0.10 Appendix 1: musician biographies  (Page 23/37)

While the timbres that Monk creates may be complex and unusual, the music underlying her work is often simple and consonant. The pure open intervals of medieval music are especially attractive to Monk. She once stated that the European music that she most admired began with the Medieval and went through to the Renaissance, skipped the Common Practice Period, and continued with 20th/21st Century music. One of her favorite composers is Perotin.

Monk, thelonious (1917–1982)

Pianist and composer. Monk is one of the most important figures in jazz history, but he is also one of the most controversial and least-understood. Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Monk’s family moved to New York when he was four, and he remained there the rest of his life. In the early 1940s he became house pianist at Minton’s in Harlem, helping to formulate what would become “bebop”—the style that would define modern jazz—though Monk himself never considered himself a “bebopper” and his music does not fit easily into that category. Monk was a highly accomplished pianist, but his idiosyncratic keyboard technique—full of dry, punchy chords, complex syncopations, intentional “wrong notes,” and long stretches of silence—led many to believe mistakenly that he was simply a poor musician. His erratic personal behavior did little to improve his stature in many peoples’ eyes, though his influence on other musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane remains legendary. Monk’s most important contribution to jazz may be as a composer, for pieces such as “Round Midnight,” “Straight No Chaser,” and “Ruby, My Dear” not only became jazz standards but expanded harmonic, rhythmic, and formal possibilities for those who improvised on them. Recent scholarship—much of it as yet unpublished—will hopefully provide a better understanding of this enigmatic musician.

Mozart, wolfgang amadeus (1756–1791)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, an Austrian cathedral town where his father was a violinist in the orchestra of the archbishop, an important official in the Roman Catholic Church. All evidence indicates that Mozart’s natural musical gifts were phenomenal and became apparent at an early age. When he was six, his father took him on the first of several extended European tours, one lasting more than three years, during which he astonished audiences with his ability to compose, improvise, and perform at the keyboard and on the violin. The many surviving letters between members of the Mozart family and friends back home in Salzburg record the highs and lows of these trips, from the exhilaration of command performances before royalty to the dangers and discomforts of travel by coach and several serious illnesses that afflicted Mozart and his older sister, Nannerl, including typhoid fever. Herr Mozart’s reference to Wolfgang cutting a tooth reminds us that these trips began when he was the age of a first grader of today.

After his experiences in London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, and other musical capitals of the time, Salzburg seemed provincial and confining. But when at the age of 17 he had not been offered a satisfactory position in any large city, Mozart grudgingly entered the service of the archbishop. He found his duties in Salzburg abhorrent and his treatment by the archbishop demeaning. Frequent disagreements ensued, culminating in a stormy encounter in 1781 during which the archbishop released him from service “with a kick on my behind,” as Mozart reported in a letter.