Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

“With a tense melodic line and taut harmonies, the composition is considered by many to be the most popular of all 20th-century orchestral works,” NPR Music. Adagio for Strings, was written by Samuel Barber in 1936. Originally written as the second movement of Barbers String Quartet, Op. 11, Adagio for Strings has been used frequently in times of mourning. The beauty of this piece is the strong emotions that it invokes from those that hear it. Written during a time, when the world was in a…

Franz Peter Schubert was born around January 31, 1797, in Himmelpfortgrund what was near Vienna. He was an Austrian composer and also wrote something has much as six or seven hundred romantic songs. His works included operas, symphonies, sonatas and many other works through his life time. As a young boy he was mainly focused training his voice and becoming a vocalist but he was skilled in many other things as well. he rarely played his music in the public eyes. He died in November 19,1828, at…

Caravaggio and Caravaggisti in 17th-Century Europe Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was one of the most imitated artists in history. A lot of artists from around the world considered themselves to be his followers. Caravaggio never liked the imitation of his style but he was unable to stop it from happening. Artists like Baglione, Carlo Saraceni, and Guercino imitated his style for only a short period of their careers while others dedicated their lives to imitate him. The quality of his work…

In the past, I want to firstly address that I personally have attended some music concerts on Sacramento State’s campus. However, I had never before attended to a symphonic wind ensemble concert. Before the concert began, I had noticed a large amount of chairs on stage as I found this quite interesting. As it was about to begin, a large amount of musicians wearing black appeared on the stage and were performing a small warmup. As performers, they were a guest group. Once the lights were turned…

When Grant Wood painted Spring Turning in 1936, he was influenced largely by renaissance painters, such as Jan Van Eyck. He borrowed their technique in regards to attention to detail and making something with strange, distorted shapes feel hyper-realistic. When Aaron Bohrod painted Hilltop Farm, Lodi, Wisconsin in 1950, he was being taught by John Sloan. This teacher encouraged a more expressionistic approach to painting. Bohrod applied this philosophy to his work by using his paint to sketch…

The famous story of Dracula by Bram Stroker shows several interactions between the living and the undead. Dracula is a century old vampire who wants to come to London to create more of his own. His powers have no limits when it comes to humans, seducing them ad ordering them to do anything the vampire wishes. His powers are the main way of interacting between humans since any normal human without duress would see that he is evil. Dracula imprisons Jonathon Harker without him even realizing, he…

Vincent Van Gogh: The Portrait of Dr.Gachet The Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent Van Gogh is sorrowful, but alluring. Iam drawn to this piece because of the heavy brush strokes and the usage of dark colors, and because of this I automatically knew there was more to the story as I analyzed-- from the subject's facial expression to the purple flower lying on the table. I began to know more about this painting’s story as I investigated Vincent’s past and other works. The greatest dutch painter…

Peter and the Wolf was written in 1936 by Sergei Prokofiev as a children's story. This work includes both music and text. The symphony is the accompaniment to the narrator, who reads the spoken parts during the work. Prokofiev was born in Sochovka, Russia on April 23, 1891. The music Prokofiev is most famous for, is the music he composed for Peter and the Wolf. Prokofiev’s composing days began during his youth, eventually leading him to study music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1918,…

Over the summer I listened to the music used in two ballets shown during the Here/Now Festival, and which will also be performed during the 2017-18 season. As a non-musician, I perceive two thematic strands in the first of the four pieces from Dan Deacon’s America to be utilized in The Times Are Racing. Let’s call them A and B. The pattern in this section is ABA. However, the same music is used in the fourth and final section of the album (and ballet); but the pattern there is BA. This A strand…

Concert Report: Mivos Quartet The Mivos Quartet performed at the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall on the campus of UC San Diego on the evening of October 12, 2016. The four-membered string ensemble - consisting of Olivia de Prato and Lauren Cauley on the violin, Victor Lowrie on the viola, and Mariel Roberts on the cello - played three modern composition in a concert that lasted about one hour. The quartet opened their performance with a piece titled Serashi Fragments composed by Lei Liang in 2005.…