Poulenc wanted to study music at the Paris Conservatoire after his school years, but the death of both his parents changed his plans. He had lessons from Ricardo Viñes who was a great teacher for him and helped him develop as a person. Poulenc wrote his first compositions for his teacher. He met many famous people including the composers Satie, Auric and Falla and writers such as Apollinaire. He started to get his works performed, and Stravinsky helped him to get them published in London. He continued to compose while he was doing his military service, and became a member of Les Six. These six composers did not all compose in the same way, but they were good friends.
Poulenc felt that he needed more lessons and he studied with Charles Koechlin. He was asked by Diaghilev to write ballet music for "Les Biches". He composed his "Concerto for Two Pianos" and the "Organ Concerto". He was very upset by the death of Raymonde Linossier who was the only woman he ever wanted to marry. Poulenc was becoming aware that he was gay. He had a lot of emotional problems with big changes of mood.
His friendship with the singer Pierre Barnac was a great help to him professionally. Barnac was a baritone. Poulenc composed about 90 songs for him. They gave many concerts together.
Poulenc spent some periods of his life composing and other periods performing. He made a series of broadcasts on French radio. He composed a great deal of music during the 1950s. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1963.
Poulenc was an excellent pianist and he wrote a lot of music for the piano, especially during the 1930s. He liked to create blurred effects by using the sustaining pedal a lot. Some of his best piano writing is in the accompaniment to his songs.
Poulenc’s early chamber music often uses jazz ideas. He wrote several sonatas for various instruments. He liked writing for wind instruments. His "Piano Sextet" is for piano and five wind instruments.
He wrote several works for orchestra as well as music for the stage and choral music. His "Gloria" is often performed by choirs. Children like his "Story of Babar the Elephant". It is for a storyteller and piano. Jean Françaix made an arrangement for an orchestra.
Germaine Tailleferre
Germaine Tailleferre (born Saint Maur Des Fossés, France, 19 April 1892; died Paris, 7 November 1983) was a French composer. She was one of the members of the famous group Les Six.
She was called Marcelle Taillefesse when she was born. When she was grown up she changed her last name to "Tailleferre" just to annoy her father because he had refused to let her study music. She studied piano with her mother at home, composing short works of her own and then began studying at the Paris Conservatoire. There she met Louis Durey, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger. She won several prizes at the Conservatoire. She often met with her friends who became known as Les Six.
In 1923 Tailleferre began to spend a great deal of time with Maurice Ravel at his home in Monfort-L'Amaury. Ravel encouraged her to enter the "Prix de Rome" Competition. In 1925, she married Ralph Barton, an American caricaturist, and moved to Manhattan, New York. She stayed in the United States until 1927 when she and her husband returned to France. They divorced shortly afterwards.
Tailleferre wrote many of her most important works during the 1920s, including her 1st Piano Concerto, The Harp Concertino, the Ballets "Le Marchand d'Oiseaux" (the most often performed ballet in the repertoire of the Ballets Suédoises during the 1920s) and "La Nouvelle Cythère" which Diaghilev had asked her to write for his ballet company.
In the 1930s she composed the Concerto for Two Pianos, Choeurs, Saxophones and Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the Operas "Zoulaïna" and "Le Marin de Bolivar", and her masterwork, "La Cantate de Narcisse", which she wrote with Paul Valéry. Her work in film music included "Le Petit Chose".
When World War II started she had to escape across Spain to Portugal and from there to America.
After the war, in 1946, she returned to her home in France where she composed a lot more music, much of which was not published until after her death. She was accompanist at a children's music and movement class. She wrote shorter pieces towards the end of her life because her arthritis made writing difficult.
Tailleferre carried on composing until a few weeks before her death in November 1983.
Cladistics
Cladistics is the method of classifying organisms into groups called clades.
A clade (Greek = branch) is a group of organisms with a common ancestor and all its descendants (and nothing else). Such a clade is monophyletic. The term 'clade' was coined by English biologist Julian Huxley.
Birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and all other descendants (living or extinct) of their most recent common ancestor form a clade. In the terms of biological systematics, a clade is a single branch on the tree of life, a monophyletic group. Biological classification needs such a natural group of organisms to be put together and given a taxonomic name.
This brings classification in line with phylogeny (how living things evolved). In cladistics, clades are the only acceptable units.
Some versions of cladistics have been the subject of controversy.
The term "clade" was introduced in 1958 by Julian Huxley, "cladistic" by Cain and Harrison in 1960, and "cladist" (for an adherent of Hennig's school) by Mayr in 1965. Hennig referred to his own approach as "phylogenetic systematics". From the time of his original formulation until the end of the 1980s cladistics remained a minority approach to classification.
In the 1990s it rapidly became the dominant method of classification in evolutionary biology. Computers made it possible to process large quantities of data about organisms and their characteristics (traits). At about the same time the development of effective sequence analysis techniques made it possible to apply cladistic methods of analysis to biochemical and molecular features of organisms as well as to anatomical ones.
For some decades in the mid to late twentieth century, a commonly used methodology was numerical taxonomy. This made no attempt to resolve phylogeny, only similarities. The weakness of this approach was that it left out the connection between classification and evolution.
Phylogenetic nomenclature is a way of giving names to the groups (clades) that have been decided on by cladistic methods. It differs in many ways from Linnaean nomenclature. Critics of phylogenetic nomenclature include Ashlock, Mayr, and Williams.
Monophyly is defined differently in evolutionary biology and cladistics. In evolutionary biology, the term monophyletic refers to a group of organisms descended from its most recent common ancestor. A monophyletic group may include all or only a part of the descendants of the common ancestor. The ancestor may be a taxon of various ranks.
In cladistics, by contrast, a monophyletic group is a group consisting of all the inferred descendants of an ancestral species.
In cladistics, a group that includes only some of the descendants of the ancestral species is not monophyletic but paraphyletic. The objective of cladistics is to block out monophyletic clades. Therefore, the elements of a paraphyletic group must be rearranged so that they do form one or several clades. Degree of similarity is not a criterion in grouping organisms into clades.
Kimbo Slice
Kevin Ferguson also known as Kimbo Slice (February 8, 1974 – June 6, 2016) was a Bahamian-born American mixed martial arts fighter. He began fighting in a series of web videos. He fights in backyards, airplane hangars, and nuclear power plants. He was trained by Bas Rutten. He was born in Nassau, Bahamas.
Slice had six children. He used to work as a bodyguard.
Slice died of heart failure at a hospital in Margate, Florida on June 6, 2016, aged 42.
Pangaea