title: Squeeze (band)

text: Beginning in the autumn of 2014, Difford and Tilbrook began touring as a duo, playing Squeeze hits in smaller venues in the UK. Squeeze, still operating as a full band, also continued to play occasional festival shows through 2014 and 2015. In early 2015, Squeeze announced that bassist John Bentley would play his final gig with the band on 24 July. In an interview, Bentley announced his replacement will be Lucy Shaw (also the bassist for Tilbrook's backing band The Fluffers), which was officially confirmed by Squeeze in August.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: From 2008 forward, Difford and Tilbrook repeatedly stated in interviews that they planned to produce an album of new Squeeze material; they alluded to this in on-camera interviews at V Festival in both 2008 and 2011. In January 2010, it was announced that they would be spending part of the coming summer in Italy together writing songs for a new Squeeze album, and in an interview on BBC Radio Wales on 10 November 2013, Tilbrook stated that Squeeze would be recording between January and March 2014. However these sessions never took place and Tilbrook ended up recording and releasing the solo album "Happy Endings".


title: Squeeze (band)

text: Around the same time, it was announced that Squeeze would be providing the music for a BBC drama called "Cradle to Grave", based on the autobiography "Going To Sea in a Sieve" by Danny Baker. Squeeze debuted the song "Cradle to the Grave" on their 2013 tour, whilst Difford and Tilbrook were photographed with Danny Baker on the set of "Cradle to the Grave".


title: Squeeze (band)

text: Recording for the album finally got underway sometime in 2014/2015, and in April 2015, Difford announced on his Twitter feed that he had listened to a "first mix" of the new album. In July, Squeeze announced on their Facebook page that the album was entering the mastering stage. "Cradle to the Grave", the band's first album of original material since 1998 received its official release on 2 October 2015. A limited edition of 1000 copies were released through the band's own Love Records at the end of August.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: Squeeze performed in front of David Cameron on BBC's The Andrew Marr Show in January 2016 and used the performance to protest against the then-Prime Minister by changing the lyrics to their song "Cradle to the Grave".


title: Squeeze (band)

text: In July 2017, the band announced a North American tour, along with two line-up changes: the replacement of Lucy Shaw as bassist with Yolanda Charles and the addition of Dirty Vegas frontman Steve Smith as percussionist and backing vocalist. The band also announced an Australian tour for 2018, and revealed that they were in the midst of recording a new album.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: In August 2017, Squeeze revealed the title of their fifteenth studio album as "The Knowledge". A new single, "Innocence in Paradise", was released ahead of the album. "The Knowledge" was released on 13 October 2017.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: The band has continued touring through the UK, Ireland and North America. A tour was announced on the official Squeeze website for 2020 in Australia and New Zealand, however it was indefinitely postponed due to scheduling problems as of November 2019.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: On 25 June 2019 "The New York Times Magazine" listed Squeeze among hundreds of artists whose material was destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: On 13 August 2019, the band officially announced the addition of a seventh member, guitarist Melvin Duffy. Duffy had played as a session musician on Squeeze's previous two albums, and at occasional live shows.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: In September 2019, Squeeze were joined at the Louisville, Kentucky Bourbon & Beyond Festival by ex-Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters front-man Dave Grohl on drums, for a performance of the 1982 hit "Black Coffee in Bed".


title: Squeeze (band)

text: In February 2020, it was announced that Yolanda Charles had departed the band, and new bassist Sean Hurley (who had filled in for Charles on bass on a few 2019 dates, including the date Dave Grohl guested) would be replacing her. In April of that year, Tilbrook, while discussing an upcoming scheduled gig, mentioned that it would be the "very first gig with our new bass player! A chap called Owen Biddle, who used to play in a band called The Roots." However, the show in question was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: In November 2022, in response to the United Kingdom cost of living crisis, the band announced that proceeds from their "Food for Thought" EP would be donated to food banks and asked fans attending their UK tour to bring donations for the Trussell Trust.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: Stylistically, Squeeze have been characterized as new wave, post-punk and power pop. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of "AllMusic" proclaimed the band to provide "one of the links between classic British guitar pop and post-punk". Squeeze have also been labeled as punk and pop punk. In a January 1988 interview by "Music Connection", when addressing Squeeze being thought of as a punk band, Glenn Tilbrook commented "I never thought that we were [a punk band] – although I thought we were influenced by it to a certain extent".


title: Squeeze (band)

text: Squeeze were inspired by 1960s rock bands The Kinks and The Beatles, and the songwriting partnership of Difford and Tilbrook has attracted comparisons to that of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, a likening the band have expressed "mixed feelings" about. In addition, members of Squeeze have cited artists including David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Donovan, The Blockheads' Ian Dury, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, King Crimson and Greg Lake, Nick Lowe, Glenn Miller, Ramones, The Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed, and The Who as sources of influence or inspiration.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: Squeeze have been cited as an influence by several bands and artists. American new wave singer Marshall Crenshaw cited Squeeze as one of the primary influences for his 1982 self-titled debut album. College rock band the Replacements, particularly bassist Tommy Stinson, also professed an admiration for the band. Many artists in the Britpop genre also took influence from the band, particularly Blur, whose guitarist Graham Coxon called Squeeze an "amazing band" and named Tilbrook's voice as "one of my favourite ever English singing voices." Later artists who named Squeeze as an influence include American Hi-Fi, The Caulfields, Kasabian, the Killers, Nightmare of You, Razorlight, and Space.


title: Squeeze (band)

text: Many bands and artists who would later achieve phenomenal success would begin their careers opening for Squeeze, including Dire Straits, The Jam, R.E.M., The Specials, U2 and XTC.


title: Banjo

text: The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by African Americans in the United States. The banjo is frequently associated with folk, bluegrass and country music, and has also been used in some rock, pop and hip-hop. Several rock bands, such as the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead, have used the five-string banjo in some of their songs. Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in Black American traditional music and the folk culture of rural whites before entering the mainstream via the minstrel shows of the 19th century. Along with the fiddle, the banjo is a mainstay of American styles of music, such as bluegrass and old-time music. It is also very frequently used in Dixieland jazz, as well as in Caribbean genres like biguine, calypso and mento.


title: Banjo

text: The modern banjo derives from instruments that have been recorded to be in use in North America and the Caribbean since the 17th century by enslaved people taken from West and Central Africa. Their African-style instruments were crafted from split gourds with animal skins stretched across them. Strings, from gut or vegetable fibers, were attached to a wooden neck. Written references to the banjo in North America and the Caribbean appear in the 17th and 18th centuries.


title: Banjo

text: The earliest written indication of an instrument akin to the banjo is in the 17th century: Richard Jobson (1621) in describing The Gambia, wrote about an instrument like the banjo, which he called a "bandore".


title: Banjo

text: The term "banjo" has several etymological claims, one being from the Mandinka language which gives The Gambia its capital name, Banjul. Another claim is a connection to the West African Akonting: The akonting is made with a long bamboo neck called a "bangoe". The material for the neck, called "ban julo" in the Mandinka language, again gives "Banjul", the capital of The Gambia, its name. In this interpretation, "Banjul" became a sort of eponym for the Akonting as it crossed the Atlantic. The instrument's name might also derive from the Kimbundu word "mbanza", which is a loan word to the Portuguese language resulting in the term "banza". Its earliest recorded use was in 1678 in the Caribbean (Martinique) by enslaved Africans.


title: Banjo

text: The OED claims that the term "banjo" comes from a dialectal pronunciation of Portuguese "bandore" or from an early anglicisation of Spanish "bandurria". However, contrary evidence definitively supports that the terms "bandore" and "bandurria" were terms used when Europeans encountered the banjo or its kin varieties in use by people of African descent, who used different terms for the instrument like "banza".


title: Banjo

text: Various instruments in Africa, chief among them the "kora", feature a skin head and gourd (or similar shell) body. Those African instruments differ from early African American banjos in that the necks do not possess a Western-style fingerboard and tuning pegs; instead they have stick necks, with strings attached to the neck with loops for tuning.


title: Banjo

text: Another likely relative of the banjo is the "akonting", a spike folk lute played by the Jola tribe of Senegambia, and the "ubaw-akwala" of the Igbo. Similar instruments include the "xalam" of Senegal and the "ngoni" of the Wassoulou region including parts of Mali, Guinea, and Ivory Coast, as well as a larger variation of the "ngoni" known as the "gimbri" developed in Morocco by Black Sub-Saharan Africans (Gnawa or Haratin).


title: Banjo

text: Banjo-like instruments seem to have been independently invented in several different places, since instruments similar to the banjo are known from a diverse array of distant countries. For example, the Chinese "sanxian", the Japanese "shamisen", Persian "tar", and the Moroccan "sintir", in addition to the many African instruments mentioned above.


title: Banjo

text: Early, African-influenced banjos were built around a gourd body and a wooden stick neck. These instruments had varying numbers of strings, though often including some form of drone. The earliest known picture, , of an enslaved person playing a banjo-like instrument (The Old Plantation) shows a four-string instrument with its fourth (thumb) string shorter than the others.


title: Banjo

text: Banjos with fingerboards and tuning pegs are known from the Caribbean as early as the 17th century. Some 18th- and early 19th-century writers transcribed the name of these instruments variously as "bangie", "banza", "bonjaw", "banjer" and "banjar".


title: Banjo

text: The instrument became increasingly available commercially from around the second quarter of the 19th century due to minstrel performances.


title: Banjo

text: In the antebellum South, many enslaved Africans played the banjo, spreading it to the rest of the population. In his memoir "With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon", the Confederate veteran and surgeon John Allan Wyeth recalls learning to play the banjo as a child from an enslaved person on his family plantation. Another man who learned to play from African-Americans, probably in the 1820s, was Joel Walker Sweeney, a minstrel performer from Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Sweeney has been credited with adding a string to the four-string African-American banjo, and popularizing the five-string banjo. Although Robert McAlpin Williamson is the first documented white banjoist, in the 1830s Sweeney became the first white performer to play the banjo on stage. Sweeney's musical performances occurred at the beginning of the minstrel era, as banjos shifted away from being exclusively homemade folk instruments to instruments of a more modern style. Sweeney participated in this transition by encouraging drum maker William Boucher of Baltimore to make banjos commercially for him to sell.


title: Banjo

text: According to Arthur Woodward in 1949, Sweeney replaced the gourd with a sound box made of wood and covered with skin, and added a short fifth string about 1831. However, modern scholar Gene Bluestein pointed out in 1964 that Sweeney may not have originated either the 5th string or sound box. This new banjo was at first tuned d'Gdf♯a, though by the 1890s, this had been transposed up to g'cgbd'. Banjos were introduced in Britain by Sweeney's group, the American Virginia Minstrels, in the 1840s, and became very popular in music halls.


title: Banjo

text: The instrument grew in popularity during the 1840s after Sweeney began his traveling minstrel show. By the end of the 1840s the instrument had expanded from Caribbean possession to take root in places across America and across the Atlantic in England. It was estimated in 1866 that there were probably 10,000 banjos in New York City, up from only a handful in 1844. People were exposed to banjos not only at minstrel shows, but also medicine shows, Wild-West shows, variety shows, and traveling vaudeville shows. The banjo's popularity also was given a boost by the Civil War, as servicemen on both sides in the Army or Navy were exposed to the banjo played in minstrel shows and by other servicemen. A popular movement of aspiring banjoists began as early as 1861. The enthusiasm for the instrument was labeled a "banjo craze" or "banjo mania."


title: Banjo

text: By the 1850s, aspiring banjo players had options to help them learn their instrument. There were more teachers teaching banjo basics in the 1850s than there had been in the 1840s. There were also instruction manuals and, for those who could read it, printed music in the manuals. The first book of notated music was "The Complete Preceptor" by Elias Howe, published under the pseudonym "Gumbo Chaff", consisting mainly of Christy's Minstrels tunes. The first banjo method was the "Briggs' Banjo instructor" (1855) by Tom Briggs. Other methods included "Howe's New American Banjo School" (1857), and "Phil Rice's Method for the Banjo, With or Without a Master" (1858). These books taught the "stroke style" or "banjo style", similar to modern "frailing" or "clawhammer" styles.


title: Banjo

text: By 1868, music for the banjo was available printed in a magazine, when J. K. Buckley wrote and arranged popular music for "Buckley's Monthly Banjoist". Frank B. Converse also published his entire collection of compositions in "The Complete Banjoist" in 1868, which included "polkas, waltzes, marches, and clog hornpipes."


title: Banjo

text: Opportunities to work included the minstrel companies and circuses present in the 1840s, but also floating theaters and variety theaters, forerunners of the variety show and vaudeville.


title: Banjo

text: The term "classic banjo" is used today to talk about a bare-finger "guitar style" that was widely in use among banjo players of the late 19th to early 20th century. It is still used by banjoists today. The term also differentiates that style of playing from the fingerpicking bluegrass banjo styles, such as the Scruggs style and Keith style.


title: Banjo

text: The "Briggs Banjo Method", considered to be the first banjo method and which taught the "stroke style" of playing, also mentioned the existence of another way of playing, the "guitar style." Alternatively known as "finger style", the new way of playing the banjo displaced the stroke method, until by 1870 it was the dominant style. Although mentioned by Briggs, it wasn't taught. The first banjo method to teach the technique was "Frank B. Converse's New and Complete Method for the Banjo with or without a Master", published in 1865.


title: Banjo

text: To play in guitar style, players use the thumb and two or three fingers on their right hand to pick the notes. Samuel Swaim Stewart summarized the style in 1888, saying,


title: Banjo

text: The banjo, although popular, carried low-class associations from its role in blackface minstrel shows, medicine shows, tent shows, and variety shows or vaudeville. There was a push in the 19th century banjo to bring the instrument into "respectability." Musicians such as William A. Huntley made an effort to "elevate" the instrument or make it more "artistic," by "bringing it to a more sophisticated level of technique and repertoire based on European standards." Huntley may have been the first white performer to successfully make the transition from performing in blackface to being himself on stage, noted by the Boston Herald in November 1884. He was supported by another former blackface performer, Samuel Swaim Stewart, in his corporate magazine that popularized highly talented professionals.


title: Banjo

text: As the "raucous" imitations of plantation life decreased in minstrelsy, the banjo became more acceptable as an instrument of fashionable society, even to be accepted into women's parlors. Part of that change was a switch from the stroke style to the guitar playing style. An 1888 newspaper said, "All the maidens and a good many of the women also strum the instrument, banjo classes abound on every side and banjo recitals are among the newest diversions of fashion...Youths and elderly men too have caught the fever...the star strummers among men are in demand at the smartest parties and have the choosing of the society of the most charming girls."


title: Banjo

text: Some of those entertainers, such as Alfred A. Farland, specialized in classical music. However, musicians who wanted to entertain their audiences, and make a living, mixed it in with the popular music that audiences wanted. Farland's pupil Frederick J. Bacon was one of these. A former medicine show entertainer, Bacon performed classical music along with popular songs such as "Massa's in de cold, cold ground", a "Medley of Scotch Airs", a "Medley of Southern Airs", and his own "West Lawn Polka".


title: Banjo

text: Banjo innovation which began in the minstrel age continued, with increased use of metal parts, exotic wood, raised metal frets and a tone-ring that improved the sound. Instruments were designed in a variety of sizes and pitch ranges, to play different parts in banjo orchestras. Examples on display in the museum include banjorines and piccolo banjos.


title: Banjo

text: New styles of playing, a new look, instruments in a variety of pitch ranges to take the place of different sections in an orchestra – all helped to separate the instrument from the rough minstrel image of the previous 50–60 years. The instrument was modern now, a bright new thing, with polished metal sides.


title: Banjo

text: In the early 1900s, new banjos began to spread, four-string models, played with a plectrum rather than with the minstrel-banjo clawhammer stroke or the classic-banjo fingerpicking style. The new banjos were a result of changing musical tastes. New music spurred the creation of "evolutionary variations" of the banjo, from the five-string model current since the 1830s to newer four-string plectrum and tenor banjos.


title: Banjo

text: The instruments became ornately decorated in the 1920s to be visually dynamic to a theater audience. The instruments were increasingly modified or made in a new style – necks that were shortened to handle the four steel (not fiber as before) strings, strings that were sounded with a pick instead of fingers, four strings instead of five and tuned differently. The changes reflected the nature of post-World War 1 music. The country was turning away from European classics, preferring the "upbeat and carefree feel" of jazz, and American soldiers returning from the war helped to drive this change.


title: Banjo

text: The change in tastes toward dance music and the need for louder instruments began a few years before the war, however, with ragtime. That music encouraged musicians to alter their 5-string banjos to four, add the louder steel strings and use a pick or plectrum, all in an effort to be heard over the brass and reed instruments that were current in dance-halls. The four string plectrum and tenor banjos did not eliminate the five-string variety. They were products of their times and musical purposes—ragtime and jazz dance music and theater music.


title: Banjo

text: The Great Depression is a visible line to mark the end of the Jazz Age. The economic downturn cut into the sales of both four- and five-stringed banjos, and by World War 2, banjos were in sharp decline, the market for them dead.


title: Banjo

text: In the post-World War Two years, the banjo experienced a resurgence, played by music stars such as Earl Scruggs (bluegrass), Bela Fleck (jazz, rock, world music), Gerry O'Connor (Celtic and Irish music), Perry Bechtel (jazz, big band), Pete Seeger (folk), and Otis Taylor (African-American roots, blues, jazz).


title: Banjo

text: Pete Seeger "was a major force behind a new national interest in folk music." Learning to play a fingerstyle in the Appalachians from musicians who never stopped playing the banjo, he wrote the book, "How To Play The Five-String Banjo", which was the only banjo method on the market for years. He was followed by a movement of folk musicians, such as Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio and Erik Darling of the Weavers and Tarriers.


title: Banjo

text: Earl Scruggs was seen both as a legend and a "contemporary musical innovator" who gave his name to his style of playing, the "Scruggs Style". Scruggs played the banjo "with heretofore unheard of speed and dexterity," using a picking technique for the 5-string banjo that he perfected from 2-finger and 3-finger picking techniques in rural North Carolina. His playing reached Americans through the Grand Ole Opry and into the living rooms of Americans who didn't listen to country or bluegrass music, through the theme music of The Beverly Hillbillies.


title: Banjo

text: For the last one hundred years, the tenor banjo has become an intrinsic part of the world of Irish traditional music. It is a relative newcomer to the genre.


title: Banjo

text: The banjo has also been used more recently in the hardcore punk scene, most notably by Show Me the Body on their debut album, "Body War".


title: Banjo

text: Two techniques closely associated with the five-string banjo are rolls and drones. Rolls are right hand accompanimental fingering patterns that consist of eight (eighth) notes that subdivide each measure. Drone notes are quick little notes [typically eighth notes], usually played on the 5th (short) string to fill in around the melody notes [typically eighth notes]. These techniques are both idiomatic to the banjo in all styles, and their sound is characteristic of bluegrass.


title: Banjo

text: Historically, the banjo was played in the claw-hammer style by the Africans who brought their version of the banjo with them. Several other styles of play were developed from this. Clawhammer consists of downward striking of one or more of the four main strings with the index, middle or both fingers while the drone or fifth string is played with a 'lifting' (as opposed to downward pluck) motion of the thumb. The notes typically sounded by the thumb in this fashion are, usually, on the off beat. Melodies can be quite intricate adding techniques such as double thumbing and drop thumb. In old time Appalachian Mountain music, a style called two-finger up-pick is also used, and a three-finger version that Earl Scruggs developed into the "Scruggs" style picking was nationally aired in 1945 on the Grand Ole Opry. In this style the instrument is played by plucking individual notes. Modern fingerstyle is usually played using fingerpicks, though early players and some modern players play either with nails or with a technique known as on the flesh. In this style the strings are played directly with the fingers, rather than any pick or intermediary.


title: Banjo

text: While five-string banjos are traditionally played with either fingerpicks or the fingers themselves, tenor banjos and plectrum banjos are played with a pick, either to strum full chords, or most commonly in Irish traditional music, play single-note melodies.


title: Banjo

text: The modern banjo comes in a variety of forms, including four- and five-string versions. A six-string version, tuned and played similarly to a guitar, has gained popularity. In almost all of its forms, banjo playing is characterized by a fast arpeggiated plucking, though many different playing styles exist.


title: Banjo

text: The body, or "pot", of a modern banjo typically consists of a circular rim (generally made of wood, though metal was also common on older banjos) and a tensioned head, similar to a drum head. Traditionally, the head was made from animal skin, but today is often made of various synthetic materials. Most modern banjos also have a metal "tone ring" assembly that helps further clarify and project the sound, but many older banjos do not include a tone ring.


title: Banjo

text: The banjo is usually tuned with friction tuning pegs or planetary gear tuners, rather than the worm gear machine head used on guitars. Frets have become standard since the late 19th century, though fretless banjos are still manufactured and played by those wishing to execute glissando, play quarter tones, or otherwise achieve the sound and feeling of early playing styles.


title: Banjo

text: Modern banjos are typically strung with metal strings. Usually, the fourth string is wound with either steel or bronze-phosphor alloy. Some players may string their banjos with nylon or gut strings to achieve a more mellow, old-time tone.


title: Banjo

text: Some banjos have a separate resonator plate on the back of the pot to project the sound forward and give the instrument more volume. This type of banjo is usually used in bluegrass music, though resonator banjos are played by players of all styles, and are also used in old-time, sometimes as a substitute for electric amplification when playing in large venues.


title: Banjo

text: Open-back banjos generally have a mellower tone and weigh less than resonator banjos. They usually have a different setup than a resonator banjo, often with a higher string action.


title: Banjo

text: The modern five-string banjo is a variation on Sweeney's original design. The fifth string is usually the same gauge as the first, but starts from the fifth fret, three-quarters the length of the other strings. This lets the string be tuned to a higher open pitch than possible for the full-length strings. Because of the short fifth string, the five-string banjo uses a reentrant tuning – the string pitches do not proceed lowest to highest across the fingerboard. Instead, the fourth string is lowest, then third, second, first, and the fifth string is highest.


title: Banjo

text: The short fifth string presents special problems for a capo. For small changes (going up or down one or two semitones, for example), retuning the fifth string simply is possible. Otherwise, various devices called "fifth-string capos" effectively shorten the vibrating part of the string. Many banjo players use model-railroad spikes or titanium spikes (usually installed at the seventh fret and sometimes at others), under which they hook the string to press it down on the fret.


title: Banjo

text: Five-string banjo players use many tunings. (Tunings are given in left-to-right order, as viewed from the front of the instrument with the neck pointing up.) Probably the most common, particularly in bluegrass, is the Open-G tuning G4 D3 G3 B3 D4. In earlier times, the tuning G4 C3 G3 B3 D4 was commonly used instead, and this is still the preferred tuning for some types of folk music and for classic banjo. Other tunings found in old-time music include double C (G4 C3 G3 C4 D4), "sawmill" (G4 D3 G3 C4 D4) also called "mountain modal" and open D (F#4 D3 F#3 A3 D4). These tunings are often taken up a tone, either by tuning up or using a capo. For example, "double-D" tuning (A4 D3 A3 D4 E4) – commonly reached by tuning up from double C – is often played to accompany fiddle tunes in the key of D, and Open-A (A4 E3 A3 C#4 E4) is usually used for playing tunes in the key of A. Dozens of other banjo tunings are used, mostly in old-time music. These tunings are used to make playing specific tunes easier, usually fiddle tunes or groups of fiddle tunes.


title: Banjo

text: The size of the five-string banjo is largely standardized, but smaller and larger sizes exist, including the long-neck or "Seeger neck" variation designed by Pete Seeger. Petite variations on the five-string banjo have been available since the 1890s. S.S. Stewart introduced the banjeaurine, tuned one fourth above a standard five-string. Piccolo banjos are smaller, and tuned one octave above a standard banjo. Between these sizes and standard lies the A-scale banjo, which is two frets shorter and usually tuned one full step above standard tunings. Many makers have produced banjos of other scale lengths, and with various innovations.


title: Banjo

text: American old-time music typically uses the five-string, open-back banjo. It is played in a number of different styles, the most common being clawhammer or frailing, characterized by the use of a downward rather than upward stroke when striking the strings with a fingernail. Frailing techniques use the thumb to catch the fifth string for a drone after most strums or after each stroke ("double thumbing"), or to pick out additional melody notes in what is known as drop-thumb. Pete Seeger popularized a folk style by combining clawhammer with up picking, usually without the use of fingerpicks. Another common style of old-time banjo playing is fingerpicking banjo or classic banjo. This style is based upon parlor-style guitar.


title: Banjo

text: Bluegrass music, which uses the five-string resonator banjo almost exclusively, is played in several common styles. These include Scruggs style, named after Earl Scruggs; melodic, or Keith style, named for Bill Keith; and three-finger style with single-string work, also called Reno style after Don Reno. In these styles, the emphasis is on arpeggiated figures played in a continuous eighth-note rhythm, known as rolls. All of these styles are typically played with fingerpicks.


title: Banjo

text: The first five-string, electric, solid-body banjo was developed by Charles Wilburn (Buck) Trent, Harold "Shot" Jackson, and David Jackson in 1960.


title: Banjo

text: The five-string banjo has been used in classical music since before the turn of the 20th century. Contemporary and modern works have been written or arranged for the instrument by Jerry Garcia, Buck Trent, Béla Fleck, Tony Trischka, Ralph Stanley, Steve Martin, George Crumb, Modest Mouse, Jo Kondo, Paul Elwood, Hans Werner Henze (notably in his "Sixth Symphony"), Daniel Mason of Hank Williams III's Damn Band, Beck, the Water Tower Bucket Boys, Todd Taylor, J.P. Pickens, Peggy Honeywell, Norfolk & Western, Putnam Smith, Iron & Wine, The Avett Brothers, The Well Pennies, Punch Brothers, Julian Koster, Sufjan Stevens, Sarah Jarosz and sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith from Rising Appalachia


title: Banjo

text: The four-string plectrum banjo is a standard banjo without the short drone string. It usually has 22 frets on the neck and a scale length of 26 to 28 inches, and was originally tuned C3 G3 B3 D4. It can also be tuned like the top four strings of a guitar, which is known as "Chicago tuning". As the name suggests, it is usually played with a guitar-style pick (that is, a single one held between thumb and forefinger), unlike the five-string banjo, which is either played with a thumbpick and two fingerpicks, or with bare fingers. The plectrum banjo evolved out of the five-string banjo, to cater to styles of music involving strummed chords. The plectrum is also featured in many early jazz recordings and arrangements.


title: Banjo

text: Four-string banjos can be used for chordal accompaniment (as in early jazz), for single-string melody playing (as in Irish traditional music), in "chord melody" style (a succession of chords in which the highest notes carry the melody), in tremolo style (both on chords and single strings), and a mixed technique called duo style that combines single-string tremolo and rhythm chords.


title: Banjo

text: Four-string banjos are used from time to time in musical theater. Examples include: "Hello, Dolly!", "Mame", "Chicago", "Cabaret", "Oklahoma!", "Half a Sixpence", "Annie", "Barnum", "The Threepenny Opera", "Monty Python's Spamalot", and countless others. Joe Raposo had used it variably in the imaginative seven-piece orchestration for the long-running TV show "Sesame Street", and has sometimes had it overdubbed with itself or an electric guitar. The banjo is still (albeit rarely) in use in the show's arrangement currently.


title: Banjo

text: The shorter-necked, tenor banjo, with 17 ("short scale") or 19 frets, is also typically played with a plectrum. It became a popular instrument after about 1910. Early models used for melodic picking typically had 17 frets on the neck and a scale length of 19 to 21 inches. By the mid-1920s, when the instrument was used primarily for strummed chordal accompaniment, 19-fret necks with a scale length of 21 to 23 inches became standard. The usual tuning is the all-fifths tuning C3 G3 D4 A4, in which exactly seven semitones (a perfect fifth) occur between the open notes of consecutive strings; this is identical to the tuning of a viola. Other players (particularly in Irish traditional music) tune the banjo G2 D3 A3 E4 like an octave mandolin, which lets the banjoist duplicate fiddle and mandolin fingering. The popularization of this tuning is usually attributed to the late Barney McKenna, banjoist with The Dubliners. Fingerstyle on tenor banjo retuned to open G tuning dgd'g' or lower open D tuning Adad' (three finger picking, frailing) have been explored by Mirek Patek.


title: Banjo

text: The tenor banjo was a common rhythm instrument in early 20th-century dance bands. Its volume and timbre suited early jazz (and jazz-influenced popular music styles) and could both compete with other instruments (such as brass instruments and saxophones) and be heard clearly on acoustic recordings. George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue", in Ferde Grofe's original jazz-orchestra arrangement, includes tenor banjo, with widely spaced chords not easily playable on plectrum banjo in its conventional tunings. With development of the archtop and electric guitar, the tenor banjo largely disappeared from jazz and popular music, though keeping its place in traditional "Dixieland" jazz.


title: Banjo

text: Some 1920s Irish banjo players picked out the melodies of jigs, reels, and hornpipes on tenor banjos, decorating the tunes with snappy triplet ornaments. The most important Irish banjo player of this era was Mike Flanagan of the New York-based Flanagan Brothers, one of the most popular Irish-American groups of the day. Other pre-WWII Irish banjo players included Neil Nolan, who recorded with Dan Sullivan's Shamrock Band in Boston, and Jimmy McDade, who recorded with the Four Provinces Orchestra in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the rise of "ceili" bands provided a new market for a loud instrument like the tenor banjo. Use of the tenor banjo in Irish music has increased greatly since the folk revival of the 1960s.


title: Banjo

text: The six-string banjo began as a British innovation by William Temlett, one of England's earliest banjo makers. He opened a shop in London in 1846, and sold seven-string banjos which he marketed as "zither" banjos from his 1869 patent. A zither banjo usually has a closed back and sides with the drum body and skin tensioning system suspended inside the wooden rim, the neck and string tailpiece mounted on the outside of the rim, and the drone string led through a tube in the neck so that the tuning peg can be mounted on the head. They were often made by builders who used guitar tuners that came in banks of three, so five-stringed instruments had a redundant tuner; these banjos could be somewhat easily converted over to a six-string banjo.


title: Banjo

text: American Alfred Davis Cammeyer (1862–1949), a young violinist turned concert banjo player, devised the six-string zither banjo around 1880. British opera diva Adelina Patti advised Cammeyer that the zither banjo might be popular with English audiences as it had been invented there, and Cammeyer went to London in 1888. With his virtuoso playing, he helped show that banjos could make more sophisticated music than normally played by blackface minstrels. He was soon performing for London society, where he met Sir Arthur Sullivan, who recommended that Cammeyer progress from arranging the music of others for banjo to composing his own music.


title: Banjo

text: Modern six-string bluegrass banjos have been made. These add a bass string between the lowest string and the drone string on a five-string banjo, and are usually tuned G4 G2 D3 G3 B3 D4. Sonny Osborne played one of these instruments for several years. It was modified by luthier Rual Yarbrough from a Vega five-string model. A picture of Sonny with this banjo appears in Pete Wernick's "Bluegrass Banjo" method book.


title: Banjo

text: Six-string banjos known as banjo guitars basically consist of a six-string guitar neck attached to a bluegrass or plectrum banjo body, which allows players who have learned the guitar to play a banjo sound without having to relearn fingerings. This was the instrument of the early jazz great Johnny St. Cyr, jazzmen Django Reinhardt, Danny Barker, Papa Charlie Jackson and Clancy Hayes, as well as the blues and gospel singer Reverend Gary Davis. Today, musicians as diverse as Keith Urban, Rod Stewart, Taj Mahal, Joe Satriani, David Hidalgo, Larry Lalonde and Doc Watson play the six-string guitar banjo. They have become increasingly popular since the mid-1990s.


title: Banjo

text: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in vogue in plucked-string instrument ensembles – guitar orchestras, mandolin orchestras, banjo orchestras – was when the instrumentation was made to parallel that of the string section in symphony orchestras. Thus, "violin, viola, 'cello, bass" became "mandolin, mandola, mandocello, mandobass", or in the case of banjos, "banjolin, banjola, banjo cello, bass banjo". Because the range of pluck-stringed instrument generally is not as great as that of comparably sized bowed-string instruments, other instruments were often added to these plucked orchestras to extend the range of the ensemble upwards and downwards.


title: Banjo

text: The banjo cello was normally tuned C2-G2-D3-A3, one octave below the tenor banjo like the cello and mandocello. A five-string cello banjo, set up like a bluegrass banjo (with the short fifth string), but tuned one octave lower, has been produced by the Goldtone company.


title: Banjo

text: Bass banjos have been produced in both upright bass formats and with standard, horizontally carried banjo bodies. Contrabass banjos with either three or four strings have also been made; some of these had headstocks similar to those of bass violins. Tuning varies on these large instruments, with four-string models sometimes being tuned in 4ths like a bass violin (E1-A1-D2-G2) and sometimes in 5ths, like a four-string cello banjo, one octave lower (C1-G1-D2-A2).


title: Banjo

text: A number of hybrid instruments exist, crossing the banjo with other stringed instruments. Most of these use the body of a banjo, often with a resonator, and the neck of the other instrument. Examples include the banjo mandolin (first patented in 1882) and the banjo ukulele, most famously played by the English comedian George Formby. These were especially popular in the early decades of the 20th century, and were probably a result of a desire either to allow players of other instruments to jump on the banjo bandwagon at the height of its popularity, or to get the natural amplification benefits of the banjo resonator in an age before electric amplification.


title: Banjo

text: Conversely, the tenor and plectrum guitars use the respective banjo necks on guitar bodies. They arose in the early 20th century as a way for banjo players to double on guitar without having to relearn the instrument entirely.


title: Banjo

text: Instruments that have a five-string banjo neck on a wooden body (for example, a guitar, bouzouki, or dobro body) have also been made, such as the banjola. A 20th-century Turkish instrument similar to the banjo is called the "cümbüş", which combines a banjo-like resonator with a neck derived from an oud. At the end of the 20th century, a development of the five-string banjo was the BanSitar. This features a bone bridge, giving the instrument a sitar-like resonance.


title: Banjo

text: The Brazilian Samba Banjo is basically a cavaquinho neck on a banjo body, thereby producing a louder sound than the cavaquinho. It is tuned the same as the top 4 strings of a 5-string banjo up an octave (or any cavaquinho tuning).


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Scary Movie 5 (stylized on-screen as Scary MoVie) is a 2013 American comedy horror film. It is the standalone sequel to "Scary Movie 4" and the fifth and final installment in the "Scary Movie" film series. It is the second film to be distributed by The Weinstein Company under the Dimension Films brand, and the last before it folded in 2018. The film is directed by Malcolm D. Lee and written by David Zucker and Pat Proft. It was released on April 12, 2013.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: The film is the only installment of the franchise not to feature Cindy Campbell (played by Anna Faris) or Brenda Meeks (Regina Hall). It premiered on April 11, at the Hollywood’s ArcLight Cinerama Dome. The film parodies various horror films and other popular culture. The film received negative reviews from critics. With a gross of $78 million, it is the lowest grossing film in the Scary Movie series, as well as being the only one to not make over $100 million. "Scary Movie 5" director Malcolm D. Lee was very critical of this movie, saying that the movie is a terrible movie and not worth anybody's time watching it.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan get together to make a sex tape with over 20 cameras beside Sheen's bed. The time-lapsed tape fast forwards through the two doing all sorts of bedroom antics, including gymnastics, riding a horse, and having clowns jump in under the sheets. Sheen is pulled into the air by a paranormal force and thrown against walls, shelves, and doors until he lands on the bed again. Lohan is frightened so she decides to go home when she flies into the air as well; she becomes possessed and throws Sheen into the camera and kills him. The text explains that Sheen's body was found that day but he didn't stop partying until days later and that his three children were found missing, Lohan was arrested, again, and a reward was put out for the missing kids.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Several months later, Ja'Marcus and D'Andre are walking in the Humboldt County woods in California in search of cannabis plants to steal. After stealing one and fleeing, they take shelter in a cabin in the woods. Upon entering they see three strange creatures, later confirmed to be Sheen's children, and turn them in for the reward. The feral children are placed in isolation at a child development research center for a few months until they are deemed well enough to be returned to familial custody. When Sheen's brother, Dan Sanders and his wife Jody come to collect them, they are told they can have them if they agree to stay in a large suburban middle-class home fitted with security cameras. Jody is reluctant to take the kids at first but soon adjusts to having them. In an attempt to bond with their new children, Jody takes an auditions for a ballet performance, "Swan Lake", and is cast in the lead role as the Swan Queen.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Meanwhile, a continuing pattern of bizarre paranormal activity in their new home makes them investigate further. They eventually learn from the children that the attacks on their home are by "Mama", the mother of the children, who is under a curse and is trying to get them back so she can sacrifice both herself and the children. Maria, the couple's Hispanic live-in maid and housekeeper, is frightened and keeps experimenting with various rituals, Catholic and otherwise, to ward off the evil spirits in the house. During the day, Dan is frustrated with the modest progress of his test subjects at a primate intelligence research facility; ironically, Dan is not bright enough to realize that one of the chimpanzees, Caesar, is now actually much smarter than he is. One night, the pool drain invites others to a party. In the morning, Maria sees the mess in the pool and does more rituals, causing Dan to fire her. Because Dan doesn't understand her Spanish, they start a fight that leads to the lab that cause all the apes to be released.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Jody and Dan, with the help of Jody's close friend Kendra Brooks, who Jody met at her ballet class, must quickly find a way to lift the curse and save their family. Along the way, they seek the assistance of psychic Blaine Fulda, who turns out to be a complete fraud, and a dream extractor named Dom Kolb, who helps them understand that the solution to their problems lies in the mysterious Book of the Evil. However, Jody and Kendra fail to see what the book is capable of, oblivious to four friends continuously becoming possessed and reviving in the cabin. They wreak havoc when either of the two read the two passages of the book; one that unleashes demons, "gort klaatu barada nikto", and the other that revives them from possession. When "Mama" takes the children to a cliff to sacrifice them, Jody fails to lift the curse with the book, but does manage to knock the evil spirit into Ja'Marcus and D'Andre's pool containing a live shark, which then devours her.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Realizing the love for her adopted children is all she needs in life, Jody gives the part of the Swan Queen to Kendra, who performs the dance in the style of a stripper. The performance is heavily applauded by an audience that includes Jody, Dan, the children, Kendra's family, and Madea. The story's narrator is revealed to be Caesar, who then informs the audience that the humans should enjoy the time they have on Earth and says that apes will one day to take over the world.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: In a post-credits scene, Sheen wakes up, with Dom Kolb sitting beside him, from a dream extraction, i.e. the whole movie was a dream. After Kolb informs that Sheen will be sleeping with Lohan, a car crashes into the room, killing Sheen. Lohan is revealed as the driver; she gets out of the car, says to Kolb, "You were driving," and throws him the keys, blaming the accident on him.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: The main films parodied in "Scary Movie 5" include "Paranormal Activity", "Black Swan", "Mama" and "Rise of the Planet of the Apes". Other films parodied are "Sinister", "Inception", "Ted" (only in the unrated DVD), "Evil Dead" (which was released a week prior to the film), "The Cabin in the Woods", "Insidious" and "The Help". The film also parodies the best-selling novel "Fifty Shades of Grey" and Tyler Perry's character Madea.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: The film is directed by Malcolm D. Lee and written by David Zucker. Anna Faris, who starred in the previous films in the franchise, confirmed that she would not return for the fifth film. Tisdale's involvement in the film was confirmed in June 2012.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Filming began in September 2012. The first promotional image of the film, featuring Lohan and Sheen in the very first scene of the movie, was released on September 20, 2012.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: The only actors from any of the previous installments to appear in this film are Sheen, Rex, Shannon, and Hammond. They do not portray their original characters, Sheen stars as himself, Rex plays Dan, Shannon plays Heather, and Hammond plays a doctor.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: The film was largely shot in and around Atlanta, Georgia in the fall of 2012, with additional filming January and February 2013 at Sunset Gower Studios in Los Angeles. David Zucker reportedly handled additional filming and reshoots while Malcolm D. Lee was starting production for "The Best Man Holiday".


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Scary Movie 5: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the soundtrack of the film and was released on April 23, 2013.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Scary Movie 5: Original Motion Picture Score is the soundtrack of the film scored by James L. Venable it was released on May 14, 2013. All songs were written and composed by Venable.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: "Scary Movie 5" was released on DVD and Blu-ray on August 20, 2013. An unrated version was also released.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: "Scary Movie 5" grossed $32 million in North America and $46.4 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $78.4 million. In North America, the film opened to #2 in its first weekend with $14.2 million, behind "42", making it the lowest-grossing opening weekend for a film in the "Scary Movie" franchise.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: It was expected to take in about half as much as its predecessors, around $17 million in its opening weekend. The film held up reasonably well in its second weekend, slipping two spots to #4 with an estimated $6,296,000. In its third weekend, the film dipped 43.8% to #7 earning an estimated $3,457,000. The film held a spot in the top ten for the fourth weekend in a row, falling to #9 with a gross of $1,441,360. "Scary Movie 5" fell to #13 in its fifth weekend earning $675,942 and slid to #15 in its sixth with $420,253.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: "Scary Movie 5" was not screened for critics in advance. The film was panned by critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a score of 4% based on 52 reviews and an average rating of 2.29 out of 10. The site's consensus states: "Juvenile even by "Scary Movie" standards, this fifth installment offers stale pop culture gags that generate few laughs." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 11 out of 100 based on 16 reviews, indicating "overwhelming dislike". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "C−" on a scale of A+ to F.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: IGN gave the film a 1.0 out of 10. Stephanie Merry of "The Washington Post" gave the film zero stars saying, "The movie is so appalling that even a film fan who guffawed her way through "The Aristocrats" would feel nothing but a deep emptiness as the end credits begin to roll, wondering if one solid joke was too much to ask from a movie that bills itself as comedy." Kyle Smith of the "New York Post" gave the film one star saying, "Down at the bottom of the comedy barrel, where the slimy gray algae-like stuff lives: That’s where this script came from. If you must go to see "Scary Movie 5", be sure to bring an iPad with you. That way you can watch a better movie on it."


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Joe Neumaier of "The New York Daily News" gave the film one star saying, "Like so much of this whole series – hatched in 2000 by the Wayans brothers and intermittently directed by "Airplane!" veteran David Zucker, though newcomer Malcolm D. Lee takes over here – the mere mention of a familiar pop culture figure or title is supposed to be hilarious. It often isn't, and in fact the constant name-dropping and gross-out humor gets tiresome (in a movie that's at least 10 minutes too long). Luckily, folks like Snoop and good sports like Sheen and, yes, Lohan, break up the monotony. Until, like an undead beastie, the boredom and dumb jokes come roaring back."


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Rafer Guzman of "Newsday" felt that "Even the talented people – comedian Katt Williams as a fake psychic, high-energy actor Jerry O'Connell in a send-up of the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' books – get chewed up and spit out by this relentless anti-laugh machine. "Scary Movie 5" doesn't even have the imagination for a worthwhile gross-out joke. When the best you can offer is a poopy toothbrush, it's time to pack it in." Darren Franich of "Entertainment Weekly" said "Hitting theaters seven years after the last "Scary Movie", the new film doesn't even feature the ameliorating presence of Anna Faris, who gave the earlier films a certain spoofy grace. In her place is "High School Musical" refugee Ashley Tisdale, her face frozen in an eye roll of mild irritation. Who can blame her? The film hopscotches between too-late riffs on "Rise of the Planet of the Apes", "Inception", "Insidious", and "Black Swan". At a running time of 86 minutes, it's about as long as an episode of "Saturday Night Live", except with less laughs and worse storytelling." Frank Scheck of "The Hollywood Reporter" said "The filmmakers’ desperation is evident from the fact that a good chunk of the running time is devoted to spoofing the recent Jessica Chastain starrer "Mama". While that film was indeed a sleeper hit, it hardly seems memorable enough to warrant such sustained treatment, and indeed the comic payoffs are nil."


title: Scary Movie 5

text: The film has earned three nominations at the 34th Golden Raspberry Awards including Worst Supporting Actress for Lindsay Lohan, Worst Screen Combo for Lohan and Charlie Sheen and Worst Prequel, Remake, Ripoff or Sequel.


title: Scary Movie 5

text: Director Malcolm D. Lee was very critical of the movie: "It was just a bad movie. Believe me. Don’t bother going to see that movie. Or renting it, or anything. It’s not worth your time”.


title: QUIC

text: QUIC (pronounced "quick") is a general-purpose transport layer network protocol initially designed by Jim Roskind at Google, implemented, and deployed in 2012, announced publicly in 2013 as experimentation broadened, and described at an IETF meeting. QUIC is used by more than half of all connections from the Chrome web browser to Google's servers. Microsoft Edge (a derivative of the open-source Chromium browser) and Firefox support it. Safari implements the protocol, however it is not enabled by default.


title: QUIC

text: Although its name was initially proposed as the acronym for "Quick UDP Internet Connections", IETF's use of the word QUIC is not an acronym; it is simply the name of the protocol. QUIC improves performance of connection-oriented web applications that are currently using TCP. It does this by establishing a number of multiplexed connections between two endpoints using User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and is designed to obsolete TCP at the transport layer for many applications, thus earning the protocol the occasional nickname "TCP/2".


title: QUIC

text: QUIC works hand-in-hand with HTTP/2's multiplexed connections, allowing multiple streams of data to reach all the endpoints independently, and hence independent of packet losses involving other streams. In contrast, HTTP/2 hosted on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) can suffer head-of-line-blocking delays of all multiplexed streams if any of the TCP packets are delayed or lost.


title: QUIC

text: QUIC's secondary goals include reduced connection and transport latency, and bandwidth estimation in each direction to avoid congestion. It also moves congestion control algorithms into the user space at both endpoints, rather than the kernel space, which it is claimed will allow these algorithms to improve more rapidly. Additionally, the protocol can be extended with forward error correction (FEC) to further improve performance when errors are expected, and this is seen as the next step in the protocol's evolution. It has been designed to avoid protocol ossification so that it remains evolvable, unlike TCP which has suffered significant ossification.


title: QUIC

text: In June 2015, an Internet Draft of a specification for QUIC was submitted to the IETF for standardization. A QUIC working group was established in 2016. In October 2018, the IETF's HTTP and QUIC Working Groups jointly decided to call the HTTP mapping over QUIC "HTTP/3" in advance of making it a worldwide standard. In May 2021, the IETF standardized QUIC in , supported by , and .


title: QUIC

text: Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, aims to provide an interface for sending streams of data between two endpoints. Data is handed to the TCP system, which ensures the data makes it to the other end in exactly the same form, or the connection will indicate that an error condition exists.


title: QUIC

text: To do this, TCP breaks up the data into network packets and adds small amounts of data to each packet. This additional data includes a sequence number that is used to detect packets that are lost or arrive out of order, and a checksum that allows the errors within packet data to be detected. When either problem occurs, TCP uses automatic repeat request (ARQ) to tell the sender to re-send the lost or damaged packet.


title: QUIC

text: In most implementations, TCP will see any error on a connection as a blocking operation, stopping further transfers until the error is resolved or the connection is considered failed. If a single connection is being used to send multiple streams of data, as is the case in the HTTP/2 protocol, all of these streams are blocked although only one of them might have a problem. For instance, if a single error occurs while downloading a GIF image used for a favicon, the entire rest of the page will wait while that problem is resolved. This phenomenon is known as head-of-line blocking.


title: QUIC

text: As the TCP system is designed to look like a "data pipe", or stream, it deliberately contains little understanding of the data it transmits. If that data has additional requirements, like encryption using TLS, this must be set up by systems running on top of TCP, using TCP to communicate with similar software on the other end of the connection. Each of these sorts of setup tasks requires its own handshake process. This often requires several round-trips of requests and responses until the connection is established. Due to the inherent latency of long-distance communications, this can add significant overhead to the overall transmission.


title: QUIC

text: TCP has suffered from protocol ossification, due to its wire image being in cleartext and hence visible to and malleable by middleboxes. One measurement found that a third of paths across the Internet encounter at least one intermediary that modifies TCP metadata, and 6.5% of paths encounter harmful ossifying effects from intermediaries. Extensions to TCP have been affected: the design of MPTCP was constrained by middlebox behaviour, and the deployment of TCP Fast Open has been likewise hindered.


title: QUIC

text: QUIC aims to be nearly equivalent to a TCP connection but with much-reduced latency. It does this primarily through two changes that rely on the understanding of the behaviour of HTTP traffic.


title: QUIC

text: The first change is to greatly reduce overhead during connection setup. As most HTTP connections will demand TLS, QUIC makes the exchange of setup keys and supported protocols part of the initial handshake process. When a client opens a connection, the response packet includes the data needed for future packets to use encryption. This eliminates the need to set up the TCP connection and then negotiate the security protocol via additional packets. Other protocols can be serviced in the same way, combining together multiple steps into a single request-response. This data can then be used both for following requests in the initial setup, as well as future requests that would otherwise be negotiated as separate connections.


title: QUIC

text: The second change is to use UDP rather than TCP as its basis, which does not include loss recovery. Instead, each QUIC stream is separately flow controlled and lost data is retransmitted at the level of QUIC, not UDP. This means that if an error occurs in one stream, like the favicon example above, the protocol stack can continue servicing other streams independently. This can be very useful in improving performance on error-prone links, as in most cases considerable additional data may be received before TCP notices a packet is missing or broken, and all of this data is blocked or even flushed while the error is corrected. In QUIC, this data is free to be processed while the single multiplexed stream is repaired.


title: QUIC

text: QUIC also includes a number of other more mundane changes that also improve overall latency and throughput. For instance, the packets are encrypted individually, so that they do not result in the encrypted data waiting for partial packets. This is not generally possible under TCP, where the encryption records are in a bytestream and the protocol stack is unaware of higher-layer boundaries within this stream. These can be negotiated by the layers running on top, but QUIC aims to do all of this in a single handshake process.


title: QUIC

text: Another goal of the QUIC system was to improve performance during network-switch events, like what happens when a user of a mobile device moves from a local WiFi hotspot to a mobile network. When this occurs on TCP, a lengthy process starts where every existing connection times out one-by-one and is then re-established on demand. To solve this problem, QUIC includes a connection identifier which uniquely identifies the connection to the server regardless of source. This allows the connection to be re-established simply by sending a packet, which always contains this ID, as the original connection ID will still be valid even if the user's IP address changes.


title: QUIC

text: QUIC can be implemented in the application-space, as opposed to being in the operating system kernel. This generally invokes additional overhead due to context switches as data is moved between applications. However, in the case of QUIC, the protocol stack is intended to be used by a single application, with each application using QUIC having its own connections hosted on UDP. Ultimately the difference could be very small because much of the overall HTTP/2 stack is already in the applications (or their libraries, more commonly). Placing the remaining parts in those libraries, essentially the error correction, has little effect on the HTTP/2 stack's size or overall complexity.


title: QUIC

text: This organization allows future changes to be made more easily as it does not require changes to the kernel for updates. One of QUIC's longer-term goals is to add new systems for forward error correction (FEC) and improved congestion control.


title: QUIC

text: One concern about the move from TCP to UDP is that TCP is widely adopted and many of the "middleboxes" in the internet infrastructure are tuned for TCP and rate-limit or even block UDP. Google carried out a number of exploratory experiments to characterize this and found that only a small number of connections were blocked in this manner. This led to the use of a rapid fallback-to-TCP system; Chromium's network stack opens both a QUIC and traditional TCP connection at the same time, which allows it to fall back with negligible latency.


title: QUIC

text: QUIC has been specifically designed to be deployable, evolvable and to have anti-ossification properties; it is the first IETF transport protocol to deliberately minimise its wire image for these ends. Beyond encrypted headers, it is 'greased' and it has protocol invariants explicitly specified.


title: QUIC

text: The protocol that was created by Google and taken to the IETF under the name QUIC (already in 2012 around QUIC version 20) is quite different from the QUIC that has continued to evolve and be refined within the IETF. The original Google QUIC was designed to be a general purpose protocol, though it was initially deployed as a protocol to support HTTP(S) in Chromium. The current evolution of the IETF QUIC protocol is a general purpose transport protocol. Chromium developers continued to track the evolution of IETF QUIC's standardization efforts to adopt and fully comply with the most recent internet standards for QUIC in Chromium.


title: QUIC

text: The QUIC code was experimentally developed in Google Chrome starting in 2012, and was announced as part of Chromium version 29 (released on August 20, 2013). It is currently enabled by default in Chromium and Chrome.


title: QUIC

text: Apple added experimental support in the WebKit engine through the Safari Technology Preview 104 in April 2020. Official support was added in Safari 14, included in macOS Big Sur and iOS 14, but the feature must be turned on manually.


title: QUIC

text: The cronet library for QUIC and other protocols is available to Android applications as a module loadable via Google Play Services.


title: QUIC

text: In October 2020, Facebook announced that it has successfully migrated its apps, including Instagram, and server infrastructure to QUIC, with already 75% of its Internet traffic using QUIC. All mobile apps from Google support QUIC, including YouTube and Gmail. Uber's mobile app also uses QUIC.


title: QUIC

text: , there are several actively maintained implementations. Google servers support QUIC and Google has published a prototype server. Akamai Technologies has been supporting QUIC since July 2016. A Go implementation called quic-go is also available, and powers experimental QUIC support in the Caddy server. On July 11, 2017, LiteSpeed Technologies officially began supporting QUIC in their load balancer (WebADC) and LiteSpeed Web Server products. , 88.6% of QUIC websites used LiteSpeed and 10.8% used Nginx. Although at first only Google servers supported HTTP-over-QUIC connections, Facebook also launched the technology in 2018, and Cloudflare has been offering QUIC support on a beta basis since 2018. , 5.0% of all websites use QUIC. Microsoft Windows Server 2022 supports both HTTP/3 and SMB over QUIC protocols via MsQuic. The Application Delivery Controller of Citrix (Citrix ADC, NetScaler) can function as a QUIC proxy since version 13.


title: QUIC

text: In addition, there are several stale community projects: libquic was created by extracting the Chromium implementation of QUIC and modifying it to minimize dependency requirements, and goquic provides Go bindings of libquic. Finally, quic-reverse-proxy is a Docker image that acts as a reverse proxy server, translating QUIC requests into plain HTTP that can be understood by the origin server.


title: Yacht rock

text: Yacht rock (originally known as the West Coast sound or adult-oriented rock) is a broad music style and aesthetic commonly associated with soft rock, one of the most commercially successful genres from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Drawing on sources such as smooth soul, smooth jazz, R&B, and disco, common stylistic traits include high-quality production, clean vocals, and a focus on light, catchy melodies. Its name, coined in 2005 by the makers of the online video series "Yacht Rock", was derived from its association with the popular Southern Californian leisure activity of sailing.


title: Yacht rock

text: Contemporaneously, the term "yacht rock" didn't exist with the music the term describes, from about 1975 to 1984. It refers to "adult-oriented rock" or "West Coast Sound", which became identified with yacht rock in 2005, when the term was coined in J. D. Ryznar et al.'s online video series of the same name. Understood as a pejorative term, "yacht rock" referred, in part, to a stereotypical yuppie yacht owner enjoying smooth music while sailing. Many "yacht rockers" included nautical references in their lyrics, videos and album artwork, exemplified by Christopher Cross's anthemic track, "Sailing" (1979). Long mocked for "its saccharine sincerity and garish fashion", the original stigma attached to the music has lessened since about 2015.


title: Yacht rock

text: The "exhilaration of escape" is "essential to yacht", according to journalist and documentary-film maker Katie Puckrik. She quoted the lyrics of Cross's "Ride Like the Wind" (1979), "to make it to the border of Mexico", as an example of the aspirational longing that demonstrates "the power of the genre". Thwarted desire is another key element that counters the "feelgood bounce" of yacht in the same song. Puckrik identified a sub-genre, "dark yacht", exemplified in Joni Mitchell's "accidental yacht rock" song "The Hissing of the Summer Lawns" (1975), which described the "tarnished love" of "a woman trapped in a big house and a loveless marriage".


title: Yacht rock

text: According to Mara Schwartz Kuge, who worked in the L.A. music industry for two decades, "Soft rock was a genre of very popular pop music from the '70s and early '80s, characterized by soft, mostly acoustic guitars and slow-to-mid tempos ... most people have generalized the term to mean anything kind of soft-and-'70s-ish, including artists like Rupert Holmes. Not all yacht rock is soft, either: Toto's 'Hold the Line' and Kenny Loggins' 'Footloose' are both very yacht rock but not soft rock."


title: Yacht rock

text: Comprehensively defining yacht rock remains difficult, despite agreement that its central elements are "aspirational but not luxurious, jaunty but lonely, pained but polished". Journalist Jack Seale stated that, as in other "micro-genres", certain albums of artists who are accepted as proponents are "arbitrarily ruled in or out". For example, Michael Jackson's "Thriller" (1982) is accepted as yacht rock, but Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" (1977) is not.


title: Yacht rock

text: "Yacht Rock" web series co-creators Ryznar, Steve Huey, Hunter Stair, and David Lyons have attempted to apply precision to what is defined as yacht rock, and have been critical of overly expansive definitions of the term. In 2016 they invented the term "nyacht rock" to refer to songs that have sometimes been classified as yacht rock but that they felt did not fit the definition. On their podcasts "Beyond Yacht Rock" and "Yacht or Nyacht?", they have ranked various songs as being either within or outside of the genre.


title: Yacht rock

text: Ryznar and co. have argued that many artists sometimes associated with yacht rock, particularly the folk-driven soft rock of Gordon Lightfoot and the Eagles, fall outside the scope of the term as originally conceived. They have also disputed the use of the term as an umbrella for any song whose lyrics include nautical references.


title: Yacht rock

text: The socio-political and economic changes that contributed to the emergence of the genre have recently been described by journalists like Steven Orlofsky, and by documentary-film maker Katie Puckrik. Orlofsky pointed out that some contemporaneous pop groups such as Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan and Supertramp were well-respected by critics and listeners. Yacht rock was art "untouched by the outside world." By contrast to what followed, this "was probably the last major era of pop music wholly separated from the politics of its day." Yacht rock represented an "introspective individualism" that emerged after the death of the "mass-movement idealism" of the 1960s. Its "reassuringly vague escapism" was boosted by the rise of FM radio which brought together two consequences of gender emancipation: women who controlled household spending and men who "felt freer to convey their emotions in song".


title: Yacht rock

text: The roots of yacht rock can be traced to the music of the Beach Boys, whose aesthetic was the first to be "scavenged" by acts like Rupert Holmes, according to "Jacobin"s Dan O'Sullivan. Captain & Tennille, who were members of the Beach Boys' live band, won "yacht rock's first Best Record Grammy" in 1975, for "Love Will Keep Us Together," a song that composer Neil Sedaka acknowledged was inspired in part by a Beach Boys riff. O'Sullivan also cites the Beach Boys' recording of "Sloop John B" (1966) as the origin of yacht rock's predilection for the "sailors and beachgoers" aesthetic that was "lifted by everyone, from Christopher Cross to Eric Carmen, from 'Buffalo Springfield' folksters like Jim Messina to 'Philly Sound' rockers like Hall & Oates."


title: Yacht rock

text: Some of the most popular yacht rock acts (who also collaborated on each other's records) included Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan and Toto.


title: Yacht rock

text: Recent positive reappraisals of the genre have appeared in "The Guardian," "The Week," and on BBC Four, which broadcast Puckrik's two-part documentary, "I Can Go for That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock", in June 2019. (That documentary is a play on the 1981 Hall & Oates song "I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)".)


title: Yacht rock

text: Orlofsky has argued that the genre's resurgence is partly due to its function as an antidote to the negativity of the Trump era in the US just as in its original context, when yacht rock created "the perfect soundtrack for listeners trying to ignore Watergate and Vietnam", it now again represents "a defiant, fingers-planted-firmly-within-ears disregard of any and all political unrest."


title: Yacht rock

text: New yacht rock bands such as Young Gun Silver Fox have garnered popularity and media recognition in recent years. Glide Magazine describes Young Gun Silver Fox's album "AM Waves" as having "its brand of 70’s SoCal-infused pop rock" and compares it to the likes of other yacht rock bands such as Ambrosia and the Doobie Brothers. S. Victor Aaron of Something Else! Reviews described their "Rolling Back" album as "as another fine example of the neo-yacht rock that YGSF has absolutely mastered." While Something Else! Reviews consider Young Gun Silver Fox to fall under the category of "neo-yacht rock", Talia Woodridge of Spill Magazine classifies Young Gun Silver as a yacht rock band.


title: Yacht rock

text: After the term "yacht rock" was popularized by the web series of the same name, yacht rock has garnered negative academic and critical reception reasons such as its lack of deep political messaging within its lyrics.


title: Yacht rock

text: A 2012 "Jacobin" article described yacht rock as "endlessly banal, melodic and inoffensive, fit to be piped into Macy's changing rooms". The article describes the popularization of Yacht rock over alternative genres of music as reflective of a regressive Reagan-era American society and "about the garden of nightmares America had become". According to the Jacobin article, Yacht rock was a music genre that attempted to act as "an escape from blunt truths" as opposed to engaging with the sociopolitical issues prevalent in the Reagan era. Johnny Black shared a similar sentiment of yacht rock lacking in any profound lyrical content in a "100.9 The Eagle" article by stating that yacht rock was a genre defined by "too much production, over-processed vocals, and non-threatening lyrics". In an article by the New Inquiry, music scholar J. Temperance stated that yacht rock "sterilized the form of its soul and blues elements and instead emphasized disinterested, intentionally trite lyrical themes". In a Udiscovermusic article, Paul Sexton expressed how yacht rock as a genre seemed to "exude privileged opulence: of days in expensive recording studios followed by hedonistic trips on private yachts." According to writer Max McKenna in a 2018 "Popmatters" article that the lack of political messaging in the yacht rock genre is a "conservative gesture(s) flying under the radar in a climate of poptimist reappraisal."


title: Yacht rock

text: Independent music scholar J. Temperance wrote an article in "the New Inquiry" as a response to the 2012 "Jacobin" article criticizing the lack of profound lyrical substance in most of the yacht rock genre. According to the "New Inquiry" article, yacht rock was essential to the growth of pop music in a time of "cultural darkness" and "serving as a dialectical pole to progressive rock as well as to punk, postpunk and even proto-postpunk, spurring drastic retrenchments". J. Temperance attributed the "smooth" sound that is characteristic of yacht rock to an indifferent approach to capitalist culture and a "regressive tolerance of allegedly transgressive music with a truly liberatory anality" by using existing symbols rather than create new anti-establishment symbols that are eventually added into the establishment symbols. The "New Inquiry" article describes the role of yacht rock as a genre that would help the people differentiate music appreciation from status by using common symbols and "rendering the popular into the smooth."


title: Yacht rock

text: Racial criticism has also been prevalent for yacht rock with the genre's associations with "the revival of white rock forms" as writer Max McKenna stated in the 2018 "Popmatters" article. Wesley Morris compares in a New York Times op-ed piece the recognition given to black artists and white artists that possess the "absurd" quality of blackness in their music. Due to its perceived lack of political involvement and borrowed elements from black music genres, yacht rock has garnered the perception of racial ignorance amongst certain critics of the genre. The "Jacobin" article described Michael McDonald, a musician well known within the genre of yacht rock, as a "bleached, blue-eyed soul cracker".


title: Yacht rock

text: Yacht rock is listed as a genre on Spotify, Amazon Music, AccuRadio, and Pandora. Since 2015, there has been a "Yacht Rock" channel on Sirius XM Satellite Radio. The channel reverts to the off-season channel after summer, but is available year-round on the SXM app. iHeartRadio also has a dedicated "Yacht Rock Radio" station that airs this format 24/7 on its website and app.


title: Yacht rock

text: Twenty-first century musicians have formed cover bands centered on the yacht rock idea, such as Yacht Rock Revue, which has done national tours. The band hosts an annual Yacht Rock Revival concert where they invite members of the original bands that they cover to join them on stage for a few songs, including Walter Egan, Robbie Dupree, Peter Beckett (Player), Bobby Kimball (former lead singer of Toto), Jeff Carlisi (.38 Special), Bill Champlin (Chicago), and Denny Laine (Wings).


title: Yacht rock

text: In 2018, Jawbone Press released "The Yacht Rock Book: The Oral History of the Soft, Smooth Sounds of the 70s and 80s" by author Greg Prato, which explored the entire history of the genre. The book featured a foreword by Fred Armisen, and interviews with Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, and John Oates, among others.


title: Yacht rock

text: Yacht rock bears strong similarities to the Japanese genre of city pop in that they both peaked in the early 1980s, featured jazz and R&B influences arranged and produced by elites in their fields, and gained newfound popularity in the 2010s through the Internet. The link between city pop and yacht rock was made explicit in 1984 when Tatsuro Yamashita, one of Japan's most influential city pop artists and producers, traveled to California to record the album "Big Wave", a mix of Beach Boys covers and original English-language compositions written in collaboration with Alan O'Day.


title: Yacht rock

text: Yacht rock had some influence on the creation of progressive rock, punk rock, postpunk, and proto-postpunk.


title: Yacht rock

text: Elements of yacht rock have been adopted by new acts such as Vampire Weekend, Foxygen, and Carly Rae Jepsen while the vaporwave genre of electronic music, which began in the 2010s, appropriated the "nautical iconography" of yacht rock.


title: Yacht rock

text: The 2017 album by Thundercat, "Drunk", featured a song that included guest vocalists Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, entitled "Show You the Way" (all performed the song together on an episode of "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" the same year).


title: Yacht rock

text: The band Sugar Ray's 2019 album "Little Yachty" is a conscious homage to yacht rock; it includes a cover of the 1979 Rupert Holmes song "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)", which lead singer Mark McGrath has called "the torch bearer of all things yacht rock".


title: Baritone

text: A baritone is a type of classical male singing voice whose vocal range lies between the bass and the tenor voice-types. The term originates from the Greek (), meaning "heavy sounding". Composers typically write music for this voice in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C (i.e. F–F) in choral music, and from the second A below middle C to the A above middle C (A to A) in operatic music, but the range can extend at either end. Subtypes of baritone include the baryton-Martin baritone (light baritone), lyric baritone, "Kavalierbariton", Verdi baritone, dramatic baritone, "baryton-noble" baritone, and the bass-baritone.


title: Baritone

text: The first use of the term "baritone" emerged as "baritonans", late in the 15th century, usually in French sacred polyphonic music. At this early stage it was frequently used as the lowest of the voices (including the bass), but in 17th-century Italy the term was all-encompassing and used to describe the average male choral voice.


title: Baritone

text: Baritones took roughly the range as it is known today at the beginning of the 18th century, but they were still lumped in with their bass colleagues until well into the 19th century. Many operatic works of the 18th century have roles marked as bass that in reality are low baritone roles (or bass-baritone parts in modern parlance). Examples of this are to be found, for instance, in the operas and oratorios of George Frideric Handel. The greatest and most enduring parts for baritones in 18th-century operatic music were composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. They include Count Almaviva in "The Marriage of Figaro", Guglielmo in "Così fan tutte", Papageno in "The Magic Flute" and the lead in "Don Giovanni".


title: Baritone

text: In theatrical documents, cast lists, and journalistic dispatches that from the beginning of the 19th century till the mid 1820s, the terms "primo basso", "basse chantante", and "basse-taille" were often used for men who would later be called baritones. These included the likes of Filippo Galli, Giovanni Inchindi, and Henri-Bernard Dabadie. The basse-taille and the proper bass were commonly confused because their roles were sometimes sung by singers of either actual voice part.


title: Baritone

text: The bel canto style of vocalism which arose in Italy in the early 19th century supplanted the castrato-dominated "opera seria" of the previous century. It led to the baritone being viewed as a separate voice category from the bass. Traditionally, basses in operas had been cast as authority figures such as a king or high priest; but with the advent of the more fluid baritone voice, the roles allotted by composers to lower male voices expanded in the direction of trusted companions or even romantic leads—normally the province of tenors. More often than not, however, baritones found themselves portraying villains.


title: Baritone

text: The prolific operas of these composers, plus the works of Verdi's maturity, such as "Un ballo in maschera", "La forza del destino", "Don Carlos"/"Don Carlo", the revised "Simon Boccanegra", "Aida", "Otello" and "Falstaff", blazed many new and rewarding performance pathways for baritones.


title: Baritone

text: Figaro in "Il barbiere" is often called the first true baritone role. However, Donizetti and Verdi in their vocal writing went on to emphasize the top fifth of the baritone voice, rather than its lower notes—thus generating a more brilliant sound. Further pathways opened up when the musically complex and physically demanding operas of Richard Wagner began to enter the mainstream repertory of the world's opera houses during the second half of the 19th century.


title: Baritone

text: The major international baritone of the first half of the 19th century was the Italian Antonio Tamburini (1800–1876). He was a famous Don Giovanni in Mozart's eponymous opera as well as being a Bellini and Donizetti specialist. Commentators praised his voice for its beauty, flexibility and smooth tonal emission, which are the hallmarks of a bel canto singer. Tamburini's range, however, was probably closer to that of a bass-baritone than to that of a modern "Verdi baritone". His French equivalent was Henri-Bernard Dabadie, who was a mainstay of the Paris Opera between 1819 and 1836 and the creator of several major Rossinian baritone roles, including Guillaume Tell. Dabadie sang in Italy, too, where he originated the role of Belcore in "L'elisir d'amore" in 1832.


title: Baritone

text: Among the non-Italian born baritones that were active in the third quarter of the 19th century, Tamburini's mantle as an outstanding exponent of Mozart and Donizetti's music was probably taken up most faithfully by a Belgian, Camille Everardi, who later settled in Russia and taught voice. In France, Paul Barroilhet succeeded Dabadie as the Paris opera's best known baritone. Like Dabadie, he also sang in Italy and created an important Donizetti role: in his case, Alphonse in "La favorite" (in 1840).


title: Baritone

text: Luckily, the gramophone was invented early enough to capture on disc the voices of the top Italian Verdi and Donizetti baritones of the last two decades of the 19th century, whose operatic performances were characterized by considerable re-creative freedom and a high degree of technical finish. They included Mattia Battistini (known as the "King of Baritones"), Giuseppe Kaschmann (born Josip Kašman) who, atypically, sang Wagner's Telramund and Amfortas not in Italian but in German, at the Bayreuth Festival in the 1890s; Giuseppe Campanari; Antonio Magini-Coletti; Mario Ancona (chosen to be the first Silvio in "Pagliacci"); and Antonio Scotti, who came to the Met from Europe in 1899 and remained on the roster of singers until 1933. Antonio Pini-Corsi was the standout Italian "buffo" baritone in the period between about 1880 and World War I, reveling in comic opera roles by Rossini, Donizetti and Paer, among others. In 1893, he created the part of Ford in Verdi's last opera, "Falstaff".


title: Baritone

text: Notable among their contemporaries were the cultured and technically adroit French baritones Jean Lassalle (hailed as the most accomplished baritone of his generation), Victor Maurel (the creator of Verdi's Iago, Falstaff and Tonio in Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci"), Paul Lhérie (the first Posa in the revised, Italian-language version of "Don Carlos"), and Maurice Renaud (a singing actor of the first magnitude). Lassalle, Maurel and Renaud enjoyed superlative careers on either side of the Atlantic and left a valuable legacy of recordings. Five other significant Francophone baritones who recorded, too, during the early days of the gramophone/phonograph were Léon Melchissédec and Jean Noté of the Paris Opera and Gabriel Soulacroix, Henry Albers and Charles Gilibert of the Opéra-Comique. The Quaker baritone David Bispham, who sang in London and New York between 1891 and 1903, was the leading American male singer of this generation. He also recorded for the gramophone.


title: Baritone

text: The oldest-born star baritone known for sure to have made solo gramophone discs was the Englishman Sir Charles Santley (1834–1922). Santley made his operatic debut in Italy in 1858 and became one of Covent Garden's leading singers. He was still giving critically acclaimed concerts in London in the 1890s. The composer of "Faust", Charles Gounod, wrote Valentine's aria "Even bravest heart" for him at his request for the London production in 1864 so that the leading baritone would have an aria. A couple of primitive cylinder recordings dating from about 1900 have been attributed by collectors to the dominant French baritone of the 1860s and 1870s, Jean-Baptiste Faure (1830–1914), the creator of Posa in Verdi's original French-language version of "Don Carlos". It is doubtful, however, that Faure (who retired in 1886) made the cylinders. However, a contemporary of Faure's, Antonio Cotogni, (1831–1918)—probably the foremost Italian baritone of his generation—can be heard, briefly and dimly, at the age of 77, on a duet recording with the tenor Francesco Marconi. (Cotogni and Marconi had sung together in the first London performance of Amilcare Ponchielli's "La Gioconda" in 1883, performing the roles of Barnaba and Enzo respectively.)


title: Baritone

text: Above reference has been made to bass-baritone, modern "Verdi baritone," Donizetti, and Francophone (though it is uncertain if the editor meant that as merely a nationality or as a subtype). There are 19th-century references in the musical literature to certain baritone subtypes. These include the light and tenorish baryton-Martin, named after French singer Jean-Blaise Martin (1768/69–1837), and the deeper, more powerful Heldenbariton (today's bass-baritone) of Wagnerian opera.


title: Baritone

text: Perhaps the most accomplished "Heldenbaritons" of Wagner's day were August Kindermann, Franz Betz and Theodor Reichmann. Betz created Hans Sachs in "Die Meistersinger "and undertook Wotan in the first "Der Ring des Nibelungen" cycle at Bayreuth, while Reichmann created Amfortas in "Parsifal", also at Bayreuth. Lyric German baritones sang lighter Wagnerian roles such as Wolfram in "Tannhäuser", Kurwenal in "Tristan und Isolde "or Telramund in "Lohengrin". They made large strides, too, in the performance of art song and oratorio, with Franz Schubert favouring several baritones for his vocal music, in particular Johann Michael Vogl.


title: Baritone

text: Nineteenth-century operettas became the preserve of lightweight baritone voices. They were given comic parts in the tradition of the previous century's comic bass by Gilbert and Sullivan in many of their productions. This did not prevent the French master of operetta, Jacques Offenbach, from assigning the villain's role in "The Tales of Hoffmann "to a big-voiced baritone for the sake of dramatic effect. Other 19th-century French composers like Meyerbeer, Hector Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet and Jules Massenet wrote attractive parts for baritones, too. These included Nelusko in "L'Africaine" (Meyerbeer's last opera), Mephistopheles in "La damnation de Faust "(a role also sung by basses), the Priest of Dagon in "Samson and Delilah", Escamillo in "Carmen", Zurga in "Les pêcheurs de perles", Lescaut in "Manon", Athanael in "Thaïs "and Herod in "Hérodiade". Russian composers included substantial baritone parts in their operas. Witness the title roles in Peter Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin "(which received its first production in 1879) and Alexander Borodin's "Prince Igor "(1890).


title: Baritone

text: Mozart continued to be sung throughout the 19th century although, generally speaking, his operas were not revered to the same extent that they are today by music critics and audiences. Back then, baritones rather than high basses normally sang Don Giovanni – arguably Mozart's greatest male operatic creation. Famous Dons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries included Scotti and Maurel, as well as Portugal's Francisco De Andrade and Sweden's John Forsell.


title: Baritone

text: The verismo baritone, Verdi baritone, and other subtypes are mentioned below, though not necessarily in 19th-century context.


title: Baritone

text: The dawn of the 20th century opened up more opportunities for baritones than ever before as a taste for strenuously exciting vocalism and lurid, "slice-of-life" operatic plots took hold in Italy and spread elsewhere. The most prominent verismo baritones included such major singers in Europe and America as the polished Giuseppe De Luca (the first Sharpless in "Madama Butterfly"), Mario Sammarco (the first Gerard in "Andrea Chénier"), Eugenio Giraldoni (the first Scarpia in "Tosca"), Pasquale Amato (the first Rance in "La fanciulla del West"), Riccardo Stracciari (noted for his richly attractive timbre) and Domenico Viglione Borghese, whose voice was exceeded in size only by that of the lion-voiced Titta Ruffo. Ruffo was the most commanding Italian baritone of his era or, arguably, any other era. He was at his prime from the early 1900s to the early 1920s and enjoyed success in Italy, England and America (in Chicago and later at the Met).


title: Baritone

text: The chief verismo composers were Giacomo Puccini, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, Alberto Franchetti, Umberto Giordano and Francesco Cilea. Verdi's works continued to remain popular, however, with audiences in Italy, the Spanish-speaking countries, the United States and the United Kingdom, and in Germany, where there was a major Verdi revival in Berlin between the wars.


title: Baritone

text: Outside the field of Italian opera, an important addition to the Austro-German repertory occurred in 1905. This was the premiere of Richard Strauss's "Salome", with the pivotal part of John the Baptist assigned to a baritone. (The enormous-voiced Dutch baritone Anton van Rooy, a Wagner specialist, sang John when the opera reached the Met in 1907). Then, in 1925, Germany's Leo Schützendorf created the title baritone role in Alban Berg's harrowing "Wozzeck". In a separate development, the French composer Claude Debussy's post-Wagnerian masterpiece "Pelléas et Mélisande" featured not one but two lead baritones at its 1902 premiere. These two baritones, Jean Périer and Hector Dufranne, possessed contrasting voices. (Dufranne – sometimes classed as a bass-baritone – had a darker, more powerful instrument than did Périer, who was a true baryton-Martin.)


title: Baritone

text: Characteristic of the Wagnerian baritones of the 20th century was a general progression of individual singers from higher-lying baritone parts to lower-pitched ones. This was the case with Germany's Hans Hotter. Hotter made his debut in 1929. As a young singer he appeared in Verdi and created the Commandant in Richard Strauss's "Friedenstag "and Olivier in "Capriccio". By the 1950s, however, he was being hailed as the top Wagnerian bass-baritone in the world. His Wotan was especially praised by critics for its musicianship. Other major Wagnerian baritones have included Hotter's predecessors Leopold Demuth, Anton van Rooy, Hermann Weil, Clarence Whitehill, Friedrich Schorr, Rudolf Bockelmann and Hans-Hermann Nissen. Demuth, van Rooy, Weil and Whitehill were at their peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries while Schorr, Bockelmann and Nissen were stars of the 1920s and 1930s.


title: Baritone

text: In addition to their heavyweight Wagnerian cousins, there was a plethora of baritones with more lyrical voices active in Germany and Austria during the period between the outbreak of WW1 in 1914 and the end of WW2 in 1945. Among them were , Heinrich Schlusnus, Herbert Janssen, Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender, Karl Schmitt-Walter and Gerhard Hüsch. Their abundant inter-war Italian counterparts included, among others, Carlo Galeffi, Giuseppe Danise, Enrico Molinari, Umberto Urbano, Cesare Formichi, Luigi Montesanto, Apollo Granforte, Benvenuto Franci, Renato Zanelli (who switched to tenor roles in 1924), Mario Basiola, Giovanni Inghilleri, Carlo Morelli (the Chilean-born younger brother of Renato Zanelli) and Carlo Tagliabue, who retired as late as 1958.


title: Baritone

text: One of the best known Italian Verdi baritones of the 1920s and 1930s, Mariano Stabile, sang Iago and Rigoletto and Falstaff (at La Scala) under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. Stabile also appeared in London, Chicago and Salzburg. He was noted more for his histrionic skills than for his voice, however. Stabile was followed by Tito Gobbi, a versatile singing actor capable of vivid comic and tragic performances during the years of his prime in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. He learned more than 100 roles in his lifetime and was mostly known for his roles in Verdi and Puccini operas, including appearances as Scarpia opposite soprano Maria Callas as Tosca at Covent Garden.


title: Baritone

text: Gobbi's competitors included Gino Bechi, Giuseppe Valdengo, Paolo Silveri, Giuseppe Taddei, Ettore Bastianini, Cesare Bardelli and Giangiacomo Guelfi. Another of Gobbi's contemporaries was the Welshman Geraint Evans, who famously sang Falstaff at Glyndebourne and created the roles of Mr. Flint and Mountjoy in works by Benjamin Britten. Some considered his best role to have been Wozzeck. The next significant Welsh baritone was Bryn Terfel. He made his premiere at Glyndebourne in 1990 and went on to build an international career as Falstaff and, more generally, in the operas of Mozart and Wagner.


title: Baritone

text: Perhaps the first famous American baritone appeared in the 1900s. It was the American-born but Paris-based Charles W. Clark who sang Italian, French and German composers. An outstanding group of virile-voiced American baritones appeared then in the 1920s. The younger members of this group were still active as recently as the late 1970s. Outstanding among its members were the Met-based Verdians Lawrence Tibbett (a compelling, rich-voiced singing actor), Richard Bonelli, John Charles Thomas, Robert Weede, Leonard Warren and Robert Merrill. They sang French opera, too, as did the American-born but also Paris-based baritone of the 1920s, and 1930s Arthur Endreze.


title: Baritone

text: Also to be found singing Verdi roles at the Met, Covent Garden and the Vienna Opera during the late 1930s and the 1940s was the big-voiced Hungarian baritone, Sandor (Alexander) Sved.


title: Baritone

text: The leading Verdi baritones of the 1970s and 1980s were probably Italy's Renato Bruson and Piero Cappuccilli, America's Sherrill Milnes, Sweden's Ingvar Wixell and the Romanian baritone Nicolae Herlea. At the same time, Britain's Sir Thomas Allen was considered to be the most versatile baritone of his generation in regards to repertoire, which ranged from Mozart to Verdi and lighter Wagner roles, through French and Russian opera, to modern English music. Another British baritone, Norman Bailey, established himself internationally as a memorable Wotan and Hans Sachs. However, he had a distinguished, brighter-voiced Wagnerian rival during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in the person of Thomas Stewart of America. Other notable post-War Wagnerian baritones have been Canada's George London, Germany's Hermann Uhde and, more recently, America's James Morris.