Beethoven is one of the most famous composers in the history of the world.
Born in Bonn in 1770, he came from a family of musicians who inspired him to compose at an early age.
He later moved to Vienna, where he created his greatest works.

His music is characterised by seriousness, drama and unpredictability.
Unpredictability. Although he left behind only 340 works, because he revised each piece carefully and self-critically, he has had a lasting influence on the history of music.
His difficult / moody character was often associated with his progressive deafness. Despite this handicap, he continued to compose, including the ‘Ode to Joy’, now used as the European anthem and recognised by UNESCO as a universal symbol of peace.
Beethoven died in March 1827. There was no school for his funeral and the military coordinated the 20,000 mourners (about 50% of Vienna’s city centre).

Did you know that his piece “For Elise” was not published until 40 years after his death and may not have been written for an “Elise” at all?

DJs play music stored on different media in front of an audience according to their own tastes.
This process is called “DJing”, which refers to the playing of records. Originally, in 1935, “DJ” referred to a radio announcer. Today, DJs are independent producers in the genres of rap, hip-hop and techno.
Since 1985, there have even been annual competitions around the world, such as the DMC World DJ Championships, considered the Olympic Games of DJing. DJs use different techniques:
Backspinning is the act of rapidly spinning a record to repeat a particular section. Beat juggling is the creative use of records to create new rhythmic patterns.
Beatmatching is the process of synchronising the tempo of two tracks,
tracks to create a seamless transition.
Scratching is the process of moving a record back and forth.
record back and forth to use it as an instrument for solo interludes.

DJs such as David Guetta and Calvin Harris are worth an estimated $200 million.
Dutch DJ Tiesto earns $250,000 per performance.

Emil Berliner invented the device in 1887 to record and play back music and sounds.
There had been phonographs before, but they used rollers instead of discs.

The gramophone has a needle that reads the grooves on the discs and a large funnel that acts as a loudspeaker.

It revolutionised the way music was consumed.
Now you could play any song as long as you wanted, as often as you wanted, whenever you wanted, bringing recorded music into the home.

What were once luxury items are now coveted collector’s items that keep the history of early music alive:
Records are once again more popular than CDs: $1.4 billion worth of records were sold in 2023, up 10% from 2022.

The most expensive record is ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’ by the Wu-Tang Clan, which is a one-off.
It was sold for $2 million with the agreement that it cannot be resold for 100 years.
not be resold (only given away) for 100 years.

A music box is a mechanical musical instrument that plays a melody automatically, either through rollers or discs. The first music box was created in 1796 by the Geneva watchmaker Antoine Favre-Salomon and marked the beginning of a new era of mechanical music. A common design for music boxes features a dancing ballerina on the top.
They range in size from small children’s models to the life-size examples found at Christmas markets.
The music box embodies a connection to another, unattainable world, such as the desire for magic, immortality or the afterlife. Ballet was originally an Italian men’s sport. King Louis XIV loved ballet so much that he spread it to France and founded the first ballet school, where women were allowed to dance ballet for the first time 300 years ago. A Swiss box was made for a Persian prince and sold at Sotheby’s London in 1901 for $23,400.
Some period music boxes can play multiple tunes and even move lights or figures using a sophisticated mechanism.

One of the most influential rock bands in music history was formed in 1962.
The original members were Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman.
Ron Wood joined later, Charlie Watts died in 2018. Their hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was recorded at night: Keith Richards had woken up at night and used a tape recorder to record the track, the guitar riff and 45 minutes of his snoring. Richards is said to have been awake for 9 days straight while working on other songs in the studio.
The iconic “Rolling Stones” logo, the distinctive tongue, became famous and the band was
number 4 on the list of the “100 greatest musicians of all time”.
The idea for the logo came from Marshall Chess, the president of Rolling Stones Records. Designer John Pasche, who was studying art at the time, was paid £50 for the tongue logo.
In 1966, the band’s requests were turned down by 14 hotels in New York because the fans outside the hotel were exceptionally difficult to deal with.
1.5 million fans saw the concert on Copacabana beach in 2006, making it the
largest rock concert in the world.

Notes are symbols used to record sounds in writing. Various forms of musical notation were developed in ancient Egypt to record music.

Music notation made it possible to record pieces of music on paper and replaced oral performance or singing. These notes provide information about the tempo, time signature, dynamics and instrumentation of the music being played.

Musical notation was developed by the music theorist and composer Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th century for her complex liturgical compositions. In addition, modern musical notation is directly influenced by the ancient Greek and Roman notation used to record music in ancient Greece.
Music can influence a lot:
Termites eat wood twice as fast when they listen to heavy metal. But mosquitoes are repelled by heavy metal, so rock’n’roll in the garden!
Incidentally, the legend that Mozart’s music makes people more intelligent was disproved in 2010 by 3000 test subjects.
Drinking behaviour with loud music: with loud music, a man drinks a beer in 12 minutes instead of 15.

The violin originated in Italy in the early 16th century.
The oldest surviving violin in the world was made by Stradivari in 1666. It is a great honour to play a Stradivarius. David Garrett, for example, plays a 1716 Stradivarius.

As a four-string instrument (g, d1, a1, e2), the violin belongs to the family of box-necked lutes. The strings can be played with a bow (coll’arco), lightly struck with a bow (col legno) or plucked with the fingers (pizzicato). The bow is made of 150 horsehair, preferably from the tails of stallions.

The violin has always played a central role in European classical music. Interestingly, the German word “Geige” originally came from a joke and referred to the fiddle before being extended to include string instruments such as the viola, cello and viola da gamba in general.

Why is the violin so difficult to play?
The fingerboard has no frets, so you have to press down on the strings in exactly the right place to produce the exact notes,
to produce the exact notes.

By the way, the most expensive violin in the world was made in 1741 and sold at auction in 2022 for $18 million.

The ghettoblaster, also known as a radio case, is a portable music system that has quickly become popular in socially disadvantaged areas of large American cities.
The name is a combination of “ghetto” and “to blast”, which roughly translates as “to make noise”.

Ghetto blaster sales peaked in the USA in 1986, with 20 million units sold.
The bigger and louder the box, the more its owner could brag about it.
The blaster became a symbol of resistance, of expression, of street culture.
and the street culture and hip-hop culture associated with it.

From the 1990s onwards, the popularity of large radio recorders declined, as smaller, less powerful devices were able to compete on portability. However, they could not compete with the sound quality of classic boomboxes. By 2003, only 330,000 boomboxes had been sold.