Archive for the 'w' Category
Wilhelm Canaris Biography (1887 - 1945)
wtorek, lipiec 1st, 2008(born Jan. 1, 1887, Aplerbeck, Westphalia, Ger.—died April 9, 1945, Flossenbürg concentration camp, Bavaria) German naval officer. Under Adolf Hitler, Canaris became head of military intelligence (Abwehr) in 1935. Believing that the Nazi regime would destroy traditional conservative values and that its foreign ambitions were dangerous to Germany, he enlisted some of the anti-Hitler conspirators into the Abwehr and shielded their activities. After the abortive July Plot against Hitler in 1944, Canaris was arrested and executed.
William, 1st Earl Cadogan Biography (1672 - 1726)
niedziela, czerwiec 15th, 2008(born 1672, Liscarton, County Meath, Ire.—died July 17, 1726, Kensington, near London, Eng.) British soldier. He served as a trusted colleague with the duke of Marlborough in the War of the Spanish Succession. Later he became involved in intrigues to secure the succession for the Hanoverian George I (1714). He crushed a Jacobite rebellion in 1716, was granted an earldom in 1718, and was promoted to commander in chief in 1722.
William S(eward) Burroughs Biography (1914 - 1997)
sobota, czerwiec 14th, 2008in full William Seward Burroughs
(born February 5, 1914, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died August 2, 1997, Lawrence, Kansas) American writer of experimental novels that evoke, in deliberately erratic prose, a nightmarish, sometimes wildly humorous world. His sexual explicitness (he was an avowed and outspoken homosexual) and the frankness with which he dealt with his experiences as a drug addict won him a following among writers of the Beat movement.
Burroughs was the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine and grew up in St. Louis in comfortable circumstances, graduating from Harvard University in 1936 and continuing study there in archaeology and ethnology. Having tired of the academic world, he then held a variety of jobs. In 1943 Burroughs moved to New York City, where he became friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, two writers who would become principal figures in the Beat movement. Burroughs first took morphine about 1944, and he soon became addicted to heroin. In 1949 he moved with his second wife to Mexico, where in 1951 he accidentally shot and killed her in a drunken prank. Fleeing Mexico, he wandered through the Amazon region of South America, continuing his experiments with drugs, a period of his life detailed in The Yage Letters, his correspondence with Ginsberg written in 1953 but not published until 1963. Between travels he lived in London, Paris, Tangier, and New York City but in 1981 settled in Lawrence, Kansas.
He used the pen name William Lee in his first published book, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953, reissued as Junky in 1977), an account of the addict’s life. The Naked Lunch (Paris, 1959; U.S. title, Naked Lunch, 1962; filmed 1991) was completed after his treatment for drug addiction. All forms of addiction, according to Burroughs, are counterproductive for writing, and the only gain to his own work from his 15 years as an addict came from the knowledge he acquired of the bizarre, carnival milieu in which the drug taker is preyed upon as victim. The grotesqueness of this world is vividly satirized in Naked Lunch, which also is much preoccupied with homosexuality and police persecution. In the novels that followed—among them The Soft Machine (1961), The Wild Boys (1971), Exterminator! (1973), Cities of the Red Night (1981), Place of Dead Roads (1983), Queer (1985), The Western Lands (1987), and My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995)—Burroughs further experimented with the structure of the novel. Burroughs (1983), by filmmaker Howard Brookner, is a documentary on the artist’s life.
William (Seward) Burroughs Biography (1855 - 1898)
sobota, czerwiec 14th, 2008(born Jan. 28, 1855, Auburn, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 15, 1898, Citronelle, Ala.) U.S. inventor. He was self-supporting from age 15. In 1885 he constructed his first calculating machine; though it proved commercially impractical, he patented a practical model in 1892. This machine was a commercial success, but he died before he could earn much money from it. A year before his death he received the Franklin Institute’s John Scott Medal. In 1905 the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. was organized as successor to the company he had started. William S. Burroughs was his grandson.
William Byrd Biography (1543 - 1623)
sobota, czerwiec 14th, 2008born 1543, Lincoln, Lincolnshire?, Eng.—died July 4, 1623, Stondon Massey, Essex) English organist and composer of the Shakespearean age who is best known for his development of the English madrigal. He also wrote virginal and organ music that elevated the English keyboard style.
Life
Of Byrd’s origins and early life virtually nothing is known. He was a pupil and protégé of the organist and composer Thomas Tallis, and his first authenticated appointment was as organist at Lincoln cathedral (Feb. 27, 1563). In 1572 he moved to London to take up his post as a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, where he shared the duties of organist with Tallis.
The close personal and professional relationship between the two men had important musical consequences. In 1575 Elizabeth I granted them a joint monopoly for the importing, printing, publishing, and sale of music, and the printing of music paper. The first work under their imprint appeared in that year—a collection of Cantiones Sacrae dedicated to the Queen; of the 34 motets, Tallis contributed 16 and Byrd 18.
In 1577 Byrd moved to Harlington, Middlesex, where he and his family lived for the next 15 years. As a devout and lifelong Catholic he probably preferred the greater privacy of living outside London. Yet in spite of his close social contact with many other Catholics, some of whom were certainly implicated in treasonable activities, his own loyalty to the government was never questioned.
In 1585 Tallis died, and in the following year Byrd’s wife, Julian. These sad events may have prompted him to set his musical house in order, for in the next three years he published four collections of his own music: Psalms, Sonets, & songs of sadnes & pietie (1588), Songs of sundrie natures (1589), and two further books of Cantiones Sacrae (1589 and 1591). The two secular volumes were dedicated, respectively, to Sir Christopher Hatton, the lord chancellor, and to Lord Hunsdon, the lord chamberlain and first cousin to the Queen. Both volumes of motets were dedicated to prominent Catholics: the Earl of Worcester, a great friend and patron of Byrd’s, whose loyalty to the crown was unimpeachable, and Lord Lumley. Also in 1591 a manuscript volume of Byrd’s keyboard music was prepared for “my Ladye Nevell” (probably Rachel, wife of Sir Edward Nevill), while many more keyboard pieces found their way into the volume known as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, copied by another well-known Catholic, Francis Tregian, during his imprisonment in the Fleet.
In 1592 or 1593 Byrd moved with his family to Stondon Massey, Essex, where he lived for the rest of his life. At the accession of James I, the Catholics’ prospects temporarily brightened, and this probably prompted Byrd’s next three publications. In his collection of three masses and two books of Gradualia (1605, 1607), he attempted to provide single-handed a basic liturgical repertory, comprising music for the ordinary (i.e., the unvarying parts of the mass) and for the proper (i.e., the parts of the mass that vary according to the day or the feast) of all main feasts. It is significant that the dedicatees of both books of Gradualia were prominent Catholics ennobled within the first years of James’s reign: the Earl of Northampton and Lord Petre of Writtle, another close friend of Byrd’s. One further publication came from Byrd, the Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets of 1611, containing English sacred and secular music.
Assessment
Byrd’s musical stature can hardly be overrated. He wrote extensively for every medium then available except, it seems, the lute. His virginal and organ music brought the English keyboard style to new heights and pointed the way to the achievements of other English composers, such as John Bull, Giles Farnaby, Orlando Gibbons, and Thomas Tomkins. In music for viol consort he also played an extremely important role, pioneering the development of the freely composed fantasia, which was to become the most important form of Jacobean and later composers. Although he admired Italian madrigals and as a publisher helped introduce them to England, Byrd’s own secular vocal music is distinctly conservative; much of it is conceived for the old-fashioned medium of solo voice accompanied by viol consort, later abandoned by the English madrigalists, with Thomas Morley (Byrd’s pupil) at their head. Byrd sometimes added texts to the polyphonic accompaniments of these songs, in effect making them madrigals.
Byrd’s religious beliefs did not prevent him from composing a great deal of church music to English words, most of which has survived only in manuscript. Although this is of generally high quality it cannot be denied that Byrd maintained his highest consistent level in his Latin sacred music. Of this, the 1589 and 1591 sets of Cantiones Sacrae (mostly designed for the private edification of the Catholic circles Byrd moved in and therefore unrestricted by liturgical considerations) have an intensity unrivalled in England and a breadth of scale unknown on the Continent. Although the Gradualia are necessarily more concise and superficially more similar to the work of Giovanni da Palestrina and Tomás Luis de Victoria, with which Byrd was well acquainted, closer examination reveals their real individuality as well as an astonishingly consistent level of inspiration.
J. Jeremy Noble
Wynn Bullock Biography (1902 - 1975)
sobota, czerwiec 14th, 2008(born April 18, 1902, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died Nov. 16, 1975, Monterey, Calif.) U.S. photographer. He was strongly influenced in his early work—mainly “solarizations,” in which the image is partly negative and partly positive—by the avant-garde experiments of László Moholy-Nagy. In 1948 Edward Weston persuaded him to focus on realism and tonal beauty, and Bullock followed his advice so closely that his images often resembled Weston’s. He is best known for realistic images that are meant to be viewed as “equivalents,” or visual metaphors (e.g., the passing of time, the inevitability of death).
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