Events Decade

John Dee (1527 – 1609)

John Dee was an English mathematician, astronomer, teacher, astrologer, occultist, and alchemist. He was the court astronomer for, and advisor to, Elizabeth I, and spent much of his time on alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy  As an antiquarian, he had one of the largest libraries in England at the time. As a political advisor, he advocated the foundation of English colonies in the New World to form a “British Empire“, a term he is credited with coining. Dee eventually left Elizabeth’s service and went on a quest for additional knowledge in the deeper realms of the occult and supernatural. He aligned himself with several individuals who may have been charlatans, travelled through […]

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1577 Florentine Camerata: The Beginnings of Opera

The Florentine Camerata, also known as the Camerata de’ Bardi, were a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama.  They met at the house of Giovanni de’ Bardi, and their gatherings had the reputation of having all the most famous men of Florence as frequent guests. After first meeting in 1573, the activity of the Camerata reached its height between 1577 and 1582.  While propounding a revival of the Greek dramatic style, the Camerata’s musical experiments […]

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†915 The music of Tuotilo

Tuotilo Renaissance maestro in 9th century Tuotilo was a Frankish monk at the Abbey of Saint Gall. He was a composer, and according to Ekkehard IV a century later, also a poet, musician, painter and sculptor. Various trope melodies can be assigned to Tuotilo, but works of other mediums are attributed with less certainty. He was a student of Iso of St. Gallen [de] and friends with the fellow monk Notker the Stammerer. Tuotilo played several instruments, including the harp. The history of the ecclesiastical drama begins with the trope sung as Introit of the Mass on Easter Sunday. It has come down to us in a St. Gallen manuscript dating from the time of Tuotilo. According to […]

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†865 The music of Kassia

Hymn of Kassia  Kassia, Cassia or Kassiani was a Byzantine-Greek composer, hymnographer and poet. She holds a unique place in Byzantine music as the only known woman whose music appears in the Byzantine liturgy.  Approximately fifty of her hymns are extant, most of which are stichera, though at least 26 have uncertain attribution.The authenticity issues are due to many hymns being anonymous, and others ascribed to different authors in different manuscripts. She was an abbess of a convent in the west of Constantinople. Additionally, many epigrams and gnomic verses are attributed to her, at least 261. Kassia is notable as one of at least two women in the middle Byzantine period known to have written in their own names, the other being Anna Comnena. Like […]

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†930 – the music of Hucbald

Hucbald was a Benedictine monk active as a music theorist, poet, composer, teacher, and hagiographer.   He was long associated with Saint-Amand Abbey, so is often known as Hucbald of St Amand. Deeply influenced by Boethius‘ De Institutione Musica, Hucbald’s (De) Musica, formerly known as De harmonica institutione, aims to reconcile ancient Greek music theory and the contemporary practice of Gregorian chant with the use of many notated examples. Among the leading music theorists of the Carolingian era, he was likely a near contemporary of Aurelian of Réôme, the unknown author of the Musica enchiriadis, and the anonymous authors of other music theory texts Commemoratio brevis, Alia musica, and De modis.

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†1759 George Frederick Handel

George Frederick Handel was a German-British Baroque composer well-known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. The Great Mr Handel Full Movie (1942)  Handel received his training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727.  He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel’s music forms one of the peaks of the “high baroque” style, bringing Italian opera to its highest development, creating the genres of English oratorio and organ concerto, and introducing a […]

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†1170 Thomas Becket murdered

Thomas Becket, also known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas of London and later Thomas à Becket, served as Lord Chancellor from 1155 to 1162, and then as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his death in 1170.  He engaged in conflict with Henry II, King of England, over the rights and privileges of the Church and was murdered by followers of the King in Canterbury Cathedral. Soon after his death, he was canonised by Pope Alexander III. He is venerated as a saint and martyr by the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. Becket’s assassins fled north to de Morville’s Knaresborough Castle for about a year. They were not arrested and seeking forgiveness, the assassins travelled to Rome, […]

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†1889 Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White Full Movie Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwrightknown especially for The Woman in White (1859), a mystery novel and early sensation novel, and for The Moonstone (1868), which established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel and is also perhaps the earliest clear example of the police procedural genre. Collins’s works were classified at the time as sensation novels, a genre that became the precursor to detective and suspense fiction. He also wrote penetratingly on the plight of women and on the social and domestic issues of his time. For example, his 1854 Hide and  Seek contained one of the first portrayals of a deaf character in English […]

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†1910 Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace Full TV-series Lev Tolstoy usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time. He received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909. Tolstoy never having won a Nobel Prize was a major Nobel Prize controversy, and remains one. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties. Tolstoy’s notable works include the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction, as well as […]

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