#13901
Allen Jenkins
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Allen Curtis Jenkins was an American character actor and singer who worked on stage, film, and television. He may be best known to baby-boomer audiences as the voice of Officer Dibble on the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon series Top Cat .
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Elizabeth Cotten
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten was an American folk and blues musician. She was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. This position meant that she would play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as "Cotten picking". NPR stated "her influence has reverberated through the generations, permeating every genre of music."
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Bess Flowers
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Bess Flowers was an American actress best known for her work as an extra in hundreds of films. She was known as "The Queen of the Hollywood Extras," appearing in more than 350 feature films and numerous comedy shorts in her 41-year career.
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David Smith
1872 - 1930 (58 years)
David Smith was an English film director and cinematographer of the silent era. He directed more than 70 films between 1915 and 1927. He was born in Faversham, Kent, and died in Santa Barbara, California. He was the older brother of Albert E. Smith, one of the co-founders of the Vitagraph Studios.
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William Henry Bell
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
William Henry Bell, known largely by his initials, W H Bell , was an English composer, conductor and lecturer. Biography Bell was born in St Albans and was a chorister at St Albans Cathedral. He studied organ, violin and piano in London at the Royal Academy of Music along with composition under Frederick Corder, and modal counterpoint privately with Charles Villiers Stanford. He won the Goss Scholarship in 1899. He mainly made his living as an organist and lecturer; he was Professor of Harmony at the Royal Academy of Music where he taught from 1909 to 1912. In 1911 Bell was Director of Music ...
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Alexander Goedicke
1878 - 1958 (80 years)
Alexander Fyodorovich Goedicke was a Russian and Soviet composer and pianist. Goedicke was a professor at Moscow Conservatory. With no formal training in composition, he studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory with Galli, Pavel Pabst and Vasily Safonov. Goedicke won the Anton Rubinstein Competition in 1900. Despite his lack of traditional guidance, his compositional efforts were rewarded when he won the Rubinstein Prize for Composition at the young age of 23. Goedicke died at the age of 80 on 9 July 1957.
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Blind Boy Fuller
1907 - 1941 (34 years)
Blind Boy Fuller was an American blues guitarist and singer. Fuller was one of the most popular of the recorded Piedmont blues artists, rural African Americans, along with Blind Blake, Josh White, and Buddy Moss.
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Al Haig
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Alan Warren Haig was an American jazz pianist, best known as one of the pioneers of bebop. Biography Haig was born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Nutley. In 1940, he majored in piano at Oberlin College. He started performing with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in 1945, and performed and recorded under Gillespie from 1945 to 1946, as a member of Eddie Davis and His Beboppers in 1946 , and the Eddie Davis Quintet in 1947, under Parker from 1948 to 1950, and under Stan Getz from 1949 to 1951. The Gillespie quintet, which included Haig, recorded four 78 r.p.m. sides for Guild Rec...
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Lucius Edwin Smith
1822 - 1900 (78 years)
Lucius Edwin Smith was a United States lawyer, editor, clergyman and educator. Biography Smith graduated from Williams College in 1843, studied law in Williamstown, and was admitted to the bar in 1845. He served during 1847/8 as associate editor of the Hartford Courant, and in 1849 as associate editor, with Henry Wilson, of the Boston Republican. From 1849 to 1854 he was assistant corresponding secretary of the American Baptist Missionary Union, Boston. The next three years he spent in Newton Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1857, and became in 1858 pastor of the Baptist church in ...
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Karl Davydov
1838 - 1889 (51 years)
Karl Yulievich Davydov was a Russian cellist, described by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as the "czar of cellists". He was also a composer, mainly for the cello. His name also appears in various different spellings: Davydov, Davidoff, Davidov, and more, with his first name sometimes written as Charles or Carl.
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Sahib Shihab
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Sahib Shihab was an American jazz and hard bop saxophonist and flautist. He variously worked with Luther Henderson, Thelonious Monk, Fletcher Henderson, Tadd Dameron, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, John Coltrane and Quincy Jones among others.
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Eduard Steuermann
1892 - 1964 (72 years)
Eduard Steuermann was an Austrian-born American pianist and composer. Steuermann studied piano with Vilém Kurz at the Lemberg Conservatory and Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin, and studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck and Arnold Schoenberg. He played the piano part in the first performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and premiered his Piano Concerto. He continued his association with Schoenberg as a pianist for the composer's Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna, and made an arrangement for piano trio of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. He performed in the radio premiere of...
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Isa Miranda
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Isa Miranda was an Italian actress with an international film career. Biography Miranda was born Ines Isabella Sampietro in Milan, the daughter of a street car conductor. When she was 10 years old, she began working as an errand girl for a dressmaker. She later had jobs in a box factory and a handbag factory. When she was 15, she became a model, a job that provided enough income for her to learn bookkeeping and typing in night school. She worked as a typist while attending the Accademia dei Filodrammatici in Milan and trained as a stage actress. She went on to play bit parts in Italian films in Rome.
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Setsuzo Kotsuji
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
was a Japanese Orientalist, and the son of a Shinto priest who descended from a long line of Shinto priests. During the Holocaust he helped Jewish refugees to escape the Nazis, arranging for them to stay first in Kobe and later in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. He also fought against Nazi-inspired anti-Jewish propaganda. A book about how he helped Jewish refugees was written by Japanese actor Jundai Yamada and published in April 2013 by NHK Shuppan.
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Charles Winninger
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
Charles J. Winninger was an American stage and film actor, most often cast in comedies or musicals. Life and career Winninger was born in Athens, Wisconsin, the son of Rosalia and Franz Winninger. His parents were Austrian immigrants. He began as a vaudeville actor. His most famous stage role was as Cap'n Andy Hawks in the original production of Show Boat, the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II musical classic, in 1927. He played the role in the 1932 stage revival and the 1936 film version of the show. He became so identified with the role and with his persona as a riverboat captain that he pl...
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Hiranmoy Ghoshal
1908 - 1969 (61 years)
Hiranmoy Ghoshal is a Bengali writer, diplomat, translator and linguist from West Bengal, India. He was a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. Ghoshal was a multilingual person who was able to speak 26 languages. He spied for Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
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Paul Verhoeven
1901 - 1975 (74 years)
Paul Joseph Verhoeven was a German actor as well as a film and theatre director. Early life Verhoeven was born in the town of Unna. He had 13 siblings. The family lived in modest circumstances. Career He directed and acted in over 50 films. He wrote over 20 film scripts, the first of which was Das kleine Hofkonzert in 1935, an operetta with music by Edmund Nick based on a comedy by Verhoeven and Toni Impekoven.
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Paul Fix
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Peter Paul Fix was an American film and television character actor who was best known for his work in Westerns. Fix appeared in more than 100 movies and dozens of television shows over a 56-year career between 1925 and 1981. Fix portrayed Marshal Micah Torrance, opposite Chuck Connors's character in The Rifleman from 1958 to 1963. He later appeared with Connors in the 1966 Western film Ride Beyond Vengeance.
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Sohrab Modi
1897 - 1984 (87 years)
Sohrab Merwanji Modi was an Indian stage and film actor, director and producer. His films include Khoon Ka Khoon , a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Sikandar, Pukar, Prithvi Vallabh, Jhansi ki Rani, Mirza Ghalib, Jailor and Nausherwan-E-Adil . His films always carried a message of strong commitment to social and national issues.
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Pete "Guitar" Lewis
1913 - 1970 (57 years)
Pete "Guitar" Lewis was an American rhythm and blues guitarist and occasional harmonica player, best known as a session musician and performer with Johnny Otis in the late 1940s and 1950s. Biography Though details of his life are uncertain, researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc state that he was born Carl Lewis in Hilly, LA. Influenced in his guitar playing by T-Bone Walker, he was discovered by Johnny Otis performing in an amateur hour event at the Barrelhouse Club in Los Angeles in 1947. He was recruited to Otis' band, and performed and recorded with him until about 1956. One reviewer s...
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Victor Varconi
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Victor Varconi was a Hungarian actor who initially found success in his native country, as well as in Germany and Austria, in silent films, before relocating to the United States, where he continued to appear in films throughout the sound era. He also appeared in British and Italian films.
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Frank Pettingell
1891 - 1966 (75 years)
Frank Edmund George Pettingell was an English actor. Pettingell was born in Liverpool, Lancashire, and educated at Manchester University. During the First World War he served with the King's Liverpool Regiment.
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Ralph J. Gleason
1917 - 1975 (58 years)
Ralph Joseph Gleason was an American music critic and columnist. He contributed for many years to the San Francisco Chronicle, was a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and cofounder of the Monterey Jazz Festival. A pioneering jazz and rock critic, he helped the San Francisco Chronicle transition into the rock era.
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Vincenzo Galilei
1520 - 1591 (71 years)
Vincenzo Galilei was an Italian lutenist, composer, and music theorist. His children included the astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei and the lute virtuoso and composer Michelagnolo Galilei. Vincenzo was a figure in the musical life of the late Renaissance and contributed significantly to the musical revolution which demarcates the beginning of the Baroque era.
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Raymond Hatton
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Raymond William Hatton was an American film actor who appeared in almost 500 motion pictures. Biography Hatton was born in Red Oak, Iowa. His physician father steered him toward a career in medicine. However, Hatton had become enamored of being on stage after he acted in a school play, and he left home to go into acting as a career.
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Charles Stevenson
1887 - 1943 (56 years)
Charles Stevenson was an American film actor of the silent era. He appeared in 136 films between 1914 and 1925. He was born in Sacramento, California, and died in Palo Alto, California. Filmography Film
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Charles Tobias
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Charles Tobias was an American songwriter. He was sometimes credited as Charley Tobias. Biography Born in New York City, United States, Tobias grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts with brothers Harry Tobias and Henry Tobias, also songwriters. He started his musical career in vaudeville. In 1923, he founded his own music publishing firm and worked on Tin Pan Alley. Tobias referred to himself as "the boy who writes the songs you sing."
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Richard Constant Boer
1863 - 1929 (66 years)
Richard Constant Boer was a Dutch linguist who specialized in Old Norse. Academic History Boer received his Ph.D. in 1888 from the University of Groningen for his edition of Örvar-Odds saga. From 1888 to 1900, he taught Dutch and geography at the gymnasium in Leeuwarden. He was also a professor of Old Norse at Groningen from 1894 to 1900, and after 1900, professor of Old Germanic and Sanskrit at the University of Amsterdam.
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Richard Wallace
1894 - 1951 (57 years)
Richard Wallace was an American film director. He began working in the editing department at Mack Sennett Studios in the early 1920s. He later moved on to rival Hal Roach Studios where he began directing two-reel films, on some of which he collaborated with Stan Laurel. In 1926, Wallace began directing feature-length films.
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Paul Rubens
1875 - 1917 (42 years)
Paul Alfred Rubens was an English songwriter and librettist who wrote some of the most popular Edwardian musical comedies of the early twentieth century. He contributed to the success of dozens of musicals.
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Alois Vojtěch Šembera
1807 - 1882 (75 years)
Alois Vojtěch Šembera, also Alois Adalbert Sembera or Alois Adalbert Schembera was a Czech linguist, historian of literature, writer, journalist and patriot. Life and work He was born in Vysoké Mýto, Bohemia, Austrian Empire. During 1819–1826 he studied at the gymnasium in Litomyšl, during 1826/27 philology at the Charles University in Prague and then law at the same university .
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Christy Cabanne
1888 - 1950 (62 years)
William Christy Cabanne was an American film director, screenwriter, and silent film actor. Biography Born in 1888, Cabanne started his career on stage as an actor and director. He appeared on-screen in dozens of short films from 1911 to 1915. He became a film director and one of the more prolific directors of his time. He signed with the Fine Arts Film Company and was employed as an assistant to D.W. Griffith. Miriam Cooper credited him with discovering her as an extra in 1912. Cabanne directed child actress Shirley Temple in The Red-Haired Alibi , her first credited role in a feature movie...
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Stanislovas Rapolionis
1485 - 1545 (60 years)
Stanislovas Svetkus Rapolionis was a Lutheran activist and Protestant reformer from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With patronage of Albert, Duke of Prussia, he obtained the doctorate of theology from the Protestant University of Wittenberg where he studied under Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. After graduation, he became the first professor of theology at the newly established University of Königsberg, also known as Albertina. As professor he began working on several Protestant publications and translations, including a Bible translation into Polish. It is believed that he also started the first translation of the Bible into Lithuanian.
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Helen Humes
1913 - 1981 (68 years)
Helen Humes was an American singer. Humes was a teenage blues singer, a vocalist with Count Basie's band, a saucy R&B diva, and a mature interpreter of the classic popular song. Early life She was born on June 23, 1913, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Emma Johnson and John Henry Humes. She grew up as an only child. Her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father was the first black attorney in her home town. In an interview, Humes recalled her parents singing to each other around the house and in a church choir.
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Jean Boyer
1901 - 1965 (64 years)
Jean Boyer was a French film director and songwriter. He was born in Paris. Selected songs 1930: "Un regardé", in 1931: "Les Gars de la marine", in Le Capitaine Craddock 1932: "Totor t'as tort" - "Un homme" - "L'amour est un mystère" - "Maintenant, je sais ce que c'est" - "Quand ça m'prend" 1934: "C’est peu de chose" 1936: "Y'a toujours un passage à niveau" 1939: "Comme de bien entendu" - "Ça c'est passé un dimanche" - "Mimile" - "Ça fait d'excellents Français" 1945: "Pour me rendre à mon bureau" 1950: "La Pagaïa" and "Je cherche un cœur"
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Vladimír Helfert
1886 - 1945 (59 years)
Vladimír Helfert was a Czechslovak musicologist in the interwar period. Although his early career as a music critic was clouded by the negative influence of his teacher, Zdeněk Nejedlý, with whom he studied at Charles University. After accepting a post in 1922 as professor of musicology at Masaryk University in Brno, he went against Nejedlý's teachings and championed the music of Leoš Janáček.
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Ranny Weeks
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Randall Webster Weeks was an American bandleader, actor, naval commander, and university administrator. Early life Weeks was born in 1907 in Everett, Massachusetts. His father, William E. Weeks, was a politician who served as Mayor of Everett and was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Weeks attended Everett High School and played quarterback for the school's football team. However, his family moved to Reading, Massachusetts, before he finished school. After graduating from Reading High School, Weeks attended Boston University's Business and Law schoolss, but left in 1929 ...
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Henry Coward
1849 - 1944 (95 years)
Sir Henry Coward was a British conductor and composer. Born in Liverpool to parents in the entertainment industry, Coward took an apprenticeship to a cutler in Sheffield. Educating himself, he became a teacher and soon a headteacher.
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Heikki Paasonen
1865 - 1919 (54 years)
Heikki Antinpoika Paasonen was a Finnish linguist and ethnographer best known for his research in the linguistics and folklore of the Mokshas and the Erzyas during his two research trips to Russia. His studies include works on Chuvash, Mishar Tatar, Meadow Mari and Khanty languages, which led to further discoveries in Finno-Ugric and Turkic studies.
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Rosina Lhévinne
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Rosina Lhévinne was a Russian and American pianist and famed pedagogue. Early life, education and family Rosina Bessie was the younger of two daughters of Maria and Jacques Bessie, a prosperous jeweller from a Dutch Jewish family who emigrated to the Russian Empire to ply his trade as a diamond merchant. There were violent anti-Semitic riots in Kiev during her first year, and the Bessies moved to Moscow in 1881 or 1882. The young Rosina began studying piano at the age of six with a teacher in Moscow, where the family had moved shortly after her birth. When her teacher became ill, a family fr...
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Mikhail Andreyev
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Mikhail Stepanovich Andreyev was a Russian-Uzbek and Soviet orientalist, cultural researcher of Central Asia, ethnographer, linguist, and archaeologist. He was initially supervised by Vladimir Nalivkin, and was the teacher of Olga Alexandrovna Sukhareva. He was a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
1829 - 1902 (73 years)
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was an English scholar, from 1863 Professor of Greek at Queen's College, Galway. Life D'Arcy was the elder son of John Skelton Thompson, shipmaster, and his wife Mary Mitchell, both of Maryport, Cumberland; it was a seafaring family, and he was born at sea on board his father's barque Georgiana, off Van Diemen's Land, on 18 April 1829. After twelve years at Christ's Hospital, London, he matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Michaelmas 1848, later migrating to Pembroke College. At Cambridge his main tutors were Augustus Arthur Vansittart and with Joseph Barber Lightfoot, both of Trinity; his closest friends were James Lempriere Hammond and Peter Guthrie Tait.
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Claude Gillingwater
1870 - 1939 (69 years)
Claude Benton Gillingwater was an American stage and screen actor. He first appeared on the stage then in more than 90 films between 1918 and 1939, including the Academy Award-nominated A Tale of Two Cities and Conquest . He appeared in several films starring Shirley Temple, beginning with Poor Little Rich Girl .
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Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender was a German operatic baritone, particularly associated with Mozart and Verdi roles. He is considered to have been one of the best lyric baritones of the inter-war period. Life and career Domgraf-Fassbaender studied first in Berlin with Jacques Stuckgold and Paul Bruns, and later in Milan with the prominent Italian dramatic tenor Giuseppe Borgatti . His stage debut occurred in 1922 in his native Aachen, as Almaviva in Nozze di Figaro.
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Joseph W. Girard
1871 - 1949 (78 years)
Joseph W. Girard was an American film actor. He appeared in more than 280 films between 1911 and 1944. He was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and died in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. Before he became an actor, Girard was a printer who worked for newspapers until he and a partner set up their own printing business in Philadelphia. Girard had an interest in the theater, however, and eventually sold his part of the printing company and focused on acting.
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Louis Gruenberg
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Louis Gruenberg was a Russian-born American pianist and prolific composer, especially of operas. An early champion of Schoenberg and other contemporary composers, he was also a highly respected Oscar-nominated film composer in Hollywood in the 1940s.
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Ted Fio Rito
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Theodore Salvatore Fiorito , known professionally as Ted Fio Rito, was an American composer, orchestra leader, and keyboardist, on both the piano and the Hammond organ, who was popular on national radio broadcasts in the 1920s and 1930s. His name is sometimes given as Ted Fiorito or Ted FioRito.
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Mortimer Wilson
1876 - 1932 (56 years)
Mortimer Wilson was an American composer of classical music. He also scored several musical and dramatic films in the 1920s. Wilson was born in Chariton, Iowa in Lucas County, a rural area in the south-central portion of the state. He studied organ, violin and composition with Frederick Grant Gleason at the Chicago Music College. He then studied in Leipzig, Germany with Max Reger. Upon return to the USA in 1911 he taught composition at the Atlanta Conservatory and conducted the Atlanta Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1916, he moved to Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia. In 1918, Wilson took a ...
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Joanna Baker
1862 - 1935 (73 years)
Joanna Baker was an American linguist and child prodigy, holding her first college teaching job at the age of 16 and publishing her first book of translations from the Greek at the age of 18. For more than a quarter of a century, she was professor of ancient languages at Simpson College in Iowa, and she also taught at Lake Erie College in Ohio.
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Hermann Reutter
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Hermann Reutter was a German composer and pianist who worked as an academic teacher, university administrator, recitalist, and accompanist. He composed several operas, orchestral works, and chamber music, and especially many lieder, setting poems by authors writing in German, Russian, Spanish, Icelandic, English, and ancient Egyptian and Greek, among others.
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