IV. Where are these theatres situated? (Match the name of the theatre and the city. You may use one city twice).

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the Bolshoi Opera House the Mariinsky Opera House Grand Opera the Royal Opera House La Scala the Covent Garden

London Milan Moscow Paris St.Petersburg

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V. Choose the right answer:

1. The Royal Albert Hall is:…
1. the name of the cinema
2. the name of the theatre
3. a big concert hall
4. a royal circus
2. Eisteddfod is a great festival of literature and music which takes place in_____every year
1. England
2. Scotland
3. Wales
4. Nothern Ireland
3. What English pop group from Liverpool is famous all over the world?
1. ABBA
2. The Beatles
3. The Beastie Boys
4. The Spice Girls
4. Carol is…
1. a name for a boy
2. a traditional Christmas song
3. a book of poems
4. a name for a dance
5. The national musical instrument of Scottish people is…
1. a horn
2. an accordion
3. a trumpet
4. a bagpipe
6. Who are the main characters of the fable “Quartet” by the great Russian writer I.A. Krylov?
1. a) a monkey, a donkey, a goat, a bear
2. b) a monkey, a donkey, a fox, a bear
3. c) a monkey, a donkey, a fox, a cock
4. d) a monkey, a donkey, a goat, a cat

X. Read the dialogue and fill in the words:

 

Perform, busy, rehearsals, music, an orchestra, performances, sleep

 

– Why don’t you come to see us?
– I’m very (54)…. You see, I’m a member of (55)… and we (56)… every night.
– Then you are free in the day – time, aren’t you?
– Certainly not. We have (57)… every morning.
– And what about the time between the rehearsals and the (58)…?
– I give (59) …lessons in-between.
– When do you sleep then?
– Why! I (60)… during the rehearsals.

54 _______________, 55______________, 56 ______________, 57 _____________, 58 _______________, 59______________, 60 ______________

 

 

III. Fill the gaps with correct words

Tuneless, enter the charts, annual, to take place, seats, breakthrough, to be worth, event, lyrics, to release

1. My brother always says that Nirvana is one of the best rock bands and it _________ listening to.

2. Woodstock used to be an _________ festival associated with hippies’ subculture.

3. The _______ of this song is really thoughtful, this is about freedom and independence.

4. Metallica __________ their first album in 1983.

5. The Kinks was the first rock band who started using guitar effect of overdrive. It was a ________ in rock music!

6. Alfa Future People which is held in Nizhny Novgorod annually is an important _______ in electronic music.

7. Some people say that heavy metal is _______ music but some songs can be really melodic and inspiring.

8. Famous folk festivals ________ in Wales and they are really popular among the locals.

9. The songs of Madonna __________ in 1980s with her songs “Everybody”, “Burning up”.

10. It was a full house! We tried to buy tickets but there weren’t any free ________.

 

IV. The music tastes has been always changing. Write 5 sentences about how they have changed using “used to” and “didn’t use to”. You should write about

1. Bands

2. Genres

3. Instruments

4. Description of music (using adjectives like “tuneless”, “loud”, “harmonious”, etc)

The importance of music

 

I have always been a big fan of music but to be honest, I don't know anyone who has ever overtly disliked it. And that’s why it’s one of life's true delights, because it can be enjoyed by anyone and everyone. With films, you need to understand what is being said and with books, you need to be able to read, but music has no boundaries, no prerequisites and is accessible for all. I don’t think there are many things in life that have such a direct and visible impact on someone’s mood. There are some people who are less bothered by music, and of course it depends on what sort of music they’re into, but watching someone react when they hear one of their favourite songs is actually the best thing ever.

Personally, I’m a big disco/soul/funk kind of girl. I like to just call it boogie music because for me, I don’t see how you can’t not dance when you hear it. It instantly changes my mood and you can see it in my face straight away (I’m that idiot bounding down the street with their headphones on and a great big smile on their face). But I don’t care, because music makes me feel good and has the power to join you with other people in this shared moment where exchanging words isn’t necessary.

I think music has such an impact on people because it taps into their feelings and always carries a story. And I don’t just mean in the lyrics but in the history of where the genre has originated from, how it’s evolved over time, who performs it, who listens to it. Everyone who partakes in experiencing music develops the story that bit more and winds it into a page of their own story.

Discovering new styles is a great way into a new culture. I’m currently in Madrid and have been enjoying salsa and reggaeton which are historic here but thanks to La Movida Madrileña, there’s a huge array of genres and clubs. From disco at Bogui to house at Mondo, techno at Sala Sol and salsa at Son, Madrid has it all. So wherever you’re living right now, I recommend you to get involved in the music scene and you might stumble across something you really love, or at the very least, you’ll partake in something special with other people.

 

 

MODERN CLASSICAL MUSIC is music which traces its primary lineage to 20th century classical composers (e.g. Schoenberg, Webern, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Shostakovich, Cage, and Bartók) rather than to the musicians of pop, rock, jazz, or folk music.

Beginning in the 20th century, modern classical comprises a multitude of different compositional approaches that deviate significantly from the previously-held tenets of Western Classical Music. Generally, the only aspect that various modern classical schools share is their abandonment of the traditional: the liberation of harmony from tonal centers, the employment of unconventional instrumental techniques, the reliance on non-musical sound sources, the introduction of new tuning scales, the admittance of randomness into the compositional process, and the deconstruction of musical themes and motifs into static, repetitious passages. Some aspects of Romanticism carried over into modern classical (in fact, many Romantic-era composers adopted the viewpoint of the modernists). Not every 20th-century composition is modern classical in terms of approach; attempts to hearken back to earlier conventions are present in styles like Neoclassicism.
The early decades of the 1900s saw a change from the dramatic emotion of late Romanticism to the more restrained and dissonant approach of Expressionism. The expressionists began to morph the Romantic inclination towards chromaticism into complete disregard for tonal harmony. This initial period of "free atonality" eventually grew into a formal, ordered system of Serialism, beginning with the Second Viennese School led by Arnold Schoenberg. The method of giving equal weight to each chromatic tone (known as the twelve-tone technique) was later applied to other aspects of music, such as dynamics and duration.
In Italy and the Soviet Union, radicalized political attitudes spilled over into the musical realm with the rise of Futurism in the early 1900s. The appeal of modern technology led composers to embrace the sounds of machines, either by playing machines in compositions or writing pieces imitating industrial sounds. The works of the futurists are viewed today as some of the foundations of Experimental music.
In the 1950s, the process of composition itself was challenged by the proponents of aleatoric music, or Indeterminacy. This method introduced randomness or chance into either writing or performance. The work of John Cage popularized the indeterminist paradigm. Closely related is the Stochastic Music of Iannis Xenakis and followers. Xenakis looked to mathematics and probability for inspiration, writing pieces that were informed by randomness as they were being developed, but also necessitated direct guidance from the composer.
In middle of the century, after realizing that recording technology could be exploited for purposes other than preserving performances, composers like Halim El-Dabh and Pierre Schaeffer began to use media such as magnetic tape as a means of producing new sounds, thereby developing Electroacoustic music and Musique concrète, early forms of Electronic music. While these two styles were initially associated with classical music (either by manipulating classical recordings or forging "found sounds" into a vague semblance of classical music), they have since expanded into fields outside of the academic.
The 1960s brought Minimalism into the classical world, which strove to take short musical ideas and continually repeat them, sometimes with aleatoric elements or with multiple themes overlapping and interacting in different ways. The expanding idea of the minimalist approach led to the related school of Post-Minimalism, which incorporated elements of contemporary music outside of the classical tradition.
While experimentation with tuning systems outside of the twelve tones of Western music certainly existed in previous epochs of classical music, it was during the modern era that Microtonal approaches were given serious attention. The systems used in Gamelan and other styles far beyond the reach of Western music were examined by composers and repurposed for new compositions. Synthesizers made these new tuning systems accessible to many, but acoustic compositions were not uncommon, either.
Although there are many other schools of modern classical, some modern composers do not fit neatly into any of its sub-categories; the general qualities of 20th-century music may exist in their works, but they either do not fully commit to one approach or use an idiosyncratic system of their own.
Modern classical has been used interchangeably with contemporary classical until recent decades. The divide between modern and post-modern art music is somewhat indistinct compared to literature and the visual arts; questions on whether there is an identifiable point of departure from the modern approach and at what point in time this divide occurred remain controversial. Nevertheless, the contemporary label is generally understood to apply to music in the second half of the twentieth century, especially from the 1970s onward.

 

Russian classical music

 

Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857)

Glinka’s unique position among Russia’s composers is due to his being hailed as the founding father of the Russian school of classical music.

He began making music when he was only 10; he was already composing by the age of 18. In his youth, he gained fame as a pianist and singer with an angelic voice. Fame as a composer came only in his 30s.

Contemporaries recalled that he was highly opinionated and valued only his own work amongst other composers, along with works of Glück and Chopin.

He was a friend of the poet Pushkin, and Glinka wrote his opera “Ruslan and Ludmila” on the basis of Pushkin’s poem of the same title. The opera earned the ire of Russian critics, but it was admired in Europe. It is a masterpiece that continues to preoccupy opera-directors – when the Bolshoi Theatre reopened in 2011, Glinka’s opera opened the rebuilt Main Stage in a provocative production.

After the implosion of the Soviet Union, Glinka’s “Patriotic Melody” – written in 1833 – served as Russia’s national anthem until 2000.

 

Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)

Source: Wikipedia

Tchaikovsky is one of the world’s best-known composers, whose masterpieces have even survived appearances on modern compilation albums such as ‘The Best Tunes for Your Dog.”

The genius to-be was the son of an engineer at a metal plant deep in the Russian provinces. Later, Pyotr moved to St. Petersburg, where he studied as a lawyer and got a job at the Justice Ministry. Music was just a hobby for him for many years, but he eventually quit his job for it – “and swapped it for the tin-whistle,” as he said at the time.

Tchaikovsky’s works were long considered second-rate, but he was later given an honorary degree by Cambridge University, “in absentia.”The composer himself modestly said that the public was over-indulgent toward him.

Yet that same public judged not only his music but also his homosexuality. Tchaikovsky’s sudden death from cholera was long thought to have been suicide.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908)

Rimsky-Korsakov was one of the most respected and talented music professors of the 19^th century – he originally graduated from the Naval Academy, but devoted his whole life to music.

The summit of his achievement was the completion of his 15 operas, which were mostly composed to stories of Russian history and fairytales. He studied Russian folklore with great fondness and used it, where possible, in his works.

Many events in his life are connected with his teaching career at the St. Petersburg Musical Conservatory. He had long refuted the need for composers to undergo musical training, before becoming a professor himself.

From behind a desk, Rimsky-Korsakov tasked himself with completing gaps in composers’ musical history. “It’s my hope as a professor to make my position unnecessary!” he declared to his pupils – among whom was a young man named Sergei Prokofiev.

 

Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881)

Source: RIA Novosti

Despite initial career intentions for the army, Mussorgsky sang well, played the piano, and was eventually won over by the desire to make music.

Not all of his compositions reached completion, due to the fact that he preferred to write scores “straight to the finish,” without making draft versions. Many of his works – including his opera “Khovanschina” – were completed or reworked by other composers, including his friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

The ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev wrote in his memoirs that Mussorgsky was rarely taken seriously as a composer during his own lifetime. He was often employed at the opera theatre as a rehearsal pianist and was paid 25 rubles per rehearsal. Critics – with few exceptions – gave the coolest of receptions to Mussorgsky’s works.

His health was wracked by addiction to alcohol, and he died at the age of 42. Acclaim for his work came only after his death.

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943)

Source: RIA Novosti

Rachmaninoff was a world-famous pianist and conductor – often called “the most Russian of composers,” despite having lived in the United States for 26 years.

Rachmaninoff was born into a wealthy noble family that was known for its musical talent. He even studied for a number of years with Tchaikovsky. He produced his first opera at the age of 19, among many other works.

He went through a difficult creative block in his youth, after which he was able to realize his abilities on the fullest scale. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Rachmaninoff emigrated to the United States, where he remained for the rest of this life.

During his life as an emigré he gained world-renown. He claimed that he was “85 percent musician, and only 15 percent human”. His famously large hands could span an octave-and-a-half on the keys.

People often said he had a golden heart: during World War II he personally paid for the construction of an aircraft for the Soviet forces.

 

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

Source: ITAR-TASS

Stravinsky’s creative output encompassed the development of neo-classicism as a new musical genre of the 20^th century.

His active touring career, unwillingness to be repetitive, and ability to write in numerous genres separate Stravinsky’s muse from that of other Russian geniuses.

He was a lawyer by profession and had studied with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky was a composer, pianist, conductor, and a patriot. Enthusiasts found his Russian roots throughout his compositions – despite the fact that he spent 57 years outside Russia.

He is alleged to have had an affair with Coco Chanel – but the composer himself downplayed such rumours.

His final masterpiece – his “Requiem” – was written when he was already 85. He passed away of heart failure.

 

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)

 

Shostakovich was a legendary Soviet-era composer whose works continue to feature among the most frequently-performed in the world.

Shostakovich had been in the crowd to hear Lenin’s public addresses, even as a toddler. After his father’s death, he earned some much-needed income for his family as a pianist for silent films. He came back to the cinema quite soon, writing the soundtracks for more than 20 Soviet-era films.

Fame came early at 21, when his “First Symphony” was played in both Germany and the United States. He struggled against Soviet censorship throughout his life – perhaps the reason that, as his contemporaries said of him, he was almost never seen smiling.

Despite several of his works failing to find favor, he was given numerous decorations and awards for high achievement. His final work – “Immortality” – was written while the composer himself was dying of lung cancer

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)

Source: RIA Novosti

Prokofiev penned his first operas when he was only 9 or 10. Later he would become famous for his musical innovation and achieve international fame.

Film fans know Prokofiev particularly for the music he wrote for Eisenstein’s epic film “Alexander Nevsky.” Some sources claim that, while Prokofiev was still living in the Soviet Union in the 1930s (although actively touring abroad), a major Hollywood studio offered him a full-time contract to write for them at the astounding pay of $25,000 per week. Yet Prokofiev returned to Moscow “to his music, and his children.”

Prokofiev was a great chess-player and also a Protestant, although he preferred not speak about the latter. The composer’s first wife – a Spanish girl named Carolina Codina – was imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp for 8 years after they divorced.

Prokofiev and Stalin coincidentally died on the same date; in the great national mourning for Stalin, the composer’s death was barely even noticed.

Alexander Scriabin (1871–1915)

Scriabin gained fame as a composer and mystic. He believed that his art offered the possibility of showing change on a universal scale.

The composer placed little value on traditions and limitations, for this reason. Consequently, the public labeled him as either an innovator or an eccentric – or possibly a madman. His synesthetic experiments in projecting colors that reflect musical tonality have proven almost impossible to perform, even in our own time.

He was the first to use color-music, believing that sound has the capability to change reality. He even planned a composition intended to cause the onset of the Apocalypse. He toured widely as a famous concert pianist. He died unexpectedly of a blood infection, at the age of 43.

 

Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998)

Source: RIA Novosti/Boris Kaufman

This famous Russian-born composer came from a German-Jewish family, and Russian was his second language. The first musical instrument he learned was the mouth-organ.

His characteristic compositional approach was a synthesis of many different styles – “polystylization,” as he called it. Some fans were enthused by Schnittke’s inclusion of electric and bass guitars in orchestral works.

Schnittke claimed that he did not compose music, but simply wrote down what came to him from on high. Like many 20^th-century composers, he also wrote film soundtracks and even music for cartoons.

His final eight years were spent in Hamburg, Germany – but his body was returned to Moscow for burial.

 

 

Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936)

Alfred Fedecki /Wikipedia

A student of Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov was a very talented musician and started composing at age 11. At 17, he wrote his first symphony and it went on to be performed in Europe to great acclaim. Thanks to patron-of-the-arts Mitrophan Belyaev, Glazunov entered a group of composers who followed the traditions of “The Mighty Handful.” Together with Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov finished the opera Prince Igor and Alexander Borodin’s Third Symphony, after he died unexpectedly and left these works incomplete.

Glazunov was a professor and later became the director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He made huge reforms in his position and founded a student orchestra. Glazunov was one of the rare representatives of the intelligentsia who was able to find a common ground with the Bolshevik regime after the 1917 Revolution. However, in 1928 he was invited to Vienna to lead a series of composition classes and decided not to return to the Soviet Union afterward.