His father, Mathais, was a wheelwright who played the harp, and his mother Maria, was a cook for count Karl Anton Harrach. It was a family custom to call their children by their second name. Thus Joseph Haydn was his name. Joseph Haydn was a choirboy in St. Stephen’s Cathedral by the age of nine. He later was kicked at the age of seventeen out of the choir because he’s amazing voice had matured and he could no longer sing the higher notes.
New York City Ballet George Balanchine was born in 1904 and was raised in St. Petersburg. As the son of a composer, Balanchine’s piano study began at the age of five. After graduating from the Imperial Ballet School in 1921, Balanchine enrolled at the state’s Conservatory of Music where he studied piano and musical theory. Balanchine’s musical background gave him an advantage over other choreographers because he more fully understood the music he was dancing to (“Biography”). The first time George Balanchine danced was as a cupid in the Maryinsky Theatre Ballet Company Production of The Sleeping Beauty, his favorite ballet (“George Balanchine”).
A year after her mother started giving her formal piano lessons. After a year of piano lessons she began giving public recitals playing the works of Handel, Beethoven, Chopin, and also played some of her own work. She made her professional debut in Bosten in 1883, playing Chopin’s Rondo in E-flat and Moscheles’s G minor Concerto. Shortly after that she appeared as a soloist with Boston Symphony Orchestra. Beach ended up marrying a surgeon 24 years older that her.
Bach was trained to be a musician from the time he was a young child. At fifteen he left his brother's home and moved to another town, where he played the violin and organ to support himself in school. When he was eighteen, he became the organist for a church not far outside of his hometown. He left this church at twenty-three and married his cousin Barbara. In 1708, Bach became a court organist in Weimar.
Roberta Flack Roberta Flack was born February 10, 1940, in the small town of Black Mountain, NC, but she grew up in Arlington, VA. She was the daughter of Loran and Irene Flack, who were both skilled musicians. Her father taught himself to play the piano and her mother had formal piano lessons, which had Roberta around music all the time. She started taking formal piano lessons at the age of nine. At the age of 13 she had won second place in a state-wide piano competition between the black students. By the age of 15 she had already graduated from high school and earned a piano scholarship to Howard University.
Born in Chicago on March 19, 1919 to an Italian family who immigrated to America in the 1890’s, Tristano already had an early exposure to music, when he began playing the piano at the age of 3. "Sometime between two and three years is as far back as my memory goes, and I was playing then. Player pianos were in fashion, and my family got one. I used to listen to it, and apparently I just started playing it.”1 Player pianos is an idea worth coming back to, however it is important to mention Tristano’s weak eyesight as a child, due to glaucoma (Tristano was born during a flu epidemic), which by the age of 10 turned him completely blind.2 Tristano’s disability did not stop him from excelling as a student or memorizing long or complicated classical pieces such as Liszt’s “Forest Murmurs” and Chopin's Etudes (Op. 10) Nos.
Cole Porter • Born June 9th, 1891, Peru, Indonesia • American composer/songwriter • Violin, age 6. Piano, age 8. • Wrote first operetta age 10, with help from mother • Mother changed his legal birth year from 1891 to 1893 to make him appear more precocious • Studied at the Worcester academy and then Yale university • First song on Broadway, ‘Esmeralda’, 1915, revue ‘Hands Up’ • First broadway show, flop, ‘See America First, 1916 (1916) See America First (1919) Hitchy-Koo Of 1919 — "An Old Fashioned Garden" (1928) Paris — "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love" (1929) Wake Up and Dream — "What Is This Thing Called
When he was young, he and his cousin were enthusiasm for the work of contemporary German painters and the music of Wagner. 8. Webern married his cousin and had four children. 9. Schoenberg formally introduced his new technique of composition to Webern in 1920s.
Erik Erikson: Post-Freudian Theory. From the Beginning to the End of His Life Denise Tamanika Duggins July 15, 2010 Psychology ~ 344 Abstract Erik Erikson life began in Germany on June 15, 1902. Erikson life was very uncommon. His childhood was very confusing for him. He married and had children with one of his peers from Anna Freud Psychoanalytic Institute.
Not long after her death Sergei’s parents divorced and Lubov took custody of the three remaining children. In 1885 Rachmaninoff failed miserably in all of his classes at school and his mother moved him to a school in Moscow. This is where he began to really show his true musical abilities. He studied piano under Nikolai Zverev who pushed him to be the great piano player he knew he could be. He also took lessons from Alexander Ziloti, who was a former piano student of Franz Liszt.