Musik
8 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- After his death, Bach's choral works were dismissed as old-fashioned for decades.
After Bach's death in 1750 his music was deemed old-fashioned; his great choral works went unheard outside Leipzig. …
- How a monk turned a hymn into "do re mi".
In the 11th century Guido of Arezzo used the hymn "Ut queant laxis": each of its first six half-lines starts one scale …
- In blind tests, Stradivarius violins lose to new ones.
Antonio Stradivari built around 1,100 instruments in Cremona between about 1666 and 1737; roughly 650 survive and now …
- MTV's first clip was about video killing the radio.
At 12:01 am on 1 August 1981, MTV went on air in the USA. The first music video was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by …
- Mozart only wrote half of his most famous work.
When Mozart died in Vienna on 5 December 1791, aged 35, his Requiem in D minor was unfinished: only the Introit was …
- The oldest sound recording went unheard for 148 years.
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented the phonautograph in 1857. It scratched sound waves as a curve onto …
- Until 1939 the same piece was pitched differently in every city.
Concert pitch was negotiable for centuries. Handel's tuning fork sat around 422.5 Hz, Beethoven's near 455 Hz, and …
- Woodstock didn't take place in Woodstock.
The festival of 15 to 18 August 1969 was planned for Woodstock, New York, then for Wallkill, where the town blocked it …