer, Maurice Ravel.

The French Impressionistic painters like Auguste Renoir were painting at the same time that Debussy was composing and that influenced his music. “Clair de Lune” is a famous example of this as it creates the feeling of rippling water.

Debussy liked to create tonal “impressions” rather than conventional melodies. “Rêverie” was one of his first successes, although the critics of the 1890’s said things like “strangeness”, “dissonance”, “ugliness” and “difficulties” about it, missing the fragile loveliness and vague shimmer which were stylistic innovations.

Debussy was playing piano and composing by the time he was 12.

DeForest

Lee DeForest was born in 1873 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. We’re sure his parents had big plans for him; but they could never have realized how their son, Lee, would change the world.

DeForest seemed to be a born inventor. He held patents for hundreds of different items including the photoelectric cell and the surgical radio knife. But none had as much impact on the world as his invention of the electron tube, specifically the triode, a three element vacuum tube, which later became the audion tube ~~ possibly the most significant invention that made radio possible.

Wireless radio broadcasting was unthinkable in the early 1900s and DeForest was considered a fraud. He was arrested for selling stock to underwrite the development of his invention, which no one believed would work. He was forced into selling the rights to his patent to American Telephone and Telegraph for $500,000; considered by most to be foolish of AT&T. The rest is history.

Lee DeForest’s 1950 autobiography is called “Father of Radio”.

Delius

Frederick Delius was born in Bradford, England. His father owned a wool company and hoped that his son would follow a career in business. Delius, however, wanted to study music. In 1884, he left England for Florida, where he worked on a plantation as an orange grower. Delius proved to be a failure as an orange grower, and began supporting himself as a musician. During 1886 – 1887, he composed Florida Suite.

Des Prez

Josquin Des Prez was born around 1440 and he died: August 27, 1521 in Cond?-sur-l-Escaut, France.

He was a French/Franco-Flemish composer and generally acknowledged as the greatest composer of the High Renaissance.

Martin Luther, who had a good knowledge of music, said of Josquin Desprez, “he alone is the master of the notes, they have to do as he bids them.” Indeed, Josquin was acknowledged by nearly all his contemporaries as the greatest composer of his time. If so, he stands as the first among many great musicians, for the composers of what we often term the Netherlands School created one of the richest periods in Western musical history. His contemporaries — including Antoine Brumel (c.1460-c.1515), Pierre de la Rue (c.1460-1518) and Loyset Comp?re (c.1445-1518) — and the previous generation — led by Johannes Ockeghem (c.1410-1497) — created a style of music that can rightly be compared to the art of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

As for Josquin himself, we know surprisingly little of his early life. We know that in the 1470s he began service in the court of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, and that by 1489 he was a member of the papal choir in Rome. But we know nothing of his early training, or even when he came to Italy (it was believed that he came in 1459 as a choirboy in the Milan cathedral, but it seems that this was a case of mistaken identity). Later in his life he served Duke Ercole d’Este in Ferrara, and possibly King Louis XII of France. The final years of his life were spent in the town of Cond?-sur-l’Escaut in northern France (possibly his birthplace). The rest of his biography is still subject to scholarly speculation.

What we do know is just what Josquin’s contemporaries knew: that he created wonderful music. What stands out most in this music is his care for the words. This is seen in part by the way he uses imitation to allow each voice to present the text before the texture becomes too dense to be clear. He also made use of homophonic textures to give the text an added clarity. Some of his works, especially his Masses, use the older cantus firmus technique. Here he uses the borrowed melody to create a huge scaffolding upon which he constructs the other melodies. Some of these pieces display a high level of technical complexity. At the same time, he could create pieces of marvelous simplicity and elegance, as he did so often in his motets and chansons.

Musical Examples:

  • Inviolata, integra et casta es Maria
  • Miserere mei, Deus
  • Missa “La sol fa re mi” (Agnus Dei II)
  • Tu solus, qui facis mirabilia

Works:

  • Sacred works, including 18 masses (Missa “La sol fa re mi”, 2 L’homme arm?
  • Masses, Missa “Pange lingua”), more than 100 motets
  • Secular works, including nearly 70 French chansons and settings of German,
    Spanish and Italian texts

Diaghilev

Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev lived from 1872 until 1929. He was a ballet impresario, born in Novgorod, Russia. Diaghilev obtained a law degree, but was preoccupied with the arts. In 1898 he became editor of Mir Iskousstva (World of Art), and during the next few years arranged exhibitions and concerts of Russian art and music. His permanent company was founded in 1911, and remained perilously in existence for 20 years, triumphantly touring Europe. Many of the great dancers, composers, and painters of his period contributed to the success of his Ballets Russes. He also encouraged several major choreographers (eg Fokine, Nijinsky, Balanchine), and gave them opportunities for artistic collaboration.

Dispeker

Thea Dispeker molded operatic talent from Lauritz Melchior to Richard Leech and lived to be 97 years old.

Dispeker owned a classical music artists agency for more than 50 years. In her career, she influenced musicians such as Richard Tucker, Judith Blegen, Roberta Peters and Pablo Casals, among others.

In 1947, she helped found the Little Orchestra Society for children’s concerts and went into business for herself.

Even in her 80s and 90s, Dispeker continued to seek out young singers and musicians to promote. Her portfolio also included the Swedish baritone Hakan Hagegard.

Her agency, Thea Dispeker Inc., received an International Society for the Performing Arts Foundation award of merit in 1997, its 50th anniversary year.

Dittersdorf

Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf lived from 1739 until 1799. He was a composer and violinist. He had composition lessons from Giuseppe Bonno in his native Vienna and served as a violinist in the orchestra of the Prince of Sachsen-Hildburghausen, followed by a position in the imperial theatre. There followed a period as Kapellmeister to the Bishop of Grosswardein, where, in 1762, he succeeded Michael Haydn. In 1769 he became Kapellmeister to the Prince-Bishop of Breslau, at this period acquiring the patent of nobility that added to the name of Ditters the honorific von Dittersdorf. Conditions in Johannisberg, the seat of the Prince-Bishop, deteriorated in the political circumstances of the time, and on the death of his employer in 1795, he moved with his family to join the household of a nobleman in Bohemia.

Dohnányi

Ernő Dohnányi lived from 1877 until 1960. He was born in Poszony (now Bratislava) in 1877 and opted for further musical study in Budapest rather than, more conventionally, in Vienna, setting an example that was followed by his younger contemporary Bartok. He played a leading part in forming the musical culture of Hungary, although there were difficulties with the regime that replaced the first republican government of the country. Due to his overt opposition to the association of Hungary with National Socialist Germany, he found it necessary to spend his final years in America, dying in New York in 1960.

As a composer Dohnányi was versatile, continuing existing traditions of music, while as a pianist he enjoyed international fame.

Domingo

Opera king Plácido Domingo
joins the Global Music Network and serves up an aria for online listeners. Live events and interviews, along with jazz and classical clips.

Donizetti

Gaetano Donizetti was born in in Bergamo, November 29, 1797 and died in Bergamo, April 8, 1848.

Inheriting the bel canto tradition from Rossini, Donizetti’s operas are today mostly admired for their many attractive melodies and fine ensembles. Although he composed over seventy operas, only a handful have remained in the general repertory, but those are generally regarded as outstanding examples of the Italian Bel Canto period. Donizetti’s most famous opera is surely Lucia di Lammermoor, based on a novel by Sir Walter Scott. The plot concerns a young girl who is tricked by her brother into thinking her lover has been unfaithful to her and forces her into a marriage of political convenience. During the wedding scene, Lucia’s lover makes an unexpected entrance, and all the protagonists give vent to their varied emotions in the celebrated Sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor. As was popular in Italian opera of the time, Lucia then goes mad, giving the prima donna an opportunity to display great acting and vocal skill in an extended scena.

The Italian operatic tradition was continued and taken to sublime heights later in the nineteenth century in the works of Giuseppe Verdi.

Dowland

John Dowland lived from 1562 until 1626. He was an English composer, singer and lutenist who wrote about 90 works for the Renaissance lute, several psalm harmonizations and many sacred songs.

Driggo

Riccardo Drigo was born and educated in Padua but he spent most of his life – from 1878 until 1915 – among Russian royalty as conductor ot the Marinsky Theater. He lived from 1846 until 1930.

Du Fay

Guillaume Du Fay was born on August 5, 1397(?) in Cambrai, France and died on November 27, 1474 in Cambrai, France. He was a French composer and was considered the leading composer of the early Renaissance.

The fifteenth century saw the rise of a new musical style, one in which harmonies began to center on full triads and the setting of the text became an important concern to composers. Guillaume Du Fay is one of the most important figures in the transition from the medieval to Renaissance style, which took place mainly among composers associated with the rich court of Burgundy. For this reason, Du Fay and his contemporaries are usually referred to as the “Burgundian School.”

Guillaume Du Fay probably received his early musical training in the cathedral choir at Cambrai, in northern France. But his career took a decidedly international turn early on. By the age of twenty-five he had gone to Italy. During his years there, he worked for courts in Pesaro, Ferrara and sang in the Papal choir in Rome. During that time he also earned a degree in canon law, probably at the University of Bologna. He spent the latter part of his life back at the cathedral in Cambrai. Du Fay wrote both sacred and secular music; he is perhaps best known for his cantus firmus Masses. Before he died, he composed a Requiem Mass (now lost) to be sung at his funeral, and asked that four of the best singers from the cathedral sing his motet Ave regina caelorum (Hail, Queen of Heaven) to him on his deathbed.

Du Fay’s music set the tone for the Renaissance (one scholar credits him with defining the “central style” of the period). His triad-based harmonies and arching melodies create a pleasant balance of melody and harmony. In his sacred music, he changed the overall sound by a more regular use of four-voice textures. At the same time, we can still find the medieval concern with structure and isorhythm in his sacred music, especially his cantus firmus Masses.

Sacred works including at least 7 complete Mass settings, numerous Mass movements and pairs, 30 motets and 60 other sacred works (hymns, etc.)
Secular works including more than 50 rondeaux, 10 ballades, 4 virelais, 15 other works.

Dukas

Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was featured in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia and Fantasia 2000.

Dvorák

Antonín Dvorák’s piece, “Humoresque” became one of the most famous pieces ever written nearly overnight. It was later discovered that this could be played simultaneously with Steven Foster’s “Way Down Upon the Swanee River”.

Dvorák, a native of Bohemia, traveled in the United States in 1892 and found American music to be “magical” and “spacious”. When Dvorák visited the United States, he encouraged American composers to use their native music. He himself incorporated folk melodies into 19th century Romantic music. His compositions include Slavonic Dances, Fifth Symphony, The Water Nymph, Carnival, Gypsy Melodies.

Dvorák lived from 1841 until 1904.