#16951
Bob Brown
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Robert Carlton Brown II was an American writer and publisher in many forms from comic squibs to magazine fiction to advertising to avant-garde poetry to business news to cookbooks to political tracts to novelized memoirs to parodies and much more.
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Dorothy Swaine Thomas
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Dorothy Swaine Thomas was an American sociologist and economist. She was the 42nd President of the American Sociological Association, the first woman in that role. Life and career Thomas was born on October 24, 1899, in Baltimore, Maryland to John Knight and Sarah Swaine Thomas.
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Karl Aben
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Karl Aben was an Estonian and Latvian linguist and translator. In Estonia, he became known as the country's foremost translator from Latvian at the time , but he also translated from Estonian into Latvian . Aben was born into an Estonian family in Northern Latvia, he studied at the University of Tartu, graduating with a degree in philology in 1940.
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Edmund Rubbra
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Edmund Rubbra was a British composer. He composed both instrumental and vocal works for soloists, chamber groups and full choruses and orchestras. He was greatly esteemed by fellow musicians and was at the peak of his fame in the mid-20th century. The best known of his pieces are his eleven symphonies. Although he was active at a time when many people wrote twelve-tone music, he decided not to write in this idiom; instead, he devised his own distinctive style. His later works were not as popular with the concert-going public as his previous ones had been, although he never lost the respect of his colleagues.
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Vincent Youmans
1898 - 1946 (48 years)
Vincent Millie Youmans was an American Broadway composer and producer. A leading Broadway composer of his day, Youmans collaborated with virtually all the greatest lyricists on Broadway: Ira Gershwin, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Caesar, Anne Caldwell, Leo Robin, Howard Dietz, Clifford Grey, Billy Rose, Edward Eliscu, Edward Heyman, Harold Adamson, Buddy DeSylva and Gus Kahn. Youmans' early songs are remarkable for their economy of melodic material: two-, three- or four-note phrases are constantly repeated and varied by subtle harmonic or rhythmic changes. In later years, however, he turned to longer musical sentences and more rhapsodic melodic lines.
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Fernão de Oliveira
1507 - 1581 (74 years)
Fernão de Oliveira , sometimes named Fernando de Oliveira or Fernando Oliveira, was a Portuguese grammarian, Dominican friar, historian, cartographer, naval pilot and theorist on naval warfare and shipbuilding. An adventurous humanist and renaissance man, he studied and published the first grammar of the Portuguese language, the Grammatica da lingoagem portuguesa, in 1536. He was an early critic of slavery and the slave trade.
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Thomas Campion
1567 - 1620 (53 years)
Thomas Campion was an English composer, poet, and physician. He was born in London, educated at Cambridge, studied law in Gray's inn. He wrote over a hundred lute songs, masques for dancing, and an authoritative technical treatise on music.
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Norman Petty
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Norman Petty was an American musician, record producer, publisher, and radio station owner. He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of early rock & roll. With Vi Ann Petty—his wife and vocalist—he founded the Norman Petty Trio.
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Humphrey Searle
1915 - 1982 (67 years)
Humphrey Searle was an English composer and writer on music. His music combines aspects of late Romanticism and modernist serialism, particularly reminiscent of his primary influences, Franz Liszt, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, who was briefly his teacher. As a writer on music, Searle published texts on numerous topics; he was an authority on the music of Franz Liszt, and created the initial cataloguing system for his works.
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Joseph Devlin
1871 - 1934 (63 years)
Joseph Devlin was an Irish journalist and influential nationalist politician. He was a Member of Parliament for the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom . Later Devlin was an MP and leader of the Nationalist Party in the Parliament of Northern Ireland. He was referred to as "the duodecimo Demosthenes" by the Irish politician Tim Healy which Devlin took as a compliment.
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Meredith Willson
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Robert Reiniger Meredith Willson was an American flutist, composer, conductor, musical arranger, bandleader, playwright, and writer. He is perhaps best known for writing the book, music, and lyrics for the 1957 hit Broadway musical The Music Man and "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" . Willson wrote three other Broadway musicals and composed symphonies and popular songs. He was twice nominated for Academy Awards for film scores.
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Luigi Nono
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music. Biography Early years Nono, born in Venice, was a member of a wealthy artistic family; his grandfather was a notable painter. Nono began music lessons with Gian Francesco Malipiero at the Venice Conservatory in 1941, where he acquired knowledge of the Renaissance madrigal tradition, amongst other styles. After graduating with a degree in law from the University of Padua, he was given encouragement in composition by Bruno Maderna. Through Maderna, he became acquainted with Hermann Scherchen—then Maderna's conducting teacher—wh...
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Bud Powell
1924 - 1966 (42 years)
Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell was an American jazz pianist and composer. A pioneer in the development of bebop, jazz critics have commented that his compositions and playing style "greatly extended the range of jazz harmony," and his application of complex bebop phrasing to the piano influenced both his contemporaries and later pianists including Walter Davis, Jr., Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Barry Harris. Although a severe beating by police in 1945, followed by years of electroconvulsive therapy treatments and hospitalization, impacted his health during the latter half of his career, he continued to compose, record, and perform until shortly before his death in 1966.
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Kai Winding
1922 - 1983 (61 years)
Kai Chresten Winding was a Danish-born American trombonist and jazz composer. He is known for his collaborations with fellow trombonist J. J. Johnson. His version of "More", the theme from the movie Mondo Cane, reached in 1963 number 8 in the Billboard Hot 100 and remained his only entry here.
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Don Ellis
1934 - 1978 (44 years)
Donald Johnson Ellis was an American jazz trumpeter, drummer, composer, and bandleader. He is best known for his extensive musical experimentation, particularly in the area of time signatures. Later in his life he worked as a film composer, contributing a score to 1971's The French Connection and 1973's The Seven-Ups.
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Patsy Cline
1932 - 1963 (31 years)
Patsy Cline was an American singer. She is considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century and was one of the first country music artists to cross over into pop music. Cline had several major hits during her eight-year recording career, including two number-one hits on the Billboard Hot Country and Western Sides chart.
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Lionel Tertis
1876 - 1975 (99 years)
Lionel Tertis, CBE was an English violist. He was one of the first viola players to achieve international fame and a noted teacher. Career Tertis was born in West Hartlepool, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. He first studied violin in Leipzig, Germany and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. There he was encouraged by the principal, Alexander Mackenzie, to take up the viola instead. Under the additional influence of Oskar Nedbal, he did so and rapidly became one of the best known violists of his time, touring Europe and the US as a soloist.
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Robert Stolz
1880 - 1975 (95 years)
Robert Elisabeth Stolz was an Austrian songwriter and conductor as well as a composer of operettas and film music. Biography Stolz was born of musical parents in Graz. His father was conductor and composer Jakob Stolz, his mother was concert pianist Ida Bondy, and he was the great-nephew of the soprano Teresa Stolz. At the age of seven, he toured Europe as a pianist, playing Mozart. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory with Robert Fuchs and Engelbert Humperdinck. From 1899 he held successive conducting posts at Maribor , Salzburg and Brno before succeeding Artur Bodanzky at the Theater an der Wien in 1907.
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Ferdinand Hérold
1791 - 1833 (42 years)
Louis Joseph Ferdinand Herold , better known as Ferdinand Hérold , was a French composer. He was celebrated in his lifetime for his operas, of which he composed more than twenty, but he also wrote ballet music, works for piano and choral pieces. He is best known today for the ballet La Fille mal gardée and the overture to the opera Zampa.
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Charles Coburn
1877 - 1961 (84 years)
Charles Douville Coburn was an American actor and theatrical producer. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award three times – in The Devil and Miss Jones , The More the Merrier , and The Green Years – winning for his performance in The More the Merrier. He was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 for his contribution to the film industry.
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Amy Beach
1867 - 1944 (77 years)
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. Her "Gaelic" Symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She was one of the first American composers to succeed without the benefit of European training, and one of the most respected and acclaimed American composers of her era. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave featuring her own music in the United States and in Germany.
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Fanny Kemble
1809 - 1893 (84 years)
Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble was a British actress from a theatre family in the early and mid-19th century. She was a well-known and popular writer and abolitionist whose published works included plays, poetry, eleven volumes of memoirs, travel writing, and works about the theatre.
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Wang Wei
699 - 759 (60 years)
Wang Wei was a Chinese musician, painter, poet, and politician of the middle Tang dynasty. He is regarded as one of the most famous men of arts and letters of his era. Many of his poems survive and 29 of them are included in the 18th-century anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems. Many of his best poems were inspired by the local landscape.
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Ignaz Pleyel
1757 - 1831 (74 years)
Ignace Joseph Pleyel was an Austrian composer, music publisher and piano builder of the Classical period. Life Early years He was born in in Lower Austria, the son of a schoolmaster named Martin Pleyl. Despite the fact that some sources claim that he had 37 siblings, he was the eighth and last child of his father's first marriage to Anna Theresia née Forster and he had eight more half siblings from his father's second marriage to Maria Anna née Placho. While still young, he probably studied with Johann Baptist Wanhal, and from 1772 he became the pupil of Joseph Haydn in Eisenstadt. As with...
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Giovanni Martinelli
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Giovanni Martinelli was an Italian operatic spinto tenor. He was associated with the Italian lyric-dramatic repertory, although he performed French operatic roles to great acclaim as well. Martinelli was one of the most famous tenors of the 20th century, enjoying a long career at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and appearing at other major international theatres.
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Jean Gabin
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Jean Gabin was a French actor and singer. Considered a key figure in French cinema, he starred in several classic films including Pépé le Moko , La grande illusion , Le Quai des brumes , La bête humaine , Le jour se lève , and Le plaisir . During his career he twice won both the Silver Bear for Best Actor from the Berlin International Film Festival and the Volpi Cup for Best Actor from the Venice Film Festival respectively. Gabin was made a member of the Légion d'honneur in recognition of the important role he played in French cinema.
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Werner Krauss
1884 - 1959 (75 years)
Werner Johannes Krauss was a German stage and film actor. Krauss dominated the German stage of the early 20th century. However, his participation in the antisemitic propaganda film Jud Süß and his collaboration with the Nazis made him a controversial figure.
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Lucjan Malinowski
1839 - 1898 (59 years)
Lucjan Feliks Malinowski was a Polish linguist, a researcher of regional dialects of Silesia, a traveller, a professor of Jagiellonian University, from the 1887 principal Seminar Slavic languages. Malinowski studied the history of the Polish language and etymology. He was the father of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski.
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Clarence Williams
1893 - 1965 (72 years)
Clarence Williams was an American jazz pianist, composer, promoter, vocalist, theatrical producer, and publisher. Biography Williams was born in Plaquemine, Louisiana, to Dennis, a bassist, and Sally Williams, and ran away from home at age 12 to join Billy Kersands' Traveling Minstrel Show, then moved to New Orleans. At first, Williams worked shining shoes and doing odd jobs, but soon became known as a singer and master of ceremonies. By the early 1910s, he was a well-regarded local entertainer also playing piano, and was composing new tunes by 1913. Williams was a good businessman and worked...
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Carl Friedrich Zelter
1758 - 1832 (74 years)
Carl Friedrich Zelter was a German composer, conductor and teacher of music. Working in his father's bricklaying business, Zelter attained mastership in that profession, and was a musical autodidact.
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Ernest Tubb
1914 - 1984 (70 years)
Ernest Dale Tubb , nicknamed the Texas Troubadour, was an American singer and songwriter and one of the pioneers of country music. His biggest career hit song, "Walking the Floor Over You" , marked the rise of the honky tonk style of music.
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Gregor Piatigorsky
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Gregor Piatigorsky was a Russian Empire-born American cellist. Biography Early life Gregor Piatigorsky was born in Ekaterinoslav into a Jewish family. As a child, he was taught violin and piano by his father. After seeing and hearing the cello, he was determined to become a cellist and was given his first cello when he was seven.
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Miles Malleson
1888 - 1969 (81 years)
William Miles Malleson was an English actor and dramatist, particularly remembered for his appearances in British comedy films of the 1930s to 1960s. Towards the end of his career he also appeared in cameo roles in several Hammer horror films, with a fairly large role in The Brides of Dracula as the hypochondriac and fee-hungry local doctor. Malleson was also a writer on many films, including some of those in which he had small parts, such as Nell Gwyn and The Thief of Bagdad . He also translated and adapted several of Molière's plays .
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Leo Robin
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Leo Robin was an American composer, lyricist and songwriter. He is probably best known for collaborating with Ralph Rainger on the 1938 Oscar-winning song "Thanks for the Memory," sung by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross in the film The Big Broadcast of 1938, and with Jule Styne on "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," a song whose witty, Cole Porter style of lyric came to be identified with its famous interpreter Marilyn Monroe.
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Ernst Buschor
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
Ernst Buschor was a German archaeologist and translator. Biography From 1905 he studied at the University of Munich as a pupil of classical archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler, earning his doctorate in 1912. After serving as a soldier in the Balkans during World War I, he became an associate professor of classical archaeology at the University of Erlangen. In 1920 he became a full professor at the University of Freiburg. From 1921 to 1929, he was director of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. From 1929 to 1959, he served as a professor of classical archaeology at Munich.
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Claude Dauphin
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Claude Dauphin was a French actor. He appeared in more than 130 films between 1930 and 1978, including Barbarella, The Quiet American, and a voice role in The Tale of the Fox, considered to be one of the earliest stop-motion animated films.
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Lauritz Melchior
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Lauritz Melchior was a Danish-American opera singer. He was the preeminent Wagnerian heldentenor of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and has come to be considered the quintessence of his voice type. Late in his career, Melchior appeared in movie musicals and on radio and television. He also made numerous recordings.
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Maurice Evans
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Maurice Herbert Evans was an English actor, noted for his interpretations of Shakespearean characters. His best-known screen roles include Dr. Zaius in the 1968 film Planet of the Apes and Samantha Stephens's father, Maurice, on Bewitched.
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Epiphanius Slavinetsky
1700 - 1675 (-25 years)
Epifany Slavinetsky was an ecclesiastical expert of the Russian Orthodox Church who helped Patriarch Nikon to revise ancient service-books. His actions precipitated the raskol, the great schism of the national church.
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Eduardo De Filippo
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Eduardo De Filippo , also known simply as Eduardo, was an Italian actor, director, screenwriter and playwright, best known for his Neapolitan works Filumena Marturano and Napoli Milionaria. Considered one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century, De Filippo was the author of many theatrical dramas staged and directed by himself first and later awarded and played outside Italy. For his artistic merits and contributions to Italian culture, he was named senatore a vita by the President of the Italian Republic Sandro Pertini.
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Eugénie Henderson
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Eugénie Jane Andrina Henderson was a British linguist and academic, specialising in phonetics. From 1964 to 1982, she was Professor of Phonetics at the University of London. She served as Chair of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain from 1977 to 1980, and President of the Philological Society from 1984 to 1988.
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Harry B. Smith
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Harry Bache Smith was a writer, lyricist and composer. The most prolific of all American stage writers, he is said to have written over 300 librettos and more than 6000 lyrics. Some of his best-known works were librettos for the composers Victor Herbert and Reginald De Koven. He also wrote the book or lyrics for several versions of the Ziegfeld Follies.
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Claude Thornhill
1909 - 1965 (56 years)
Claude Thornhill was an American pianist, arranger, composer, and bandleader. He composed the jazz and pop standards "Snowfall" and "I Wish I Had You". Early years Thornhill was the son of J. Chester Thornhill and his wife, Maude. When he was 11 years old, he played piano professionally. While still a youth, he played with two local combos. As a student at Garfield High School in Terre Haute, he played with several theater bands. Thornhill studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
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Arthur John Butler
1844 - 1910 (66 years)
Arthur John Butler , was an English scholar, editor, and mountaineer, professor of Italian language and literature at University College London. Apart from his work on Dante and other Italian poets, Butler translated books from German and French, including the memoirs of Bismarck, Thiébault, and Marbot, and work by Sainte-Beuve. He also contributed to the Cambridge Modern History and the Dictionary of National Biography and in the 1890s was editor of the Alpine Journal.
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Charles Julius Hempel
1811 - 1879 (68 years)
Charles Julius Hempel was a German-born translator and homeopathic physician who worked in the United States. Biography After completing his collegiate course at Solingen, he attended lectures at the Université de France and Collège de France, in Paris, and financed his schooling by translating. At the Université de France, he assisted Jules Michelet, who succeeded François Guizot as professor of history, in the publication of his Histoire de la France .
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Art Tatum
1909 - 1956 (47 years)
Arthur Tatum Jr. was an American jazz pianist who is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever. From early in his career, fellow musicians acclaimed Tatum's technical ability as extraordinary. Tatum also extended jazz piano's vocabulary and boundaries far beyond his initial stride influences, and established new ground through innovative use of reharmonization, voicing, and bitonality.
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Gian Francesco Malipiero
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Gian Francesco Malipiero was an Italian composer, musicologist, music teacher and editor. Life Early years Born in Venice into an aristocratic family, the grandson of the opera composer Francesco Malipiero, Gian Francesco Malipiero was prevented by family troubles from pursuing his musical education in a consistent manner. His father separated from his mother in 1893 and took Gian Francesco to Trieste, Berlin and eventually to Vienna. The young Malipiero and his father broke up their relationship bitterly, and in 1899 Malipiero returned to his mother's home in Venice, where he entered the Ve...
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George Schick
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
George Schick was a Czechoslovakian conductor, vocal coach, accompanist, and music educator. He served as accompanist for Richard Tauber on his 1946/7 tour of North, Central and South America, also for Elizabeth Schumann, including what proved to be some of her last recordings in New York in 1950. He is particularly remembered for his work as an opera conductor, notably serving on the conducting staffs of the Metropolitan Opera and the Prague State Opera. He spent the latter years of his career serving as the President of the Manhattan School of Music from 1969-1976.
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Jan Peerce
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Jan Peerce was an American operatic tenor. Peerce was an accomplished performer on the operatic and Broadway concert stages, in solo recitals, and as a recording artist. He is the father of film director Larry Peerce.
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Deems Taylor
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Joseph Deems Taylor was an American music critic, composer, and promoter of classical music. Nat Benchley, co-editor of The Lost Algonquin Roundtable, referred to him as "the dean of American music." He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1934.
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