Ballerina Tiler Peck dances with Lil Buck & Sergei Polunin
/
Tiler Peck from New York City Ballet performs first with Memphis jookin' sensation Charles "Lil Buck" Riley and later, on the same program, with Russian ballet star Sergei Polunin at the 2013 Vail International Dance Festival.
Howard Goodall's Story of Music (Videos)
/English composer Howard Goodall wrote and presented a six-part series for the BBC documenting the story of music. On the first episode he conveys a hard-to-imagine truth, there was a period of time, not long ago, where it was possible to go for days, weeks, months, even longer, without hearing any music. Over the course of the six episodes he moves forward until he arrives at the state of music today.
If you love music and are curious to learn more about how it evolved you should check out the six one-hour long videos below (before they probably go away.)
Age of Discovery
The composer examines the history and development of music, beginning by looking back at the first faltering steps humanity took toward creating it. He considers archaeological evidence showing that music was as important in the late Stone Age as it is now and charts how Gregorian chant started with a handful of monks singing the same tune in unison. Over the course of several centuries, medieval musicians painstakingly put together the basics of what has become termed harmony and then added rhythm - the building blocks of the music the world enjoys today.
Age of Invention
The composer examines the extraordinarily fertile musical period between 1650 and 1750, which saw innovations including the orchestra, the overture, modern tuning, the oratorio and the piano. Vivaldi developed a form of concerto where a charismatic solo violin was pitted against the rest of the orchestra, Bach wrote complex and heartfelt music in his mission to glorify God, and Handel brought all the techniques of the preceding 100 years to his oratorio Messiah.
Age of Elegance and Sensibility
The composer examines the age of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin. This period from 1750 to 1850 saw composers going from being paid, liveried servants of princes and archbishops to working as freelancers required to appeal to a new, middle-class audience. The era also saw tremendous social upheaval, including the American, French and Industrial revolutions, but until around the turn of the 19th century, the music that was being written bore little relevance to the tumultuous changes in society.
Age of Tragedy
The composer examines the middle to late 19th century, exploring the European craze for opera and music that dealt with death and destiny. He suggests that composers were inspired by Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique to write about witches, ghouls, trolls and hellish torment, and that the death of the heroine in Verdi's La Traviata was a comment on the hypocrisies of wider society. Howard also argues that the image of the composer as a misunderstood genius was cemented in the public imagination during this period.
Age of Rebellion
Howard Goodall examines the ways in which modernism and the birth of recorded sound in the late 19th century changed the way music was played, heard and distributed. He reveals how the works of Mussorgsky made a huge impression on European composers when aired at the 1889 Paris World Fair, and discusses how increasingly disparate musical influences were woven together to create groundbreaking new sounds.
The Popular Age
The composer examines the history of the past 100 years in music, known as the popular age. During this period, classical music - as it is now termed - seemed to be in decline, but Howard argues that while some cutting-edge works proved too challenging to be appreciated by the mainstream audience, the DNA of the genre is alive and well in musical theatre, cinema and popular music.
The Week's Links: August 2, 2013
/All the links posted on social networks this week:
- Watch 25 Alfred Hitchcock Trailers, Exciting Films in Their Own Right ➞
- Design Staff guide to research ➞
- Lessons In Creative Productivity From 24-Hour Plays ➞
- Amazing: Delicate Cut Leaf Images ➞
- Train of Thought Derailed: How an Accident Can Affect Your Brain ➞
- Wait, Have I Been Here Before? The Curious Case of Déjà Vu ➞
- Why Living in a City Makes You More Innovative ➞
- Would you like to be inspired? Here’s what you should do: ◉
- Creativity Top 5: Week of July 29, 2013 ◉
- A Brief History of the Baseball ➞
- The Origin of the Pilcrow. Better Known as the Strange Paragraph Symbol ➞
- 100 Ideas that Changed Fashion ◉
- The Story of the First Postage Stamp ➞
- What the Handwriting Says About the Artist ➞
- Crayola Has At Least 16 Different Names For What Most of Us Would Call ‘Orange’ ➞
- Choir Members’ Hearts Beat in Time With Each Other ➞
- A New Language Is Being Born in This Remote Australian Village ➞
- Entrepreneurs Are Using Instagram to Sell Everything From Sweaters to Sheep ➞
- Who Invented The Internet? We Did. ◉
- Can You Spot the Mars Rover in This Gorgeous Photo? ➞
- The test of first-rate intelligence ◉
- The Intended Audience ◉
- 100 Ideas that Changed Architecture ◉
- A New Surgical Knife Identifies Cancerous Tissue As Doctors Are Cutting It Out ➞
- Eric William Carroll's art based on Grand Unified Theories ➞
- The National Endowment for the Arts 2012 Annual Report is now online. ➞
- Disney's Crazy Invention Lets You Feel Phantom Objects Floating In Air ➞
- Ten Things You Need to Know About the Publicis-Omnicom Merger ➞
- New York Times elevates comments from below the line ➞
- How to Build a Better Marketing Budget ➞
- Design Wants to Be Free ◉
- Millions of words and only six emotions ◉
- Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe ➞
- 100 Ideas that Changed Photography ◉
- What Are Neuromarketers Really Selling? ➞
- Brilliant take by The New Yorker: Gary Shteyngart- Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer ➞
- Joss Whedon on The Nerdist. Enough said. ➞
- NASA has a great collection of ebooks about space, science, aeronautics, and the history of science. ➞
- BBC launches User Experience Research Partnership ➞
- Data.gov redesign preview modernizes public data delivery ➞
- So You Want To Write A Digital Strategy? ➞
- How to Travel: 21 Contrarian Rules ➞
- Anil Dash's 10 Rules of Internet ➞
- Proving the skeptics wrong ➞
- Visualizing the Infinite Beauty of Pi ➞
- The making of a Steinway grand piano ➞
- Even J. K. Rowling Has To Deal With Fear And Change ◉
- The History of Western Architecture: From Ancient Greece to Rococo (A Free Online Course) ➞
- Magazines of Stuff: Embracing the Physical in the Digital Age ➞
- And Answers ◉
- Troubleshooting CSS ➞
- Revolutionary discovery: Colonists’ 1767 petition uncovered in a Harvard library foreshadows the split with Britain ➞
- 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design ◉
- Understanding and marketing to the first global generation ➞
- Doctors: Where pagers haven't gone extinct yet ➞
- Lovely: Redesigned ‘Harry Potter’ Posters Give Movie Franchise New Look ➞
- Super useful tools for CSS coding ➞
- The Rise of UX Leadership - Robert Fabricant ➞
- Diane von Furstenberg and Jack Dorsey talk influences, parents, and whether or not they'd make good employees ➞
- Publicis And Omnicom To Merge, Creating World's Biggest Advertising Company ➞
- 12 Famous Writers on Literary Rejection ➞
- Leonardo da Vinci the Foodie? ➞
- Imagineer Rolly Crump on Designing Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland ➞
- Day in the Life at Dropbox: Rasmus Andersson ➞
- The New Multi-Screen World Study – Think Insights – Google ➞
- About Face: Emotions and Facial Expressions May Not Be Directly Related ➞
- Questionable: Shakespeare's canon to be reworked by authors in "cover" novels. ➞
- Dark UX: The Elements of The Video Gambling Experience, Used To Fool You ➞
- Interesting: Dark Patterns - User Interfaces Designed to Trick People ➞
- We Need a Better Symbol for the Concept of Saving Stuff ➞
- Whole human brain mapped in 3D ➞
- Yes, Kickstarter raises more money for artists than the NEA. Here’s why that’s not really surprising: ➞
- Do You Know What You’re Good At? (with Sir Ken Robinson) ➞
- Marshall McLuhan's Four Innovation Fundamentals ➞
- Really enjoying the design of the newly launched Nautilus online magazine. ➞
- One Thing I Know: hard-earned insights from creative leaders ➞
- So great: Sketching Out of My Comfort Zone: A Type Design Experiment ➞
- The Greatest American Novel? 9 Experts Share Their Opinions ➞
- Scientists discover what’s killing the bees and it’s worse than you thought ➞
- Banished Words ◉
- Six people tell the NYTimes why they work in dance. ➞
- Herman Miller is working on reinventing your workplace with something they call the Living Office. ➞
- Yes! Sandman author Neil Gaiman ventures into gaming with Wayward Manor ➞