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German-born composer Hans Zimmer is recognized as one of Hollywood's most innovative musical talents. He featured in the music video for The Buggles' single "Video Killed the Radio Star", which became a worldwide hit and helped usher in a new era of global entertainment as the first music video to be aired on MTV (August 1, 1981).
Hans Florian Zimmer was born in Frankfurt am Main, then in West Germany, the son of Brigitte (Weil) and Hans Joachim Zimmer. He entered the world of film music in London during a long collaboration with famed composer and mentor Stanley Myers, which included the film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). He soon began work on several successful solo projects, including the critically acclaimed A World Apart, and during these years Zimmer pioneered the use of combining old and new musical technologies. Today, this work has earned him the reputation of being the father of integrating the electronic musical world with traditional orchestral arrangements.
A turning point in Zimmer's career came in 1988 when he was asked to score Rain Man for director Barry Levinson. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year and earned Zimmer his first Academy Award Nomination for Best Original Score. The next year, Zimmer composed the score for another Best Picture Oscar recipient, Driving Miss Daisy (1989), starring Jessica Tandy, and Morgan Freeman.
Having already scored two Best Picture winners, in the early 1990s, Zimmer cemented his position as a preeminent talent with the award-winning score for The Lion King (1994). The soundtrack has sold over 15 million copies to date and earned him an Academy Award for Best Original Score, a Golden Globe, an American Music Award, a Tony, and two Grammy Awards. In total, Zimmer's work has been nominated for 7 Golden Globes, 7 Grammys and seven Oscars for Rain Man (1988), Gladiator (2000), The Lion King (1994), As Good as It Gets (1997), The The Preacher's Wife (1996), The Thin Red Line (1998), The Prince of Egypt (1998), and The Last Samurai (2003).
With his career in full swing, Zimmer was anxious to replicate the mentoring experience he had benefited from under Stanley Myers' guidance. With state-of-the-art technology and a supportive creative environment, Zimmer was able to offer film-scoring opportunities to young composers at his Santa Monica-based musical "think tank." This approach helped launch the careers of such notable composers as Mark Mancina, John Powell, Harry Gregson-Williams, Nick Glennie-Smith, and Klaus Badelt.
In 2000, Zimmer scored the music for Gladiator (2000), for which he received an Oscar nomination, in addition to Golden Globe and Broadcast Film Critics Awards for his epic score. It sold more than three million copies worldwide and spawned a second album Gladiator: More Music From The Motion Picture, released on the Universal Classics/Decca label. Zimmer's other scores that year included Mission: Impossible II (2000), The Road to El Dorado (2000), and An Everlasting Piece (2000), directed by Barry Levinson.
Some of his other impressive scores include Pearl Harbor (2001), The Ring (2002), four films directed by Ridley Scott; Matchstick Men (2003), Hannibal (2001), Black Hawk Down (2001), and Thelma & Louise (1991), Penny Marshall's Riding in Cars with Boys (2001), and A League of Their Own (1992), Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), Tears of the Sun (2003), Ron Howard's Backdraft (1991), Days of Thunder (1990), Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997), and the animated Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) for which he also co-wrote four of the songs with Bryan Adams, including the Golden Globe nominated Here I Am.
At the 27th annual Flanders International Film Festival, Zimmer performed live for the first time in concert with a 100-piece orchestra and a 100-voice choir. Choosing selections from his impressive body of work, Zimmer performed newly orchestrated concert versions of Gladiator, Mission: Impossible II (2000), Rain Man (1988), The Lion King (1994), and The Thin Red Line (1998). The concert was recorded by Decca and released as a concert album entitled "The Wings Of A Film: The Music Of Hans Zimmer."
In 2003, Zimmer completed his 100th film score for the film The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise, for which he received both a Golden Globe and a Broadcast Film Critics nomination. Zimmer then scored Nancy Meyers' comedy Something's Gotta Give (2003), the animated Dreamworks film, Shark Tale (2004) (featuring voices of Will Smith, Renée Zellweger, Robert De Niro, Jack Black, and Martin Scorsese), and Jim Brooks' Spanglish (2004) starring Adam Sandler and Téa Leoni (for which he also received a Golden Globe nomination). His 2005 projects include Paramount's The Weather Man (2005) starring Nicolas Cage, Dreamworks' Madagascar (2005), and the Warner Bros. summer release, Batman Begins (2005).
Zimmer's additional honors and awards include the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in Film Composition from the National Board of Review, and the Frederick Loewe Award in 2003 at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. He has also received ASCAP's Henry Mancini Award for Lifetime Achievement. Hans and his wife live in Los Angeles and he is the father of four children.- Majid Entezami is an Iranian composer, conductor, musician and oboist. He composed music for 9 television series, 10 suite symphonies and over 80 movies. His works include The Cyclist, The Fateful Day, The Glass Agency and The Insane Flew Away, all of which he was awarded the best award for film music for in the International Fajr Film Festival of Tehran. Besides that, his music for The Train, Once Upon A Time, Cinema, From Karkheh To Rhine, Attack on H-3, The Fragrance of Joseph's Shirt, Duel, A Place To Live, Intense Cold, The Saint Mary, The Men of Anjelos, The Wolves and The Loneliest General are some of his most notable, memorable and nostalgic works for Iranians. Majid Entezami is one of the most active film composers after the revolution of Iran.
Majid Entezami was born in 1948 in Tehran. He played the oboe at the Tehran Conservatory of Music. After graduation he was forced to travel to Germany for a medical operation and decided to continue his studies at State University of West Berlin under the supervision of Karl Steins and Lothar Koch in 1968. He performed successful concerts with Berlin University Symphony Orchestra in Lyon, Nancy and Marseille, France from 1969 to 1972.
In 1973 Entezami came to Iran by the invitation of Tehran Symphony Orchestra and performed a successful Mozart concert as oboe soloist, conducted by Helge Dorsch. After this concert Journal de Tehran called him one of the most talented young musicians in Iran. Then he returned to Germany as a member of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and West Deutsche Philharmonie.
In 1974 he became a member of Tehran Symphony Orchestra as well as teacher at the Tehran Conservatory and music department of Tehran University. After his return he has performed two oboe recitals with Lucette Martirossian on piano and harpsichord and Ivan Pristas on bassoon in 1976 and a concert with the Les Jeunesses Musicales de I'Iran orchestra conducted by Ali Rahbari and Valodia Tarkhanian as viola d'amore soloist.
Despite being the son of famous Iranian actor Ezzatollah Entezami, Majid's entrance into the cinema industry was his own. In 1977, due to differences of opinion with the Symphonic Orchestra of Tehran, he resigned from playing in the orchestra and teaching at the university and took other work. At the time, one of his friends who had a position in Kanoon (Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), Ahmadreza Ahmadi, suggested composing some music for contemporary poetry. After composing music for the poetry of Foroogh Farrokhzad and Nosrat Rahmani, he found another position composing music for an animation, Zaal and Simorgh by Ali Akbar Sadeghi. Entezami's first cinema work was for Journey of the Stone, directed by Masoud Kimiaei, who was a famous director at that time. - Composer
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Vangelis was a composer and performer who worked almost exclusively with electronic instruments. With Jean-Michel Jarre and Mike Oldfield in the 1970s, Vangelis was a pioneer in the instrumental music and a main influence in the creation of the musical genre "new age," a style related to spiritual, meditation, relaxing ambient sounds as well as sounds from outer space. He was probably most well known for his Chariots of Fire (1981), Blade Runner (1982), The Bounty (1984) and 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) soundtracks or for the tracks used in the documentary TV series Cosmos (1980) created, produced and hosted by scientist Carl Sagan. Vangelis was involved in many musical collaborations, most famously with British progressive rock band Yes's founding member Jon Anderson.- Composer
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Clinton Darryl Mansell is an English singer, musician and film composer known for his collaborations with Darren Aronofsky. He composed Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, Black Swan, The Wrestler, Noah, Ghost in the Shell, Peacemaker, Doom Patrol, Loving Vincent, Mass Effect 3, Titans, World Traveler, Smokin' Aces, Doom, The Hole, and Definitely, Maybe.- Composer
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Jan A. P. Kaczmarek is a composer with a tremendous international reputation that continues to grow. As a successful recording artist and touring musician, Jan turned to composing film scores as his primary occupation. Jan's first success in the United States came in theater. After composing striking scores for productions at Chicago's Goodman Theatre and Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, Jan won an Obie and a Drama Desk Award for his music for the New York Shakespeare Festival's 1992 production of John Ford's "Tis Pity She's A Whore," directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, starring Val Kilmer and Jeanne Tripplehorn. Newsday wrote that Jan's score "undulates with hypnotic force that gets under your skin," while Frank Rich of the New York Times found it worthy of the films of Bernardo Bertolucci and Luchino Visconti. Educated as a lawyer, he abandoned his planned career as a diplomat, for political reasons, to write music in order to finally gain freedom of expression. First he composed for the highly politicized underground theater, and then for a mini-orchestra of his own creation, "The Orchestra of the Eighth Day". The major turning point in his life, he says, was a period of intense study with avant-garde theater director, Jerzy Grotowski. "Playing and composing was like a religion for me," Kaczmarek explains, "and then it became a profession." "The Orchestra of the Eighth Day" began touring Europe in the late 1970's and to date, has completed eighteen major tours. They appeared at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the VPRO Radio International Contemporary Music Festival in Amsterdam,the Venice Biennale, and the International Music Festival in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, where Jan won the Golden Spring Prize for the Best Composition. He is a five-time winner in Jazz Forum's Jazz Top Poll. At the end of the Orchestra's first American tour in 1982, Kaczmarek recorded his debut album, Music for the End, for the Chicago-based major independent Flying Fish Records. Jan returned to America in 1989 to find a label for his latest composition for the Orchestra. Jan stayed in the United States where he expanded his horizons by composing for theater as he had already done in Poland with great success, capped by two prestigious New York theater awards in 1992. Having also composed music for films in Poland, he focused his attention to that medium, achieving recognition as a film composer with scores to such films as "Total Eclipse", "Bliss", "Washington Square", "Aimée & Jaguar", "The Third Miracle", "Lost Souls", "Edges of the Lord", "Quo Vadis" and Adrian Lyne's "Unfaithful."
February 2005, Jan won his first Oscar for Best Original Score on Marc Forster's highly acclaimed film, "Finding Neverland."
Jan also won The National Review Board's award for Best Score of the Year, and was nominated for both a Golden Globe and BAFTA's Anthony Asquith Award for Achievement in Film Music.In addition to his work in films, Jan is also setting up an Institute inspired by the Sundance Institute, in his home country of Poland, as a European center for development of new work in the areas of film, theatre, music and new media. The Institute website (currently under construction) is: www.rozbitek.org. It is anticipated that Rozbitek will begin accepting students in 2006.- Composer
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Born in Poland in 1955, Zbigniew Preisner studied philosophy and history in the university of Cracow. In his twenties he started to study music in a autodidactical way: buying records and learning to write by taking the music in parts. He started to write his own compositions. His style has always been very romantic, influenced by romantic polish composers from the XIX century and others like Paganini or Sibelius. He has always emphasized the importance of melody in music. He doesn't like experimental modern music.
In 1981 he began his collaboration with filmmakers. While he was working with Antoni Krauze's movie "Weather Report" he met director Krzystof Kieslowski who invited him to work in his new movie "No End" about Poland under the martial law at the beginning of the 80s.
With that movie he began a very close collaboration with Kieslowski and his screenwriter Krzystof Piesiewicz. He works while the script for the movie is still being written but he usually also takes part in the editing of the movie.
Their next collaboration became a success worldwide. "Decalogue" won the European film award for best film and also awards in Cannes and other festivals. Kieslowski became one of the most importants directors in Europe and Preisner the leading film music composer of his generation.
At the same time he continued his collaboration with Kieslowski in such films like "La double vie de Veronique" and the trilogy of colours ("Blue", "White" and "Red") he also wrote soundtracks for others important directors like Louis Malle, Agniezka Holland or Héctor Babenco.
His collaboration with Kieslowski ended with his death in 1996. In the last years Preisner not only has continued his collaboration in others movies but he also has been involved in others musical projects like the writing of an opera to be performed in London and features for the Varsovia Simphony orchestra.- Composer
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A classmate of director Sergio Leone with whom he would form one of the great director/composer partnerships (right up there with Eisenstein & Prokofiev, Hitchcock & Herrmann, Fellini & Rota), Ennio Morricone studied at Rome's Santa Cecilia Conservatory, where he specialized in trumpet. His first film scores were relatively undistinguished, but he was hired by Leone for A Fistful of Dollars (1964) on the strength of some of his song arrangements. His score for that film, with its sparse arrangements, unorthodox instrumentation (bells, electric guitars, harmonicas, the distinctive twang of the jew's harp) and memorable tunes, revolutionized the way music would be used in Westerns, and it is hard to think of a post-Morricone Western score that doesn't in some way reflect his influence. Although his name will always be synonymous with the spaghetti Western, Morricone has also contributed to a huge range of other film genres: comedies, dramas, thrillers, horror films, romances, art movies, exploitation movies - making him one of the film world's most versatile artists. He has written nearly 400 film scores, so a brief summary is impossible, but his most memorable work includes the Leone films, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) , Roland Joffé's The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988), plus a rare example of sung opening credits for Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966).- Composer
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Eleni Karaindrou was born in the mountain village of Teichio in central Greece and grew up in Athens, where she studied piano and theory at the Hellenikon Odion. From 1969-74 she studied ethnomusicology in Paris and, on returning to Greece, founded the Laboratory for Traditional Instruments at the ORA Cultural Centre. She has since been an active campaigner on behalf of Greece's musical resources. Karaindrou has a long history of writing for film and theatre; to date, some 18 feature films, 13 plays and 10 television series have featured her music. Although most of her work has been with Greek directors, she has also collaborated with Chris Marker, Jules Dassin and Margarethe von Trotta. Eleni Karaindrou has been associated with Theodoros Angelopoulos since 1982.- Composer
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Yann Tiersen was born on 23 June 1970 in Brest, Finistère, France. He is a composer and writer, known for Amélie (2001), Good Bye Lenin! (2003) and Inescapable (2012).- Composer
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Ludovico Einaudi was born on 23 November 1955 in Turin, Italy. He is a composer and actor, known for Nomadland (2020), The Father (2020) and This Is England (2006).- Composer
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Javier Navarrete was born in 1956 in Teruel, Aragón, Spain. He is a composer, known for Pan's Labyrinth (2006), Wrath of the Titans (2012) and Byzantium (2012).- Music Department
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James Horner began studying piano at the age of five, and trained at the Royal College of Music in London, England, before moving to California in the 1970s. After receiving a bachelor's degree in music at USC, he would go on to earn his master's degree at UCLA and teach music theory there. He later completed his Ph.D. in Music Composition and Theory at UCLA. Horner began scoring student films for the American Film Institute in the late 1970s, which paved the way for scoring assignments on a number of small-scale films. His first large, high-profile project was composing music for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), which would lead to numerous other film offers and opportunities to work with world-class performers such as the London Symphony Orchestra. With over 75 projects to his name, and work with people such as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Oliver Stone, and Ron Howard, Horner firmly established himself as a strong voice in the world of film scoring. In addition, Horner composed a classical concert piece in the 1980s, called "Spectral Shimmers", which was world premiered by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Horner passed away in a plane crash on June 22, 2015, two months short of his 62nd birthday.- Composer
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Arvo Pärt is one of those composers in the world, whose creative output has significantly changed the way we understand the nature of music. In 1976, he created a unique musical language called tintinnabuli, that has reached a vast audience of various listeners and that has defined his work right up to today. There is no compositional school that follows Pärt, nor does he teach, nevertheless, a large part of the contemporary music has been influenced by his tintinnabuli compositions.
Childhood and studies Arvo Pärt was born on 11 September 1935 in Paide, where he also spent his first years. In 1938, the Pärt family moved to Rakvere, where he began to study piano at Rakvere Music School under Ille Martin. Having graduated from Rakvere Secondary School No 1 (1954), he continued studying music at the Tallinn Music School under Veljo Tormis. His studies were interrupted by mandatory military service in the Soviet Army (1954-1956), after which, in 1957, he continued at the Tallinn State Conservatoire under Heino Eller graduating in 1963. Several works composed during his student years still belong to the official list of his compositions: two sonatinas (1958-1959) and partita (1958) for piano, and orchestral works such as Nekrolog (1960), Perpetuum mobile (1963) and Symphony No. 1 (1963).
Early period (1958-1968) Pärt worked as a sound engineer at the Estonian Radio from 1958 to 1967. Those were also the years of his early modernist compositions. Estonian music in the 1960s was shaped by an entire generation of innovative composers with a modern approach - although a few years older, besides Pärt there were Eino Tamberg, Veljo Tormis, Jaan Rääts and their junior follower Kuldar Sink. Almost simultaneously through their music all the most important styles and compositional techniques of the 20th century were introduced to Estonian music: neoclassicism, dodecaphony, serialism, sonorism, collage technique and aleatoricism. The works of Pärt proved to pioneer many of these areas: Nekrolog is the first dodecaphonic, Perpetuum mobile the first sonoristic and Collage über B-A-C-H (1964) the first work employing the collage-technique in Estonian music. Pärt had become one of the leading figures in the Soviet avant-garde. Nevertheless, none of those styles remained permanently in his work nor interested him for very long - many of his early compositions can be viewed rather as brilliant experiments or testing the boundaries. However, regardless of the chosen styles or techniques, Pärt's early oeuvre is characterized by a punctual and powerful concept of dramaturgy, concentrated musical material and elaborated form - the elements, which are visibly present in his later tintinnabuli music and can therefore be characterized as the main pillars of his musical thinking.
Arvo Pärt in 1962. The most remarkable line of development in Pärt's early compositions is his collages, which in his case are expressed in a personal and dramatic manner differing from the usual playful character of the collage technique. In his Collage über B-A-C-H, cello concerto Pro et contra (1966), Symphony No. 2 (1966) and Credo (1968), two musical but also spiritual worlds have been set against each other. He describes those worlds as if separated by a deep abyss, which, at the same time, he longs to transcend. Pärt's dodecaphony here represents the "unbearable atmosphere of barbed wire" (to use his own words) of all modernist music, and the quest for beauty, purity and perfection is expressed through the stylization of Baroque music or concrete quotes primarily from Bach, but also Tchaikovsky, for example. Those works are witness to the growing inner anxiety and crisis for the composer. The most extreme and dramatic of them is Credo, composed in 1968 - it is the final renunciation of all means of expression used so far, the turning point in his oeuvre as well as his life.
The reception of his music in the Soviet Union at the time was conflicting and complicated. On one side, he was perceived as one of the most original and outstanding composers of his generation, whose works were also performed and acknowledged outside the USSR. On the other, many of his works composed in the 1960s were heavily criticized; for example, the neoclassical partita, but above all the dodecaphonic Nekrolog. However, it was not the composition style that caused the scandal following the premiere of Credo, but its inner message and choice of text as well as the "dangerously" strong impact it had on audiences (when the piece was performed for the very first time, the audience demanded a repetition). With its text in Latin "Credo in Iesum Christum" the composer openly and sincerely confessed to being religious, which was considered provocative and against the Soviet regime at the time. Credo was basically banned and Pärt, as well as his music, fell into disfavour for several years.
Paradoxically, Arvo Pärt was one of the most productive and highly valued composers for film in Estonia throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1967, he had become a freelance composer and after the events following Credo, film music was the only field Pärt could openly engage in. Pärt has composed music for many films - "Ukuaru" (1973, directed by Leida Laius), "Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (1975, directed by Grigori Kromanov), "Navigator Pirx" (1978, directed by Marek Piestrak), to name a few, and also music for animated films.
Years of crisis (1968-1976) and the birth of tintinnabuli Arvo and Nora Pärt with pianist Helju Tauk (in the middle) at the rehearsal of Tabula rasa before the premiere concert, in 1977. In Pärt's creative biography, the years 1968-1976 mark his period of crisis - the final renunciation of the modernist techniques and means of expression used so far, searches for personal musical language and as a result, a radical change in the author's style. "I didn't know at the time that was I going to be able to compose at all in the future. Those years of study were no conscious break, but life and death agonising inner conflict. I had lost my inner compass and I didn't know anymore, what an interval or a key meant," Pärt recalled many years later.
In his new quest for self expression Pärt turned even more intensively towards the early music and became absorbed for years studying Gregorian chant, the Notre Dame School and Renaissance polyphony. The first signs of this appear in his Symphony No. 3 (1971) - one of the very few works that premiered in these years.
It was also the time of important events in Arvo Pärt's personal life as he married and joined the Orthodox Church in 1972.
In 1976, Pärt emerged with a new and highly original musical language, which he called tintinnabuli (from tintinnabulum - Latin for 'little bell'). The new style first appears in a short piece for piano, Für Alina, followed soon by works like Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977), Fratres (1977), Tabula rasa (1977) and Spiegel im Spiegel (1978). Pärt has now been composing in his tintinnabuli-style for over 40 years, and it has proven to be a rich and inexhaustible creative source.
Tintinnabuli music can be defined as a distinct technique, which in essence unites two monodic lines of structure - melody and triad - into one, inseparable ensemble. It creates an original duality of voices, the course and inner logic of which are defined by strict, even complicated mathematical formulas. Through that duality of voices Pärt has given a new meaning to the horizontal and vertical axis of music, and broadened our perception of tonal and modal music in its widest sense.
Tintinnabuli music can also be described as a style in which the musical material is extremely concentrated, reduced only to the most important, where the simple rhythm and often gradually progressing melodies and triadic tintinnabuli voices are integrated into the complicated art of polyphony, expressing the composer's special relationship to silence.
In addition, tintinnabuli is also an ideology, a very personal and deeply sensed attitude to life for the composer, based on Christian values, religious practice and a quest for truth, beauty and purity.
After emigrating (1980 onwards) The first tintinnabuli works were composed and premiered in Tallinn, Estonia - the USSR at that time. As did the avant-garde spirit of Pärt's early works, so led the religious aspect of his tintinnabuli music to more and more controversial reviews and confrontations with Soviet officials. In January 1980, Arvo Pärt was forced to emigrate to Vienna with his wife Nora and two sons. A year later the family moved on a DAAD scholarship to Berlin, where they lived for almost 30 years.
As an active and productive composer, Pärt has continued composing since without any longer breaks. Vocal compositions, often based on liturgical texts or other Christian prayers, comprise a large part of his oeuvre. Among them there are many large-scale compositions for choir and orchestra, such as Passio (1982), Stabat Mater (1985), Te Deum (1985), Miserere (1989/1992), Berliner Messe (1990/2002), Litany (1994/1996), Kanon pokajanen (1997), Como cierva sedienta (1998/2002) and In principio (2003), as well as choral pieces with organ accompaniment or a cappella. One can say that the Word plays an important role in Pärt's oeuvre because even many of his instrumental works are text related and the textural structure is often the basis of his compositional process (i.e. Psalom, 1985; Orient & Occident, 2000; Symphony No. 4, 2008 etc.).
It was also in Germany, where the lasting collaboration with Manfred Eicher, founder and producer of the renowned ECM Records, began. In 1984, ECM released Tabula rasa launching a whole new, highly successful series of recordings under the ECM New Series title, which brought Pärt to the world. His music was soon included in the programmes of many renowned festivals, orchestras and ensembles as well as television and radio broadcasts. Since this debut album, all the first recordings of Pärt's major works have been released under ECM.
Back to Estonia After Estonia regained its independence in 1991, the connections between the Pärt family and Estonia as well as its music scene were restored. In the 1990s, his works were often performed as part of Estonian concert programmes, and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under the baton of Tõnu Kaljuste also released their first recordings of Pärt's music under ECM.
In the early 2000s, the tradition began of celebrating Arvo Pärt's birthday with concerts in his childhood home towns of Paide and Rakvere, and also in Tallinn. Festivities on a grander scale have been organised in the composer's jubilee years. At the initiative of the Estonian Music Days, the first exhaustive collection of conversations, essays and articles on Pärt was published in Estonian in 2005 ("Arvo Pärt in the Mirror", compiled by Enzo Restagno), the radio show "Arvo Pärt 70", consisting of 14 episodes by Immo Mihkelson was broadcast on Klassikaraadio (Classical Radio) and the international conference "The Cultural Roots of Arvo Pärt's Music" was held at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2010. Since 2010, Nargenfestival organises Pärt Days around the time of the composer's birthday.
During the last decade, Pärt has rearranged approximately 30 of his earlier works as well as having composed around 10 new pieces, Silhouette. Hommage à Gustave Eiffel (commissioned by Orchestre de Paris in 2009/2010), Adam's Lament (2010) commissioned for the European Capitals of Culture Istanbul 2010 and Tallinn 2011 premiering in Istanbul, Swansong (commissioned by the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg and premiering at the Mozartwoche 2014), and Greater Antiphons (2015), commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and premiered by the same orchestra under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel.
Arvo Pärt has lived permanently in Estonia since 2010. The same year, on the initiative of Arvo and Nora Pärt, the Arvo Pärt Centre was established in Laulasmaa. In collaboration with the composer himself and his family, the APC aims to create and maintain the personal archive of the composer.- Composer
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Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Glass worked in his father's radio store and discovered music listening to the offbeat Western classical records customers didn't seem to want. He studied the violin and flute, and obtained early admission to the University of Chicago. After graduating in mathematics and philosophy, he went to New York's Juilliard school, drove a cab, and studied composition with Darius Milhaud and others.
At 23, he moved to Paris to study under the legendary Nadia Boulanger, who taught almost all of the major Western classical composers of the 20th century. While there, he discovered Indian classical music while transcribing the works of Ravi Shankar into Western musical notation for a French filmmaker. A creative turning point, Glass researched non-Western music in India and parts of Africa, and applied the techniques to his own composition.
Back in the United States, Glass spent the late 1960s and early 1970s driving a taxi cab in New York and creating a major collection of new music. In 1976, his landmark opera "Einstein on the Beach" was staged by Robert Wilson to a baffling variety of reviews. His compositions were so avant-garde that he had to form the Philip Glass Ensemble to give them a venue for performance. Although called a minimalist by the Western classical mainstream, he denies this categorization. His major works include opera, theater pieces, dance, and song.
His work in film, beginning with Koyaanisqatsi (1982), gave filmmakers such as Godfrey Reggio and Errol Morris a new venue of expression through the documentary form. His many recordings have also widened his audience. He was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to compose "The Voyage" for the Columbus quinquacentennial in 1992. In 1996, he composed original music for the Atlanta Olympic Games, which, perhaps, made Glass almost mainstream. Glass remains one of the most important American composers. His music is distinctive, haunting, and evocative. Either performed by itself or in collaboration with other media, his compositions move the listener to unexplored places. More recently, a major reexamination of Glass's oeuvre has led him to be labeled the Last Romantic by the musical press.