Category: people

“Henry, a trained composer who studied with … Olivier Messiaen, is known for establishing the GRMC (Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète) … along with his early colleague and radio professional Pierre Schaeffe. … Henry composed the first work of musique concrète to be used in a commercial film, his 1952 work Astrologie ou le miroir de la vie. Later, Henry would establish the first private electronic music studio in France, the Apsone-Cabasse Studio.”

“In 1967, the term ‘Arabic literature,’ for most Western readers, meant two books, the Quran and The Arabian Nights. But that year, readers were handed a full menu of contemporary fiction in Arabic with the publication of Modern Arabic Short Stories, an anthology that showcased the work of 20 writers, including Yusuf Idris, Tayeb Salih, Zakaria Tamer and Naguib Mahfouz, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.”

“Chaka Khan and Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White studied with him. The globally influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) was co-founded by him. And generations of musicians drew inspiration from the pioneering work of Chicago composer and multi-instrumentalist Kelan Phil Cohran.”

You won’t find any novelists, playwrights, painters, or classical musicians on this unconventional and diverse list: there are two videographers, two chefs, three models (each of whom has at least one other discipline), a photographer, and the founder of a museum.

“[He] was part of a circle of mid-century geometric abstractionists active in Ohio that included Julian Stanczak … Like Stanczak, Mieczkowski participated in the pivotal 1965 exhibition ‘The Responsive Eye’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which launched Op Art. Mieczkowski co-founded the Anonima group in 1960 in Cleveland with painters Ernst Benkert and Francis Hewitt.”

“Dr. Fontein, a renowned Asian art curator and historian who restored the MFA to solid financial footing when he took over after a period of internal strife at the museum, … ushered the institution into the modern era of museums as cultural marketplaces, overseeing the fund-raising and creation of the I.M. Pei-designed west wing that included expansive shops, restaurants, auditoriums, and galleries.”

Emma Allen’s “ability to find new voices for Daily Shouts is what first drew the attention of The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick. ‘She was bringing in people and things that I hadn’t heard before, and sometimes you need to reinvigorate parts of the magazine,’ he said by phone, adding, ‘We need to have a deeper exploration of the web, as far as cartooning.'”

“It was at the BBC where he became a household name, presenting from a comfortable armchair and often dressed in a familiar jumper. A catchphrase, ‘And why not?,’ was used on occasion by Norman and became the title of his autobiography, but took on a life of its own in the mouth of the puppet version of him in the satirical show Spitting Image on ITV.” Then there was the time Robert DeNiro almost hit him.

Williams was also a painter and generally a polymath, and always committed to being a revolutionary. He “was the author of many polemical poems, written over four decades in a unique documentary style. They included works about the devastation being wrought on the natural environment – Sacred Elephant, Whale Nation and Falling For a Dolphin – and Autogeddon, a grim and majestic attack on the car.”

“He stopped, startled by the perfect harmonisation and then by the realisation that the singers, when they came into view, were working men, carrying protest banners as they sang. By accident, he’d encountered a party of Welsh miners from the Rhondda valley. They were stragglers from the great working-class army routed during what the poet Idris Davies called the ‘summer of soups and speeches’ – the general strike of 1926.”