Bob Marley

Robert Nesta Marley, better known as Bob Marley (Nine Mile, Saint Ann, Jamaica, February 6, 1945-Miami, Florida, United States, May 11, 1981), was a Jamaican musician, guitarist and composer. During his musical career he was the leader, composer and guitarist of the bands of The Wailers (1964-1974) and Bob Marley & The Wailers (1974-1982). Marley is still the most well-known and respected performer of reggae music and is credited with helping to spread both Jamaican music and the Rastafarian movement (of which he was a committed member) to a worldwide audience.

Among his greatest successes are the singles "I Shot the Sheriff", "No Woman, No Cry", "Jamming", "Redemption Song" and, along with The Wailers, "Three Little Birds", as well as the posthumous release « Buffalo Soldier ». The Legend compilation album, released by Island Records in 1984, three years after his death, is the best-selling reggae album in history with 15 platinum records in the United States and more than 28 million copies worldwide.

Ray Charles

(Ray Charles Robinson, Albany, 1932 - Los Angeles, 2004) Singer, instrumentalist and American composer, one of the most important figures of black music of the twentieth century. In his repertoire he can be found from the most traditional blues or gospel to jazz or soul, style in which he developed a dizzying career. It is difficult to catalog his hundreds of recordings, perhaps because of the eclecticism that has always characterized him. During his long career he was awarded twelve Grammy awards.

Blind since he was seven, Ray Charles learned to read and write music in the Braille system. He studied in Florida, at an Institute of San Agustín, and from a very young age he participated in different musical events

His record career began in 1953, when he was hired by agent Ahmet Ertegun, who introduced him to the company Atlantic Records. From then Ray Charles would be known as one of the leading and essential figures of rhythm & blues. He lived successively in various cities (New Orleans, Texas) and, after joining Ruth Brown, formed a band that also included David Newman (sax) and Joe Bridgewater (trumpet). In the mid-fifties, Ray Charles created that kind of magnificent fusion between blues, gospel and swing, and imposed on his music also the frenetic rock and roll.

He passed away at the age of 73, on June 10, 2004 at his home in California. His remains are found in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

Freddie Mercury

Freddie Mercury, born as Farrokh Bulsara (Stone Town, Zanzibar, September 5, 1946-Kensington, London, United Kingdom, November 24, 1991) was a British singer, composer, pianist, and musician of Parsi and Indian origin for being the lead singer of the rock band Queen.

As an interpreter, he has been recognized for his powerful voice and extravagant staging. As a composer, he wrote many of Queen's hits, such as Killer Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody, Somebody to Love, We Are the Champions, Do not Stop Me Now, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, It's a Hard Life or Innuendo. In addition to the activity with the band, in the eighties he launched his solo career, which led him to publish two albums, Mr. Bad Guy (1985) and Barcelona (1988), the latter in collaboration with the Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé. The simple namesake, a collaboration between both, was the official song of the Olympic Games of Barcelona 1992.

He died of a bronchopneumonia complicated by AIDS on November 24, 1991, only a day after officially announcing that he had the latter disease. In 2006, Time Asia magazine named him one of the most influential Asian heroes of the last sixty years. In 2005, in a survey organized by Blender and MTV2, he was named the best male singer of all time. In 2008, the American magazine Rolling Stone placed him in the 18th place on his list of the 100 best singers of all time, while Classic Rock, the following year, considered him the best rock singer in history. For his part , Allmusic defined Mercury as "one of the most charismatic and dynamic leaders in the history of rock".

JOHN LENNON

John Winston Ono Lennon (born only John Winston Lennon), MBE (Liverpool, United Kingdom, October 9, 1940 - New York, United States, December 8, 1980), was a multi-instrumentalist musician and composer who rose to fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, a British rock band active during the 1960s, and recognized as the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed in the history of popular music. Along with Paul McCartney, he formed one of the most successful pairs of composers of the twentieth century.

He was born and raised in Liverpool, where as a teenager he became familiar with the skiffle musical genre, forming the band The Quarrymen, which would later become The Beatles in 1960. When the group began to disintegrate until its dissolution at the end of that decade, Lennon began a solo career, marked by several critically acclaimed albums, including John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs like "Give Peace a Chance. »E« Imagine ».

After his self-imposed "retirement" from the music industry in 1975 to devote time to his family, Lennon returned to it in 1980 with a comeback album, Double Fantasy. Lennon was killed three weeks after that launch.

In the United States, Lennon's sales as a soloist are close to fourteen million units, and whether as an interpreter, author or co-author, he is responsible for twenty-seven singles number one on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2002, he was placed on the eighth place in a BBC survey of the "100 most important Britons", while in 2008 he was rated by Rolling Stone magazine as the fifth best singer of all time. After his death he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Composers in 1987 and in the Hall of Fame of Rock in 1994.

MICHAEL JACKSON

Michael Joseph Jackson (Gary, Indiana, August 29, 1958 - Los Angeles, California, June 25, 2009), known in the art world as Michael Jackson, was an American singer, songwriter and dancer of pop music and its variants. Known as the "King of Pop", he achieved nearly 80 records for different reasons and was included in the Guinness Book of Records on numerous occasions, for reasons including, among others, being the most successful musical artist of all. times, with about 750 million discs sold; the most awarded musical artist in history, with hundreds of awards, including 15 Grammy awards.

Michael Jackson announced his return to the stage with a tour that would be titled This Is It, however, almost twenty days before the start of the tour, on June 25, 2009, the singer died of cardiac arrest. The Los Angeles County Coroner's Department stated that his death had been a homicide, and his personal physician declared himself "not guilty" of involuntary manslaughter charges and paid bail for not entering prison, his trial was postponed for January 2011. The sudden death of the artist led to an avalanche of global grief, and even more than two billion people saw his public funeral on live television. In 2010, Sony Music Entertainment signed a contract with its family for 250 million dollars to retain the distribution rights of their albums and publish up to seven posthumous albums until 2017.

ELVIS PRESLEY

Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 - August 16, 1977) was one of the most popular American singers of the twentieth century, considered a cultural icon and widely known under his given name, Elvis. He is often referred to as "the King of rock and roll" or simply "the King".

He was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, but when he was 13 years old he moved with his family to Memphis, Tennessee where, in 1954, he began his artistic career when the owner of Sun Records, Sam Phillips, saw in him the way to expand African-American music. . Accompanied by guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, he was one of the creators of rockabilly, a style of fast tempo driven by a constant rhythm consisting of a fusion of country music and rhythm and blues.

In 1977 he died suddenly at the age of 42 years.

Presley is considered one of the most important figures of popular culture of the twentieth century. He had a versatile voice and an unusual success in many genres, including country, pop, ballads, gospel and blues. Also, it is the most sold soloist in the history of popular music. Nominated for 14 Grammy awards, he won three and received one in the career category at the age of 36, in addition to appearing in various musical halls of fame.

JAMES MARSHALL (JIMI HENDRIX)

(Born as Johnny Allen Hendrix, Seattle, United States, November 27, 1942 - London, United Kingdom, September 18, 1970) was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. He is considered and quoted frequently by various artists, by various magazines specialized in music, by various critics and the press in general and by the admiration and affection of the people as the greatest guitarist in the history of rock and roll, besides being One of the greatest innovators and most influential artists in a large number of genres. Hendrix was introduced to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. In the year 2003, the Rolling Stone magazine chose him as the best guitarist of all time21 and in 2004 he was included in his list of the best artists of all time (No. 6). In 2009, the American magazine Time placed him as the best electric guitar guitarist in history, ahead of B. B. King, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, among others.6 Likewise, in 2003 the British magazine Total Guitar, with the vote of more than 4000 readers, chose Jimi Hendrix as the best guitarist in rock history.5 He also has the best riff in the history of music for his song « Voodoo Child »according to a survey carried out in 2009 by the British specialized page Music Radar, surpassing other renowned bands like Derek and The Dominos, Guns N 'Roses, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, among others.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

(Bonn, December 16, 1770 - Vienna, March 26, 1827) was a German composer, conductor and pianist. His musical legacy covers, chronologically, from the classical period to the beginnings of musical romanticism. He is one of the most important composers in the history of music and his legacy has had a decisive influence on later music. Considered the last great representative of Viennese classicism (after Christoph Willibald Gluck, Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), Beethoven managed to transcend the music of romanticism, influencing the diversity of nineteenth-century musical works. His art was expressed in numerous genres and although symphonies were the main source of his international popularity, his impact proved to be mainly significant in his works for piano and chamber music. His production includes piano genres (thirty-two sonatas for piano), chamber music (sixteen string quartets, seven trios, ten sonatas for violin and piano), vocal (lieder and an opera: Fidelio), concertante (five concertos for piano and orchestra, one for violin and orchestra) and orchestral (nine symphonies, overtures, etc.), among which is the cycle of the Nine Symphonies, including the Third Symphony, also called Eroica, in my ♭ major, the Fifth Symphony , in C minor and the Ninth Symphony, in D minor (whose fourth movement is based on the Ode to Joy, written by Friedrich von Schiller in 1785).

Why does music make us happy?

Research had already shown that the happiness produced by musical stimuli was very similar to the feeling you have when trying certain drugs, because basically listening to a song that we really like our brain releases dopamine, the hormone responsible for causing feelings of well-being and that is also achieved when we eat something rich, like chocolate, or having sex. Wait, I'm not going to change the music because of that! ... I mean chocolate, of course 😛 In this way, the dopamine that is released in our body acts in such a way that makes us get excited, exalt and, therefore, enter a state of continuous happiness, which like food, drugs and sex becomes addictive and it makes us want more and more. That's why many people can spend a lot of time each day listening to our favorite music, even in the bathroom.

What is music?

Music is, according to the traditional definition of the term, the art of sensibly and logically organizing a coherent combination of sounds and silences respecting the fundamental principles of melody, harmony and rhythm, through the intervention of complex psychoanimic processes. The concept of music has evolved since its origin in Ancient Greece, where poetry, music and dance were united without distinction as unitary art. For several decades now, the definition of what music is and what it is not has become more complex, as leading composers, within the framework of diverse border artistic experiences, have produced works that, although they could be considered musical, expand the limits of the definition of this art. Music, like all artistic manifestations, is a cultural product. The purpose of this art is to elicit an aesthetic experience in the listener, and express feelings, emotions, circumstances, thoughts or ideas. Music is a stimulus that affects the perceptual field of the individual; thus, the sound flow can fulfill various functions (entertainment, communication, setting, fun).