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[Bernardo delle Girandole ]

(b Florence, c1531; d Florence, June 6, 1608). Italian architect, stage designer, engineer and painter. He studied with Vasari and in 1574 succeeded him as director of all the elaborate productions staged at the Florentine court; the theatre that he built in 1586 in a hall in the Uffizi became the centre of all such festivities. For the Medicis he designed palaces, villas (including Pratolino, outside Florence), fortresses, canals and harbour installations in Florence and Tuscany.

Buontalenti had worked for the court before his appointment as director, designing costumes and special machines for transformation scenes in intermedi directed by Vasari in 1565 and Lanci in 1569. He gave the new theatre in the Uffizi an advanced system of revolving periaktoi that were a great improvement on the clumsy machinery of his predecessors, enabling the scenery to be changed virtually as often as wanted. The capabilities of the stage were demonstrated by the productions of the comedies ...

(b ?Cesena, c1605; d Vienna, July 21, 1655). Italian stage designer and architect. His first known works as an artist were the tournament theatre and stage designs for Marazzoli’s Le pretensioni del Tebro e del Po (1642, Ferrara). These show the influence of Alfonso Rivarola (‘il Chenda’), whose pupil he may have been and whom he may have succeeded as stage designer and engineer at the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, about 1640, where he probably staged operas by Monteverdi. He was active there in 1643 and 1651 and may have built the small Teatro SS Apostoli (opened 1648), for which he directed and designed until 1651. With his brother Marc’Antonio he was summoned to Vienna by Ferdinand III in 1651, and until his death, assisted by his son Ludovico Ottavio, he was responsible for the décor of the operatic and festive productions at the imperial court....

(b ?Mantua, 1636; d Vienna, Dec 12, 1707). Italian stage designer and architect, son of Giovanni Burnacini. He went to Vienna in 1651 as his father’s assistant and pupil. After his father’s death (1655) he at first succeeded him as stage designer at the imperial court, but on 30 June 1657 he was dismissed by the new emperor, Leopold I, in favour of G.B. Angelini. Re-engaged from 1 January 1659, for nearly five decades he designed all the stage sets, machines and costumes for the theatrical performances, sacre rappresentazioni, festivals and memorial ceremonies of the Viennese court. He also did architectural work, including the building of the new court theatres, 1666–8.

Burnacini’s unique scenic imagination stamped Viennese opera in the 17th century – the works of Bertali, Cesti, Draghi and the Zianis – with an unmistakable imprint. Surpassing even the masterly theatrical machinery of his father, he developed a spectacular style of courtly stage design, particularly in the great ‘homage operas’ of the 1660s and 70s (e.g. Cesti’s ...

(b Newton, MA, Nov 14, 1850; d Forest Glen, MD, May 31, 1930). American ethnologist. He studied biology at Harvard (AB 1875, PhD 1877), and later studied at Leipzig and the University of Arizona. He was field director of the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition (1889–94), and, commissioned by Mary Hemenway, tested the value of the phonograph for fieldwork in March 1890 by recording songs of the Passamaquoddy Indians in Maine. These were soon followed by his Zuni (1890) and Hopi Pueblo (1891) recordings which were then analysed by Benjamin Ives Gilman. He was responsible for the Hemenway Exhibition at the Madrid exhibition of 1892 commemorating Columbus's discovery of America, and consequently received many honours. As a result of his work in Madrid, Hemenway later commissioned recordings by Gilman. From 1895 to 1918 Fewkes worked as an ethnologist at the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, DC, becoming chief in ...

(b Waa, nr Mombasa, 1924). Kenyan popular musician. Konde has travelled widely in eastern Africa for over 50 years. Born in colonial Kenya, he absorbed the local nomba dance rhythms from an early age. He attended St George's Catholic School where he learned clarinet, flute and trumpet, and Western notation. In 1940 he joined the colonial Department of Health but continued to play acoustic guitar, occasionally entertaining at weddings and parties. Konde's early groups featured guitars, accordions and drums, and played original compositions in Swahili that combined traditional Sengenya rhythms with African American blues and Cuban Son, styles that were accessible at the time and were now influential in the bustling port of Mombasa.

At 19 years old he enrolled in the King's African Rifles (Entertainment Unit), and began entertaining in Burma with musicians from Tanganyika and Uganda; he made his first recordings at that time in a Calcutta studio. After World War II, Konde's unit returned to Kenya under the guidance of the film producer and director of East African Records, Peter Coleman. He was encouraged to play an electric Gibson (the first in East Africa) and from then on became the featured guitarist in Peter Coleman's African Band. From there his career flourished, as he became one of the three most sought after entertainers in the region....

(Henry )

(b Canton, OH, Aug 18, 1905; d West Redding, CT, July 31, 1978). American composer, violinist, bandleader, recording engineer, and producer. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, he performed as a light classical violinist in the United States and Europe. During the 1930s he studied conducting with Maurice Frigara in Paris. After a near-fatal car accident in 1940, he organized his own dance band, the Light Brigade, which recorded for RCA and Columbia. After he disbanded it at the turn of the decade, Light devoted himself to management, working for several record companies before becoming president of Waldorf Music Hall Records in 1954. He founded his own label, Grand Award, in 1956 and had success with Dixieland and honky-tonk piano albums. In 1959, he founded Command Records on which he released Persuasive Percussion, the first in a successful series of high-fidelity albums that used stereo technology to great advantage. Over the next two decades, he continued to produce hit albums drawing on the latest technological savvy and packaged with covers usually designed by Josef Albers. Musicians who appeared on Light’s albums include the Free Design, Doc Severinsen, Dick Hyman, Bobby Byrne, and Bobby Hackett. In ...

(b Utica, NY, Oct 20, 1944; d New York, Nov 14, 2016). American disc jockey, producer, and party planner. He spent his youth listening to records with a racially mixed crowd and then relocated to New York in the early 1960s. Moving to a loft (known later as “The Loft”), Mancuso became involved designing sound systems for clubs around the city, including Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage. He began to host invitation-only parties in the mid-1960s for which he spun a wide range of musical styles; many of the guests, including Tony Humphries and Frankie Hawkins, would become DJs themselves. Later parties took on titles and became special events, including “Love Saves the Day,” which took place in 1970. In 1974 Mancuso and Steven D’Aquisto developed a shared record pool for local DJs. His parties continued at The Loft until 1985, when he began to search out new locations offering more space. After ...

(b Bermuda, July 10, 1957). American audio engineer, musician, and owner of Keith McMillen Instruments, based in Berkeley, California. He received his BS in acoustics from the University of Illinois, where he also studied classical guitar and composition. In 1979 he founded Zeta Music, which designed and sold electric and electronic violins and basses. In 1992 he organized a research laboratory for Gibson Guitars. He developed a computerized composition, notation, and performance system, and also helped devise ZIPI, a MIDI-like music control language. At the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California, Berkeley, he researched audio networking, synthesizers, and string instruments. In 1996 he became director of engineering for the audio processing and distributed music networks division of Harmon Kardon. In 1999 he founded Octiv, Inc., an Internet audio signal processing company, which produced the ‘Volume Logic’ plug-in for iTunes that allows digital audio remastering to improve the sound produced by computers and MP3 players....

(b Milan, July 27, 1777; d Milan, March 12, 1849). Italian scene painter and designer. He began his career designing scenery and decorating new theatres in conjunction with other leading artists such as Paolo Landriani, Giovanni Pedroni, Giovanni Perego and Giorgio Fuentes. From 1817 to 1832 he was sole designer and chief scene painter for La Scala. From this powerful position during a rich period of operatic output, he influenced design standards for the works of Bellini, Donizetti, Mozart, Meyerbeer, Rossini and many other later composers until well into the 20th century. Among the hundreds of operas and ballets he designed at La Scala were the premières of Rossini’s La gazza ladra (1817), Bellini’s Norma (1831) and Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia (1833).

Sanquirico’s designs were the foundation of the style commonly associated with 19th-century grand opera. They combined the restrained neo-classicism of his early training with the romantic trait of basing stage fantasy on historical accuracy and sensibility. Vast enough in scale to accommodate the epic quality of lyric drama, they were intimate enough and sufficiently ‘realistic’ to render human passions credible and reasonably natural. He tended to prefer spacious settings with single perspective, unlike the more intricate plans of the late Baroque period. A typical Sanquirico formula, widely copied and still theoretically valid, was to set a scene in a richly decorated architectural foreground which opened out on to a broad landscape view painted on a backdrop, profound in its simplicity (see overleaf). This solved many technical problems of scale and, at the same time, satisfied the aesthetic needs of romantic audiences for spectacle. The end of his career saw the introduction of gas lighting in theatres, and his painted scenery showed a sensitivity to the nuances of light which later scene painters lost because of advances in lighting control. One reason for Sanquirico’s international influence was that portfolios of hand-coloured engravings based on his theatrical and architectural drawings were published and extensively circulated and copied (...

[Van Noorden, Philip Van Loon Guybo Schaap ]

(b New York, April 8, 1951). American disc jockey and record producer. His father, Walter Schaap, a scholar and a translator of French jazz texts, collaborated in 1937 with Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay in creating a bilingual jazz periodical, Le jazz hot. In 1970 Phil Schaap became an announcer for Columbia University’s radio station WKCR; later he also worked at the radio stations WBGO and WNYC and had a syndicated program, “Jazz Session.” This radio work is characterized by his encyclopedic and anecdotal knowledge of the material he plays; he is especially known for his daily WKCR program “Bird Flight,” on which he discusses and plays recordings by Charlie Parker. Schaap organized jazz performances at the West End Café in 1980. He has taught at the New School for Social Research and at Princeton University, and he has written liner notes for new and reissued recordings.

As a record producer Schaap has been involved in tape vault research, the restoration of archived materials, and the production and packaging of material to be reissued. In this capacity he strives for the best possible sound and incorporates such ancillary material as alternate and incomplete takes, or assorted studio chatter, within the chronological presentation of originally released material. Though this exhaustive approach generally reflects contemporaneous trends in jazz issues, and has been much praised, it has also engendered some criticism, particularly following Schaap’s reorganization of Duke Ellington’s classic Columbia LP ...

(b Augsburg, June 7, 1926; d Vienna, June 2, 2015). Austrian scene designer of German birth. He was guided to study scene design by Clemens Krauss, through whom he gained early experience in scene painting at the Staatsoper in Munich, where he studied with Sievert, Preetorius and Rudolf Hartmann. From 1947 to 1954 he designed for theatres and films in Berlin, Munich and Salzburg. In 1952 he began his 20-year association with the Salzburg marionette theatre, eventually revolutionizing the design of the puppet stage and creating several new productions of Mozart operas. In 1954 he was named chief of design at the Bremen Staatstheater, where he designed his first Ring. After collaborating with Karajan on Pelléas et Mélisande at the Vienna Staatsoper in 1960 he became Karajan’s personal adviser on production, moving in 1962 to Vienna where he was appointed chief designer for the Staatsoper, the Burgtheater and the Volksoper. He made his Covent Garden début in ...

(b Hanover, May 17, 1887; d Munich, Dec 11, 1966). German stage designer. After studying scene painting at the Stadttheater and at the school of applied arts in Aachen, he worked in various, chiefly Rhenish, scenic studios as a painter, 1904–9. He then became artistic director of the Werkstätte für Bühnenkunst in Munich (1910) and of the important Studio Lüttkemeyer in Coburg (1911), before going to the Städtische Bühnen in Freiburg (1912–14) as artistic director. There followed engagements as director of design at Mannheim (1914–18), Frankfurt (1918–37) and Munich (1937–43), as well as invitations to work at other European and American opera houses.

Sievert’s work was at first influenced by neo-romanticism and the reforms of Jugendstil. He played a part in the development of the anti-historicist and anti-naturalist Stilbühne, to which he gave a craftsmanlike, ornamental stamp which asserted itself later, especially in his Mozart productions. The radicalization of the ...

(b Časlav, May 10, 1920; d Prague, April 8, 2002). Czech stage designer. He was apprenticed in his father’s profession of cabinet maker before studying (1941–3) to be an interior architect. It was through his hobby, painting, that he became interested in stage design. His first work was for an amateur group in Časlav (1942), after which he did designs for the Novy Soubor (‘New Group’), of which he was a founder member, in Prague (1943–4). After World War II he studied architecture in Prague (1945–50), also taking over in 1945 the direction of design at the Grand Opera of the Fifth of May, which became the Smetana Theatre in 1948. He was appointed chief designer and technical director of the National Theatre in 1951 and exercised a decisive influence on the development of Czech music theatre. His work outside Czechoslovakia from the late 1950s also considerably affected international opera....

(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 ...

[Jacopo]

(b ?Fano, Sept 1, 1608; dFano, June 17, 1678). Italian stage designer, engineer and architect. He was probably trained as an architect and engineer, but he may also have been a pupil of the stage designers Niccolò Sabbatini and Francesco Guitti. He was working as an engineer in the Venice Arsenal around 1640, when he designed the Teatro Novissimo, Venice’s fourth public opera house, built in 1641. He invented a new system of stage machinery which for the first time enabled the whole set to be changed in one operation: the wings were supported on undercarriages running on rails beneath the stage, and were moved by turning a central roller to which the undercarriages were attached by ropes. In the next few years Torelli designed the sets for all the operas staged in the Teatro Novissimo, and occasionally worked for the Teatro di SS Giovanni e Paolo as well. Summoned to Paris in ...

(b Jersey City, NJ, c1925; d Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Aug 25, 2016). Recording engineer. In the late 1940s he created a recording studio in the living room of his parents’ home in Hackensack, New Jersey, and began recording as a hobby. An optometrist by profession, he became the principal recording engineer for Blue Note in 1953, and the following year he began working for Prestige (to 1969) and Savoy as well. After abandoning optometry, in July 1959 he moved into a newly built home and studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. He also made numerous recordings for Cadet, CTI, Elektra Musician, Enja, GRP, Impulse!, Kudu, Milestone, Muse (ii), Reservoir, Riverside, and Verve.

Van Gelder’s skill at getting a proper mix of instruments directly onto the master tape (long before multiple-channel recording existed) was exemplary, and his clean, crisp, well-balanced drum-kit sounds were especially noteworthy. Perhaps his most distinctive aural signature was the tight, boxy sound of his small Steinway grand piano. Although his output slowed from the frenetic pace he set during the 1950s and 1960s, he continued to work, and in the late 1980s he changed to digital technology....

(b Reggio nell’Emilia, c1623; d ?Paris, Feb 17, 1713). Italian theatre architect and scene designer, son of Gaspare Vigarani. With his brother Lodovico, he accompanied his father to Paris in 1659, and in 1662 was invited back by Louis XIV to design court entertainments. As part of a triumvirate with Lully and Molière, he was responsible for a series of festivities mostly at Versailles in 1664, 1668 and 1674. These stand among the most exquisite and sumptuous entertainments of the period. Each consisted of several divertissements, comedy-ballets or operas commissioned for the occasion, including La Princesse d’Elide, George Dandin, Les fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, Alceste (Quinault–Lully), and Le malade imaginaire (Molière-Charpentier). In 1673 he received French citizenship and in 1679 was appointed ‘inventor of machines for theatres, ballets and royal festivities’. With Lully, he directed the Académie Royale de Musique (the Paris Opéra) according to the ‘Act de Société’ of ...

(b Reggio nell’Emilia, Feb 20, 1588; d Modena, Sept 9, 1663). Italian theatre architect and scene designer . He was active as a designer of machinery for festivities at Reggio nell’Emilia by 1618. From the 1630s, if not before, he was employed by the Duke of Modena, and in 1635 was promoted to ‘engineer and general superintendent of buildings’. In 1640 and 1651 he took part in the design of theatres at Capri Modena and Mantua. In 1659 Cardinal Mazarin invited him to Paris to supervise the entertainments planned for the marriage of Louis XIV; for this occasion he constructed the Salle des Machines in the Palais des Tuileries and designed the inaugural production there, Cavalli’s Ercole amante (with additional ballets by Lully), performed, after considerable delay, in 1662. This production, with its spectacular stage machinery and scenic effects, was a major factor in the prominence enjoyed by Italian theatrical art in France for the next century. The theatre itself marked the transition from the pre-Baroque amphitheatre auditorium, which then prevailed in Paris, to the Italian opera house with perspective wing-stage and horseshoe auditorium. G.L. Bernini criticized it (...

(b Odessa, 5/Aug 18, 1907; d Paris, Feb 11, 1984). Russian stage, costume and film designer, resident in France from 1920. He studied in Paris, taking painting and sculpture at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs and architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In the course of a prolific career he was responsible for more than 600 productions: some 150 films (including Michel Carné’s Les visiteurs du soir, 1942), 300 plays and 200 operas, staged in most of the leading European houses. He worked with the director Peter Brook in both opera and theatre.

Wakhévitch’s designs were characterized by a bold, sometimes coarse, painterly style, the sumptuous use of strong colour, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting effects and – reflecting his architectural training – confident, if conventional, handling of complicated stage space. Typical productions were the barbarically Russian Boris Godunov (1948, Covent Garden; directed by Peter Brook), the dramatic, enduring ...