About Me

Au claire de lal lune, mon ami pierrot... Prete-moi ta plume pur ecrire un mot... Ma chandelle est morte.. je n'ai plus de feu, ouvre-moi ta porte pour l'amour de dieu..... Salut Mon vieux! Haha... Lost in translation..... Whatever... Everyone else has a web site, so I figured, why not me too? On this site I'll describe myself and share my interests and ideas.

----------------------------------------------
Tale as old as time
True as it can be
Barely even friends
Than somebody bends
Unexpectedly
Just a little change
Small, to say the least
Both a little scared
Neither one prepared
Beauty and the Beast
Ever just the same
Ever a surprise
Ever as before
Ever just as sure
As the sun will arise
Tale as old as time
Tune as old as song
Bittersweet and strange
Finding you can change
Learning you were wrong
Certain as the sun
Rising in the east
Tale as old as time
Song as old as rhyme
Beauty and the beast

: ..eleborated from the pic on the right
----------------------------------------------

Mmm... Segmen ade relevent ngan this tacky webpage... some pieces here and there..

Tomaso Albinoni (b Venice, 1671; d 1751) A wealthy amateur hose output, notably of operas and concerti grossi, was vast.

Johann Sebastian Bach (b Eisenach, 1685; d 1750) Organist and composer of cantata, oratorio and keyboard music. In his own lifetime, he lacked the acclaim, as the greatest of composers, that he has received over the last century or more. He was buried in an unmarked grave, whose location was not established until 1894.

Bela Bartok (b Nagyszentmiklois, Hungary, 1881; d 1945) Composer whose works acquired a national style. Later however his output wa conspicuously atonal and dissonant. He died dillusioned by the disintegration, in recent decades of his native land.

Ludwig van Beethoven (b Bonn, 1770; d 1827) Born in poverty, the offspring of alcoholics. He had little education and found it hard to express himself verbally.

Alban Berg (b Vienna, 1885; d 1935) A pupil of Schoenberg, whose influece appears in the atonal quality of many works.

Hector Berlioz (b near Grenoble, 1803; d 1869) Innovative in his orchestration.

Pierre Boulez (b Montbrizon, France 1925) As an orchestral conductor he had ad extensive career.

Johannes Brahms (b Hamburg, 1833; d 1897) I an era of romantic tastes, his orchestral music remained predominantly classical.

Benjamin Britten (b Lowestoft 1913; d 1976) He studied under Frank Bridge and John Ireland.

Anton Bruckner (b Ansfelden, Upper Austria, 1824;d 1896) Composer of choral works and symphonies, largely informed by a profound religious sence.

William Byrd (b Lincolnshire 1543; d 1623) His religious pieces, written for Catholic and Protestant Churches.

Frederic Frncois Chopin (b Zelazowa Wola, Poland 1810; d 1849) Pianist and composer, who wrote many pieces intended to show off technique inperformance.

Aaron Copland (b Brooklyn, 1900; d 1992) Pianist, lectrer, and conductr.

Arcangelo Corelli (b Fusignano, Italy, 1653; d 1713) As a violinist he had a huge influence on subsequent musicians.

Francois Couperin (b Paris, 1668; d 1733) A court musician in the service of Louis XIV, and member of a celebrated family.

Peter Maxwell Davies (b Manchester 1934) His rage as an experimental composer is large, and since 1970 has been influenced by the land-and-seascapes around his home in the Orkney islands.

Claude Debussy (b St Germain-en-Laye, 1862; d 1918) Composer of fragmentary melody and unconstrained rhythms in pieces.

Frederick Delius (b Bradford, Yorkshire, 1862; d 1934) The son of a Prussian industrialist, he is mostly known for his orchestral tone poems, though his work also includes pieces for full orchestra, concertosand operas.

John Dowland (b London(?), 1563; d 1626) author of several books of cmpositions for the lute.

Edward Elgar (b Broadheath near Worcester, 1857;d 1934). Only in 1899 with the Enigma Variations, did he achieve wide recognition,

Gabriel Faure (b Pamiers, Ariege, 1846; d 1924) A pupil of Saint-Saens; composer of music for the theatre.

George Gershwin (b New York 1898; d 1937) Born into a family of Russian immigrants taht included his Brother Ira, the song lyricist, with whom he had a life-long collaboration.

Orlando Gibbons (b Oxford, 1583; d 1625) for he second half of his life he was organist of the Chapel Royal and also, from 1623, at Westminster Abbey.

Christoph Willibald von Gluck (b Erasbach, Bavaria, 1714;d 1787) Performer on cello, violin and keyboardinstruments.

Edvard Grieg (b Bergen, 1843; d d1907) Born into an accomplished musical family with scottich antecedents; composer of tuneful ochestral works, sonatas and songs.

George Frederic Handel (b Halle, Saxony, 1685; d 1759) He trained in composition and harpichord, oboe, organ and violin despite opposition to a musical career from his father, a barber-sourgen.
Franz Joseph Haydn (b Rohrau, Austria, 1723; d 1809) Composer who established the form of the string quartr and had much influence on the development of the symphony.

Gustav Holst (b Cheltenham, 1874; d 1934) He came from a musical family of Swedish decent, and studied at the Royal College of Musia., where his classmate Vaughan Williams became a life-long friend.

Charles Ives (b Danbury CT 1874;d 1954) His involvement with a successful insurance company, Ives and Myrick, which he founded in 1907, enables him to persue a career in experimental music.

Leos Janacek (b Hukvaldy Moravia, 1854; d 1928) Born into a family of fourteen children he faced a steep climb out of poverty in his early years.

Franz Liszt (b Raiding Hungary, 1811; d 1886) piano virtuoso and composer of much music for the piano aong with concertos and the first symphonic poems.

Jean-Baptiste Lully (b Floence. 1632; d 1687) A dancer as well as musician, Lully enjyed he patronage og Louis XIV, for hom in collboration with Moliere, he wrote a number of ballets.

Gustav Mahler (b Kaliste, Bohemia, 1860; d 1911) Composer of log symphonic works using idiosyncratic orchestral resources.

Felix Mendelsshon-Bartholdy (b Hamburg, 1809; d 1847) The form of his music is classical; its spirit is expressvely lyrical. He was recognised early as a major omposer, in 1826 with works including the Midsummer Night's Dream overture. In 1843 he founded the Liepzig Conservatory.

Olivier Messiaen (b Avignon, 1908; d 1992) A strongly felt Chatolicism is the basis for much of his work whose inspirations include Gregorian chant and bird song; it also features electronic music and inventive use of percussion.

Caudio Monteverdi (b Cremona, 1567; d 1643) He has a prosperous career, largely as a writer of madrigals, but with unexpected setbacks.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (b Salzburg 1756; d 1791) As a harpsichordist and comoser, a child prodigy who wrote his first - and already Morzatian-sounding - symphony at eight years old.

Niccolo Paganini (b Genoa 1782; d 1840) An early virtuoso on violin for which instrument he wrote several works.

Giovanni Palestrina (b Palestrina, c1525; d 16594) Composer of some madrigals and much church music, distinguished for its flowing choral melodies.

Sergey Prokofiev (b Sontsovka, Ukraine, 1891; d 1953) Pianist, conductuor and composer of works including bllets, film scores, and operas; his early music in particular was dissonant but nonetheless melodic.

Giacomo Puccini (b Lucca, 1858;d 1924) A major contributer to operatic repertoire world-wide, as the composer of melodic works with a strong dramatic narrative.

Henry Purcell (b London, 1659;d 1695) Known mainly for his theatre music and opera, in which he anticipated Handel. From 1679 he was organist at Westminster Abbey. He wrote prolifically and was recongnised during his tragically shortened life as the first among English composers of his time.

Sergei Rachmaninov (b Oneg, near Novgorod, 1873; d 1943) Pianist and composer, whose music is romantic and emotive in style. Having freed himself from depression and poverty, he gained international success.

Maurice Ravel (b Ciboure 1875.d 1937) A composer of orchestral music both lyrical and strongly rhythmic.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (b Tikhvin, 1844;d 1908) While he was at the Naval College in St Petersburg he was intoduced by his piano teacher to Balakirev and together with fellow composers Borodin and Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov became part of the group known as 'The Five'.

Gioachino Rossini (b Pesaro, Italy, 1792; d 1868) Known mainly as a composer of opera, he also wrote church music, piece for piano, and songs.

Eric Satie (b Honfleur, 1866; d 1925) Witty and modernist; largely specialising in peces for the piano.

Arnold Schoenberg (b Vienna 1874; d 1951) His twelve-tone technique of atonal composition had a permanat effect on western forms of composition. He had little formal training in music, though a a child he was thought several instruments. After WW1, opposition to his wrk began t be replaced by success.

Franz Schubert (b Vienna, 1797; d 1828) He is best known for his piano works and hia many song settings. Early succrss favoured him, but he became ill with syphilis and was killed a few years later by typhoid.

Robert Schumann (b Zwickau, 1810; d 1856) Pianist, composer and conductor, whose career as a perfomer ended in 1832 when his right hand became crippled. It was partly this that redirected him toward composing.

Dmitri Shostakovich (b St Petersburg, 1906; d 1975) Opera, ballet and film music were all part of his oeuve; but most of all he is known for his symphonies celebrating the best and the most terrible of current Soviet history.

Jean Sibelius (b Hameenlinna Finlad, 1865; d 1957) Following early success as a composer he enjoysd an international career. His music shows the powerful effect of Finnish mythology.

Bedrich Smetana (b Litomysl 1824; d 1884) Founder of a patriotic movement within Czech music through works that drew much from national folk rhythms; the upheavals of 1848 helped lighten his patriotic fervour. A disorganised life, including deafness, from 1874, did not prevent him from composing He died of syphilis.

Johann Strauss (b Vienna 1825; d 1899) The 'Waltz King' of Vienna came from an extensive family of perforers and composers.

Richard Strausess (b Munich, 1864; d 1949) His earlier work, in a career featuring song, ballets, operas and symphonic poems, tended toward grandiloquence; later they become more intimate.

Igor Stravinsky (b Oranienbaum, near St Petersburg, 1882; d 1971) Famously composer of the music for Diaghilev's Rite of Spring (1913), whose first night provoked a riot. After the October Revolution of 1917 he lived in exile, returning to Russia only once; on a visit forty-eight years later.

Thomas Tallis (b London(?); d 1518) Organist, and composer of Latin masses pieces for keyboard and motets such as the ingenious Spem in alium for forthy-part choir. From 1543 he remained a Gentleman of the chapel Royal, through some formidable changes of regime.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (b Kamsko-Votkinsk, 1840; d 1893) Whether reflective or exulant his Russian-accented music was direct and powerful.

George Phillip Telemann (b Magdeburg 1681; d 1767) Deploying all the styles of his time, he was enormously prolific: his works include forty operas and six hundred overtures.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (b Down Ampney Gloucestershire, 1872; d 1958) His music, which included symhonies operas, choral works ad orchestral pieces, carried a great feelig for the English countryside. A private income allowed him a lot of time for researching folk music, and much of his last three decades were spent on composing.

Giuseppi Verdi (b Le Roncole 1813; d 1901) Mainly a composer of operas, although he did devote five years, from 1860, to the parliament of the newly united Italy. In his later operas, the musical themes are increasinglybased on character and action.

Antonio Vivaldi (b Venice, 1676; d 1741) His hair gained him the nicnickname 'the red priest'; it seems, though that he took his priesthood lightly. He wrote church music, oratorious and operas, but is est known for the concerto The Four Seasons, written for the founding hospital for girls in Venice.

Richard Wagner (b Leipzig, 1813; d 1883) Opera, to him combined all the arts; for his four-opera masterwork The Ring he rote his own libretti and oversaw every aspect of production. His life, surprising in its antisemetism given his Jewish ancestry, was disorganised and featured escape attemps from debtors, from political persecution, and from sexual scandal.

Kurt Weill (b Dessau, 18900; d 1950) Jazz was an influence on his orchestral work; he also wrote musicals and theatre pieces. He colloborated to formidable effect with Bertolt Brecht; but after Hitler came to power his mucis was banned in Germany. He lived a life of hardship and exile from 1933, until achieving success.

----------------------------------------------
Segmen saje-saje... sekadar halwa di telinga...
Some important twentieth-cetury architects

Alvar Aalto (1898-1976), Finnish, is one of the founding fathers of modern architecture. His buildings, such as the Paimio Sanatorium in Finland, are uncompromisingly modern in their use of concrete and machine-made components, yet beautifully detailed and sensitive to natural forms.

Ove arup (1895-1988), Danish engineer who pioneered methods of using concrete in London in the 1930s. The engineering consultancy he founded is hugely respected and the company is often used in complex structural design.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965), French-Swiss, the city planner and modernist architect of many projects and unrivalled influence. He started off as a cubist painter, and that can be seen in his white, geometrical early buildings, but he became more sculptural as in the famous chapel at Ronchamp. His huge blocks of flats for workers in Marseilles, the Unites d'Habitation, were beautifully made and worked well under the smiting sun of the south of France. Much copied but with less care over execution, they could be pretty grim in other parts of the world.

Charles Eames (1907-78) and Ray Eames (1916-88), an American husband and wife team, made beautiful and comfortable modern houses often with a double height area full of light. They also designed furniture, and the classic Eames chair is still available at a cheeky price.

Norman Foster (b 1935), evangelically futurist and influential British exponent of high-tech ingenuity and elegance. His terminal at Stansted Airport, UK, is much admired but it palls into insignificance compared to the enormous plane-shaped terminal he designed for Chep Lap Kok airpot in China. He also designed the central glass dome for the remodelled Reichstag in Berlin.

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), American inventor and architect, an ebullient exponent of modernism, always tried to use the least material to contain the maximum space- thus his Dymaxion House is very much ahead of it time. It was, however expensive and not easy to live in. He is also associated with the geodesic dome and his evangelism on the subject meant that a class of carbon molecules that show a similar structure are named Fullerenes in his honour.

Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926), Catalan-Spanish, whose designs are famously curvy, decorated and organic as if they had grown rather than been built. His famous cathedral in Barcelona is still being constructed.

Frank Gehry (b 1929), American, an architectural iconoclast who plays with form - especially with wild, swooping roof structure. His remarkable Gunggenheim Museum in Bilbao Spain, clad in titanium, has changed the art of the possible.

Walter Gropius (1883-1969) born in Germany but naturalised American, the grand old man of the Bahaus school. His housing for workers in Siemenstadt, Berlin, was often copied though seldom as well. He became Professor of Architecture at Harvard (1938-52) and designed the Harvard Graduate Center (1949) and the US Embassy in Athens (1960).

Zaha Hadid (b 1951) Iraqi, an exponent of the dynamic, bold and angular, she won a competition to build the Opera House in Cardiff, Wales but her design proved to be too innovative for te men in suits and was blocked. The museum she designed for Cincinnati Ohio, was completed and has been a huge success.

Arne Jacobsen (1902-1988), Danish rationalist architect and furniture designer of the international school. The clean-lined elegance of Danish houses and municipal buildings owes a lot to Jacobsen.

Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), a very English classical architect capable of the domestic and the very grand. He designed much of New Delhi, India, including the Viceroy's House. Dining with King George V on some catering fish, Lutyens is reported to have said: 'Your Majesty, this is the piece of cod that passeth all understanding...'

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1862-1928), Scottich architect and decorative artist who integrated his designs into a coherent art noveau vision. His Glasgow School of Art building is his best known. His furniture designs are still popular.

Oscar Niemeyer (1907), Visionary Brazilian and chief architect of Brasilia, the spectacular but artificial capital city that never quite overcame its social and economic problems.

IM Pei (b 1917) Chinese American , creator of elegant post-modernist archtecture such as the extention to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the glass pyramid and subterranean space for controlling the flow of tourists at the Louvre, Paris. The locals protested vehemently against the latter though it has no become much loved.

Cesar Pelli (b 1926), Argentine, a post-modernist on a grand scale responsible for the huge but blocky Canary Wharf Tower in London's Docklands and also for the gigantic spectecular but undeniably kitch Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Auguste Perret (1874-1954), important french architect of apartment blocks who combined concrete constructios with art nouveau details. He was one of the first to leave concrete structural members exposed as part of the design.

Renzo Piano (b 1937), Italian engineer architect who worked with Richard Rogers on the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Both romantic and high tech, Piaoâ€™s greatest achivement is Kansai Airport, Osaka Bay, Japan, which is constructed on an artificial island.

Richard Rogers (b 1933), British post-modernist high-tech architect. His Lloyd's Building, with its vast internal space and silent escalators, is very innovative and the technique of putting the services outside the shell of the building in order t leave the interior uncluttered has been much followed.

Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), German architect of the Bauhaus who became hugely influential as head of the Illinois Institute of Technology whose campus he designed in the late 30s. The clean lines of his Seagram Building in New York inspired many a monumental corporte HQ.

Eero Saarinen (1910-61), Finnish archiect, of the international school, but less blocky and more expressionistic than others. His TWA terminal at JFK airport is striking.

Skidmore Owings and Merill (SOM), a huge American practice, was founded in 1936 and soon had braches in Chicago San Francisco and New York. It has always eschewed the prima donna in favour of team work. SOM created many skycrapers and slab-sided office blocks (of which the Lever Building in New York is a good example). In 1982 it showed its versetality by designing the Haj Air Terminal in Saudi Arabia usiang a high-tech Arabian tent motif to great effect.

James Stirling (1926-92), internationally famous British architect whose uncompromising approach to form and function was close to Brutalism. His History Faculty building in Cambridge (UK) is characteristic.

Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924), Chicago-based architect who designed the early and revolutionary steel-framed skyscrapers.

Kenzo Tange (b 1913), Japanese architect and town-planner known for his work in Japanee cities in the 1950s. He manage to combine Brutalist Le Corbusier-influenced structures with traditional Japanese elements. He also designed Nigeria's cresent-shaped capital, Abuja.

Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), Russian, abstract painter and designer, was associated with the idea of constructivism. He designed colossal, heroic projects to celebrate the Third Interational (1919); the model was exhibited, but the Monumet was never built.

Jorn Utzon (b 1918), is the Danish architect famous for the Sydney Harbour Opera House, the result of an international competition which he won in 1956. He fell out with the powers that be and left the project in 1966- which may account for why the inside of the building does not quite live up to the excitement of the spectacular shell-shape roof line.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959), influential American architect who introduced a new era of the modern planar look. His Robie House in Chicago with its dramatic flat roof and built-in garage epitomised the modernist times. Ayn Rand was said to have based the hero of her bombastic novel The Fountainhead on Frank Lloyd Wright.

----------------------------------------------

RAMADHAN'S RECIPE...

Favorite Band or Musician: Tempatan and antarabangsa. From Datuk Siti Nurhaliza to Il Divo!
Favorite TV show: ...Wait, I know the answer!
Favorite movie: ...wait too, I know the answer!!
Favorite book: I'm a librarian maaa...
Favorite sports team: Bukan Team Biasa.. ahahaha!
Favorite food: Cakes and biscuits... actually..I like baking them..