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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > 20th century music
Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century seeks to understand recent German history and contemporary German culture through its sounds and musics, noises and silences, using the means and modes of the emerging field of Sound Studies. German soundscapes present a particularly fertile field for investigation and understanding, Feiereisen and Hill argue, due to such unique factors in Germany's history as its early and especially cacophonous industrialization, the sheer loudness of its wars, and the possibilities of shared noises in its division and reunification. Organized largely but not strictly chronologically, chapters use the unique contours of the German aural experience to examine how these soundscapes - the sonic environments, the ever-present arrays of noises with which everyone lives - ultimately reveal the possibility of "national" sounds. Together the chapters consider the acoustic national identity of Germany, or the cultural significance of sounds and silence, since the development and rise of sound-recording and sound-disseminating technologies in the early 1900s Chapters draw examples from a remarkably broad range of contexts and historical periods, from the noisy urban spaces at the turn of the twentieth century to battlefields and concert halls to radio and television broadcasting to the hip hop soundscapes of today. As a whole, the book makes a compelling case for the scholarly utility of listening to them. An online "Bonus Track" of teaching materials offers instructors practical tips for classroom use.
The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of
Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's
provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its
earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative
five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of
masterworks-the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and
direction to a significant period in the history of Western music.
The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of
Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's
provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its
earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative
five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of
masterworks-the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and
direction to a significant period in the history of Western music.
for SATB (with soprano semi-chorus), piano, & optional percussion (bass drum, tam-tam/gong, & 3 tom-toms) This is a colourful and dramatic celebration of nature and its powerful and hypnotizing sounds. The listener is taken on a captivating journey through the natural world, via 'tongues of thunders', the 'singing sea', and 'trumpet-throated winds'. Clustered harmonies, cross-rhythms, and vocal effects are combined with bell-like passages and rippling figurations in the piano, and the optional percussion part adds further rhythmic and dynamic interest. The semi-chorus part can be sung by one or more sopranos or a children's choir.
for solo harp and strings Suite Lyrique is a work in six movements for harp and strings, with music taken from the composer's Suite Antique of 1979 for flute, harpsichord, and strings. The six movements - Prelude, Ostinato, Aria, (Jazz) Waltz, Chanson, and Rondeau - explore different moods and exploit the harp's sound world and capabilities to the full to create a highly attractive and joyful concert work. The harp part and full score are available on sale and string parts and scores available on hire.
for SATB (with divisions) and organ Commissioned and first performed by the choir of Liverpool Cathedral, this anthem is ideal for use during the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. The choral lines move between sonorous homophonic writing and vibrant imitative passages, and are underpinned by a repeated quaver motif in the organ. Combining a sense of joy with moments of reflection, this anthem will particularly appeal to choirs looking to expand their choral repertoire.
for SATB and organ The Missa Sanctae Margaretae is a stunning new setting of the Missa Brevis, showcasing Jackson's mesmerizing choral writing. Scored for SATB and organ, the accessible choral lines move through a variety of textures and harmonies, with linear passages in the Kyrie and Agnus Dei and rich, chordal writing in the Gloria. The idiomatic organ accompaniment brings additional flavour to the music, sometimes answering the choral lines, sometimes offsetting them with fast, rhythmic passages. Ideal for use in services and concerts.
Distinguished music theorist and composer David Lewin (1933-2003) applies the conceptual framework he developed in his earlier, innovative Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations to the varied repertoire of the twentieth century in this stimulating and illustrative book. Analyzing the diverse compositions of four canonical composers--Simbolo from Dallapiccola's Quaderno musicale di Annalibera; Stockhausen's Klavierstuck III; Webern's Op. 10, No. 4; and Debussy's Feux d'articifice --Lewin brings forth structures which he calls "transformational networks" to reveal interesting and suggestive aspects of the music. In this complementary work, Lewin stimulates thought about the general methodology of musical analysis and issues of large-scale form as they relate to transformational analytic structuring. Musical Form and Transformation, first published in 1993 by Yale University Press, was the recipient of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.
Violin and piano reduction of Walton's Violin Concerto, based on the edition published in the Walton Edition Violin and Cello Concertos volume. Commissioned by Jascha Heifetz, the work was completed in 1939 and premiered by Heifetz later that year. Walton revised the concerto in 1943 and it is this version which is presented in the current edition. Orchestral material is available on hire.
The book comprises a selection of some 750 letters of the composer,
Ralph Vaughan Williams, selected from an extant corpus of about
3,300. The letters are arranged chronologically and have been
chosen to provide a cumulative pen-picture of the composer in his
own words. In general the letters reflect VW's major
preoccupations: musical, personal and political. It was not VW's
way to discuss his inner creative processes but he does discuss his
music, once it had been written: for example there is much to
illustrate the process of 'washing the face' of his major pieces
before, and after, they had reached the concert platform. There is
correspondence with collaborators such as Gilbert Murray, Harold
Child and Evelyn Sharpe who provided texts; with his publishers
(mainly OUP) about printing scores and parts; with conductors such
as Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli about performances. He was in
regular correspondence with fellow composers such as Gustav Holst,
George Butterworth, Gerald Finzi, Herbert Howells, John Ireland,
Alan Bush and Rutland Boughton. There were his pupils: Elizabeth
Maconchy and Cedric Thorpe Davie amongst others. A series of close
personal friendships is well represented: his Cambridge
contemporary and cousin Ralph Wedgwood, Edward Dent, and latterly
Michael Kennedy. Above all there are insights on his lifelong
devotion to his first wife, Adeline, and his growing friendship
with Ursula Wood, who was to become his second wife.
Walton's two coronation marches - Crown Imperial, written for the coronation of George VI in 1937, and Orb and Sceptre, written for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 - are both stirring marches with sweeping tunes, and famous examples of the genre. They are published here in new editions taken from the Walton Edition volume of shorter orchestral pieces, with a short preface from the editor, David Lloyd-Jones.
for mixed chorus, baritone solo, and orchestra This new study-score edition of Walton's seminal cantata has been off-printed from the William Walton Edition, Vol. 4, edited by Steuart Bedford. It combines the scholarship of the Edition with the practical benefits of the smaller format. Orchestral material is available on hire/rental.
Due to popular demand, this exquisite piece has been made available as a separate choral leaflet. It is also in the anthology Weddings for Choirs. Ideal for concerts, and special occasions such as weddings and anniversaries, this choral song sets a beautiful text by Paul Eluard to rich, sumptuous music which will delight singers and listeners alike.
for SATB (with divisions) and organ Commissioned by the choir of Merton College, Oxford, In the beginning was the Word provides a welcome musical setting of this iconic biblical text. The choral lines combine plainchant with harmonically intricate passages, and all is complemented by a soloistic organ part. Suitable for use throughout the church year.
Walton's Violin Sonata was commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin after a chance encounter in Lucerne, Switzerland in September 1947. The work was completed in 1949 and first performed by Menuhin and Louis Kentner that year. This edition is based on the score published in the Walton Edition Chamber Music volume.
Janacek wrote regular articles for the Brno daily paper and in these he expressed his attitude and feelings towards the everyday things in nature and human situations which had commanded his attention. The sounds he heard, especially the human voice, he annotated with musical sketches and these appear in this book in his own words and serve to illuminate the works which this great composer produced. The thirty-odd articles are grouped under Memories of Youth, The Sounds of Music, Travel, Birds, while included under Operatic Studies is a fascinating account of the origins of The Cunning Little Vixen. The book also contains some rare photographs and music examples, many in Janacek's own hand.
Puccini's famous but controversial Madama Butterfly reflects a practice of 'temporary marriage' between Western men and Japanese women in nineteenth-century treaty ports. Groos' book identifies the plot's origin in an eye-witness account and traces its transmission via John Luther Long's short story and David Belasco's play. Archival sources, many unpublished, reveal how Puccini and his librettists imbued the opera with differing constructions of the action and its heroine. Groos's analysis suggests how they constructed a 'contemporary' music-drama with multiple possibilities for interpreting the misalliance between a callous American naval officer and an impoverished fifteen-year-old geisha, providing a more complex understanding of the heroine's presumed 'marriage'. As an orientalizing tragedy with a racially inflected representation of Cio-Cio-San, the opera became a lightning rod for identity politics in Japan, while also stimulating decolonizing transpositions into indigenous theatre traditions such as Bunraku puppet theatre and Takarazuka musicals.
A study in contrasts, the career of Sergey Prokofiev spanned the
globe, leaving him witness to the most significant political and
historical events of the first half of the twentieth century. In
1918, after completing a program of studies at the St. Petersburg
conservatory, Prokofiev escaped Russia for the United States and
later France where, like most emigre artists of the time, he made
Paris his home. During these hectic years, he composed three
ballets and three operas, fulfilled recording contracts, and played
recitals of tempestuous music. Scores were stored in suitcases,
scenarios and librettos drafted on hotel letterhead. The constant
uprooting and transience fatigued him, but he regarded himself as a
person of action who, personally and professionally, traveled
against rather that with the current. Thus, in 1936, as political
anxieties increased in Western Europe, Prokofiev escaped back to
Russia. Though at first pampered by the totalitarian regime,
Prokofiev soon suffered official correction and censorship. He
wrote and revised his late ballets and operas to appease his
bureaucratic overseers but, more often than not, his labors came to
naught. Following his official condemnation in 1948, many of his
compositions were withdrawn from performance. Physical illness and
mental exhaustion characterized his last years. Housebound, he
journeyed inward, creating a series of works on the theme of youth
whose music sounds despondently optimistic.
In this completely rewritten and updated edition of his
long-indispensable study, Malcolm MacDonald takes advantage of 30
years of recent scholarship, new biographical information, and
deeper understanding of Schoenberg's aims and significance to
produce a superb guide to Schoenberg's life and work. MacDonald
demonstrates the indissoluble links among Schoenberg's musical
language (particularly the enigmatic and influential twelve-tone
method), his personal character, and his creative ideas, as well as
the deep connection between his genius as a teacher and as a
revolutionary composer.
The symphony has long been entangled with ideas of self and value. Though standard historical accounts suggest that composers' interest in the symphony was almost extinguished in the early 1930s, this book makes plain the genre's continued cultural dominance, and argues that the symphony can illuminate issues around space/geography, race, and postcolonialism in Germany, France, Mexico, and the United States. Focusing on a number of symphonies composed or premiered in 1933, this book recreates some of the cultural and political landscapes of an uncertain historical moment-a year when Hitler took power in Germany, and the Great Depression reached its peak in the United States. Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination asks what North American and European symphonies from the early 1930s can tell us about how people imagined selfhood during a period of international insecurity and political upheaval, of expansionist and colonial fantasies, scientised racism, and emergent fascism.
Renowned today as a prominent African-American in Music Theater and the Arts community, composer, conductor, and violinist Will Marion Cook was a key figure in the development of American music from the 1890s to the 1920s. In this insightful biography, Marva Griffin Carter offers the first definitive look at this pivotal life's story, drawing on both Cook's unfinished autobiography and his wife Abbie's memoir. A violin virtuoso, Cook studied at Oberlin College (his parents' alma mater), Berlin's Hochschule fur Musik with Joseph Joachim, and New York's national Conservatory of Music with Antonin Dvorak. Cook wrote music for a now-lost production of Uncle Tom's Cabin for the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and then devoted the majority of his career to black musical comedies due to limited opportunities available to him as a black composer. He was instrumental in showcasing his Southern Syncopated Orchestra in the prominent concert halls of the Unites States and Europe, even featuring New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet, who later introduced European audiences to authentic blues. Once mentored by Frederick Douglas, Will Marion Cook went on to mentor Duke Ellington, paving the path for orchestral concert jazz. Through interpretive and musical analyses, Carter traces Cook's successful evolution from minstrelsy to musical theater. Written with his collaborator, the distinguished poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Cook's musicals infused American Musical Theater with African-American music, consequently altering the direction of American popular music. Cook's In Dahomey, hailed by Gerald Bordman as "one of the most important events in American Musical Theater history," was the first full-length Broadway musical to be written and performed by blacks. Alongside his accomplishments, Carter reveals Cook's contentious side- a man known for his aggressiveness, pride, and constant quarrels, who became his own worst enemy in regards to his career. Carter further sets Cook's life against the backdrop of the changing cultural and social milieu: the black theatrical tradition, white audiences' reaction to black performers, and the growing consciousness and sophistication of blacks in the arts, especially music.
The book comprises a selection of some 750 letters of the composer,
Ralph Vaughan Williams, selected from an extant corpus of about
3,300. The letters are arranged chronologically and have been
chosen to provide a cumulative pen-picture of the composer in his
own words. In general the letters reflect VW's major
preoccupations: musical, personal and political. It was not VW's
way to discuss his inner creative processes but he does discuss his
music, once it had been written: for example there is much to
illustrate the process of 'washing the face' of his major pieces
before, and after, they had reached the concert platform. There is
correspondence with collaborators such as Gilbert Murray, Harold
Child and Evelyn Sharpe who provided texts; with his publishers
(mainly OUP) about printing scores and parts; with conductors such
as Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli about performances. He was in
regular correspondence with fellow composers such as Gustav Holst,
George Butterworth, Gerald Finzi, Herbert Howells, John Ireland,
Alan Bush and Rutland Boughton. There were his pupils: Elizabeth
Maconchy and Cedric Thorpe Davie amongst others. A series of close
personal friendships is well represented: his Cambridge
contemporary and cousin Ralph Wedgwood, Edward Dent, and latterly
Michael Kennedy. Above all there are insights on his lifelong
devotion to his first wife, Adeline, and his growing friendship
with Ursula Wood, who was to become his second wife.
Classical music shows a close relationship to language, and both musicology and philosophy have tended to approach music from that angle, exploring it in terms of expression, representation, and discourse. This book turns that idea on its head. Focusing on the music of Debussy and its legacy in the century since his death, After Debussy offers a groundbreaking new perspective on twentieth-century music that foregrounds a sensory logic of sound over quasi-linguistic ideas of structure or meaning. Author Julian Johnson argues that Debussy's music exemplifies this idea, influencing the music of successive composers who took up the mantle of emphasizing sound over syntax, sense over signification. In doing so, this music not only anticipates a central problem of contemporary thought-the gap between language and our embodied relation to the world-but also offers a solution. With a readable narrative structure grounded in an impressive body of literature, After Debussy ranges widely across French music, demonstrating the impact of Debussy's music on composers from Faure and Ravel to Dutilleux, Boulez, Grisey, Murail and Saariaho. It ranges similarly through a set of French writers and philosophers, from Mallarme and Proust to Merleau-Ponty, Jankelevitch, Derrida, Lyotard and Nancy, and even draws from the visual arts to help embody key ideas. In accessibly tackling substantial ideas of both musicology and philosophy, this book not only presents bold new ways of understanding each discipline but also lays the groundwork for exciting new discourse between them.
In Off Key, Kay Dickinson offers a compelling study of how certain
alliances of music and film are judged aesthetic failures. Based on
a fascinating and wide-ranging body of film-music mismatches, and
using contemporary reviews and histories of the turn to
post-industrialization, the book expands the ways in which the
union of the film and music businesses can be understood.
A new edition of Humphrey Burton's celebrated biography of Leonard Bernstein, published to coincide with the centenary of his birth. With a new introduction by the author.'Humphrey Burton's biography remains the essential account of American music's dominant figure.' Alex RossComposer, pianist, author, television teacher, Harvard lecturer, cultural icon, humanist and conductor without peer, Leonard Bernstein's versatility was legendary. He captivated Broadway with such hits as On the Townand West Side Story and introduced middle America to classical music with his Young People's Concerts on television. He composed three symphonies and a full-length opera, and he inspired the world's leading orchestras to give some of the most memorable performances of the twentieth century.Humphrey Burton was given exclusive access to Bernstein's rich legacy of letters and papers, and the book draws on hundreds of interviews with family, friends and colleagues to reveal Bernstein's fascinating and complex personality. His compelling narrative captures Bernstein's high-spirited vitality on the page, providing a frank account of his homosexuality and his marriage and chronicling the lifelong conflict between the rival claims of Bernstein's conducting and composing careers.'Burton's style is spare and unobtrusive: the picture he paints is a vivid one. So much energy. So much intelligence . Burton also demonstrates that behind Leonard Bernstein's flamboyance (and the increasingly embarrassing public behaviour) there remained honesty of purpose and generosity of spirit. This biography is imbued with the same virtues. It is a book of exceptional quality.' The Times'Humphrey Burton has written a book worthy of a great man.' Daily Telegraph'This book brings Bernstein's exuberant vitality to the page, showing why he became one of the most celebrated musical figures of the [twentieth] century.' Gramophone'The richness of the tapestry makes all the names, dates and places a compelling read, since at every turn we are in the company of an exceedingly alive man.' O |
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