Search Results

(b Barcelona, March 27, 1862; d Barcelona, March 31, 1908). Spanish composer, folklorist and music critic. He studied composition with Antonio Nicolau and Anselmo Barba and piano with C.G. Vidiella in Barcelona and was music critic for various journals there, including La renaixensa, L'avenç and, from 1905 to 1908, El poble català. He published his Collecció de 6 melodies per a cant i piano and five Cansons per cant i piano (both Barcelona, 1887), which are settings of poems by Angel Guimerá, Francisco Matheu y Fornells, Apeles Mestres and Jacinto Verdaguer. He illustrated the latter volume himself, and some of his work was displayed at an exhibition of the Sociedad de Acuarelistas in Barcelona. A distinguished folklorist as well as a sensitive composer and skilful melodist, he collected Catalan folksongs and published arrangements of 23 of these in Cansons populars catalanas (Barcelona, 1891). He used native rhythms and melodies in his songs and piano pieces (among them ...

(d ?London, 1695). English instrument- and bookseller. Few if any personal details of his life can be ascertained, particularly given the large number of people with the same or a similar name who were involved in the printing and publishing industry in the late 17th century. He first appears in 1681, when he co-published (with John Hudgebut) John Banister (ii)’s The Most Pleasant Companion, an oblong, octavo, mostly engraved volume of ‘Choice New Lessons for the Recorder or Flute’. Throughout the ensuing decade, operating out of his shop at the Golden Viol in St. Paul’s Churchyard, he specialized in similarly formatted ‘tutors’ for a variety of instruments, including recorder, flageolet, violin, lyra viol, and cittern. Each tutor combined instructions for playing the instrument with a selection of tunes, rendered primarily in tablature. Among other publications, he issued nine editions of Youth’s Delight on the Flagelet (beginning in ...

(b Augsburg, 1520; d Augsburg, July 28, 1583). German collector of music. He came from one of the oldest patrician families of Augsburg, where his father Georg was mayor. As a judge and a member of the higher and lower councils he was one of the most influential men in Augsburg public life. Through large-scale commercial and banking businesses, partly in collaboration with the house of Habsburg and with Anton Fugger, he and his brother Johann Paul amassed a considerable fortune. In 1548 they were ennobled, along with another brother, Johann Jakob. Herwart’s descendants lived in Augsburg until 1801 and the male line continued uninterrupted in Prussia until the early 20th century. The Herwart brothers used part of their wealth to acquire works of art, books and musicalia. After his death Johann Heinrich’s valuable collections passed to Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria in 1585 and 1594; they included over 400 items of printed and manuscript music (the nucleus of the collection in ...

(b? Edinburgh, c1684; d ?London, after 1752). Scottish singer and folksong collector . His father was Daniel Thomson, one of the king's trumpeters for Scotland. He sang solos as a boy at a Musical Society concert in Edinburgh on St Cecilia's Day 1695. By 1722 he had settled in London, where he gave a benefit concert in February that year, including (according to Burney) a Scottish folksong as an encore.

Thomson published Orpheus Caledonius, a Collection of the Best Scotch Songs set to Musick (London, 1725), a lavishly produced volume dedicated to the Princess of Wales, with a subscription list of 300 notable people. It contains 50 Scottish folksongs, most of them taken from Allan Ramsay's Tea-table Miscellany (Edinburgh, 1723); the melodic ornaments and the figured bass accompaniments are Thomson's own. Hawkins described Thomson as ‘a tradesman’ and the collection as ‘injudicious and very incorrect’; it is true that some of the song texts are in crude, oral versions and that the figured basses have grammatical mistakes. In ...