![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > 20th century music
The correspondence between composer John Cage and Peter Yates represents the third and final part of Cage's most significant exchanges of letters, following those with Pierre Boulez and with David Tudor. Martin Iddon's book is the first volume to collect the complete extant correspondence with his critical friend, thus completing the 'trilogy' of Cage correspondence published by Cambridge. By bringing together more than 100 letters, beginning in 1940 and continuing until 1971, Iddon reveals the dialogue within which many of Cage's ideas were first forged and informed, with particular focus on his developing attitudes to music criticism and aesthetics. The correspondence with Yates represents precisely, in alignment with Cage's fastidious neatness, the part of his letter writing in which he engages most directly with the last part of his famous tricolon, 'composing's one thing, performing's another, listening's a third'.
Glasgow has always been known for its live music, and at the heart of any music community it is the live venues and buildings that are important, and play host to local and touring acts. One of the main reasons for Glasgow's continued blossoming as a cultural capital is the infrastructure of clubs and buildings available for live performances. This book in glorious colour throughout tells the history of the city's music through Glasgow's famous landmark buildings by people best placed to tell those stories - music writers and journalists and historians. This book is a collection of memories and stories about the buildings that hosted stars such as Michael Jackson, Joan Armatrading, Joy Division, among many thousands more - ranging from the Apollo to the Pavilion, Piping Centre, Sub Club and King Tut's.
A singer in an evening dress, a grand piano. A modest-sized audience, mostly well-dressed and silver-haired, equipped with translation booklets. A program consisting entirely of songs by one or two composers. This is the way of the Lieder recital these days. While it might seem that this style of performance is a long-standing tradition, German Song Onstage demonstrates that it is not. For much of the 19th century, the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were heard in the home, salon, and, no less significantly, on the concert platform alongside orchestral and choral works. A dedicated program was rare, a dedicated audience even more so. The Lied was a genre with both more private and more public associations than is commonly recalled. The contributors to this volume explore a broad range of venues, singers, and audiences in distinct places and time periods-including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany-from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century. These historical case studies are set alongside reflections from a selection of today's leading musicians, offering insights on current Lied practices that will inform future generations of performers, scholars, and connoisseurs. Together these case studies unsettle narrow and elitist assumptions about what it meant and still means to present German song onstage by providing a transnational picture of historical Lieder performance, and opening up discussions about the relationship between history and performance today.
for high voice and piano This beautiful collection of 14 songs for high voice offers secular pieces by some of Oxford's best-loved composers. Suitable for solo singers and unison choirs alike, each song is presented with piano accompaniment, and high-quality, downloadable backing tracks are included on a companion website. With a wonderful selection of pieces, including favourites such as Bob Chilcott's 'The Lily and the Rose' and John Rutter's 'A flower remembered', this is the perfect collection for use in recitals or for enjoying at home. Also available in a volume for low voice and piano.
The theme of this Research Companion is 'connectivity and the global reach of electroacoustic music and sonic arts made with technology'. The possible scope of such a companion in the field of electronic music has changed radically over the last 30 years. The definitions of the field itself are now broader - there is no clear boundary between 'electronic music' and 'sound art'. Also, what was previously an apparently simple divide between 'art' and 'popular' practices is now not easy or helpful to make, and there is a rich cluster of streams of practice with many histories, including world music traditions. This leads in turn to a steady undermining of a primarily Euro-American enterprise in the second half of the twentieth century. Telecommunications technology, most importantly the development of the internet in the final years of the century, has made materials, practices and experiences ubiquitous and apparently universally available - though some contributions to this volume reassert the influence and importance of local cultural practice. Research in this field is now increasingly multi-disciplinary. Technological developments are embedded in practices which may be musical, social, individual and collective. The contributors to this companion embrace technological, scientific, aesthetic, historical and social approaches and a host of hybrids - but, most importantly, they try to show how these join up. Thus the intention has been to allow a wide variety of new practices to have voice - unified through ideas of 'reaching out' and 'connecting together' - and in effect showing that there is emerging a different kind of 'global music'.
Focusing on Messiaen's relation to history - both his own and the history he engendered - the Messiaen Perspectives volumes convey the growing understanding of his deep and varied interconnections with his cultural milieux. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences examines the genesis, sources and cultural pressures that shaped Messiaen's music. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception analyses Messiaen's compositional approach and the repercussions of his music. While each book offers a coherent collection in itself, together these complementary volumes elucidate how powerfully Messiaen was embedded in his time and place, and how his music resonates ever more today. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception explores Messiaen's imprint on recent musical life. The first part scrutinizes his compositional technique in terms of counterpoint, spectralism and later piano music, while the second charts ways in which Messiaen's influence is manifest in the music and careers of Ohana, Xenakis, Murail and Quebecois composers. The third part includes case studies of Messiaen's reception in Italy, Spain and the USA. The volume also includes an ornithological catalogue of Messiaen's birds, collates information on the numerous 'tombeaux' pieces he inspired, and concludes with a Critical Catalogue of Messiaen's Musical Works.
This accessible Introduction explores both mainstream and experimental manifestations of electronic music. From early recording equipment to the most recent multimedia performances, the history of electronic music is full of interesting characters, fascinating and unusual music, and radical technology. Covering many different eras, genres and media, analyses of works appear alongside critical discussion of central ideas and themes, making this an essential guide for anyone approaching the subject for the first time. Chapters include key topics from synth pop to sound art, from electronic dance music to electrical instruments, and from the expression of pure sound to audiovisuals. Highly illustrated and with a wide selection of examples, the book provides many suggestions for further reading and listening to encourage students to begin their own experiments in this exciting field.
The Sarah Quartel Songbook brings together a selection of the composer's best-loved pieces for mixed voices, including favourites such as Sing, my Child, Voice on the Wind, and Swept Away. This is an invaluable resource both for choirs looking to explore the work of this fine choral composer for the first time and for admirers of Quartel's style hoping to find staple repertoire conveniently gathered together in one volume.
Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture, Sixth Edition, presents an extensive history of electronic music-from its historical beginnings in the late nineteenth century to its everchanging present-recounting the musical ideas that arose in parallel with technological progress. In four parts, the author details the fundamentals of electronic music, its history, the major synthesizer innovators, and contemporary practices. This examination of the music's experimental roots covers the key composers, genres, and techniques used in analog and digital synthesis, including both art and popular music, Western and non-Western. New to this edition: A reorganized and revised chapter structure places technological advances within a historical framework. Shorter chapters offer greater modularity and flexibility for instructors. Discussions on the elements of sound, listening to electronic music, electronic music in the mainstream, Eurorack, and more. An appendix of historically important electronic music studios around the globe. Listening Guides throughout the book provide step-by-step annotations of key musical works, focusing the development of student listening skills. Featuring extensive revisions and expanded coverage, this sixth edition of Electronic and Experimental Music represents an comprehensive accounting of the technology, musical styles, and figures associated with electronic music, highlighting the music's deep cultural impact.
In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of composers and performers, whose intentional actions either create music as notated or manifest music as significant sound, virtual agency is inferred from the implied actions of those sounds, as they move and reveal tendencies within music-stylistic contexts. From our most basic attributions of sources for perceived energies in music, to the highest realm of our engagement with musical subjectivity, Hatten explains how virtual agents arose as distinct from actual ones, how unspecified actants can take on characteristics of (virtual) human agents, and how virtual agents assume various actorial roles. Along the way, Hatten demonstrates some of the musical means by which composers and performers from different historical eras have staged and projected various levels of virtual agency, engaging listeners imaginatively and interactively within the expressive realms of their virtual and fictional musical worlds.
Arvo Part is one of the most influential and widely performed contemporary composers. Around 1976 he developed an innovative new compositional technique called 'tintinnabuli' (Latin for 'sounding bells'), which has had an extraordinary degree of success. It is frequently performed around the world, has been used in award-winning films, and pieces such as Fur Alina and Spiegel im Siegel have become standard repertoire. This collection of essays, written by a distinguished international group of scholars and performers, is the essential guide to Arvo Part and his music. The book begins with a general introduction to Part's life and works, covering important biographical details and outlining his most significant compositions. Two chapters analyze the tintinnabuli style and are complemented by essays which discuss Part's creative process. The book also examines the spiritual aspect of Part's music and contextualizes him in the cultural milieu of the twenty-first century and in the marketplace.
One hundred years after Luigi Russolos The Art of Noises, this book exposes a cross-section of the current motivations, activities, thoughts, and reflections of composers, performers, and artists who work with noise in all of its many forms. The books focus is the practice of noise and its relationship to music, and in particular the role of noise as musical material -- as form, as sound, as notation or interface, as a medium for listening, as provocation, as data. Its contributors are first and foremost practitioners, which inevitably turns attention toward how and why noise is made and its potential role in listening and perceiving. Contributors include Peter Ablinger, Sebastian Berweck, Aaron Cassidy, Marko Ciciliani, Nick Collins, Aaron Einbond, Matthias Haenisch, Alec Hall, Martin Iddon, Bryan Jacobs, Phil Julian, Michael Maierhof, Joan Arnau Pamies, and James Whitehead (JLIAT). The book also features a collection of short responses to a two-question interview -- what is noise (music) to you? and why do you make it? -- by some of the leading musicians working with noise today. Their work spans a wide range of artistic practice, including instrumental, vocal, and electronic music; improvisation; notated composition; theater; sound installation; DIY; and software development. Interview subjects include Eryck Abecassis, Franck Bedrossian, Antoine Chessex, Ryan Jordan, Alice Kemp (Germseed), George Lewis, Lasse Marhaug, Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, Diemo Schwarz, Ben Thigpen, Kasper Toeplitz, and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay.
The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet is one of the seminal albums in rock history. Arguably it not only marks the advent of the 'mature' sound of the Rolling Stones but lays out a new blueprint for an approach to blues-based rock music that would endure for several decades. From its title to the dark themes that pervade some of its songs, Beggars Banquet reflected and helped define a moment marked by violence, decay, and upheaval. It marked a move away from the artistic sonic flourishes of psychedelic rock towards an embrace of foundational streams of American music - blues, country - that had always underpinned the music of the Stones but assumed new primacy in their music after 1968. This move coincided with, and anticipated, the 'roots' moves that many leading popular music artists made as the 1960s turned toward a new decade; but unlike many of their peers whose music grew more 'soft' and subdued as they embraced traditional styles, the music and attitude of the Stones only grew harder and more menacing, and their status as representatives of the dark underside of the 60s rock counterculture assumed new solidity. For the Rolling Stones, the 1960s ended and the 1970s began with the release of this album in 1968.
Commissioned by Roderick Williams, this characterful trilogy of songs sets poems by John Greening that present a vibrant, modern take on Schubert's song cycles. The first draws on 'Gute nacht' from Der Winterreise, taking inspiration from Captain Scott's perilous expedition to the Antarctic in 1911-12. The second, 'After Standchen', has an air of darkness and mystery, with icy clusters and ghostly spread chords. The text of the third song alludes to Schubert's 'Mein' from Die schoene Mullerin, and the musical setting is characterized by rapid semiquaver figuration in the piano and a vocal line full of dramatic expression.
Of the post-war, post-serialist generation of European composers, it was Luigi Nono who succeeded not only in identifying and addressing aesthetic and technical questions of his time, but in showing a way ahead to a new condition of music in the twenty-first century. His music has found a listenership beyond the ageing constituency of 'contemporary music'. In Nono's work, the audiences of sound art, improvisation, electronic, experimental and radical musics of many kinds find common cause with those concerned with the renewal of Western art music. His work explores the individually and socially transformative role of music; its relationship with history and with language; the nature of the musical work as distributed through text, time, technology and individuals; the nature and performativity of the act of composition; and, above all, the role and nature of listening as a cultural activity. In many respects his music anticipates the new technological state of culture of the twenty-first century while radically reconnecting with our past. His work is itself a case study in the evolution of musical activity and the musical object: from the period of an apparently stable place for art music in Western culture to its manifold new states in our century. Routledge Handbook to Luigi Nono and Musical Thought seeks to trace the evolution of Nono's musical thought through detailed examination of the vast body of sketches, and to situate this narrative in its personal, cultural and political contexts.
One of the twentieth century's greatest composers, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) virtually stopped writing music during the last thirty years of his life. Recasting his mysterious musical silence and his undeniably influential life against the backdrop of Finland's national awakening, "Sibelius" will be the definitive biography of this creative legend for many years to come. Glenda Dawn Goss begins her sweeping narrative in the Finland of Sibelius' youth, which remained under Russian control for the first five decades of his life. Focusing on previously unexamined parts of Sibelius' life, Goss explores the composer's formative experiences as a Russian subject and a member of the Swedish-speaking Finnish minority. She goes on to trace Sibelius' relationships with his creative contemporaries, with whom he worked to usher in a golden age of music and art that would endow Finns with a sense of pride in their heritage and encourage their hopes for the possibilities of nationhood. Skillfully evoking this artistic climate - in which Sibelius emerged as a leader - Goss creates a dazzling portrait of the painting, sculpture, literature, and music it inspired. To solve the deepest riddles of Sibelius' life, work, and enigmatic silence, Goss contends, we must understand the awakening in which he played so great a role.
for soprano and baritone soloists, SATB chorus, and orchestra This significant seven-movement work from Cecilia McDowall presents an imaginative pairing of extracts from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci with texts from the Latin Missa pro defunctis. Da Vinci's reflective and penetrating insights into the nature of mortality and all that it encompasses cast new light on the familiar Requiem texts, and McDowall employs her orchestral forces to create a rich, atmospheric backdrop to the profound narrative presented by the chorus and soprano and baritone soloists. Dark, sonorous writing precedes an energetic 'Sanctus', and the closing bars of the luminous 'Lux aeterna' create a powerful allusion to da Vinci's concept of 'The Perspective of Disappearance'.
Can music make the world a better place? Can it really 'belong' to anyone? Can the magic, mystery and incertitude of music - of the human brain meeting or making sound - can it stop wars, rehabilitate the broken, unite, educate or inspire? From Jimi Hendrix playing 'Machine Gun' at The Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 to the Bataclan under siege in 2015, Ed Vulliamy has lived the music, met the legends, and asked, when words fail, might we turn to music? There's only one way to find out, and that is to listen...
for SATB or upper voices, and wind band The Future of Fire is a brief but powerful work. The vibrant scoring creates a feeling of explosive energy from beginning to end with intense bursts from a battery of percussion. The melodic material is taken from a popular and touching love song from Shannxi province in north-western China, which is coupled with rhythmic motives in both the wind band and chorus. Folk melodies from this region use intervals of a minor seventh these angular leaps are suited to the dynamic spirit of this work. The chorus sings a vocalise based on repeated syllables that are found in Chinese folk songs, as well as many folk songs from around the world.
Pierre Boulez is acknowledged as one of the most important composers in contemporary musical life. This collection explores his works, influence, reception and legacy, shedding new light on Boulez's music and its historical and cultural contexts. In two sections that focus firstly on the context of the 1940s and 1950s, and secondly on the development of the composer's style, the contributors address recurring themes such as Boulez's approach to the serial principle and the related issues of form and large-scale structure. Featuring excerpts from Boulez's correspondence with a range of his contemporaries here published for the first time, the book illuminates both Boulez's relationship with them and his thinking concerning the challenges which confronted both him and other leading figures of the European avant-garde. In the final section, three chapters examine Boulez's relationship with audiences in the United Kingdom, and the development of the appreciation of his music.
A study of the life and works of Erik Chisholm, one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Scottish music. Erik Chisholm was the pre-eminent composer and musician in Scottish classical music in the first half of the twentieth century. As Sir Charles Mackerras put it, 'Chisholm was a musician of rare capabilities. He was a pianist and organist, a conductor, a composer, a lecturer on music, an entrepreneur and administrator, and to all these he brought a unique blend of originality, flair and energy.' As well as his life in Glasgow, Chisholm travelled to the Far East, notably Singapore, for the Entertainments and National Service Association during the Second World War, and subsequently became Professor of Music at the University of Cape Town, where he greatly developed the study and performance of music. He conducted numerous first British performances, including Berlioz's The Trojans in 1935 and Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle in 1957. Accounts of the visits to Glasgow by such composers as Bartok,Casella, Hindemith et al are being presented here. Erik Chisholm. Scottish Modernist will be of general interest to scholars and students of twentieth-century music. In particular, those interested in the development of music, opera and ballet in Scotland, Scottish literature and cultural history will find this book of much value. It will also be of interest to those studying the music of Bartok, Sorabji, Hindemith, Walton, Bax, Casella, and Shostakovich whom Chisholm knew personally and brought to Scotland.
Double Lives: Film Composers in the Concert Hall is a collection of fifteen essays dealing with 'iconic' film composers who, perhaps to the surprise of many fans of film music, nevertheless maintained lifelong careers as composers for the concert hall. Featured composers include Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann, Nino Rota, Leonard Rosenman, and Ennio Morricone. Progressing in chronological order, the chapters offer accounts of the various composers' concert-hall careers and descriptions of their concert-hall styles. Each chapter compares the composer's music for films with his or her music for the concert hall, and speculates as to how music in one arena might have affected music in the other. For each composer discussed in the book, complete filmographies and complete works lists are included as appendices. Double Lives: Film Composers in the Concert Hall is accessible for scholars, researchers, and general readers with an interest in film music and concert music.
Music, Time, and Its Other explores the relation between the enigmatic character of our temporal experiences and music's affective power. By taking account of competing concepts of time, Savage explains how music refigures dimensions of our experiences through staking out the borderlines between time and eternity. He examines a range of musical expressions that reply to the deficiency born from the difference between time and an order that exceeds or surpasses it and reveals how affective tonalities of works by Bach, Carolan, Debussy, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass augment our understanding of our temporal condition. Reflections on the moods and feelings to which music gives voice counterpoint philosophical investigations into the relation between music's power to affect us and the force that the present has with respect to the initiatives we take. Music, Time, and Its Other thus sets out a new approach to music, aesthetics, politics, and the critical roles of judgment and imagination.
The first book about Elliott Carter's only opera--or indeed about any single work by this still-productive modern master. In 1997, the eminent American composer Elliott Carter teamed with British music critic/librettist Paul Griffiths to create the one-act opera What Next? Hailed by the New York Times as "theatrically dynamic" and "poignant," the opera explores how six people work together to emerge from the wreckage of an accident. Today, What Next? enjoys a prominent position in Carter's celebrated "late late" compositional period. In the firstbook to focus exclusively on one Carter composition, Guy Capuzzo uses the metaphors of communication, cooperation, and separation to trace the dramatic arc of What Next? Through an approach that places stage action, words,and music on equal footing, Capuzzo's readings of four excerpts from the opera reveal the inner workings of Carter and Griffiths's tragicomedy. Elliott Carter's "What Next?": Communication, Cooperation, and Separation sheds light on a significant work by a major figure in twentieth-century concert music and will be of interest to all who study American music, vocal music, and musical criticism. Guy Capuzzo is associate professor of music theory at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro.
Originally the title for Vaughan Williams's opera Sir John in Love, Fat Knight was conceived as a seven-movement orchestral suite that drew upon the opera and had, as its central character, Shakespeare's Falstaff. Vaughan Williams never completed the work and left only a two-piano score. It is from this score that the conductor Martin Yates has realised the Fat Knight suite, incorporating the orchestration from the completed opera. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Flexible Adaptation in Cognitive Radios
Shujun Li, Miecyslaw Kokar
Hardcover
R3,471
Discovery Miles 34 710
Advances in Italian Mechanism Science…
Giovanni Boschetti, Alessandro Gasparetto
Hardcover
Control of Complex Systems - Theory and…
Kyriakos Vamvoudakis, Sarangapani Jagannathan
Hardcover
Africa's Business Revolution - How to…
Acha Leke, Mutsa Chironga, …
Hardcover
![]()
|