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[Geddes, Norman ]

(b Adrian, MI, April 27, 1893; d New York, May 8, 1958). American stage designer. He studied briefly at the Cleveland School of Art, but had no formal education after the age of 16. His first wife, Helen Belle Sneider, became his collaborator, and ‘Norman-Bel-Geddes’ was their nom de plume for articles on art and the theatre, until their divorce in 1932. Notable designs for Montemezzi’s La nave for Chicago Opera (1919) and Henry Hadley’s Cleopatra’s Night for the Metropolitan (1920) attracted Broadway attention, and his innovative approach was soon recognized. At an early stage of his career he discarded the proscenium arch and planned open-stage projects. For a commission in 1924 to design Vollmöller’s morality play The Miracle with Humperdinck’s music for Max Reinhardt, he converted the theatre into a Gothic cathedral. His work for Broadway included Kurt Weill’s The Eternal Road (...

(b Norfolk, 1702; d London, Dec 15, 1771). English naturalist and amateur musician. In 1724, after studying classics and mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, he became tutor to William Windham in Felbrig, Norfolk. In 1737 he embarked with his pupil on a tour of the Continent. From 1738 to about 1742 he and Windham, with Robert Price and others, formed a common room in Geneva for the purpose of performing plays. Stillingfleet, Windham and Price supplied the music, scenery and machines, and Gaspard Fritz led the orchestra. He returned to England in 1743 and in 1761 removed from London to Price's estate at Foxley, Herefordshire, where the two men wrote librettos for J.C. Smith, who visited Foxley in about 1758. Influenced by Price's explication of Rameau's theories, Stillingfleet undertook a partial translation of Giueseppe Tartini's Trattato di musica (Padua, 1754), with comments interspersed. To this he added a long appendix on the origin, power and efficacy of music, based on the doctrine of moral sentiment of Francis Hutcheson. Published anonymously in ...

(Alfred )

(b Hull, August 14, 1922; d March 7, 2002). English physicist, writer and lecturer on the physics of music. He studied physics at Queen Mary College, London (BSc 1942), and at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (PhD 1951, DSc 1959), where he was a lecturer then a reader in physics (1948–85). As professor and head of department of physics at University College, Cardiff (1965–83), he established the first electronic music studio in a British university (1970); he was visiting professor of experimental physics at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1976–88), and became emeritus professor of physics at the University of Wales in 1983. He was elected an honorary fellow of the Institute of Acoustics (1985).

Though his major research activity was in the study of X-ray and optical diffraction, the important musical acoustics research group which he founded at Cardiff carried out pioneering holographic studies of the vibrational modes of stringed instrument bodies. In ...