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820 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 2 of 14.

61. Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was first written with a happy endingProkofiev's first version of Romeo and Juliet let the lovers survive, defying Shakespeare. Soviet officials objected, the Bolshoi shelved it, and the full ballet first reached the…
62. Sam Smith's debut album was Britain's best-selling first album of the 2010sSam Smith broke through as a featured voice on Disclosure's Latch in 2012. Two years later their debut album, In the Lonely Hour, swept four Grammys and became the UK's top-sellin…
63. Ricky Nelson scored the first ever number one on Billboard's Hot 100When Billboard launched its Hot 100 chart in 1958, the first song to top it was Poor Little Fool by Ricky Nelson, a teenager America already knew from his family's sitcom. He had …
64. Rihanna became the first female musician to reach billionaire statusA girl who helped her father sell clothes from a Bridgetown street stall became one of the best-selling artists ever, with estimated sales above 250 million records. Rihanna then …
65. Rio de Janeiro may be named after a river that was never thereWhen Portuguese explorers reached Guanabara Bay on January 1, 1502, they may have called it a ria, an inlet of the sea, for January. Confusion with rio, meaning river, seems to ha…
66. The first electric guitar was nicknamed the Frying PanLong before Fender or Gibson electrics, a small Los Angeles firm sold a long-necked, round-bodied lap steel that players called the Frying Pan. Introduced in 1932, it made Rickenb…
67. Left Eye was TLC's chief songwriter, designer and provocateurLisa Lopes rapped the verses, but she also co-wrote more TLC songs than her bandmates, designed outfits and even the stage for a world tour, and picked Chilli's name. Her restless…
68. How one company came to promote the concert and sell the ticketWhen the biggest concert promoter merged with the biggest ticket seller in 2010, Bruce Springsteen was among those who objected. Live Nation Entertainment now controls hundreds of…
69. The world's oldest insurance market began with bets in a coffee houseAround 1689, sailors and merchants crowded into Edward Lloyd's coffee house for shipping news and started wagering on which vessels would make it home. That gambling grew into Llo…
70. Louis XIII seized power at 16 by having his mother's favourite killedCrowned at eight after his father's assassination, Louis XIII spent years sidelined by his mother's regency and her Italian favourite. At 16 he struck back: the favourite was kill…
71. The composer behind Oppenheimer also produced This Is AmericaLudwig Göransson has won three Oscars for film scores, including Oppenheimer and Black Panther, plus Emmys for The Mandalorian. The same Swede produced Childish Gambino's This Is …
72. Christianity's most-sung canticle may not have been Mary's at allSung every evening at Vespers and Evensong, the Magnificat is known as the Song of Mary. It turns the social order upside down: the proud scattered, the hungry fed, the rich sent …
73. Mariah Carey's debut nearly slipped past the executive who signed herAt an industry party in 1988, a backing singer's demo tape was snatched out of another executive's hand by Tommy Mottola. He played it in his limousine, rushed back inside, and fo…
74. Verdi's Requiem grew from a failed tribute to RossiniWhen Rossini died, Verdi rallied a dozen Italian composers to write a Requiem together, and wrote the final movement himself. The joint project collapsed days before its premiere.…
75. Levantine cooking still rests on the bread, olive oil and wine of antiquityHummus and tabbouleh are recent chapters in a long story. Bread, olive oil and wine sat at the heart of Levantine eating from the days of the Canaanites and Phoenicians, and they …
76. Katseye was built from 120,000 applicants using the K-pop trainee methodMore than 120,000 people applied, twenty reached a televised contest, and six were chosen in November 2023. Katseye, a Los Angeles girl group with members from four countries, is …
77. The keytar's ancestors reach back to a Viennese strap-on piano of 1795The keytar looks like pure 1980s excess, but its lineage starts with the orphica, a small portable piano made in Vienna in 1795 and held much the same way. The idea was simple and…
78. Korn borrowed its backwards R from the toy shop where members had workedSomebody proposed calling the Bakersfield band Corn. Guitarist James Shaffer swapped in a K and flipped the R, an idea lifted from the Toys R Us logo, since several members had wo…
79. Japan's koto is built like a dragon, from shell and stomach to tailEvery part of a koto carries a dragon's name. The top is its shell, the underside its stomach, the string holes its eyes, and the far end its tail. Japan's national instrument is …
80. Why the Latin Mass still opens with a prayer in GreekIn the middle of the Latin Mass sits a scrap of Greek: Kyrie eleison, meaning Lord, have mercy. It survives because Rome first worshipped in Greek, and the plea was kept when Lati…
81. France's anthem was written in one Strasbourg evening and named for MarseilleOn 25 April 1792 the mayor of Strasbourg asked a guest to write a song to rally soldiers against invading armies. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle finished it that same evening as a …
82. Leopold Mozart gave up composing to manage the miracle born in SalzburgIn 1756 Leopold Mozart published a violin method that made his name across Europe. The same year his son Wolfgang was born. Within a few years he had stopped teaching violin, then…
83. The Leslie speaker spins its sound, and Hammond tried to block itDonald Leslie bought a Hammond organ in 1937 and hated how flat it sounded at home. His fix was a speaker cabinet with spinning parts that mimicked the scattered voice of a pipe o…
84. In & Juliet, Anne Hathaway rewrites her husband's tragedy with Max Martin hitsWhat if Juliet woke up, found Romeo dead and simply carried on living? That question drives & Juliet, a jukebox musical in which Shakespeare's wife seizes the quill, sends the her…
85. Jason Momoa won Khal Drogo by performing a Māori haka at his auditionBorn in Honolulu and raised in small-town Iowa, Jason Momoa walked into a Baywatch audition at 19 and has barely left the screen since. He landed Game of Thrones' Khal Drogo after…
86. When DownBeat declared jazz dead, Miles Davis plugged in and proved otherwiseIn 1967, with rock ruling American charts, DownBeat ran a headline announcing that jazz as people knew it was finished. Within two years Miles Davis, listening to Jimi Hendrix and…
87. Jethro Tull got its name from a booking agent who loved agricultural historyStruggling for repeat bookings on the London club circuit, a Blackpool blues band kept changing its name. One alias, borrowed from an 18th-century agriculturist, happened to be on…
88. Jimmy Reed's wife prompted his lyrics, and the Rolling Stones learned his songsJimmy Reed's laid-back electric blues crossed from the R&B charts onto the pop Hot 100 in the late 1950s, and one critic calls him perhaps the most influential bluesman of all. El…
89. The composer who made guitar a concert instrument never mastered playing itJoaquín Rodrigo lost his sight to diphtheria at three, composed in Braille, and wrote the Concierto de Aranjuez, perhaps the most famous guitar concerto ever. Yet he never learned…
90. Lorne Michaels doubted John Belushi would suit Saturday Night Live until one auditionJohn Belushi was in the very first sketch Saturday Night Live ever aired, in October 1975, yet its creator had almost passed on him, unsure his physical comedy fit. Within a few y…
91. Before the Velvet Underground, John Cale joined an 18-hour piano marathonA Welsh miner's son who learned English only at about seven, John Cale arrived in New York in 1963 as a classically trained violist. Within weeks he had joined John Cage in the fi…
92. A Dios le Pido spent 47 weeks on the Latin chart for Colombia's JuanesJuanes grew up in Medellín when it had the world's highest murder rate, lost a cousin and a close friend to violence, and turned that grief into songs about imagining a better Col…
93. James Taylor's guitar style began with cello lessons and a piano-minded thumbJames Taylor learned cello before guitar, and he shaped his finger-picking so his thumb played like a pianist's left hand. After heroin addiction and a failed New York band, a dem…
94. Yo-Yo Ma wanted a double bass at three and settled for a celloAt three, Yo-Yo Ma asked his father for a big instrument. A leading Paris violin maker lent the family a tiny sixteenth-size cello, and by seven the boy was playing for Presidents…
95. Germany's second TV channel exists because a court blocked Adenauer's own networkChancellor Konrad Adenauer thought Germany's first public broadcaster was too friendly to his opponents, so in 1960 he founded a rival that critics nicknamed Adenauer television. …
96. Iggy Azalea matched a Beatles chart feat with her first two hitsIn 2014 Iggy Azalea held the top two spots on the Billboard Hot 100 at once, with her own Fancy at number one and her guest turn on Ariana Grande's Problem at number two. Only the…
97. By 1914 Russia had Europe's largest peacetime army, and 15 million servedThe Imperial Russian Army lasted from 1721 to the revolution of 1917. On the eve of the First World War it was the biggest standing army in peacetime Europe, around 1.3 million me…
98. The record industry's global lobby was born at a Rome congress in 1933Every commercially released track carries a unique code, the ISRC, and since 1989 the body that hands those codes out has been the IFPI. Founded in Rome in 1933, it speaks for som…
99. Your ear hears musical steps as equal, but the frequencies multiplyClimb a scale one octave and the pitch doubles in frequency; climb another and it doubles again. Musical intervals are ratios, not fixed distances, so equal-sounding steps are rea…
100. James turned down a Factory Records album because they distrusted studiosTony Wilson spotted the young Manchester band James while editing concert footage in 1982 and offered them an album deal with Factory Records. They were so wary of spoiling their …
101. Warren Beatty has 14 Oscar nominations across acting, writing, directing and producingFew film careers look like Warren Beatty's Academy Award record: four nominations for Best Actor, four for Best Picture, two for directing and four for screenplays. He won Best Di…
102. London fishmongers still give Westminster Abbey a salmon every yearLegend says a young Thames fisherman saw Saint Peter near the spot where Westminster Abbey now stands. The Fishmongers' Company still presents a salmon each year in honour of that…
103. Critics shrugged at Morning Glory, then it became Britain's best-selling studio albumWhen Oasis released their second album in October 1995, many reviewers called it weaker than the debut. It still sold 345,000 copies in its first British week, a record, and in Ju…
104. How a Latin word for rest became a genre for the concert hallRequiem simply means rest in Latin, taken from the opening plea of the Catholic Mass for the dead: grant them eternal rest, O Lord. That funeral liturgy inspired so much music, fr…
105. The jeweller who gave away his fortune and invented how Carnatic music is taughtPurandara Dasa was a rich dealer in gold and silver who renounced everything to wander as a singer devoted to Vishnu. Along the way he designed the graded exercises that South Ind…
106. Queen Latifah picked her name at eight and hip-hop firsts followedDana Owens was eight when she found the Arabic name Latifah, meaning delicate and very kind, in a book of names. A decade later she was a rapper challenging how Black women were t…
107. Quincy Jones learned the hard way that music and the music business differBefore Thriller and We Are the World, Quincy Jones led what he called the best jazz band on the planet, and went broke doing it. That failure taught him a lesson he never forgot, …
108. Rage Against the Machine signed to a major label and stayed furious anywayA band with revolutionary, anti-capitalist lyrics signed to Epic Records, topped the Billboard 200 twice and sold more than 16 million records. Rage Against the Machine fused meta…
109. The Ramones borrowed a Beatle's alias and played songs under two minutesFour friends from Forest Hills, Queens, none of them related, all took the surname Ramone, lifted from a stage name Paul McCartney used in the Silver Beetles days. Their songs rar…
110. Reba McEntire nearly talked her mother out of the drive to NashvilleIn March 1975 a young Oklahoma ranch girl kept inventing reasons for her mother to pull over rather than continue to Nashville. Her mother said she would turn around if asked, but…
111. Berlin's Reichstag went from ruin to glass-domed parliament over a centuryGermany's parliament meets in a building that burned in 1933, sat as a shell through the Cold War, and was once wrapped entirely in fabric by artists. Today visitors climb a walk-…
112. Rekha, the reluctant teenage actress who reinvented herself into a Hindi film iconRekha wanted to be a flight attendant. When money ran short in 1968, her mother asked her to act, so she left ninth grade at 13 or 14 and went to work. Critics mocked her looks an…
113. Pula, the Croatian port whose Roman arena has outlasted every empire that ruled itAt the southern tip of Istria sits a city of about 52,000 people built around one of the best preserved Roman amphitheatres anywhere. Pula has belonged to Romans, Byzantines, Fran…
114. Pattie Boyd inspired Something, Layla and Wonderful Tonight, then picked up a cameraFew people can claim songs by two rock legends as love letters. Pattie Boyd, a model who met George Harrison on the set of A Hard Day's Night, prompted his Something and later Eri…
115. A Sydney Harbour Bridge rigger talked his way onto TV and became Crocodile DundeePaul Hogan was working high on the Sydney Harbour Bridge when he decided a talent show's sneering judges needed a taste of their own medicine. Billed as a tap-dancing knife-throwe…
116. The Sound of Silence became a hit after a producer secretly added electric guitarsSimon & Garfunkel's first album flopped, and Paul Simon went off to play folk clubs in England. Back home, radio listeners kept requesting one track, so producer Tom Wilson overdu…
117. Peter Gabriel's fox head and red dress doubled Genesis's fee overnightMidway through a Dublin gig in 1972, Genesis's singer slipped offstage and came back wearing his wife's red dress and a fox's head. His bandmates later said they first took him fo…
118. Before Genesis, Phil Collins was the Artful Dodger and a Marquee Club sweeperLong before In the Air Tonight, Phil Collins was a child actor earning £15 a week as the Artful Dodger in the West End, until his voice broke mid-show. He swept floors at a Soho r…
119. Dolly Parton wrote I Will Always Love You about leaving Porter WagonerOne of the most famous love songs ever recorded is really a professional goodbye. Dolly Parton wrote I Will Always Love You about breaking away from Porter Wagoner, the rhinestone…
120. The Psalms were songs first, and their headings still carry the choirmaster's notesOpen the Book of Psalms and many poems begin with odd little instructions: for the choirmaster, with stringed instruments, according to lilies. They are traces of performance. The…

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