hey
i can't find any info on the following composers
so i was wondering what everyone else has for them:

- weber
- berlioz
- wagner
- tchaikovsky
- richard strauss
- gluck

Have you tried google?

yes
but it doesn't find many useful stuff on their music
=\
just about their lives

know any sites that have the information?
i keep running into sites that talk about their lives.

What sort of information do you need - at one end of the scale do you just want the titles, or at the other end an analysis of the structure of individual pieces, or something else in-between?

Is this for a school project, university... - what level in other words? That will have a bearing on what sites may give the most appropriate information

Wikipedia is a good starting place.

One easy way to find the wiki pages is to put this into google:

Composer Name wiki

Can't find any info? Are you kidding?! Googling for Berlioz, for example, comes up with 243,000 hits!!!

Or how about... looking in a book! A decent music dictionary would give you a starting point, or, for more information, the Oxford Companion to Music is pretty good (similar format to a dictionary - i.e. alphabetical, rather than a narrative). There's Grout or even Grove, Master Musicians, Harvard Dictionary, Larousse Encyclopedia of Music. Shall I go on??

Try entering the composer's name along with the full title of the work in the search engine. Sometimes you will be lucky enough to get a hit on some CD that contains the work with a short discussion of each work. Or I have come across actual programme notes!

BUT don't rely only on the internet for information. It is not always the most trustworthy form of info. Nothing compares to a proper book or encyclopedia! New Grove Dictionary is King!

Something I have tried a few times is to e-mail the webmaster of the site you find on the composer. They are usually very helpful and don't taketo long to reply! But try the biggest sites (something with a .com at the end! There are some dodgy sites out there!)

The composers you have listed are all so well known! You must be able to find something!

What exam are you preparing for? Some advanced exams like the DipRSM and higher require that you do some analises of your own on the pieces drawing on your knowledge of stylistic characteristics of each composer!

Keep on trying! This is fun! You learn so much in the process!

Grade 6 - I think your teacher isn't looking for cut-and-paste off the internet jobs - he or she knows what your level of musical education is, and what to expect from you.

If you want to go on with music, it would be worth getting a good musical dictionary. We have Slonimsky and Baker's "Biographical Dictionary of Musicians", because it does have reasonable coverage of 20th century musicians. A new edition came out last year, which can only mean that the edition we bought is now available cheaply second-hand.

Although the dictionary is "biographical", there is plenty to get you started on thinking about each composer' music.

If you google with the composer's name plus one word that you would expect to find, e.g. "Tchaikovsky" + "orchestration", you will certainly get several paid subsciption sites that are not accessible to us ordinary folk, but you will also get things like programme notes from an orchestra, Wikipedia, and the like.

For example, one of those sites talks about "lush orchestration". Lush means luxurious or more than adequate - so next you want to see if it refers to the notes (harmony, melody) or the sound (instrumentation, dynamics). So keep googling...

Also, when you find terms like this, why don't you look at your own music, or go to a big library and get out a score or borrow some CDs (or listen on you tube, and try and figure out what you think that term means. I'm sure your teacher would rather hear that you were looking and listening for yourself at Grade 6 level.

When my son took Grade 5, he went over his music and identified common chords and changes of key - even doing that showed him which composers changed keys most often, which composers used lots of notes apart from the basic ntoes of each scale, which composers stuck to the basics for harmony, etc. etc. Since you're doing Grade 6, you can put your Grade 5 Theory to work!

I don't know the first thing about music, so if I can get from A to B with a dictionary and the internet, I'm sure you can do a really good job.