Copland: Billy the Kid

Billy the Kid is a 1938 ballet written by the American composer Aaron Copland on commission from Lincoln Kirstein. It was choreographed by Eugene Loring for Ballet Caravan. Along with Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, it is one of Copland's most popular and widely performed pieces. The ballet is most famous for its incorporation of several cowboy tunes and American folk songs and, although built around the figure and the exploits of Billy the Kid, is not so much a biography of a notorious but peculiarly appealing desperado as it is a perception of the pioneer West, in which a figure such as Billy played a vivid role.

It was premiered on 16 October 1938 in Chicago by the Ballet Caravan Company, with pianists Arthur Gold and Walter Hendl performing a two-piano version of the score. The first performance of Billy the Kid in New York City occurred on 24 May 1939, with an orchestra conducted by Fritz Kitzinger.

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (April or May 1562 – 16 October 1621) was a Dutch composer, organist, and pedagogue whose work straddled the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the Baroque eras. He was among the first major keyboard composers of Europe, and his work as a teacher helped establish the north German organ tradition.

Sweelinck represents the highest development of the Dutch keyboard school and indeed represented a pinnacle in keyboard contrapuntal complexity and refinement before J.S. Bach. However, he was a skilled composer for voices as well and composed more than 250 vocal works (chansons, madrigals, motets and Psalms).

Some of Sweelinck's innovations were of profound musical importance, including the fugue—he was the first to write an organ fugue which began simply, with one subject, successively adding texture and complexity until a final climax and resolution, an idea which was perfected at the end of the Baroque era by Bach.

Sweelinck was a master improviser, and acquired the informal title of the "Orpheus of Amsterdam". More than 70 of his keyboard works have survived, and many of them may be similar to the improvisations that residents of Amsterdam around 1600 were likely to have heard. In the course of his life, Sweelinck was involved with the musical liturgies of three distinctly different traditions: Catholic, the Calvinist, and Lutheran—all of which are reflected in his work. Even his vocal music, which is more conservative than his keyboard writing, shows a striking rhythmic complexity and an unusual richness of contrapuntal devices.

Sweelinck's influence spread as far as Sweden and England, carried to the former by Andreas Düben and to the latter by English composers such as Peter Philips, who probably met Sweelinck in 1593. Sweelinck, and Dutch composers in general, had evident links to the English school of composition. Sweelinck's music appears in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, which otherwise only contains the work of English composers. He wrote variations on John Dowland's famous Lachrimae Pavane. John Bull, who was probably a personal friend, wrote a set of variations on a theme by Sweelinck after the death of the Dutch composer.

Vittorio Gui

Vittorio Gui (14 September 1885 – 16 October 1975) was an Italian conductor, composer, musicologist and critic.

Gui was born in Rome in 1885. He graduated in humanities from the University of Rome and also studied composition at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia; his principal composition teachers were the noted composers Giacomo Setaccioli and Stanislao Falchi. His style was "impressionistic with characteristic Italian traits".

Gui's opera David premiered in Rome in 1907; later that year, he made his professional conducting debut at the Teatro Adriano in Rome, leading Ponchielli's La Gioconda as a substitute. This led to invitations to conduct in Naples and Turin (he met Claude Debussy in Turin in 1911). In 1923, Arturo Toscanini invited him to conduct Salome by Richard Strauss as the season opener at La Scala in Milan. He conducted the Teatro Regio in Turin from 1925 to 1927; in his last year in Turin, he premiered his fairy-tale opera Fata Malerba there. (Other notable compositions included the cantata Cantico dei cantici ("Song of Songs") from 1921, and the symphonic poem Giulietta e Romeo (with voices, from 1902).)

In 1928, Gui founded and conducted the Orchestra Stabile; he developed the organization of the orchestra into the 1933 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino or "Florence May Music Festival", which he led until 1943. At the festival, he conducted unusual operas such as Verdi's Luisa Miller, Spontini's La vestale, Cherubini's Médée and Gluck's Armide.

Gui was particularly known for his conducting of the works of Brahms, of which he was said to be a leading conductor in Italy. In 1947, the 50th anniversary of Brahms's death, Gui conducted a complete cycle of Brahms's orchestral and choral works in that country.[1] He was also known for conducting contemporary music and first performances; among works he premiered was Dallapiccola's first major composition, his Partita, in 1933.

Vittorio Gui was also a prolific author and critic. Notable writings include his 1924 study of Boito's opera Nerone, an article on "Mozart in Italy" from 1955, and his collected essays, Battute d'aspetto (1946).

Fumio Hayasaka

Fumio Hayasaka, 早坂 文雄, (August 19, 1914 – October 15, 1955) was a Japanese composer of classical music and film scores.

Hayasaka won a number of prizes for his early concert works; in 1935, his piece Futatsu no sanka e no zensōkyoku won first prize in a radio competition, and another concert piece, Kodai no bukyoku, won the 1938 Weingartner Prize. Other early works include a Nocturne (1936) for piano and the orchestral Ancient Dance (1938). In 1939, Hayasaka moved to Tokyo to begin a career as a film composer. By early 1940, Hayasaka was seen as "a major composer for Japanese Cinema".

After the war, Hayasaka continued working on films, quickly winning recognition for his abilities. In 1946, he received the film music award for An Enemy of the People (Minshū no Teki, 1946) at the first annual Mainichi Film Awards. The year after, 1947, Hayasaka received the Mainichi film music award for Teinosuke Kinugasa's Actress (Joyu).

In the late 1940s, Hayasaka invited his friend Akira Ifukube to write film music with him at Toho Studios. Ifukube's first film score for Toho was for Senkichi Taniguchi's Snow Trail (Ginrei no hate) in 1947. Toshirō Mifune, the famous actor who later starred in most of Kurosawa’s films, first met Kurosawa at a pre-screening of this movie.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (14 August 1892 – 15 October 1988) was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer. He was one of the 20th century's most prolific piano composers.

As a composer and pianist, Sorabji was largely self-taught, and he distanced himself from the main currents of contemporary musical life early in his career. He developed a highly idiosyncratic musical language, with roots in composers as diverse as Busoni, Debussy and Szymanowski, and he dismissed large portions of the established and contemporary repertoire.

A reluctant performer, Sorabji played a few of his works in public between 1920 and 1936, thereafter "banning" performances of his music until 1976. Since very few of his compositions were published during those years, he remained in public view mainly by writing essays and music criticism, at the centre of which are his books Around Music and Mi contra fa: The Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician. He had a tendency to seclusion, and in the 1950s he moved from London to the village of Corfe Castle, Dorset, where he spent most of the rest of his life quietly.

Sorabji's music is characterised by the frequent use of polyrhythms, complex juxtaposition of tonal and atonal elements, and copious ornamentation. Many of his works contain sections employing strongly contrasting approaches to musical architecture; some of them use baroque forms, while others are athematic. His musical output consists of over 100 compositions, ranging from aphoristic pieces to works spanning several hours. Most are for piano solo or feature an important piano part, but he also composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, organ and other instruments. Partly because of this, Sorabji has been described as a descendant of a tradition of composer-pianists such as Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt and Charles-Valentin Alkan.

Debussy: La mer

La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre, or simply La mer, L. 109, is an orchestral composition by French composer Claude Debussy.

Composed between 1903 and 1905, the piece was initially not well received, but soon became one of Debussy's most admired and frequently performed orchestral works.

The work was started in 1903 in France and completed in 1905 at Grand Hotel Eastbourne (Eastbourne was also where Frank Bridge was to complete his suite The Sea in 1911) on the English Channel coast. The premiere was given on 15 October 1905 in Paris, by the Orchestre Lamoureux under the direction of Camille Chevillard. Debussy arranged the piece for piano for four hands in 1905 and in 1909 his publisher Durand presented a second edition of La mer with the composer's revisions.

Lully: Le Bourgeois gentilhomme

Le Bourgeois gentilhomme is a five-act comédie-ballet written by Molière, first presented on 14 October 1670 before the court of Louis XIV at the Château of Chambord by Molière's troupe of actors. Subsequent public performances were given at the theatre of the Palais-Royal beginning on 23 November 1670. The music was composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully, the choreography was by Pierre Beauchamp, the sets were by Carlo Vigarani and the costumes were done by Laurent d’Arvieux.

Le Bourgeois gentilhomme satirizes attempts at social climbing and the bourgeois personality, poking fun both at the vulgar, pretentious middle-class and the vain, snobbish aristocracy. The title is meant as an oxymoron: in Molière's France, a "gentleman" was by definition nobly born, and thus there could be no such thing as a bourgeois gentleman. The play is in prose (except for the ballet openings which are in verse)./