This site is a community for classical guitar enthusiasts at all levels. We aim to gather as much useful information as possible about our instrument, its composers and its performers. All members can add articles, factbook items, events and home recordings.
So, login and add your article!
Check out our forum. |
|
Biography
Catherina Josepha Pelzer was born in 1821 in Muelheim, on the Rhine. She was the daughter of Ferdinand Pelzer, a leading German guitarist during the early part of the 19th Century. Ferdinand began tutoring his daughter when she was quite young - a task made easier by the fact that young Catherina was quite the musical prodigy. She made her London concert debut at the age of seven. Soon after, her family moved from Germany to England where she received much critical acclaim and gained fame as a performer. Her concerts and recitals inspired people all over to pick up the guitar. Catherina later became much sought after as a guitar teacher, instructing the likes of the Princesses Louise and Beatrice, among others. In 1854 Catherina Pelzer married a renowned flautist and composer, and took the name by which she is more commonly remembered - Madame Sidney Pratten.
After some time as an instructor, she realized that many people were not inclined to invest the necessary effort to master the guitar. Many others simply did not possess the skills to do so. She had the solution, which came in the form of several publications. Her most popular and successful manual, Learning the Guitar Simplified, included easy exercises, each of which was followed by a simple song, along with diagrams of the fingerboard to show where the notes were found. She created another publication that color-coded each note in the diatonic scale. This was known, logically enough, as Colored Diagrams of the Notes of the Fingerboard of the Guitar. And for those who had very little time to practice, she put together Instructions for the Guitar Tuned in E Major. One tuning. No muss, no fuss.
Read the full article »
Biography
Born in Westphalia in 1926, Henze received his earliest musical training against the background of the rise of Nazism in Germany; his realisation that all the modernist music, art and literature that stimulated him most profoundly had been condemned by the Nazis ingrained in him the belief in the potential of art to be genuinely subversive, inspiring a tendency that was to surface explicitly in his work thirty years later. After the Second World War he resumed his formal education by studying with Wolfgang Fortner, and composed the first pieces that he still acknowledges in an elegant neo-Classical style, which mingled Stravinsky and Hindemith while already demonstrating the innate lyrical gift that has characterised Henze's music in all its phases. In the late 1940s, however, he began to attend the Darmstadt summer schools and realised the value of serialism. But, typically, he did not follow many of his contemporaries in embracing the technique to the exclusion of all else, and instead fused it with his neo-Classical style. The Violin Concerto (1947) first put this synthesis into practice, and it served also for his first opera, "Boulevard Solitude".
Read the full article »
