Because, written by John Lennon, was inspired by Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
“Yoko was playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano … I said, ‘Can you play those chords backwards?’, and wrote ‘Because’ around them. The lyrics speak for themselves … No imagery, no obscure references.”
Marvin Hamlisch composed the music for Woody Allen’s films Take the Money and Run and Bananas.
Charles Ives’s father-in-law, Rev. Joe Twichell, was good friends with Mark Twain. From Jan Swafford’s book, Charles Ives: A Life with Music:
Besides being an ideal minister, Joe Twichell was an ideal sidekick, a jolly, agreeable Watson to Twain’s trenchant Holmes. It was Joe who suggested to Mark, during a dry spell, that he turn his old Mississippi yarns into stories.
p. 172
As a result, Charles Ives got to meet and converse with the writer on a number of occasions. When Ives’s sister-in-law, Sue, told Mark Twain about Ives’s music, Twain said:
“Now that the young man has joined the Twichell family, he will get the same inspiration from his Harmony (his wife) that I did from Joe and his Harmony.”
Although Charles Ives is now famous for his composing skills, during most of his lifetime he was more known for his success in the insurance industry and is attributed as the inventor of “term life insurance”.
The premier of Beethoven’s Piano Trio No. 7 in Bb Major,op. 97 (“Archduke”) on April 11th 1814 was Beethoven’s last performance as a pianist.
“In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys until the strings jangled and in piano he played so softly that whole groups of notes were omitted.”
— Louis Spohr
“A Clockwork Orange” author Anthony Burgess penned the English - language dialogue for Fellini’s “Casanova”.
Stanley Kubrick was a great director but he was kind of a dick. He lied to Arthur C. Clarke about the release date of 2001: A Space Odyssey to assure the film would come out first so no one could read the book before seeing the film.
After Bruckner wrote his first symphony he wrote Die Nullte (translated to The Zeroth or Number Nought in English) also known as Symphony No. 0 in D minor.
From Wikipedia:
One of the earliest discussions of equal temperament occurs in the writiting of Aristoxenus in the 4th century B.C.
Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo Galilei) was one of the first practical advocates of twelve-tone equal temperament in his 1581 “Dialogo”, accompanied by sets of dance suites on each of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, and 24 ricercars in all the “major/minor keys”.[1] He used the 18:17 ratio for fretting the lute (although some adjustment was necessary for pure octaves).[2]
Galilei’s countryman and fellow lutenist Giacomo Gorzanis had written music based on equal temperament by 1567.[3][4] Gorzanis was not the only lutenist to explore all modes or keys: Francesco Spinacino wrote a “Recercare de tutti li Toni” as early as 1507.[5] In the 17th century lutenist-composer John Wilson wrote a set of 26 preludes including 24 in all the major/minor keys.[6]
Before equal temperament, a note and its enharmonic equivalent (G#-Ab, D#-Eb, etc.) were considered two different pitches with different frequencies. In fact, enharmonic used to mean “two notes less than a semitone apart” instead of its current meaning of “two equivalent notes (or keys) that are spelled differently.” The difference between an F and F# was known as a major semitone while the difference between F# and Gb was known as a minor semitone.
(From Wikipedia:)
Known as gadwal in Arabic,[7] the quarter tone scale was developed in the Middle East in the eighteenth century and many of the first detailed writings in the nineteenth century Syria describe the scale as being of 24 equal tones.[8] The invention of the scale is attributed to Mikhail Mishaqa whose work Essay on the Art of Music for the Emir Shihāb (al-Risāla al-shihābiyya fi ‘l-ṣinā‘a al-mūsīqiyya) is devoted to the topic but also makes clear his teacher Sheikh Muhammad al-‘Attār (1764-1828) was one of many already familiar with the concept.[9]
Nino Rota was friends with Igor Stravinsky.
“Stravinsky was fun; his mind struck sparks. Age was no barrier - ours became a true friendship, despite distance and meeting ever more rarely.”
In the 1930’s, Leo Ornstein and his wife, the former Pauline Mallet-Prèvost, founded the Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia whose alumni include John Coltrane and Jimmy Smith.
Jean-Baptiste Lully’s conducting led to his death.
From Wikipedia:
On 8 January 1687, Lully was conducting a Te Deum in honor of Louis XIV’s recent recovery from illness. He was beating time by banging a long staff (a precursor to the bâton) against the floor, as was the common practice at the time, when he struck his toe, creating an abscess. The wound turned gangrenous, but Lully refused to have his toe amputated and the gangrene spread, resulting in his death on 22 March.
