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Friday, August 31, 2018

Paul Taylor Dies at 88

Paul Taylor Dies at 88
Brought Poetry and Lyricism to Modern Dance
Taylor kept working well into his 80s, choreographing two new pieces a year, and 147 in all.

Mr. Taylor’s poignant and exuberant works entered the repertory of numerous dance companies. His own company has been one of the world’s superlative troupes.
By Alastair Macaulay




Paul Taylor, who brought a lyrical musicality, capacity for joy and wide poetic imagination to modern dance over six decades as one of its greatest choreographers, died on Wednesday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.
The cause was renal failure, said Lisa Labrado, a spokeswoman for the Paul Taylor Dance Company.
Mr. Taylor, whose highly diverse style was born in radical experimentalism in the 1950s, created poignant and exuberant works that entered the repertory of numerous dance companies. His own company, eloquent and athletic, has been one of the world’s superlative troupes.

Paul Taylor Dance Company - Company B
Company B juxtaposes the exuberance of Americans post-Depression, as heard in the pop songs of the Andrews Sisters, with the tragedy of men who never returned from World War II.

Paul Taylor Dance Company - Company B from Royal Winnipeg Ballet on Vimeo.

As a strikingly gifted dancer in his 20s, Mr. Taylor created roles for the master choreographers Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham and George Balanchine. He had piercing blue eyes, the power and musculature of a skilled athlete and an incisive, outgoing — but also elusive — personality.
Throughout the 1950s, he also made dances of his own — 18 of them with Robert Rauschenberg as his designer, two with music commissioned from John Cage. In 1960, he began to collaborate with the painter Alex Katz; though they worked together only from time to time, they continued to do so until 2014, and made two of Mr. Taylor’s most exceptional works, the highly dissimilar “Sunset” (1983) and “Last Look” (1985).


With the premieres of “Aureole” (1962, to music of Handel) and “Orbs” (1966, to Beethoven), Mr. Taylor broke through to new levels of national and international popularity as other companies started presenting many of his creations. At his own company, Rudolf Nureyev was often a guest star, as well as dancing “Aureole” around the world.
Mr. Taylor’s company included many illustrious performers, including Pina Bausch and Twyla Tharp, who themselves subsequently became world-class choreographers.


Martha Graham and Mr. Taylor performing “Clytemnestra” at the 54th Street Theater in Manhattan in 1960.CreditSam Falk/The New York Times
When he retired from dancing in 1974, both his dancers and his new creations became even more magnetic draws for audiences. New York’s annual Taylor season, usually occupying a large theater (for decades City Center Theater, since 2011 the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center) became one of the glories of world dance. Lincoln Kirstein, the eminent patron of the arts (and writer about them) who loved to complain that modern dance was governed by the cult of idiosyncrasy, made an exception for Mr. Taylor.
Mr. Taylor’s “Esplanade” (1975) was recognized immediately as an irresistible and transporting masterpiece. Set to the music of Bach, it explored pedestrian movement (walking, running, standing, skidding, falling) and encompassed both dark and bright emotions in a miraculous flow.


A large number of the other dances he made between 1975 and 1985 also became classics. Several later works, too, up to at least 2008 (“Beloved Renegade,” for example), showed the Taylor imagination in full power.
In 2014, after 60 years of choreography, Mr. Taylor, who leaves no immediate survivors, prepared for his company’s next phase: He turned its three-week New York seasons into a new entity, Paul Taylor American Modern Dance (originally Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance). His dancers now performed works old and new by other dance makers, older and younger than him, from Martha Graham to Doug Elkins. Other troupes appeared as guests under the Taylor Modern Dance aegis, performing choreography by Merce Cunningham, Donald McKayle and Trisha Brown. (The Paul Taylor Dance Company continued to perform his work under its old name on United States and international tours.)
In May, Mr. Taylor named Michael Novak, a company member, as the troupe’s artistic director-designate.
Paul Belville Taylor Jr. was born on July 29, 1930, in Wilkinsburg, Pa., and grew up in the Washington area. His father, a physicist who worked for the federal government, was of French Huguenot descent; his mother, Elizabeth Rust Pendleton, came from a genteel Virginia family. She was a widow with three children when she met and married Paul Taylor Sr., who was rooming in her home.
Mr. Taylor’s parents separated before he turned 4. “It became clear that my father had become overly attracted to her elder son,” Mr. Taylor wrote in his autobiography, “Private Domain,” published in 1987.

Mrs. Taylor supported her children by managing a restaurant in a Washington hotel. Paul, whose half siblings remained part of his life, grew up with a love of literature and art and a hefty penchant for fantasy. Taylor scholars have encountered many tales in which his version of the facts diverges from the provable record. He liked nonetheless to insist that his account was the historic truth.


According to his memoir, it was in childhood that he invented an imaginary companion or alter ego named George Tacet. In later years, he named Tacet as the designer of several of his most celebrated dances — notably “Aureole” and “Runes” (1975).
At Syracuse University, he joined the swimming team on a scholarship. Athleticism became something he was later to champion in dance: Many of his male dancers had powerful musculatures, while many of his female dancers displayed lissomeness, force and boldness.
He studied art at Syracuse and would later give divergent accounts of how and when dance entered his life. But it was certainly during his Syracuse years that he came to recognize it as a central mission

Dance Beginnings

He pursued dance studies in the summer of 1952 at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College, where Martha Graham became an oracular presence in his life. He followed this by studying at the Juilliard School in New York in the 1952-53 academic year.
He caught a golden era at Juilliard, where his eminent teachers included the composer and dance theorist Louis Horst, the modern-dance choreographers Doris Humphrey and José Limón, and the ballet teachers Antony Tudor, Margaret Craske and Alfredo Corvino.
In 1953, he became a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Black Mountain College; he created a role in Cunningham’s “Septet,” a dance still performed today. But Cunningham was in the early stages of using chance procedures to compose a dance, and Mr. Taylor later wrote that chance excluded him from dancing once too often for him to hang around much longer.




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Mr. Taylor and members of his company during a rehearsal at his Manhattan studio in 1972.CreditJack Manning/The New York Times
Though he did not remain in the Cunningham company long, he spent the next several years in its orbit while he began to choreograph professionally. In 1954, at the Stable Gallery, he met Cunningham’s longtime designer, Robert Rauschenberg, who would make costumes or sets for 18 dances created by Mr. Taylor between 1954 and 1958, as well as a final one in 1962.


One of these, “The Tower” (1957), with décor by Rauschenberg, had costumes by Jasper Johns, who was then living with Rauschenberg. In 1958, when Cunningham made “Summerspace,” one of his enduring classics, Rauschenberg designed superlative costumes and décor in impressionist-pointillist style. Some of the paint work was contributed by Mr. Johns, and some by Mr. Taylor.
On October 20, 1957, Mr. Taylor presented the most radical offering of his early career, “Seven New Dances.” Two of the seven, “Resemblance” and “Duet,” set to Cage’s music, had choreography akin to the composer’s 1950s departures from conventional music — using radical stillness and ordinary pedestrian movement. Mr. Taylor later recalled audience members walking out. Louis Horst, his former Juilliard teacher, wrote a review of the work in the magazine Dance Observerwith a single blank space in lieu of words.
These choreographic experiments nonetheless developed Mr. Taylor’s interest in ordinary gesture and non-virtuoso motion. Henceforth, however, he grew more interested in keeping audiences in their seats.
Mr. Taylor had joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1955; he remained there for seven years. (“Naughty boy,” she remarked of some of his own choreography; he later reported those words with pride.) “Clytemnestra” (1958) was the most famous dance Graham created during his time with her troupe; it was also the blockbuster of the long period in which she revisited Greek myth by way of psychology and feminist affirmation. She played the title role; Taylor was Aegisthus, her evil lover and second husband.
He later wrote, however, that Graham’s work had become artificial by the time he joined her company. The Graham works that he felt were most sincere, deep-hewn and potent were ones that came from the 1930s and early ’40s, such as “El Penitente.”
Perhaps the most valuable element that Mr. Taylor took from Graham was her modernist dance technique, with the forceful expressive tension that it forged between torso and legs. In her work, the body was often excitingly at war with itself. In his work, that tension would be translated into a vehemently lyrical current.




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Mr. Taylor working on a new piece with the Paul Taylor Company dancer Amy Young in 2009.CreditAndrea Mohin/The New York Times
In 1959, Graham and Balanchine, then the two most celebrated choreographers working in America, came together to create the two-part “Episodes,” to music by Webern. Each made one half. Graham’s was a drama about the hostility between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor; Balanchine’s was a suite of plotless dances.
The two choreographers agreed to take one dancer from each other’s company. So from Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, Graham chose Sallie Wilson, who danced Elizabeth I to her own Mary Stuart. Balanchine chose Mr. Taylor, for whom he made an explosively knotty solo.
Mr. Taylor now spent time watching City Ballet closely. Balanchine invited him to dance the title role in his 1928 masterpiece, “Apollo.” Mr. Taylor declined this remarkable offer, but it seems likely that Balanchine’s choices of classical music and his fluent response to it influenced the big move that Mr. Taylor made in 1962 with “Aureole.”

Formation of a Company

Mr. Taylor was already gathering some remarkable dancers around him, including Pina Bausch (a company member from 1960 to 1962) and Twyla Tharp (1963-65). The tall, long-limbed, dramatic Bettie de Jong joined in 1962, later becoming the company’s main rehearsal director. She never left. Like her, Dan Wagoner and Carolyn Adams (1965-82) were beloved Taylor figures. The lighting designer Jennifer Tipton began working with Mr. Taylor in 1963; her most recent design was in 2013.
Mr. Taylor in 1961 had made dances to Bach (“Junction”) and Schoenberg (“Fibers”). But his use of Handel in “Aureole” displayed a quality of powerfully rhythmic melody and charming blitheness that were departures from the largely tough-grained ethos of modern dance. It caught the “Camelot” moment of happiness and hope in John F. Kennedy’s America.
Some of Mr. Taylor’s old artistic colleagues, however, felt that he was courting popularity and compromising his former standards. Cage, Cunningham and Rauschenberg never worked with him again; neither did Mr. Johns. Mr. Taylor made barbed remarks about Cage’s music as late as 2009, though Cage had died in 1992.


Mr. Taylor’s growing status in the dance world only kindled his singular imagination; his works grew even bolder and more authoritative. In “Orbs,” he coupled human life and the course of the planets. Four central sections were called “Venusian Spring,” “Martian Summer,” “Terrestrial Autumn” and “Plutonian Winter.” “Big Bertha” (1970), set to music from the St. Louis Melody Museum collection of band machines, showed a fairground machine of initially comic appearance but eventually lethal effect: It drives a family into incestuous rape and murder.




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Michelle Fleet, left, and Parisa Khobdeh of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in “Polaris” at New York City Center in 2011.CreditAndrea Mohin/The New York Times
Mr. Taylor’s range of musical choices likewise grew: from the 17th century to commissions, from Haydn to the popular music of yesteryear. The breadth and depth of his reading also became apparent. It was not unusual for the program notes for his works to feature literary quotations from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Herrick, Spinoza, Blake, Whitman, Yeats, Neruda and other sources. The title of the dance “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun” is from Wallace Stevens. “To Make Crops Grow” (2012) was a dramatization of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery.”
Mr. Taylor himself emerged as a skilled writer. Many consider “Private Domain” their favorite dance book. It is rich in acute intelligence about dance (“Dance is only a symbol, not the real thing,” he wrote about the importance of order), pungent observations (Bausch, he wrote, danced “like calipers across paper”) and memorable narrations of the serious and absurd moments of Mr. Taylor’s life.
The memoir reaches its most despairing moment with the injury that curtailed Mr. Taylor’s career, in 1974. This makes a curious end to the Taylor autobiography, for it implies that he — like many modern-dance creators — was bound up with making dance vehicles for himself. Yet by the time he published “Private Domain” in 1987, Mr. Taylor had proved the opposite. In the 11 years that followed his withdrawal from the stage (1975-85), he created an exceptional number of enduring classics.
It is often hard to believe that “Esplanade,” Mr. Taylor’s most widely beloved dance, contains no formal dance step. Its dancers walk, stop, run, skip, sit, jump, fall, embrace and gesture. Everything is very precisely choreographed; patterns predominate. Yet the impetus underlying it is powerful; its moods combine joy and grief, heartbreak and exuberance, memory and impulsiveness; and its spontaneity is often astounding.
With such masterworks, the annual Taylor season became one of the highlights of the New York dance year. Few if any companies devoted to the work of one sole choreographer ever matched that of his.


Masterworks Abound

The years 1975 to 1986 showed Mr. Taylor widening his range to a bewildering and dazzling extent. The dense series of classic works from that time have all remained in repertory, most of them also acquired by other companies — and each is extraordinary in a different way. They include “Runes,” “Cloven Kingdom” and “Polaris” (1976), “Images” and “Dust” (1977), “Airs (1978), “Le Sacre du Printemps (the Rehearsal)” (1980), “Arden Court” (1981), “Mercuric Tidings” (1982), “Sunset” (1983), “Byzantium” (1984), “Roses” and “Last Look” (1985), and “A Musical Offering” (1986). In these years, he was deepening his skill in making classical constructions of pure dance, in blending comedy with darkness, and in showing the complexity of his imagination.
An example of that complexity is “Cloven Kingdom” (1976), in which Mr. Taylor used sometimes overlapping scores from three different composers, the Baroque Arcangelo Corelli and the American modernists Henry Cowell and Malloy Miller. His dancers here seemed alternately, then simultaneously, civilized and animal, following different drummers, sometimes as if to music unheard. The result shows how contrasting facets of humanity (celestial, bestial, civilized) coexist.




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Mr. Taylor directing members of his company at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in 2012.CreditAndrea Mohin/The New York Times
“Le Sacre du Printemps (the Rehearsal)” combined, with absurd logic and tragicomic intensity, the stories of a ballet company rehearsing with a private detective hunting for a lost baby. As so often with Mr. Taylor, the concept seems bizarre; as so often with Mr. Taylor, the stage creation has such a complete inner life that it triumphs.
Sunset,” with designs by Alex Katz, was immediately recognized as among the great dance works of its day. Set to music by Elgar, sometimes alternating with the call of loons, it depicts a number of soldiers on leave with the women they visit and who care for them. The mood is elegiac. One man appears to die; his funeral is suggested. The highly ambiguous drama that develops demonstrates the poignancy of men who have more in common with one another than with their women, and for whom self-expression is difficult.
More movingly yet, “Sunset” also develops a quasi-tragic depth of feeling, with men and women trying to bridge the gap between them. For many, this equals “Esplanade” as Mr. Taylor’s greatest work; it is also one of several creations that qualify him as one of the superlative war poets.
One of the skills he now increasingly evinced was in evoking different historic periods. “Runes” suggests tribal ritual; “Images” (to Debussy) suggests Minoan culture; the policemen of “Le Sacre” are Keystone Kops. “A Musical Offering” is a close response to Bach’s highly European masterpiece of that name, and yet, with wonderful defiance of cultural logic, its movement is all neo-primitivist, evoking Polynesian or Aztec imagery.


The Taylor company of the 1980s was dominated by the lovably heroic Christopher Gillis, who joined in 1976, and by such female paragons as Susan McGuire, Cathy McCann and, especially, Kate Johnson. Guest dancers included Mikhail Baryshnikov, Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins; other guests were Gwen Verdon, Adolph Green, Betty Comden and Hermione Gingold.
The composer and conductor Donald York became part of the Taylor operation in 1976: He composed new scores (his most recent was “House of Joy” in 2012), arranged others and conducted entire seasons. The master designer Santo Loquasto first worked with Mr. Taylor in 1987; the most recent of his many contributions was in 2017.
After 1986, there were diminutions and depletions. Mr. Gillis died of AIDS in 1993. Mr. Taylor began to use taped music for most seasons between 1991 and 2013. His success rate grew more intermittent, and a few works looked at best half-baked. Later, he sold four works owned by Rauschenberg that he had long owed so he could afford to bring live music back.


But many later Taylor dances become beloved, too, “Company B” (1992), “Eventide” and “Piazzolla Caldera” (1997), “Promethean Fire” (2002) and “Beloved Renegade” (2008) were among the classics made by Mr. Taylor after he turned 60.
Mr. Taylor’s dances contained, like tributaries into the mainstream, the influence of many senior choreographic currents. He in turn fed the delta of multiple junior streams. A number of works by the younger choreographer Mark Morris — more musically analytical than Mr. Taylor — contained overt Taylor quotations; there can be no greater homage.
Edward Villella, the celebrated former principal of New York City Ballet and founding artistic director of Miami City Ballet, remembered Mr. Taylor in a phone interview on Thursday. “When he danced the solo that Balanchine made on him in ‘Episodes’ in 1959, I was just stunned,” Mr. Villella said.


Mr. Villella later acquired several of Mr. Taylor’s dances for Miami City Ballet. “Paul was something of a recluse,” he recalled, “and yet he came down to Miami to work with our dancers, helping them to find a more weighted kind of movement.
“We were especially privileged when he let us dance his ‘Promethean Fire,’ his response to 9/11 — an amazing work. And he was so funny; we knew his love of poetry, but he also loved sharing and collecting dirty jokes.”
To the end, Mr. Taylor stayed unpredictable and irreverent — sometimes lashing out at the use of pointwork in ballet, once writing venomously to a number of critics, often wicked about artists dead and alive. His collection of moths, butterflies and other insects was famous.
Aside from his memoir, Mr. Taylor had at least one work that could be interpreted as autobiography: “Beloved Renegade,” which shows his contradictory originality in full flower.
Why is a dance set to Poulenc’s “Gloria” linked in the program to a number of quotations from Walt Whitman? The only answer lies in the theatrical beauty of Mr. Taylor’s dance creation. “Beloved Renegade” became a work of great emotion for many — and was reportedly so for Mr. Taylor during its creation, with its intimations of immortality: The artist’s muse is also his angel of death.



Related Coverage


Get to Know the Colors on Paul Taylor’s Palette




Thursday, August 30, 2018

What Happen when you Tell People to Run !!

Telling Random People to Run
Prank

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What Happen when you Tell People to Run !!
Prank: Where I simply walk by them and yell RUN, RUN for your life! Thats all
Pegadinha: Você esta andando na rua tranquilamente e passa um cara correndo desesperadamente ao seu lado dizendo pra você correr...veja o que acontece.

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Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Opera's Most Amazing Entrances

Opera's Most Amazing Entrances
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The world of opera knows how to arrive on stage in style
Be that descending on a cloud, or bellowing from castle battlements...
This film was originally screened as part of #OperaPassion Day 2017.
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Find out more at http://www.roh.org.uk
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Sunday, August 26, 2018

Paris 3D 🇫🇷 Through the Ages + Sainte-Chapelle

Paris 3D
Through the Ages - Dassault Systèmes
Dassault Systèmes launched in 2012 the Paris 3D Saga project, an educative and immersive journey in the History of Paris from -52 BC to 1889
Paris 3D Saga Making Of
English Subtitles - Dassault Systèmes
September 29th 2012, 15 000 people participated at the City hall of Paris to a new kind of immersive and virtual reality show.

Paris 3D Saga: http://paris.3ds.com

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Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry Juin
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Reconstitution 3D
La Sainte-Chapelle et du Palais Royal
de la Cité au XIVème siècle
A l’occasion du 8ème centenaire de la naissance de Louis IX, qui donne lieu à une exposition « Saint Louis » présentée par le Centre des monuments nationaux (CMN) du 8 octobre 2014 au 11 janvier 2015, l’Institut Passion for Innovation de Dassault Systèmes et le CMN s’associent pour créer une expérience immersive inédite du Palais de la Cité au XIVème siècle. Grâce aux technologies 3D temps réel, ce nouveau projet dévoile pour la première fois la Sainte-Chapelle et l’ensemble architectural de l’époque dans une version interactive. 
Pour vivre l’expérience et découvrir la visite virtuelle de la Sainte-Chapelle et des bâtiments de Paris 3D, rendez-vous : 
• A partir du 8 octobre en exclusivité sur la borne interactive mise à disposition dans la chapelle basse de la Sainte-Chapelle au 8 boulevard du palais 75001 Paris 
• A l’exposition « Saint Louis », à découvrir à la Conciergerie au 2 boulevard du palais 75001 Paris du 8 octobre 2014 au 11 janvier 2015 
• Toutes les informations sur www.monuments-nationaux.fr 

Et enfin : 
• Prochainement sur l’application « Paris 3D Saga » disponible gratuitement sur l’Apple Store (référence dans la catégorie éducation) et sur le Windows Store, 
• Sur http://paris.3ds.com, 
• Sur des bornes tactiles interactives sur la construction de Notre-Dame à la Crypte Archéologique du parvis de Notre-Dame.

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La Sainte Chapelle Paris
History
The Sainte-Chapelle or "Holy Chapel", in the courtyard of the royal palace on the Île de la Cité (now part of a later administrative complex known as La Conciergerie), was built to house Louis IX's collection of relics of Christ, which included the Crown of Thorns, the Image of Edessa and some thirty other items. Louis purchased his Passion relics from Baldwin II, the Latin emperor at Constantinople, for the sum of 135,000 livres, though this money was actually paid to the Venetians, to whom the relics had been pawned. The relics arrived in Paris in August 1239, carried from Venice by two Dominican friars. Upon arrival, King Louis hosted a week-long celebratory reception for the relics. For the final stage of their journey they were carried by the King himself, barefoot and dressed as a penitent, a scene depicted in the Relics of the Passion window on the south side of the chapel. The relics were stored in a large and elaborate silver chest, the Grand-Chasse, on which Louis spent a further 100,000 livres. The entire chapel, by contrast, cost 40,000 livres to build and glaze. Until it was completed in 1248, the relics were housed at chapels at the Château de Vincennes and a specially built chapel at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. In 1246, fragments of the True Cross and the Holy Lance were added to Louis' collection, along with other relics. The chapel was consecrated on 26 April 1248 and Louis' relics were moved to their new home with great ceremony.
As well as serving as a place of worship, the Sainte-Chapelle played an important role in the political and cultural ambitions of King Louis and his successors. With the imperial throne at Constantinople occupied by a mere Count of Flanders and with the Holy Roman Empire in uneasy disarray, Louis' artistic and architectural patronage helped to position him as the central monarch of western Christendom, the Sainte-Chapelle fitting into a long tradition of prestigious palace chapels. Just as the Emperor could pass privately from his palace into the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, so now Louis could pass directly from his palace into the Sainte-Chapelle. More importantly, the two-story palace chapel had obvious similarities to Charlemagne's palatine chapel at Aachen (built 792–805) - a parallel that Louis was keen to exploit in presenting himself as a worthy successor to the first Holy Roman Emperor.
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Saturday, August 25, 2018

Leonard Bernstein's 100th Birthday

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Leonard Bernstein's 100th Birthday
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Google Doodle
Happy Birthday, Leonard Bernstein!
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Published on Aug 24, 2018
Today's Doodle celebrates the 100th birthday of American composer, conductor, pianist, author and music lecturer, Leonard Bernstein!

Happy 100th birthday to American music icon Leonard Bernstein! The youngest conductor ever to lead the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, he was also the first U.S. conductor to gain international renown, leading a 1953 performance of ‘Medea’ at La Scala in Milan, Italy's foremost opera house.
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The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Bernstein discovered music around age 10 and overcame his parents’ resistance to his passion for the arts. His creativity and talent spilled over from one art-form to the next, and throughout his life, the most persistent criticisms of his work were that he did too much. “I want to conduct,” he wrote late in life. “I want to play the piano. I want to write for Hollywood. I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can still do justice to them all.''
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Today’s Doodle celebrates Bernstein’s life set to one of his  most iconic works - the score to West Side Story. The tale, following the turf war between two rival gangs and star-crossed lovers in the west side of Manhattan, was brought to life through Bernstein’s gripping score. The original 1957 production was nominated for six Tony Awards including Best Musical. Explore the history and legacy of the iconic musical by visiting Google Arts & Culture.
A larger-than-life personality, Bernstein held the baton with emphatic mannerisms, reacting to the emotion of the music mid-performance. As Director of the New York Philharmonic, he exposed generations of young people to musical programming on television. Before Bernstein’s tenure, no widely-aired television show existed to educate youth through musical performances. In this way, and as a popular commentator about music on radio and TV, he made intellectual culture more accessible to the public at large.
Bernstein was also a skilled lecturer - winning a Grammy in 1961 for Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording (other than comedy). He published books about music and lectured on poetry at Harvard University. 
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His legacy endures as a musical polymath, a creator of culture, and an example that sometimes more is more.

Leonard Bernstein Team 
  • Art Lead: Lydia Nichols
  • Motion Designer: Stan Cameron
  • Marketing: Perla Campos, Carlos Diaz
  • Business Affairs: Madeline Belliveau
  • Doodle Team Lead: Jessica Yu
For more info behind the Doodle, please visit:
 https://www.google.com/doodles/leonard-bernsteins-100th-birthday
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Beyond West Side Story:
5 of Leonard Bernstein’s musical masterpieces
Leonard Bernstein gave American music so much more than West Side Story.
By Aja Romano Updated Aug 25, 2018
Of all the figures in the American cultural pantheon, there are few who have had a broader cultural impact than Leonard Bernstein — composer, conductor, performer, queer and Jewish icon, and genius.

As today’s Google Doodle celebrates Bernstein’s 100th birthday, you might be tempted to whip out your copy of West Side Story and indulge in a reminiscence of “Somewhere” or “Tonight” or “Cool,” or any of the other brilliant songs that have made the Bernstein-Sondheim masterpiece such an enduring part of our modern musical lexicon.
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But let us suggest a different approach to celebrating Bernstein’s birthday. Though it may be tempting to stop at West Side Story, if you did, you’d be missing out on a wealth of gorgeous music from the man who churned out hundreds of works before his death in 1990. Bernstein’s complete oeuvre is massive, spawning everything from Broadway musicals to jazz singles to symphonies and ballets.

Here are five seminal works by Bernstein that you shouldn’t miss if you want to understand what made him America’s greatest composer.
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 Bernstein
The Greatest 5 min. in Music Education
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This amazing lecture series (The unanswered Question ), is actually an interdisciplinary overview about the evolution of Western European classical music from Bach through the 20th century crisis and beyond a bit . Mr. Bernstein uses linguistics namely Chomskian Linguistics to provide a framework to illustrate how music and all the arts evolved toward greater and greater levels of ambiguity/expressivity over history until the 20th century crisis . He manages this impressive feat of popular education , by dividing music into; Phonology (the study of sound); Syntax (the study of structure) and; Semantics (the study of meaning)
Candide Overture:
Leonard Bernstein conducting
Candide Overture, conducted by the composer himself, Leonard Bernstein. Concert performance of Candide with June Anderson, Jerry Hadley, Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Gedda - London Symphony Orchestra (London, December 13, 1989).

The Best of Bernstein
Top Classical Music - Published on May 29, 2013

Tracklist: Candide
1. Abertura
Três variações do Balé "Fancy Free"
2. Variação I: Galop
3. Variação II: Waltz
4. Variação III: Danzon
Danças Sinfônicas de "West Side Story" (Amor, Sublime Amor)
5. Prólogo (Allegro moderato)
6. Somewhere (Adagio)
7. Scherzo (Vivace e leggiero)
8. Mambo (Meno presto)
9. Cha-Cha (Andantino con grazia)
10. Meeting Scene (Meno mosso)
11. Cool Fugue (Allegretto)
12. Rumble (Molto allegro)
13. Finale (Adagio)
Três episódios de dança "On The Town" (Um dia em Nova York)
14. I. The Great Lover
15. II. Lonely Town: Pas de deux
16. III. Times Square: 1944
17. Suíte sinfônica de "On the Waterfront" (Sindicato dos Ladrões)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Love classical music? Learn to play the best PIANO pieces the easiest way: http://tinyurl.com/classic-flowkey
West Side Story - Prologue
Official Full Number - 50th Anniversary (HD)
The opening Prologue from the 10-time Academy Award winning musical film West Side Story, which is celebrating its 50th Anniversary on November 15, 2011. Here is the full Prologue from the movie in HD, and below are links where you purchase the 50th Anniversary Edition of West Side Story on Blu-ray and Limited Edition Box Set!



Conceived, Directed and Choreographed by Jerome Robbins Music by Leonard Bernstein
Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Arthur Laurents

 
West Side Story - America
(1080p HD)
From the 50th Anniversary Edition Blu-Ray of the movie.


West Side Story - America
(1961) HD
FILM DESCRIPTION: Romeo and Juliet is updated to the tenements of New York City in this Oscar-winning musical landmark. Adapted by Ernest Lehman from the Broadway production, the movie opens with an overhead shot of Manhattan, an effect that director Robert Wise would repeat over the Alps in The Sound of Music four years later.

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West Side Story
The Gangs fight in the street


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  • Victoria Vasquez:  I wish choreographed gang fights were actually a thing.

  • Juei-min Huang: Choreographed gang fights would definitely make America great again.

  • Houdini: Just an average day in New York City.

  • Zach Rolf:  I go to a theater school and this is what we do when we see our rivals on the street.
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