Jerome Lawrence

(July 14, 1915 - February 29, 2004)

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an American playwright and author. His notable works include Auntie Mame and Inherit the Wind.

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a play first published in 1890 by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The play has gained recognition as a classic of realism, nineteenth century theatre, and world drama.

The character of Hedda is considered by some critics as one of the great dramatic roles in theatre. Depending on the interpretation, Hedda may be portrayed as an idealistic heroine fighting society, a victim of circumstance, a prototypical feminist, or a manipulative villain.

Susan Keating Glaspell

(1 July 1876 – 27 July 1948)

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an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actress, director, and bestselling novelist. Her novels and plays are committed to developing deep, sympathetic characters, to understanding 'life' in its complexity. Though realism was the medium of her fiction, she was also greatly interested in philosophy and religion. Many of her characters make principled stands.

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a scale used in the blues generally consisting of tonic, major second, minor third, fourth, fifth, major sixth and minor seventh, in which notes, particularly the third, fourth and fifth may be bent.

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a motif or phrase which is persistently repeated in the same musical voice. An ostinato is always a succession of equal sounds, wherein each note always has the same weight or stress. The repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a tune, or a complete melody in itself.

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an ostinato figure: a repeated chord progression, pattern, refrain or melodic figure, often played by the rhythm section instruments or solo instrument, that forms the basis or accompaniment of a musical composition.

Zoltán Kodály

(December 16, 1882 – March 6, 1967)

Suzuki methodとか

スズキ・メソード

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an educational philosophy which strives to create high ability and beautiful character in its students through a nurturing environment. Its primary vehicle for achieving this is music education on a specific instrument. The 'nurture' involved in the movement is modeled on a concept of early childhood education that focuses on factors which Shinichi Suzuki observed in native language acquisition.

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an approach to music education created by a prominent German composer. It begins with a student's innate abilities to engage in rudimentary forms of music, using basic rhythms and melodies. Orff considers the whole body a percussive instrument and students are led to develop their music abilities in a way that parallels the development of Western music, fostering student self-discovery.

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a method based on an extensive body of research and field testing by Edwin E. Gordon and others. Music Learning Theory provides the music teacher a comprehensive method for teaching musicianship through audiation, Gordon's term for hearing music in the mind with understanding.

The Palace of Westminster

or the Houses of Parliament

or Westminster Palace

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the meeting place of the two houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Reginald Rose

(December 10, 1920 – April 19, 2002)

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an American film and television writer most widely known for his work in the early years of television drama. Rose's work is marked by its treatment of controversial social and political issues. His realistic approach helped create the slice-of-life school of television drama.

The Song of Roland

ou La Chanson de Roland

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the oldest surviving major work of French literature. It exists in various different manuscript versions which testify to its enormous and enduring popularity in the 12th to 14th centuries. The epic poem is the first and most outstanding example of the chanson de geste, a literary form that flourished between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries and celebrated the legendary deeds of a hero.

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often used in very fast 2/4, 3/4 and 3/8 time signatures. It appears as a series of downbeats with a single rebound as shown in the accompanying diagram.

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designed to produce a heavy accent on the first beat of the bar and a lighter one on the second.  It is used in both 2/4 and 6/8 meters. 

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used in ¾, 3/2, slow 3/8 and fast 9/8 meters.

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used most often in 4/4, 4/2 and fast 12/8 meters.

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a scale in which each note is separated from its neighbors by the interval of a whole step.

Georges Braque

(13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963)

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a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as Cubism.

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a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms: "What is there?" and "What is it like?"

Aristophanes

(ca. 446 BC – ca. 386 BC)

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a prolific and much acclaimed comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and they are in fact used to define the genre. Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy, Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author.

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the covered passage around a cloister.

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a rectangular open space surrounded by covered walks or open galleries, with open arcades on the inner side, running along the walls of buildings and forming a quadrangle or garth. The attachment of a cloister to a cathedral or church usually indicates that it is part of a monastic foundation.

Francesco Borromini

(25 September 1599 – 3 August 1667)

William "Count" Basie

(August 21, 1904 – April 26, 1984)

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an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. Basie led his jazz orchestra almost continuously for nearly 50 years. Many notable musicians came to prominence under his direction. Basie's theme songs were "One O'Clock Jump" and "April In Paris."

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an abbreviation of accompanying; this term is used in jazz music to describe the chords, rhythms, and countermelodies that keyboard players or guitar players use to support a jazz musician's improvised solo or melody lines.

Stanley Getz

(February 2, 1927 – June 6, 1991)

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an American jazz saxophone player. Getz was known as "The Sound" because of his warm, lyrical tone.

James Macpherson

(27 October 1736 – 17 February 1796) 

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a Romantic Scottish writer, poet, literary collector and politician, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of poems, which helped start the Celtic Revival. Some of his poems include "Fingal" and "Temora."

Philip Milton Roth

(March 19, 1933)

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an American Ethnic novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award. In 1969 he became a major celebrity with the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint, the humorous psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor," filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language."

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the first book published by the American novelist Philip Roth, a collection of six stories. In addition to its title novella, set in New Jersey, Goodbye, Columbus contains the five short stories "The Conversion of the Jews," "Defender of the Faith," "Epstein," "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings," and "Eli, the Fanatic." Each story deals with the problems and concerns of second- and third-generation assimilated American Jews as they leave the ethnic ghettos of their parents and grandparents and go on to college, the white-collar professions, and life in the suburbs.

Louis Daniel Armstrong

(August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971)

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an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana. Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an "inventive" cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the music's focus from collective improvisation to solo performance.

With his instantly recognizable deep and distinctive gravelly voice, Armstrong was also an influential singer, demonstrating great dexterity as an improviser, bending the lyrics and melody of a song for expressive purposes. He was also greatly skilled at scat singing, vocalizing using sounds and syllables instead of actual lyrics.

The New Tenant

ou Le Nouveau Locataire

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a play written by Eugène Ionesco in 1955. The central image is common to many Ionesco plays: something, in this case furniture, accumulates on stage and overwhelms the characters. The main characters are a gentleman, a caretaker, and two movers. The caretaker talks as the gentleman, the "new tenant" of the title, directs the two movers who continuously bring in furniture.

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a 1940 western novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, in which two drifters are drawn into a lynch mob to find and hang three men presumed to be rustlers and the killers of a local man.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark

(August 3, 1909 — November 10, 1971)

Jasper Johns, Jr.

(born May 15, 1930)

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an American contemporary painter. He is best known for his painting Flag, which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to pop. Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.

Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondrian

( March 7, 1872 – February 1, 1944)

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a Dutch painter who was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of white ground, upon which was painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the three primary colors.

De Stijl ("The Style")

or neoplasticism

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a Dutch artistic movement whose proponents sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white.

Donato Bramante

(1444 – March 11, 1514)

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an Italian architect, who introduced the Early Renaissance style to Milan and the High Renaissance style to Rome, where his most famous design was St. Peter's Basilica. Some of his other works include San Pietro in Montorio and Christ at the column.

Franz Jozef Kline

(May 23 1910 – May 13 1962)

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an American painter mainly associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was married to Elizabeth Vincent Parsons, a British ballet dancer.