Rosemary Brown was a spirit medium who claimed that dead composers dictated new musical works to her. She created a small media sensation in the 1970s by claiming to produce works dictated to her by Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Johann Sebastian Bach, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Franz Schubert, Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy, Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Often recognized as the world’s first electronic musical instrument, the Telharmonium was a large organ-like device that used tonewheels to creative synthetic musical notes that were then transmitted by wires to a series of loudspeakers. The Telharmonium was developed by the inventor Thaddeus Cahill in 1897, and at the time it was one of the biggest instruments ever built.
Moondog was a blind American composer, musician, poet and inventor of several musical instruments. Moving to New York as a young man, Moondog made a deliberate decision to make his home on the streets there, where he spent approximately twenty of the thirty years he lived in the city. Most days he could be found in his chosen part of town wearing clothes he had created based on his own interpretation of the Norse god Thor. Thanks to his unconventional outfits and lifestyle, he was known for much of his life as The Viking of 6th Avenue.
Académie Royale de Musique was the music academy of ancien regime France, made up of opera, ballet, and music. It was merged into the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1816.
Funcrusher Plus is the debut album by Company Flow.
Big L was a rapper from Harlem.
Blind Willie McTell was a twelve-string finger picking Piedmont blues guitarist who recorded 149 songs between 1927 and 1956.
Carlo Annibale Tononi was a luthier who trained and worked with his father in the Tononi family workshop in Bologna, Italy. Before his death, Tononi modified his will to provide for his funeral. He requested that the proceeds from the sale of one of his cellos be used to pay for a mass to be said for his soul. On 21 April 1730, his executors published his will after his death. A genuine Tononi violin ranges in value from $45,000 to $450,000 depending on condition and provenance.
Bo Harwood is a composer who worked closely with John Cassavetes.
Interviews with fifty-six great operatic divas of the twentieth century illuminate their lives, their art, and the world of modern opera.