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(Seiko)

(b Seattle, WA, 9 July 1938). Composer. He studied composition with Robert Palmer (i) at Cornell University (MA in English literature 1961, DMA 1965), and continued his studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris (1962–3), Ernst Pepping in Berlin (1965–6), and Gunther Schuller at the Berkshire Music Center (1966). He joined the faculty of UCLA in 1966 and was associate professor of music until 1976; during those years he founded and directed the Twice Ensemble, conducted the collegium musicum and was composer-in-residence for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (1971–4). He was Andrew Mellon Professor at the California Institute of Technology in 1975 and taught at the California Institute of the Arts (1976). In 1980 he became composer-in-residence for the San Francisco Ballet. He re-joined the UCLA faculty in 1996 and was Visiting Professor in 1999. He has written over 15 film scores and has worked as a consultant and arranger for stage musicals, including Duke Ellington's ...

(b Minneapolis, MN, 28 March, 1941). Composer for television, conductor, arranger, and orchestrator. Clausen grew up in Jamestown, ND, where he took up French horn and piano, as well as singing in school choirs. He attended North Dakota State University studying mechanical engineering before a summer in New York City, before being exposed to first-run Broadway musicals and other professional musical settings convinced him he should pursue music instead. He took up string bass and baritone sax and graduated with a degree in music in 1963, followed by a masters degree at Berklee College of Music.

After moving to southern California, his first high-profile professional gig was as an arranger for the second season of The Donny and Marie Show, and eventually conductor and music director for the show’s third season. He moved away from variety and into scripted drama with his work on Moonlighting; during this time he also scored the comedy series ...

(b Concord, NH, March 7, 1940; d Cheektowaga, NY, April 9, 2016). American filmmaker, composer, violinist, and media artist. He began playing violin in his youth and studied with Ronald Knudsen. He became fascinated with the physics of sounds and interested in intonation, the harmonic series, long-held tones, and the act of close listening. He attended Harvard University and received an AB in mathematics in 1962. While at Harvard he met Henry Flynt and Christian George Wolff and became involved with the post-Cagean avant garde based in New York. In 1959 Conrad met La Monte Young, who became a frequent collaborator in the mid-1960s. Conrad credited an encounter with the music of 17th-century composer and violinist Heinrich Ignaz Biber in the late 1950s with a profound transformation of his musical thinking, drawing his attention to variable tunings and the role of timbre as an aesthetic concern. Conrad’s exposure to the music of Ali Akbar Khan also heightened his interest in drones as a basis for musical performance....

Line of MIDI-based reproducing player pianos introduced by Yamaha Corporation in 1982 (1986 in North America). The Disklavier system combines an acoustic piano with an electromechanical player-piano system. As in other such systems, fibre-optic sensors register the movement of keys, hammers, and pedals during performance, while the digital controller operates a bank of solenoids installed under the piano’s key bed; one solenoid is positioned under the tail of each key, with additional solenoids connected to the pedal rods. Performance information is stored digitally on CD-ROM, floppy discs (still used for many accompaniments for instructional piano material), or a hard drive. Disklavier systems can be connected to sequencers, tone modules, and computers via MIDI and Ethernet. A built-in speaker system attached to the case under the soundboard is used to play back optional digital piano sound and especially for playback of accompanying orchestral or vocal tracks.

Unlike other electronic player systems, the Disklavier is only installed in new Yamaha pianos and only at the factory. It cannot be installed in older Yamahas or other brands of pianos. Compared with other systems, the Disklavier’s recording capability is generally regarded to be of the highest quality and sophistication. Of the Disklavier models available in ...

(b New York, NY, Aug 5, 1953). American composer and media artist. He studied film and video art at the State University of New York at Buffalo (MA 1976) and composition with Pauline Oliveros (1974), La Monte Young (1974–6), and finally Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University (MA 1982). He has directed and composed music for a number of his own ensembles, including the Orchestra of Excited Strings, the first iteration of which formed in 1979. Among the most rock-oriented of minimalist composers, he has experimented with performance techniques, explored original systems of tuning, and modified or created new instruments to achieve specific timbral effects. In 1984 he moved to Berlin, where he became composer-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. Since arriving in Europe he has expanded his creative activities: staging multi-day performances (The Memory Projects, 1995–2001); creating installations such as From the Archives...

(Joseph)

(b Toronto, ON, 24 July 1917; d Guernsey, 23 April 2005). Canadian arranger, composer, and conductor. He began his career as a trumpet player in dance bands and later worked for Percy Faith's CBC Orchestra. By 1942 he had composed two symphonies, and in 1944 he came to Britain as conductor of the Canadian Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force, alongside Glenn Miller and George Melachrino fronting the US and British bands. He took his army discharge in Britain, where Decca contracted him to work with their leading singers such as Vera Lynn and Gracie Fields; the BBC granted him a radio series with his own orchestra. He began composing for the cinema, and early successes out of some 40 scores included Spring in Park Lane, Maytime in Mayfair, and Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. The emergence of LPs provided orchestra leaders such as Farnon the opportunity to develop their arranging and composing talents more fully, and his Decca albums from the 1950s have become highly prized by admirers, especially fellow musicians in the United States. Many have acknowledged his influence, including John Williams, Henry Mancini, Quincy Jones, and Johnny Mandel. Farnon's light orchestral cameos are among the finest to have been written since World War II, notably ...

(b Milan, Oct 22, 1929; d Parma, Italy, July 29, 2014). Italian composer, pianist, and conductor. Having studied the piano from a young age, he began to appear at the age of 13 as a conductor and orchestral pianist specializing in light music, and in jazz groups. After the war, while establishing himself as a jazz musician, he completed his studies of the piano, composition, and conducting at the Milan Conservatory (with, among others, Renzo Bossi, Antonino Votto, and Giulini) and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena (with Paul Van Kempen). Active for many years as a conductor of various musical groups and as a composer, his growing interest in jazz led him during the second half of the 1950s to attempt to combine jazz and classical music composition.

A key work was the octet Tempo e relazione (1957) – a piece in five movements based on two 12-note series – and from that point on Gaslini became recognized as a major figure of the Italian and wider jazz avant garde. His music continued to be characterized by a determination to integrate different idioms, including free jazz, serialism, pop, and electronics. Alongside this ‘multi-lingual’ approach, set apart from the American Third Stream, he made manifest a political commitment to working-class and student left-wing movements after ...

(Mitchell )

(b Brooklyn, NY, March 21, 1948). American jazz and film critic and historian. After studying English at Grinnell College (BA 1972), he returned to New York and began writing on film for the Hollywood Reporter (1972) and on jazz for Down Beat (1972–3). Citing influence from the writers Martin Williams and Dan Morgenstern, he decided to focus his efforts exclusively on jazz and in 1973 was hired as a music critic by the Village Voice. His regular column “Weather Bird” became highly influential during the next three decades. Unlike critics who concentrated primarily on recent performances, Giddins wrote on a range of topics, including the legacies of historical figures, contemporary developments, and issues relating to jazz advocacy and education. From the 1980s he began publishing collections of his essays as well as book-length monographs, including biographies of Charlie Parker (1987), Louis Armstrong (...

(b Baltimore, MD, 31 Jan 1937). American composer. Philip Glass is considered one of the founding figures of minimalist music. After studying at the University of Chicago (1952–6) and the Juilliard School (1957–62) he received a Fulbright scholarship that supported him to develop his craft with Nadia Boulanger in Paris (1964–6). During this period, he served as Ravi Shankar’s music assistant for the film Chappaqua, which depicts the life of its director and protagonist, Conrad Rooks, and his struggles with drug addiction. On returning to the United States, Glass collaborated with the Chicago-based Kartemquin Film company on Inquiring Nuns and Marco (see Eaton, 2013). This period of soundtrack production was short-lived, however, as he later concentrated on concert music and opera, producing such key works as Music in Twelve Parts (1971–4) and Einstein on the Beach (1975–6)....

(b Yonkers, NY, May 14, 1948). American film scholar. She received the BA in French, the MA in Romance Languages, and took the doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature, all at the University of Washington (1969, 1971, and 1978). She studied in Paris from 1973–1974 with Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Roland Barthes, and Nadia Boulanger. She taught comparative literature and film studies at Indiana University from 1975 to 1990, then joined the founding faculty at the University of Washington, Tacoma, in 1990. Gorbman has written extensively on film music and film sound. She has also translated from French many of Michel Chion’s key theoretical works on the audiovisual, including Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994), The Voice in Cinema (1999), and Film: A Sound Art (2009). Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies (based on her doctoral dissertation) examined the narrative and expressive functions of music in film. It was the first to draw on narrative, semiotic, and psychoanalytic theories that flourished in film studies in the 1970s. Her use of the narrative theory-derived terminology “diegetic/non-diegetic” to assess if and how music, and the soundtrack as a whole, participated in film narration was especially far-reaching, and has since been embraced within film music studies and far beyond to other disciplines....

(b Detroit, MI, Sept 13, 1970). American writer, filmmaker, and cultural critic. She received undergraduate and graduate degrees in film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her short film, I Am Ali, won Best Short Film at the Newport International Film Festival in 2002. Her 2010 documentary, Black August: A Hip-Hop Documentary Concert, grew out of her work with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and integrates footage from the Black August Hip Hop Benefit Concert series and interviews with musicians, academics, and activists on political prisoners and the injustices of the prison system.

As a journalist hampton has published on hip hop and popular culture in magazines such as The Village Voice, Harper’s Bazaar, Vibe, and The Source. She was an editor for The Source in the 1990s, and a contributing writer at Vibe. She has profiled or interviewed the most successful figures in hip hop of the 1990s, including Jay-Z, Nas, Tupac, and Biggie Smalls, who after being the subject of a college documentary film assignment later became a friend and the godfather of hampton’s daughter. As familiar as she is with the most commercially successful side of commercial hip hop, hampton has also written critically and personally about the often problematic relationship between young black women and popular hip hop. She cowrote an unreleased autobiography of Sean “Jay-Z” Carter, and later collaborated with him on ...

(Roy)

(b Los Angeles, 14 Aug 1953; d Santa Barbara, CA, 22 June 2015). American film composer and conductor. The son of the Bohemian American production designer Harry Horner, James Horner studied at the RCM, where his teachers included György Ligeti. He moved to California in the early 1970s and attended the University of the Pacific and then USC. He then earned the master’s degree in composition and music theory at UCLA, where he also taught music theory and worked on a doctorate; his professors included Paul Chihara. In 1978 Horner scored a series of films for the American Film Institute (including The Watcher), and in 1979 he began scoring feature-length films, including work for B-movie producer Roger Corman.

Horner often incorporates electronic elements, choral or solo vocal music (including wordless female voices), and Celtic and other ‘world music’ elements. He has scored a large number of science fiction and action films, and also many dramas and children’s films, totaling nearly one hundred feature film scores as of ...

(Alexis)

(b Lyons, France, 13 Sept 1924; d Malibu, CA, 28 March 2009). French composer. He studied engineering at the University of Lyons and at the Sorbonne, then attended the Paris Conservatoire, studying percussion with Passerone and composition with Honegger and Joseph Martenot, inventor of the ondes martenot. He served in the army during World War II, and in the late 1940s played percussion in the navy band, with the Orchestre Radio-Symphonique, and with the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, where he became friends with Boulez and Delerue. When Jean Vilar became director of the Théâtre National Populaire, he made Jarre his musical director, resident composer, and conductor. In 1952 Georges Franju asked him to write the score for Hôtel des invalides. The film went on to become a minor classic, and Jarre turned henceforth almost exclusively to film music, writing scores for many French directors, including Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Rappeneau. His score for ...

(b Trikala, Greece, April 7, 1922; d Athens, Greece, April 8, 1990). Greek composer and lyricist. He was of middle-class origin and finished high school in 1941. He became fascinated with rebetiko and the music of the refugees from Asia Minor, and he was also influenced by religious Byzantine and folk music. From 1941 until 1947 he worked as a bouzouki player in taverns and nightclubs in Trikala and especially Thessaloniki. He was lauded for his first recorded compositions, made in 1947 and including the emblematic laïko song Nychtose choris fengari (‘The Night Fell with No Moon’), which were invested with various social and political meanings as a result of the civil war. In the following years he cooperated with several important laïko creators, and had dozens of hits in the late rebetiko style with singers like Haskil, Tsaousakis, and Bellou, and in grieving or Indian style with singers like Kazantzidis, Gavalas, Angelopoulos, Menidiatis, and Lydia. From ...

(b Yambol, 30 March 1933; d Plovdiv, 12 April 2014). Bulgarian composer and music educator, famous for his work in different genres but mostly for his distinctive contribution to the field of film music. He graduated from the Bulgarian State Conservatory in 1961 under Pancho Vladigerov (composition) and Assen Dimitrov (conducting). Author of the music for over 120 cartoons and more than 40 feature films, Karadimchev also wrote songs for rock bands, marked usually by laconic yet highly attractive melodic lines. His lyrical Byala tishina (‘White Silence’), performed by Georgi Minchev and The Shturtzite, made a particular breakthrough for Bulgarian rock music on the national level by winning the first prize at The Golden Orpheus Pop Music Festival in 1967. And his close collaboration with The Tangra in the early 1980s developed ‘the melodic style of rock’ in songs such as Bogatstvo (‘Fortune’) and Nashiat grad (‘Our Town’). Some of his title songs written for movies such as the ...

[Mitchnick, Irwin ]

(b Brooklyn, NY, Jan 30, 1928). American composer, producer, and director. After earning a BA and MA from the Yale School, where he studied with paul Hindemith , he worked as a jazz musician and from 1954 wrote music for television and commercial jingles, such as “Nobody doesn’t Like Sara Lee.” In 1957 Leigh formed the company Music Makers as a focus for these efforts. He wrote incidental music for two plays, Too Good to be True (1963) and Never Live over a Pretzel Factory (1964), and then composed with the lyricist Joe Darion the score for the Broadway hit Man of La Mancha (1965). Their Tony Award-winning score includes spirited “Spanish” gestures and songs that effectively describe characters and situations. The show itself, which won a Tony Award for Best Musical, ran 2328 performances and has remained popular. Leigh also wrote the scores for ...

Ludomusicology is the study of music and sound in, or related to, games. Broadly speaking, the term may apply to any type of game or sport, or to the relationship between music and play more generally (see Moseley, 2016; Fritsch, 2018). In practice, however, ‘ludomusicology’ has most commonly referred to the study of music and video games, or interactive media.

The study of video game audio presents unique challenges. Games themselves, which are typically the objects of study, are often unstable. This instability may emerge because of the interactive nature of the medium, in which each user’s experience may differ; because games exist in multiple formats or versions; or because they are constantly evolving, as in updates to online games (see Summers, 2016; Reale, 2019). Furthermore, copyright restrictions, regionally restricted releases, and/or technological obsolescence sometimes render archival materials – even entire games – inaccessible to scholars. As a result, overviews of game music history and style have by necessity focused on readily available ‘canonic’ titles that were released widely in North America, Western Europe, and (to a lesser extent) Japan....