Brian Eno is a musician, composer and producer of audio and visual landscapes. Eno's synthesizer work and electronic manipulation of audio textures was first featured during the early 1970's as a founding member of Roxy Music. His solo and collaborative musical compositions with John Cale, Robert Fripp and David Bowie have been in circulation world-wide over the last 25 years.
Eno has produced records for numerous artists including U2, David Bowie, Jane Siberry and performance artist Laurie Anderson, executive produced the "Help" benefit album, and performed with Pavarotti, Bono and The Edge at 1995's Modena Festival to benefit the War Child charitable organization.
Paul Holdengräber
Paul Holdengräber is the Director of LIVE from the NYPL.
Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor is a British sculptor of Indian birth. Born in Mumbai. Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s when he moved to study art, first at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.
Peter Sellars
Peter Sellars is an American theater director, noted for his contemporary stagings of classical operas and plays.
Sellars is professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action.
Renowned music producer Brian Eno advises people not to dismiss music apps and new media, which he calls the first beginings of a new art form. To make his point, Eno compares living today to living in 1911 and trying to imagine the future of film.
Musical drama made up of vocal pieces with orchestral accompaniment, overtures, and interludes. Opera was invented at the end of the 16th century in an attempt by the Camerata (an academy of Florentine poets, musicians, and scholars) to imitate ancient Greek drama, which was known to have been largely sung or chanted. Since no actual Greek music was known, composers had considerable freedom in reconceiving it. Imitations of Greek pastoral poetry became the basis for early opera libretti. The first operas, Dafne by Jacopo Peri (1561–1633) in 1598 and by Giulio Caccini about the same time, are now lost; the earliest surviving opera is Peri's Euridice (1600). They consisted of lightly accompanied vocal melody closely imitating inflected speech. Claudio Monteverdi, the greatest early operatic figure, composed the first masterpiece, Orfeo, in 1607; unlike its predecessors, it is scored for a small orchestra. With this work, recitative began to be clearly distinguished from aria, an achievement that would prove decisive for opera's future success. In France, Jean-Baptiste Lully produced a prototype for courtly opera that influenced French opera through the mid-18th century. Jean-Philippe Rameau, George Frideric Handel, and Christoph Willibald Gluck were the most significant opera composers of the first two-thirds of the 18th century; their works were surpassed by the brilliant operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In the early 19th century, Gioacchino Rossini and Gaetano Donizetti dominated Italian opera. In the later 19th century the greatest works were those of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner; the latter, with his bold innovations, became the most influential operatic figure since Monteverdi. Richard Strauss and Giacomo Puccini wrote the most popular late 19th- and early 20th-century operas. Though the death of Puccini in 1924 is often cited as the end of grand opera, new and often experimental works—by composers such as Alban Berg, Benjamin Britten, Gian Carlo Menotti, John Adams, and Philip Glass—continued to be produced to critical acclaim. Opera entered the 21st century as a vibrant and global art form. See alsoballad opera; operetta.
Live performance of dramatic actions in order to tell a story or create a spectacle. The word derives from the Greek theatron (“place of seeing”). Theatre is one of the oldest and most important art forms in cultures worldwide. While the script is the basic element of theatrical performance, it also relies in varying degrees on acting, singing, and dancing, as well as on technical aspects of production (seestagecraft). Theatre is thought to have had its earliest origins in religious ritual; it often enacts myths or stories central to the belief structure of a culture or creates comedy through travesty of such narratives. In Western civilization, theatre began in ancient Greece and was adapted in Roman times; it was revived in the medieval liturgical dramas and flourished in the Renaissance with the Italian commedia dell'arte and in the 17th–18th century with established companies such as the Comédie-Française. Varying theatrical forms may evolve to suit the tastes of different audiences (e.g., in Japan, the kabuki of the townspeople and the Noh theatre of the court). In Europe and the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries, theatre was a major source of entertainment for all social classes, with forms ranging from burlesque shows and vaudeville to serious dramas performed in the style of the Moscow Art Theatre. Though the musicals of Broadway and the farces of London's West End retain their popular appeal, the rise of television and movies has eroded audiences for live theatre and has tended to limit its spectators to an educated elite. See alsolittle theatre.
