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Iwan Knorr

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Iwan Otto Armand Knorr (3 January 1853 – 22 January 1916) was a German composer and music teacher. Life A native of Gniew, Knorr was taken to southern Russia at the age of four, where he was surrounded by Russian folk music. His mother taught him piano. The family settled in Leipzig in 1868, where Knorr attended the Leipzig Conservatory, studying with Ignaz Moscheles, Ernst Friedrich Richter and Carl Reinecke. In 1874, he became a teacher and in 1878 director of music theory instruction at the Imperial Kharkiv Conservatory, in what is now Ukraine. In 1883, he settled in Frankfurt, where he joined the faculty of the Hoch Conservatory. In 1908, he became director of the school. As a teacher he exerted great influence. Among his pupils were Bernhard Sekles, Ernest Bloch, Vladimir Sokalskyi, Ernst Toch and Hans Pfitzner, as well as the English-speaking composers such as William Beatton Moonie and friends that become known as the Frankfurt Group: Balfour Gardiner, Percy Grainger, Norman O’Neill, Roger Quilter and Cyril Scott. His compositions include three operas, a symphony, a piano quartet and several sets of variations and suites, as well as pedagogical works of counterpoint and fugu

Iwan Müller

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Iwan Müller, sometimes spelled Iwan Mueller (14 December 1786, Reval, Governorate of Estonia – 4 February 1854, Bückeburg), was a clarinetist, composer and inventor who at the beginning of the 19th century was responsible for a major step forward in the development of the clarinet, the air-tight pad. Biography Müller was born in Reval (present-day Tallinn), at that time a city with a strong Baltic German community in the Governorate of Estonia, part of the Russian Empire. He became a chamber musician in Saint Petersburg before he was twenty. At the same time, he was constantly striving to improve the clarinet, with new types of keywork. At the time, the standard clarinet used flat brass plates covered in soft leather to cover the toneholes. Since these leaked air, the number of them had to be kept to a minimum, which meant that notes outside the main scale of the clarinet (accidentals) had to be obtained by complicated fingerings which were difficult to play quickly and rarely were in tune. Clarinets would have five or six keys, the bare minimum to obtain an acceptable chromatic scale. Müller’s solution was the stuffed pad, originally made of kid leather stuffed with felt. These pa

Iwonka Bogumiła Szymańska

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Iwonka Bogumiła Szymańska (born 11 July 1943) is a Polish composer and pianist who developed a new musical form she called a “sonnet”. Szymańska was born in Warsaw. She debuted as a pianist in 1951 and began composing in 1965, also performing on the radio. She studied piano at the State Music College in Gdańsk and composition at the State Music College in Warsaw, graduating in 1972. Her teachers included K. Jastrzebska and Witold Rudzinski. Szymańka’s compositions Two Essays (1971) and Trylogia (1973) received prizes. *Second String Quartet (with flute) *Third String Quartet *Tryptyk (brass band) Orchestra *First Sonnet *Mahoniowy Koncert (violin and orchestra) *Mobil *Play of Colors *Second Play of Colors *Third Sonnet (two pianos and orchestra) *Trylogia *Wiosenny Koncert (piano and orchestra) Piano *Arabeski (two pianos) *Esej (piano and percussion) *Trzy Sonety Voice *Second Sonnet (two sopranos, choir and orchestra) References