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History of Pink Floyd

Like most band in the sixties, Pink Floyd was a product of the upheavals and climactic changes happening that time. The band was formed in 1965 during the psychedelic era in London’s music underground. The original band members were Nick Mason, Rick Wright, Roger Waters, Clive Metcalf, Keith Noble, and Juliette Gale. Juliette later married Rick.

The band’s name went through a series of changes from Sigma-6, The Meggadeaths, and The Abdabs, The Screaming Abdabs, and The Architectural Abdas. The band broke up eventually, but Waters, Wright, and Mason stayed together. Bob Close and Syd Barrett joined up with them later as guitarists.

Pink Floyd

For a time, they were called the Tea Set (or perhaps T-Set as spelled by some sources), but after encountering another band with the same name in the bill, they had to change the band’s name to something else. That was when they were called the Pink Floyd Sound because Syd Barrett had worked with blues players Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The word “Sound” was dropped shortly after and the group just went by the name of Pink Floyd.

A New Kind of Sound

Pink Floyd was known for its avant-garde music and its electrifying live performances. Words like lavish, over-the-top, and flashy were attached to descriptions of the band’s performances. Pink Floyd was actually the first to use a combination of sound and lights in their live performances. Each show was a theatrical production with explosions, laser lights, film clips projected on white screens, and stage smoke. In fact, the performers themselves seemed secondary attractions.

However, more than the grand concert performances, Pink Floyd was best known among its fans for its brand of music. In the early days, the band covered rhythm and blues songs such as “Louie, Louie.” Later, they shifted to psychedelic interpretations, with extended improvised sections and “spaced out” solos.

The public’s reaction was cold at first because the songs were new and odd sounding. The newness of the sound and the easy-to-remember lyrics attracted a small crowd each time they perform in the underground clubs.

Pink Floyd

How They Were Discovered

Pink Floyd’s members were ready to break up and go their separate ways before the band was discovered by a music agent named Jenner. Jenner had already absorbed the different genres of hippie music scene in the Unites States that time. He was also appreciative of the underground scene in London.

Jenner felt that the group had huge commercial potential. He and the band formed Blackhill Enterprises, which brought them to completely new ways of using lights and sounds for concerts. Sounds were taken from other groups playing the London underground and mashed together to form new music. Light technicians from the United States replaced their color slide light shows with oil slides, which were projected on the stage during concert.

The name was changed back and forth from “the Pink Floyd Sound” to “Pink Floyd” and finally ended as the latter, which is still in use. The band’s popularity was increasing radically with the increasing numbers of concerts. In early spring 1967, the band has been playing as many as 20 concerts a month. The band was signed on with a record label named EMI, which held their first press launch on April 1, 1967.

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History of Opera

Opera is a style of entertainment that involves theater combined with orchestral music and singers who perform using a distinctive classical method of projecting their voice. Performers in opera are not only trained in singing, but also in stage craft such as acting and choreography. The lead performers in most major productions are usually well known, and often as famous as their counterparts in other forms of theater such as Broadway Musicals.

As an art form opera was invented in the mid 1500s in the Italian city of Florence by a group of actors who were performing classical Greek theater and surmised that the original would have been performed with music playing in the background. Adopting the humanist approach to theater, these actors were nobel men educated in Latin and Greek and for whom the ancient dramas defined theater at its best.

The style of music played in the original Greek plays would have been quite simple, perhaps only a handful of instrumentalists playing the lyre, flutes and simple drums. By renaissance times instruments were quite different leading to richer more obvious music accompaniment, certainly by this time brass instruments like the trumpet had been invented and most string and wood instruments were significantly different.

Opera Spirit of Paris

Fuller sounding instrumentals would often drown out the voice of the performers leading to actors developing techniques for amplifying the voice, a step that quickly led to singing their parts instead of just reciting their lines. Singing is known to allow performers to project their voices further or more loudly and renaissance time were changing from religious austerity to more creative endeavors being the perfect environment for opera to develop.

By the end of the 16^th century this new style of theater was becoming popular and new productions specifically written to be sung with accompaniment began appearing. The De Medici family in Florence are believed to have paid a composer Jacopo Peri for the very first opera entitled ‘Dafne’ in 1598. It was performed in their private court for the nobility of Florence, and sadly much of the score for it has been lost yet it still has a place in the history of opera.

A few years later opera had made its mark and word of the new theater to music had spread from Florence to the rest of Italy, north to the Austrian Empire and the German Principalities, east the the Russian Empire, and as far west as England, France, and Spain. Outside of Italy the enthusiasm for opera was restricted to the nobility and landed gentry.

In Florence and the other great Italian cities such as Venice, Rome, or Milan dedicated opera houses started to be built and tickets to performances sold, with Venice taking the lead starting in 1637, but eventually building over 15 for the citizens of Venice alone and making Venice the spiritual and cultural home of opera even if Florence had been its birth city.

Claudio Monteverdi, one of the fathers of opera and whose works are still performed took the decision early in his operas to add short performances within his works that were designed to appeal to a wider audience, the emerging merchant classes who were less cultured and needed a little more entertainment than the heavy operas of the day.

Eventually these short pieces were dropped as the crowds started to appreciate a full length opera without interruption. The growing demand for opera of both a serious nature (opera seria) or the more entertaining comedic nature (opera buffa) created different schools of thought on the nature of opera, some composers preferring complex subtexts and interwoven plots, others preferring a minimalist approach.

Metropolitan Opera - 1937

As opera productions generally told the story of love, many of the characters appearing on stage were of course meant to be women, but renaissance society frowned on female actors, leading to all actors being men, a situation that encouraged castrati (castrated men) from all over Europe and the Arab world to make their way into theater, the best of them being able to hold a superb falsetto indistinguishable from that of a woman.

The introduction of women into opera as performers tho wasn’t always seen as a disgrace to be remedied with castratis, indeed the famed English composer Henry Purcell wrote an English language opera for the dancing professor of a girls boarding school, which received critical review in the late 1600s and featured a cast of young ladies drawn from the gentry of England.

The language of the original operas were mostly written in the Italian of the great cities such as Florence and Venice, happily this is very similar to the Italian of today. Opera however did prove popular in other languages and has been able to transcend the language barrier to become popular elsewhere, notably German and French, and in the 20^th century English operas and operatic style musicals became exceedingly popular.

The development of opera in the 18^th century, at least outside of Italy, was mostly of German origin under the patronage of the most powerful imperial family of Europe, the Habsburgs of Austria. Based in Vienna they had a natural interest in German language opera inspired by Germanic myths and folklore.

Composers such as Glück, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Strauss, Weber, and Wagner all drove German opera to the pinnacle of perfection and thus influenced every other composer since, from the Italian courts to the French grand opera. German singspiele, singing and acting, came to be dominant and transformed opera buffa from its slapstick roots into a style filled with humor and nuance.

Sydney Opera House

English opera by comparison developed in wholly different directions after having been banned during Cromwell’s reign whose puritan government frowned on singing and dancing. After the return of the monarchy opera was acceptable again but opera buffa proved more popular, leading to a distinctly English style of opera humor whose greatest proponents included George Fredric Handel, Thomas Arne, John Gay, and perhaps best known of them all Gilbert and Sullivan.

European immigrants to the US brought their love of opera with them, and Americans with their passion for being entertained quickly adopted opera as their own. In New York the Metropolitan Opera company in the 20^th century took a leading role in the development of modern opera and providing a stage for contemporary opera to thrive.

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History of Rap Music

Rap music is a style of poetic rhyming set to a heavy percussive beat often including a chorus sung by another performer in the style of traditional pop or rhythm and blues. Rap music is primarily an American medium but in recent years has exploded onto the world stage and rappers can now be found on almost every nation.

Most music fans associate rap music with African American youth from the ghettos, projects, and lower strata of American society, and since most performers come from one of those backgrounds the idea has gained acceptance.

As a style, rap dates back to traditional West African story telling that itself predates the development of the slave trade. Tribal history would be recited in a rhythmic manner to the beat of drums and stamping of feet within the tribal village square and session would often last thru the night or at least into the early morning.

Rap Music

In the US and the Caribbean this style of story telling never really died but wasn’t considered music. During the slave years African Americans clung onto anything that gave them roots leading to rap rightfully being considered a parent style to blues even to the extent of blues singers incorporating rap into songs as far back as the 1920s.

The 1970s in New York was when Rap found it’s way into Hip hop music, initially as a small part of an overall track, and later as the major part of a track with a small Hip Hop component. The first track to enter the billboard charts with a rap sound was the group Last Poets with their debut track ‘Wake Up, Niggers’, a political commentary that accompanied the film “Right On!”

Even in it’s early days rap music was dominated by social issues affecting young African Americans, leading to a bad reputation amongst mainstream communities for its gang culture references. Gangs and prison time are almost synonymous with rap music, one of the Last Poets was himself jailed and not able to perform on their second album a year later.

Sugerhill Gang

The first obviously rap track to be released came in 1979 from the Sugerhill Gang whose track ‘Rappers Delight’ hit #36 on the US pop charts and #2 on the US R&B charts. Whilst technically a hip hop song it paved the way for the commercial success of rap as a music style and the group were quickly followed in the charts by Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and Kool Herc.

Rap in the 80s experienced a major boost in popularity with the first gangsta rap singles catapulting rappers like Ice-T and Niggas With Attitude into the ranks of the all time best rap performers, but leading to controversy over their choice of lyrics and track names. Songs such as Cop Killer and Fuck the Police added fire to the flames giving rap music instant recognition.

By the 1990s rap had fully shaken off its baby cousin reputation against hip hop, artists started experimenting with

Eminem

new forms and patterns, abandoning the old rap style with inherent structure and moving toward pure rap that snaps from form to form.

Murders and gangster shootings of rap performers has shaken the industry but done nothing to adversely affect the uptake of rap as a mainstream music style. Artists such as Tupac, Shakur Notorious B.I.G., Big L, and Jam Master Jay were all gunned down in drive-by or mafia style murders.

The growth of rap into mainstream has most recently started to encourage performers from outside of its traditional base, people like Eminem, Lil Kim, Salt n Pepa, and Queen Latifah all successfully proving rap isn’t the preserve of black males.

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History of Bossa Nova

The Bossa Nova is a Brazilian style of music that is closely related to Jazz and is known for its off key interpretations where the melody is often sung at a higher range than the instrument. Bossa Nova is known for it’s swaying motion rather than the swinging motion of Jazz or Samba.

Brazil is a Portuguese speaking country in the tropics of South America and was settled by Portuguese and slaves from Africa and both groups brought with them very distinctive cultural norms that together make Brazilian music unique on the world stage.

Bossa Nova Party

The Samba is the style most often associated with Brazil, and from which the Bossa Nova evolved, although it has been described as less percussive and more harmoniously complex. The name Bossa Nova is generally considered to mean ‘New Trend’ and in brazil the word bossa was synonymous with anything that was cool and hip.

During the 1950s Brazil was developing economically and becoming a progressive nation, music had developed a commercial following so new bands and singers were being sought out, especially those with a different sound. Amongst the middle and upper classes in Brazil styles such as the Bossa Nova were incredibly popular in clubs.

João Gilberto is credited with being the inventor of the Bossa Nova style, but the first Bossa Nova released song wasn’t performed by Gilberto, instead he only played the guitar in accompaniment to Elizete Cardoso, a famous Brazilian actress. The song “Chega de Saudade” was written by Vinícious de Moraes and Tom Jobim, but truly became a sensational hit when Gilberto recorded it a year later as the lead single of his debut album.

João Gilberto singing the Bossa Nova

While the Bossa Nova craze only lasted six years (1958-1963) in Brazil, by the end of this time it had made it’s way to the US and was picked up by such big name artists as Frank Sinatra, Herbie Mann, Charlie Byrd, and Stan Getz. In the history of music the Boss Nova had now arrived and a willing global audience was ready to buy into it.

It was at this time that Bossa Nova’s biggest hit and signature tune “The Girl from Ipanema” was released, with Gilberto on guitar and Portuguese vocals, Getz on saxophone, and the English verse sung by Gilberto’s wife Astrud.

Not long after this Bossa Nova started to be replaced by other forms of music in the hit parade, but the legacy left by Bossa Nova’s greatest acts regularly inspires new fusions of Bossa Nova with other styles of music.

Check out the following video for a Bossa Nova song example. (”Chega de Saudade” by João Gilberto)

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History of Pink Floyd

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History of Rap Music

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