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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles > 20th century music
for SATB and piano or organ This expressive anthem brings together
excerpts from the gospels that express God's commandment to mankind
to love one another. Underpinned by a flowing piano or organ
accompaniment, Love one another explores this profound topic with
sensitive harmonies and effective modulations. Although suitable
for performance throughout the church year, this anthem would be
particularly affecting in a Wedding or Maundy Thursday service.
for SATB (with optional solos) and organ or piano or small
orchestra or chamber group O Come, Emmanuel is an Advent
Celebration, suitable for both church and concert choirs. It is
based on the 7 Great 'O' Antiphons, and fragments of the well-known
plainsong hymn permeate the work. To these, Bullard has added
settings of a number of other Advent texts and hymns, including the
beautiful 'There is a rose-tree', a rousing setting of 'Chanticleer
Carol', and new arrangements of 'Gabriel's Message' and 'Joy to the
world!'. The work may be sung throughout by SATB choir, or a range
of soloists may take some of the lines. The accompaniment - for
organ or piano, or with small orchestra or chamber group - is
equally flexible. A number of the movements make highly effective
separate pieces and anthems. Written with the composer's long and
practical experience, O Come, Emmanuel is a strikingly original
work for Advent and Christmas that will enhance both liturgical
celebrations and concert programmes at this time.
Examines the reputation of the Hungarian musician Bela Bartok
(1881-1945) as an antifascist hero. This book examines the
reputation of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok (1881-1945) as an
antifascist hero and beacon of freedom. Following Bartok's
reception in Italy from the early twentieth century, through
Mussolini's fascist regime, and into the early Cold War, Palazzetti
explores the connexions between music, politics and diplomacy. The
wider context of this study also offers glimpses into broader
themes such as fascist cultural policies, cultural resistance, and
the ambivalent political usage of modernist music. The book argues
that the 'Bartokian Wave' occurring in Italy after the Second World
War was the result of the fusion of the Bartok myth as the
'musician of freedom' and the Cold War narrative of an Italian
national regeneration. Italian-Hungarian diplomatic cooperation
during the interwar period had supported Bartok's success in Italy.
But, in spite of their political alliance, the cultural policies by
Europe's leading fascist regimes started to diverge over the years:
many composers proscribed in Nazi Germany were increasingly
performed in fascist Italy. In the early 1940s, the now exiled
composer came to represent one of the symbols of the anti-Nazi
cultural resistance in Italy and was canonised as 'the musician of
freedom'. Exile and death had transformed Bartok into a martyr,
just as the Resistenza and the catastrophe of war had redeemed
post-war Italy.
for SAATBB unaccompanied This touching piece sets Yeats' beautiful
words describing the love of a parent for their child. Switching
between major and minor tonalities, A Cradle Song is quiet and
understated, with sensitive a cappella scoring that makes the
sentiments seem all the more real. This is an impressive and
sophisticated debut from Swedish singer and composer Joel Nilson.
for SAATBB unaccompanied The signature tune for the award-winning
Swedish a cappella group Vocado, this poignant love song is
characterized by mixed messages: the lover wants to leave, but
can't quite bring himself to walk out the door. The flavour of the
music reflects the dilemma, with emotions ranging from muted
acceptance in the verses to highly charged indecision in the
passionate chorus. With classic a cappella rhythms and textures,
along with melodies that will stay with you for days, this
dual-language publication in the Voice Junction series is perfect
for vocal groups and choirs singing in Swedish or English. Hall mig
kvar has been recorded by Vocado on the CD 'Northern Lights'.
for SATB (with divisions) unaccompanied This reflective setting of
an evocative text by Charles Bennett uses pastoral and romantic
imagery to depict the beauty of a life free from the desire for
worldly possessions. The music draws on the words' dream-like
character, with lilting scat rhythms and interweaving vocal lines
building to a stirring climax before the piece gradually fades as
the idyllic vision is enveloped in sleep. With sacred and secular
resonances, Marriage to My Lady Poverty is ideal for performance in
both services and concerts.
for soprano solo, SSA chorus, and full orchestra This new edition
of Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 7, the Sinfonia Antartica, has
been prepared by David Matthews with support from the Vaughan
Williams Charitable Trust. The work was drawn from the music
Vaughan Williams provided for the film Scott of the Antarctic in
1947 and was completed in 1952. In it the composer skilfully evokes
the sparse beauty and grandeur of the landscape with a large
orchestra and percussion section, including - famously - a wind
machine, to create a work of great power and intensity. This new
edition contains an introduction and textual commentary and is
published as a full score, study score, and women's chorus, with
all performing material on hire.
for SAATTB unaccompanied Setting a heart-breaking wartime text by
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Pott has created a beautifully poignant
piece befitting any Remembrance occasion. Written in memory of
Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, a bomb disposal expert killed in 2009
during the Afghanistan conflict, Lament embodies a sense of
timeless commemoration. Combining this with Pott's striking
harmonic language and deftly interweaving vocal lines results in a
highly compelling work, both emotionally and musically.
for SSATB unaccompanied This expressive Wedding anthem sets an
extract from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence. With chromatic
inflections and gently arching vocal lines, the music perfectly
reflects the text's emphasis on the relationship between pleasure
and sorrow. Joy and Woe are woven fine will make a striking
addition to the repertory of more experienced choirs looking to try
something new.
for SSATB and organ This attractive and uplifting anthem sets the
text of the Eastertide Vidi aquam antiphon. Different parts of the
text are treated to contrasting musical ideas, including extended
melismatic upper-voice passages and mainly homophonic full-choir
sections, and the undulating organ part represents the flowing
water of the text. A welcome addition to a service or concert
programme for all fans of Gabriel Jackson's music. Commissioned by
the Friends of Lincoln Cathedral for their 75th anniversary and
first performed by the Choir of Lincoln Cathedral with Charles
Harrison (organ), directed by Aric Prentice, on 25 June 2011.
For SATB (divisi) with 2 soprano solos
for SATB unaccompanied This serene and reflective setting of the
Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis was commissioned to mark the 300th
anniversary of the death of Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells.
With expansive harmonies and arching melodic lines, this accessible
setting will appeal to any cathedral, chapel, or church choir
looking for fresh service material.
'Clear and matter-of-fact, adopting the cool objectivity that is
advisable when dealing with such extraordinary and chilling
material, this book is needed to make us reflect on an essential
part of the history of twentieth-century music.' - Peter
Franklin;In this authoritative study, one of the first to appear in
English, Erik Levi explores the ambiguous relationship between
music and politics during one of the darkest periods of recent
cultural history. Utilising material drawn from contemporary
documents, journals and newspapers, he traces the evolution of
reactionary musical attitudes which were exploited by the Nazis in
the final years of the Weimar Republic, chronicles the mechanisms
that were established after 1933 to regiment musical life
throughout Germany and the occupied territories, and examines the
degree to which the climate of xenophobia, racism and
anti-modernism affected the dissemination of music either in the
opera house and concert hall, or on the radio and in the media.
One of contemporary music's most significant and controversial
figures, Brian Ferneyhough's complex and challenging music draws
inspiration from painting, literature, and philosophy, as well as
music from the recent and distant past. His dense, multilayered
compositions intrigue musicians while pushing both performer and
instrument to the limits of their abilities. A wide-ranging survey
of his life and work to date, "Brian Ferneyhough" examines the
critical issues fundamental to understanding the composer as a
musician and a thinker. Debuting in celebration of Ferneyhough's
seventieth birthday in 2013, this book strikes a rich balance
between critical analysis of the music and close scrutiny of its
aesthetic and philosophical contexts, making possible a more
rounded view of the composer than has been available.
From the Romantic era onwards, music has been seen as the most
quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to
invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and
recurrence of events, music has the ability to stylise in multiple
ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching
implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity,
personal and collective identity, and history. Time, as
philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history,
is notoriously hard to define. Yet music, seemingly bound up so
intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as
disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes
of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged
position in nineteenth-century thought. The Melody of Time examines
the multiple ways in which music relates to, and may provide
insight into, the problematics of human time. Each chapter explores
a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through
music: the purported timelessness of Beethoven's late works or the
nostalgic impulses of Schubert's music; the use of music by
philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal
existence or as a medium suggestive of the varying possible
structures of time; and, a reflection of a particular culture's
sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible
spirit behind the course of human history itself. Moving fluidly
between cultural context and historical reception, competing
philosophical theories of time and close reading of the repertoire,
Benedict Taylor argues for the continued importance of engaging
with music's temporality in understanding the significance of music
within society and human experience. At once historical,
analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, The Melody of
Time provides both fresh insight into many familiar
nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future
research.
In this engaging work Vaughan Williams takes advantage of the
expressive possibilities of the cello, ranging from wistful and
melancholic to lively and jovial. It was composed in 1929 and
premiered the following year by its dedicatee, the legendary
Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. The five folk songs on which the work
is founded are 'Salisbury Plain', 'The Long Whip', 'Low down in the
broom', 'Bristol Town', and 'I've been to France'. Materials for
the orchestral accompaniment are available on hire.
for SSATB & piano or string orchestra The Shipping Forecast is
in 3 movements: 'Donegal', 'They that go down to the sea in ships',
and 'Naming'. The first and last movement are settings of poems by
the poet, broadcaster, and academic, Sean Street. In 'Donegal'
snatches of the shipping forecast (spoken) are woven into the
atmospheric texture of the poem. The second movement is a setting
of the Psalm 107: 23-26 | 28-29: 'They that go down to the sea in
ships'. The setting has the feel of a Celtic lullaby, moving from a
simple statement to a centre of turmoil then back to overlapping
phrases, melting into tranquillity at the end. In the final
movement, 'Naming', the text becomes 'a meditation on the fortunes
of the sea as reflected in other names, gathered from coastal maps
of Newfoundland'. Energetic, in perpetual motion and rhythmic,
'Naming' drives the whole work to an upbeat finish.
A brief, detailed biography of the composer/architect, student and
protege of Honegger, Milhaud, Messiaen, Le Corbusier. Xenakis
himself is a major proponent of advancing the boundaries of musical
possibilities.
This collection of original essays is in tribute to the work of
Derek Scott on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As one of the
leading lights in Critical Musicology, Scott has helped shape the
epistemological direction for music research since the late 1980s.
There is no doubt that the path taken by the critical musicologist
has been a tricky one, leading to new conceptions, interactions,
and heated debates during the past two decades. Changes in
musicology during the closing decades of the twentieth century
prompted the establishment of new sets of theoretical methods that
probed at the social and cultural relevance of music, as much as
its self-referentiality. All the scholars contributing to this book
have played a role in the general paradigmatic shift that ensued in
the wake of Kerman's call for change in the 1980s. Setting out to
address a range of approaches to theorizing music and promulgating
modes of analysis across a wide range of repertories, the essays in
this collection can be read as a coming of age of critical
musicology through its active dialogue with other disciplines such
as sociology, feminism, ethnomusicology, history, anthropology,
philosophy, cultural studies, aesthetics, media studies, film music
studies, and gender studies. The volume provides music researchers
and graduate students with an up-to-date authoritative reference to
all matters dealing with the state of critical musicology today.
For all of its apparent simplicity-a few chords, twelve bars, and a
supposedly straightforward American character-blues music is a
complex phenomenon with cultural significance that has varied
greatly across different historical contexts. One Sound, Two Worlds
examines the development of the blues in East and West Germany,
demonstrating the multiple ways social and political conditions can
shape the meaning of music. Based on new archival research and
conversations with key figures, this comparative study provides a
cultural, historical, and musicological account of the blues and
the impact of the genre not only in the two Germanys, but also in
debates about the history of globalization.
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