Giuseppe Tartini was born in Pirano, Italy and lived from 1692 until 1770. He was a violinist and composer, who also had studied law and divinity at Padua, and was an accomplished fencer. He secretly married a proteg?e of the Archbishop of Padua, for which he was arrested. He fled to Assisi but, after attracting the archbishop's attention by his violin playing, he was invited back to his wife. Perhaps one of the greatest violinists of all time, he was also an eminent composer. His best-known work is the Trillo del Diavolo (c.1735, Devil's Trill). .

John Kenneth Tavener, born in 1944 in London, England is a composer. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music, London and has been professor of music at Trinity College of Music since 1969. He was still at college when he won the prestigious Prince Rainier of Monaco Prize in 1965 with his cantata, Cain and Abel. His music is predominantly religious, and includes the cantata The Whale (1966), Ultimos ritos (1972, Last Rites) for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, and a sacred opera Therese (1979). He was converted to the Russian Orthodox faith in 1976.

His work, Eternity's Sunrise, won a Grammy Award. His sacred work, Song for Athene, was sung at the funeral ceremony of Princes Diana.

John Taverner lived from about 1490 until 1545. He was employed as master of the choristers at Cardinal College (Christ Church), Oxford, in its early heyday, retiring, on Cardinal Wolsey's fall from power, to Boston, where he was held in considerable regard until his death in 1545. The popular, if mistaken, account of his life is the subject of the opera by Peter Maxwell Davies, Taverner.

Taverner wrote Latin Mass settings, Magnificat settings and motets. Of the first of these the Western Wynde Mass, using the melody of a popular song of that name, is among the better known. From his Mass Gloria tibi Trinitas came the fragment of a theme that served later generations as the basis of an English genre of consort music, the In nomine.

Taverner himself began the tradition of the In nomine, an instrumental arrangement of part of the Benedictus of his Mass Gloria tibi Trinitas.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky lived between 1840 and 1893. He is considered to be a romantic composer. He was a Russian composer who was a master of melancholy moods, emotional outbursts and dramatic climaxes in his music.

"Worthless, vulgar, derivative, unplayable" were a few of the adjectives that pianist and conductor Nicholas Rubinstein used to describe Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto in b-flat minor, when he first heard it on Christmas Eve, 1874. Ironically, Tchaikovsky had arranged the piece as a gift for Rubinstein, to whom he intended to dedicate it. Furious, Tchaikovsky re-dedicated the piece to pianist Hans von Bülow, who was the first to perform it.

Within a few yers, Rubinstein's distaste for the concerto mellowed and he became one of its principal intrepreters.

Tchaikovsky read Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in the 1860's and set its melancholy poem "None but the Lonely Heart" to music.

Tchaikovsky found one of his greatest successes with his lovely waltz from the "Serenade for Strings" which he composed in 1880. He was also composing the 1812 Overture at the same time. He conducted several early performances of the Serenade himself, but he had no formal conducting training and became so nervous that he sometimes lost the place in his own music.

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet inspired the melancholy Tchaikovsky to write his own version, using musical themes to suggest various themes from the play.

On his way to New York in 1891 to participate in the opening of Carnegie Hall, Tchaikovsky stopped in Paris and discovered the celesta, The celesta is a small keyboard with tiny silver bars which sound like bells when struck. He ordered one to be sent to Moscow in strict secrecy so that he could be the first to use it. His ballet The Nutcracker included the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" which has several wonderfully shimmering phrases for the celesta.

Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker was featured in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia.

The first performance of the Sixth Symphony was only a mild success. By the time of the next performance a few weeks later - which was a tremendous success - Tchaikovsky was dead of cholera. It's title Pathétique - is characteristic of the composer, who always was afraid that his creativity would suddenly stop.

Kremlin's Early Christmas Gift: Nutcracker on Net

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin offered an early Christmas present Wednesday, saying it would broadcast Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet live on the Internet this month.

The Kremlin is an ancient fortress that contains many buildings including churches, President Boris Yeltsin's offices and a vast Soviet-era concert hall once used for Communist Party gatherings and now known as the State Kremlin Palace.

"It is a Christmas gift to the entire world," the State Kremlin Palace said in its announcement. "The best New Year extravaganza of the 20th century!"

The live performance of the traditional ballet about a magical guest at a Christmas gathering will be broadcast on the Internet at www.kremlin-gkd.ru on Dec. 13 at 11 a.m. EST.

The Kremlin said it would be the first live ballet broadcast from Russia on the Internet. But many Russians who have Internet access may find it difficult to view the show because of poor-quality telephone lines.

Highlights will be available free for a month, covering Western and Orthodox Christmas -- Dec. 25 and Jan. 7 -- and New Year's, a particularly important holiday for Russians.

The State Kremlin Palace is owned by the presidential administration and has its own established ballet company.

Weldon Leo 'Jack' Teagarden was a Jazz musician, born in Vernon, Texas and he lived from 1905 until 1964. He came from a musical family with his mother, Helen, playing piano and his father,Charles, trumpet. His two brothers, Charlie (trumpet) and Clois (drums) were also talented musicians as was his sister Norma (piano). Jack started on piano at the age of five and two years later learned to play the baritone horn, bought for him by his father. By the age of ten Jack was playing trombone.

The family moved from Vernon to Chappell, Nebraska in 1918 and Jack was soon playing in local theatres accompanied by his mother on piano. From here his travels become a little blurred but we know that he lived for a while in 1919 in Oklahoma City then with his uncle in San Angelo and started playing with local bands. He then played with a quartet at the Horn Palace Inn, San Antonio led by drummer Cotton Bailey,from late 1920 until September 1921 except for a summer season in Shreveport.

It was from Cotton Bailey that the young Weldon received his nickname, "Jack". From then until the spring of 1923 he played with the legendary Peck Kelly's Bad Boys. Dropped out of music in Wichita Falls in the summer of '23 then joined Marin's Southern Serenaders before rejoining Peck Kelly.

His recording debut came with Johnny Johnson and his Statler Pennsylvanians in early December 1927 when they cut two sides for Victor, "Thou Swell"/"My One and Only". Jack was twenty-two years old. Two months with the Tommy Gott Orchestra then a major move to Ben Pollack where he remained from June 1928 until May 1933. This period with Pollack was extremely productive in recording terms as he led his own recording groups as well as playing as a sideman with Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Red Nichols, Eddie Condon, and many other famous musicians of the day.

He took part in the first 'mixed' recording session with Louis which produced the majestic blues "Knockin' a Jug". In October 1928 Jack cut "Makin' Friends" with Eddie Condon and made history by using a water glass as a substitute for a mute, removing the bell of the trombone and holding the glass over the open end of the tubing producing a unique sound.

In December 1933 he made his big move to join Paul Whiteman. He stayed with Whiteman's star-studded aggregation until December 1938. His stay with Whiteman brought him financial security but we will never know if this residency was a good move or a bad one. Opinions differ strongly. It has been surmised that Benny Goodman would have offered Jack the trombone chair in his new orchestra as featured soloist.

After leaving Whiteman, Jack started up his own big band which he led until from February 1939 until November 1946. Musically the band was a success but financially a disaster. When the band was finally broken up, Jack gigged around, recorded as a freelance and played at the 'Esquire' jazz concert in January 1944 at the Metropolitan Opera House with Armstrong, Eldridge, Tatum, Hawkins. He led his own sextet until joining Louis Armstrong's All Stars where he stayed from July 1947 until August 1951.

When he left Louis he formed his own All Stars and toured with them until he disbanded in 1956 when he played with Ben Pollack for a few months. He co-led another all-star group with Earl Hines which visited Britain and Europe in the fall of 1957 which was raptuorously received. Jack led another group on a State Department sponsored tour of Asia from September 1958 until January 1959.

Jack was a mainstay of late 1920s New York Jazz scene, a trombonist and singer whose relaxed, melodic instrumental style was highly influential. He was also one of the best White Jazz singers, particularly when he sang the Blues on songs like Makin' Friends.

He continued playing and leading a group until his death on January 15, 1964. He played his last engagement at The Dream Room in New Orleans while suffering from bronchial pneumonia, returned to the Prince Conti Motor Hotel, just three blocks from Basin Street, after the gig and was found by the room-maid the next afternoon, dead on the floor clad in his dress shirt and shorts. He was 58 years old. The New Orleans "Times-Picayune" published his obituary on January 16, 1964. Jack was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Los Angeles, Plot # 7281. The headstone reads "Where there is Hatred, Let Me Sow Love"

Renata Tebaldi is an Operatic soprano, born in Pesaro, Italy in 1922. She studied at Parma Conservatory, made her debut at Rovigo in 1944, and was invited by Toscanini to appear at the re~opening of La Scala, Milan, in 1946, where she sang until 1954. She then sang in many opera houses, including several seasons at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, and made many recordings.

Tebaldi had one of the most beautiful Italian voices of the century. Although her rivalry with Maria Callas attracted much attention, it was her singing that captivated her fans.

Her breakthrough came in 1946 when she auditioned in Milan for the great conductor Toscanini and from then until the late 1970s she performed across Europe and the United States.

When she made her debut at the city's La Scala opera house in late 1946, the maestro dubbed her "The Voice of an Angel."

Singing the soprano part in Giuseppe Verdi?s "Te Deum," the concert marked the reopening of the theater after the end of World War II. It also branded Tebaldi in Italian minds as part of the country's post-war renaissance.

She went on to perform at London's Covent Garden, the San Francisco Opera and appeared regularly at the Metropolitan Opera (news - web sites) in New York taking the lead roles in "La Boheme," "Madam Butterfly," "Tosca" and "La Traviata."

"I started my career at 22 and finished it at 54. 32 years of success, satisfaction and sacrifices. Singing was my life's scope to the point that I could never have a family," she wrote in a preface to her official Web site.

Tebaldi was born in the Italian seaside town of Pesaro on Feb. 1, 1922. Stricken with polio at the age of 3, she was unable to partake in strenuous activities and instead became interested in music.

In her early teens, she began studying music at the Conservatory of Parma.

"I started singing when I was a young girl but my family wanted me to study piano but my overwhelming need to express myself with my voice made me choose the art of singing," she once told her fans.

Tebaldi has left a huge legacy of complete operas on disc with other famous singers including Mario del Monaco, Giulietta Simionato, and Carlo Bergonzi.

Her recordings include Verdi's "Otello" and "Aida" and Puccini's "La Boheme" and "Madama Butterfly."

She last performed on the opera stage in 1973, and her last concert took place in 1976.

Tebaldi was a Knight Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and had received a Commander, Order of Arts and Letters from France.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, born in 1944 in Gisborne, New Zealandin, is an Operatic soprano. After winning many awards in New Zealand and Australia she came to London, where she made her debut with the Royal Opera Company in 1970. She has since taken a wide range of leading roles, and in 1981 sang at the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales. She was made a dame in 1982 and has produced many non-classical recordings. In 1989 she published Land of the Long White Cloud: Maori Myths and Legends.

Georg Philipp Telemann, born in 1681 in Magdeburg, Germany, was a very prolific late Baroque era composer, composing 600 overtures in the Italian style, 44 Passions, 40 operas, innumerable trio sonatas, suites and flute quartets. He was a self-taught composer and organist. When he died in 1767, his organist post in Leipzig went to Johann Sebastian Bach.

Michael Tilson Thomas is the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, the Founder and Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, and the Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. He is currently Artistic Director of the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, which he and Leonard Bernstein inaugurated in 1990. Born in Los Angeles, he is the third generation of his family to follow an artistic career. At age nineteen he was named Music Director of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra where he worked with Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen and Copland on premieres of their compositions. He was also Assistant Conductor at the Bayreuth Festival. Noted for his commitment to music education, Michael Tilson Thomas founded the New World Symphony in 1988, to be a national orchestra for the most gifted graduates of America's music conservatories. In addition to their regular season in Miami, they have toured France, Great Britain, South America, Japan, Israel and the United States, and in 1998 celebrated their 10th anniversary with concerts in New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam and Vienna.

Tilson Thomas has recently completed a very successful tour of Europe with the San Francisco Symphony and back at home in June 1999, they present a festival of Stravinsky's music, some of which they have recently recorded together.

With the London Symphony Orchestra, Tilson Thomas has toured in Israel, Japan, the USA, as well as in Europe including an appearance at the Salzburg Festival. In London, he and the orchestra have mounted major festivals focusing on the music of Brahms, Mahler, Rimsky-Korsakov, Gershwin, Reich and Takemitsu.

Tilson Thomas' recordings have received many awards and cover a wide range of repertoire including Bach, Beethoven, Mahler and Prokofiev as well as his pioneering work with the music of Ives, Ruggles, Reich, Cage and Gershwin. In 1994 Michael Tilson Thomas received the Ditson Award for contributions to American Music, was named Musical America's Conductor of the Year and received five Grammy nominations and two Gramophone awards for his recordings. He has been an exclusive BMG Classics/RCA Victor Red Seal recording artist since 1995 and his most recent releases include the disc "New World Jazz" with the New World Symphony Orchestra.

Tilson Thomas has also worked extensively for television including educational broadcasts with the New York Philharmonic, a BBC series with the London Symphony Orchestra including programmes on Strauss, Sibelius and Beethoven, and other television productions celebrating works by Gershwin and Bernstein.

Albert Von Tilzer (Albert Gumm) (1878 - 1956) was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on Mar. 29, 1878. He was the younger brother of Harry Von Tilzer. He was a vaudeville performer and composer and wrote many hit tunes. Some of them were: Carrie (Carrie Marry Harry), Give Me the Moonlight, Give Me the Girl, I'll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time, Put Your Arms Around Me Honey and Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Overview Composer Albert Von Tilzer was an important songwriter most active from the early 1900's into the 1920's. He was the younger brother of composer Harry Von Tilzer.

Albert went to work in his father's Indianapolis shoe store after graduating from high school. He learned to play the piano by ear and did have some lessons in harmony before he joined a vaudeville troupe.

In 1899, he went to Chicago, and worked briefly for his older brother's music publishing firm, Shapiro, Bernstein and Von Tilzer. Albert then traveled to New York City, and found work as a shoe salesman in a large Department store.

In 1900, he published his first song "The Absent Minded Beggar Waltz", a piano instrumental. In 1903 he wrote "That's What the Daisy Said", with his own lyric. This was published by his brother's firm.

In 1903, he formed York Music Company, his own publishing house, which would thereafter publish all of his own music.

All the while Albert was composing and publishing, he was also working as a vaudeville performer. He was a headliner on the Orpheum circuit. In 1930, he settled in Hollywood and worked in a few motion pictures. He was elected to the Songwriter's Hall of Fame. Albert Von Tilzer died in L.A., in 1956, at age 78.

Harry Von Tilzer (Harry Gummbinsky -the family later shortened the name to "Gumm".) lived from 1872 until 1946. He was born in Detroit, Michigan and was the older brother of Albert Von Tilzer. He was an entertainer and common laborer who turned to music composition and formed the Harry Von Tilzer Music Company in 1902. He wrote many hit tunes. Some of them are: (She was only a) Bird in a Gilded Cage; I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad); I'd Leave My Happy Home for You; Take Me Back to New York Town; Wait 'Til the Sun Shines Nellie; When My Baby Smiles at Me and Why Do They Always Pick on Me?

Harry, one of six children, was to find a career in music as did his younger brother Albert. (Apparently, two of the children, a boy and an girl, perished in childhood.) When Harry was still a child, his family moved to Indianapolis, IN, where he father acquired a shoe store. A theatrical company gave performances in the loft above the store, and that's where Harry learned to love show business.

His career really started in 1886 when, at age 14, he ran away from home and joined the Cole Brothers Circus. By 1887, he was playing piano, composing songs, and acting in a traveling repertory company. He changed his name at that time. His mother's maiden name was Tilzer, and he 'gussied' it up by adding the 'Von'. Thereafter he would be called Harry Von Tilzer, and later his younger brother would adopt the name also, Albert Von Tilzer.

Harry met Lottie Gilson when the burlesque troupe with which he was working reached Chicago. The popular vaudevillian took an interest, and induced him to go to New York. In 1892, Harry, working as a groom on a trainload of horses, arrived in New York, with just $1.65 in his pocket. He rented a room near the Brooklyn Bridge and became a $15.00 per week saloon pianist. He left New York briefly to work in a traveling medicine show, but returned to again work in saloons and later as a vaudevillian in a 'Dutch' act with George Sidney.

At this time, Harry was writing songs, literally hundreds of songs that were never published. He would sell them outright to other entertainers for $2.00 each. Even Tony Pastor sang a few of his songs in his theater. But the tide was about to turn for Harry.

One of his songs was published, "My Old New Hampshire Home", lyric by Andrew B. Sterling. William C. Dunn, owner of a small print shop, purchased it outright for $15.00, and issued it in 1898. It was a hit that sold more than 2 million copies.

There is an interesting historical note connected with Harry Von Tilzer. In the Early 1900's, Von Tilzer kept an upright piano in his publishing firm. Harry kept pieces of paper stuffed between the strings of the piano's harp. It gave the piano a tinny sort of sound to which Von Tilzer was partial. One day, the lyricist and newspaper journalist Monroe Rosenfeld was in Harry's office and heard him playing the tinny sounding piano. The sound suggested a title for a piece he was writing, - Tin Pan Alley.

Harry's last years were spent in retirement, while living in the Hotel Woodward, in New York City. He died in 1946, at age 74.

Sir Michael (Kemp) Tippett is a Composer, born in London, England, UK in 1905. He studied at the Royal College of Music, London, and became director of music at Morley College from 1940 until 1951. His oratorio, A Child of Our Time (1941), reflecting the problems of the 1930s and 1940s, won him wide recognition. A convinced pacifist, he was imprisoned for three months as a conscientious objector during World War 2. He scored a considerable success with his operas The Midsummer Marriage (1952) and King Priam (1961), and among his other works are four symphonies, a piano concerto, and string quartets. He was knighted in 1966, and received the Order of Merit in 1983.

Arturo Toscanini, 1867 to 1957, was a conductor who born in Parma, Italy. He was a cellist before the night in 1886 when he took over the baton from an indisposed conductor in Rio de Janeiro and stayed on the podium for the rest of his career. After years of journeyman work in Italian opera houses, he became conductor of Milan's La Scala in 1898. In 1909 he came to the USA to lead the Metropolitan Opera orchestra; his subsequent career took him to positions in Europe, England, and the USA, including the podium of the New York Philharmonic from 1928 to 1936. In 1937 the NBC Symphony, primarily a broadcasting and recording orchestra, was created for Toscanini; he led it until 1954, cementing his reputation as one of the most revered conductors in the world. He helped pioneer a new performance tradition that proclaimed an end to Romantic interpretive excesses and substituted absolute fidelity to the score; in practice, that made for clean, sinewy performances, achieved partly by his legendary tantrums in rehearsals. He was equally admired for his performances of Beethoven and other 19th-century classics and of modern composers including Stravinsky, Debussy, and Richard Strauss.

Born Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend on May 19, 1945, as a member of The Who, he wrote nearly all of the songs and sang "The Acid Queen" and "Sensation". for the double album Tommy. Tommy is a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who becomes a Messiah and later is forsaken by his followers. Tommy is based, in part, on the spiritual teachings of Indian mystic Meher Baba, of whom Townshend had become a devotee. Read the rest of this biography at www.petetownshend.net

There is a statue of Richard Tucker, an opera singer, in New York.