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Mozart spent the rest of his life in Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburg Empire, home of the Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Joseph II, and one of Europe’s major cultural centers. Although he held some minor court appointments, he was one of the first composers to seek a career as a free agent rather than in the employ of the church or aristocracy. For a few years he presented a series of very popular and lucrative concerts of his own works, among them 12 spectacular piano concertos in which he was featured as the soloist. He also received several commissions to compose operas, among them Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, which premiered in Prague in 1786 and 1787, respectively. But Mozart’s success was sporadic and short-lived. He died at age 35 and was buried in a common grave, his impoverished circumstances due in part to his extravagant tastes and inability to manage his finances. In retrospect he also emerges as a tragic casualty of a society in transition, a man too proud and conscious of his own genius to abase himself in the service of the ruling class, yet too profound a musical thinker to be appreciated by the new bourgeois audience.

Mozart was an extraordinarily prolific composer, creating enduring works in virtually every genre of his day—operas, symphonies, piano sonatas, chamber music, works for the Roman Catholic Church. As a composer of the classical period, the ideals of clarity and balance inform Mozart’s music, from his early piano pieces written at age six and seven through his great opera The Magic Flute and the unfinished Requiem Mass from the last year of his life. What sets him apart from his contemporaries is the mastery of counterpoint, intensity of developmental processes, expressive power, and sophisticated orchestration that characterize works written during Mozart’s decade in Vienna. This maturing and deepening of his compositional craft, while also creating works that would be accessible, seems to have been a conscious pursuit. As he wrote to his father in 1782:

These concertos are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult. They are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.

Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Mozart’s works remain staples of the concert repertory of artists and ensembles all over the world.

Parker, charlie “yardbird” or “bird” (1920–1955)

Though his life was brief and often tragic (he died at the same age as Mozart), Parker made a profound impact on jazz that is still felt today. In fact, Parker and Louis Armstrong are probably the most significant and influential figures in all of jazz history. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he started playing alto saxophone at age 13, and played around his hometown for several years until taking a brief trip to New York in 1939. From 1940 to 1942, he toured with Jay McShann’s band and made several recordings. He also participated in informal jam sessions at Minton’s in Harlem and other New York jazz clubs, helping to create the music that would become known as “bebop.” In 1945 he participated in some important recording sessions with fellow bebop musician trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. His most influential and productive years were from 1947 to 1951, when he performed extensively and made dozens of recordings that have become indispensable jazz classics. Plagued by years of drug and alcohol abuse, Parker died just a week after his final performance at Birdland, a club named in his honor. As a composer of many tunes that have become jazz standards, Parker’s harmonic inventiveness and rhythmic sophistication have influenced legions of jazz musicians. His nickname, according to McShann, came from an incident while on tour, when the band’s bus hit a chicken (or “yardbird”) that Parker insisted on having cooked up by their host. But the moniker, especially in its shorter form “Bird,” seemed to fit Parker and his flights of musical brilliance perfectly.

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Source:  OpenStax, Music appreciation: its language, history and culture. OpenStax CNX. Jun 03, 2015 Download for free at https://legacy.cnx.org/content/col11803/1.1
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