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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Classical music (c 1750 to c 1830)
The description for this book, Thayer's Life of Beethoven, Part I, will be forthcoming.
No change has had a more profound influence on the development of music-making over the last two decades than the growth of the historical performance movement. The notion that we can - and indeed should - perform music in the manner its composers intended has led to a search for original methods and styles of performance. At first this was the pursuit of a small coterie, but in recent years the explosion of popular interest in what has been called the 'authenticity' movement has led to a sea-change in our listening habits. Performances on period instruments are now supplanting those on modern instruments in some central areas of the classical repertory, and by many this is perceived as a threat. For the first time, this book explores the thinking behind the search for so-called authenticity in musical performance, and questions some of the received opinions about its worth and purpose. The contributors include critics Nicholas Kenyon of Early Music and Will Crutchfield of the New York Times, alongside Howard Mayer Brown, Philip Brett, Robert P. Morgan, Richard Taruskin, and Gary Tomlinson, all of them experts in their field. The variety of views expressed is sure to provoke wide discussion and to stimulate new thought among both scholars and performers about the future of the historical performance movement.
Who "speaks" to us in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice, " in Wagner's operas, in a Mahler symphony? In asking this question, Carolyn Abbate opens nineteenth-century operas and instrumental works to new interpretations as she explores the voices projected by music. The nineteenth-century metaphor of music that "sings" is thus reanimated in a new context, and Abbate proposes interpretive strategies that "de-center" music criticism, that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, and that celebrate musical gestures often marginalized by conventional music analysis.
This study of the growth of instrumental music and the crucial transition of composers, from dependent court musicians to free professionals, emphasizes the major influential cultural trends and political events of the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.
Music examples and charts illustrate the analyses, and each essay is fully annotated by the editor. in some cases, the results of the original research by the editor or by others working in the field are published here for the first time. Much of the material has never before appeared in English. A score embodying the best available musical text. Historical background what is known of the circumstances surrounding the origin of the work, including (where relevant) original source material. A detailed analysis of the music, by the editor of the volume or another well-known scholar. Other significant analytic essays and critical comments, exposing the student to a variety of opinions about the music."
This piano score represents a reduction of the orchestral version of Tchaikovsky's famous ballet. Headings are in Russian and French. 275 pages, 7 by 10 ? inches.
During his short lifetime, Franz Schubert (1797-1828) contributed to a wide variety of musical genres, from intimate songs and dances to ambitious chamber pieces, symphonies, and operas. The essays and translated documents in "Franz Schubert and His World" examine his compositions and ties to the Viennese cultural context, revealing surprising and overlooked aspects of his music. Contributors explore Schubert's youthful participation in the Nonsense Society, his circle of friends, and changing views about the composer during his life and in the century after his death. New insights are offered about the connections between Schubert's music and the popular theater of the day, his strategies for circumventing censorship, the musical and narrative relationships linking his song settings of poems by Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten, and musical tributes he composed to commemorate the death of Beethoven just twenty months before his own. The book also includes translations of excerpts from a literary journal produced by Schubert's classmates and of Franz Liszt's essay on the opera "Alfonso und Estrella." In addition to the editors, the contributors are Leon Botstein, Lisa Feurzeig, John Gingerich, Kristina Muxfeldt, and Rita Steblin.
A brand-new look at the life and music of renowned composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) was the last compositional prodigy to emerge from the Austro-German tradition of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was lauded in his youth by everyone from Mahler to Puccini and his auspicious career in the early 1900s spanned chamber music, opera, and musical theater. Today, he is best known for his Hollywood film scores, composed between 1935 and 1947. From his prewar operas in Vienna to his pathbreaking contributions to American film, Korngold and His World provides a substantial reassessment of Korngold's life and accomplishments. Korngold struggled to reconcile the musical language of his Viennese upbringing with American popular song and cinema, and was forced to adapt to a new life after wartime emigration to Hollywood. This collection examines Korngold's operas and film scores, the critical reception of his music, and his place in the milieus of both the Old and New Worlds. The volume also features numerous historical documents-many previously unpublished and in first-ever English translations-including essays by the composer as well as memoirs by his wife, Luzi Korngold, and his father, the renowned music critic Julius Korngold. The contributors are Leon Botstein, David Brodbeck, Bryan Gilliam, Daniel Goldmark, Lily Hirsch, Kevin Karnes, Sherry Lee, Neil Lerner, Sadie Menicanin, Ben Winters, Amy Wlodarski, and Charles Youmans. Bard Music Festival 2019 Korngold and His World Bard College August 9-11 and 16-18, 2019
It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? In "Mozart's Grace," Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace. Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.
The first volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt. "You can't help but keep turning the pages, wondering how it will all turn out: and Walker's accumulated readings of Liszt's music have to be taken seriously indeed." D. Kern Holoman, New York Review of Books "A conscientious scholar passionate about his subject. Mr. Walker makes the man and his age come to life. These three volumes will be the definitive work to which all subsequent Liszt biographies will aspire." Harold C. Schonberg, Wall Street Journal "What distinguishes Walker from Liszt's dozens of earlier biographers is that he is equally strong on the music and the life. A formidable musicologist with a lively polemical style, he discusses the composer's works with greater understanding and clarity than any previous biographer. And whereas many have recycled the same erroneous, often damaging information, Walker has relied on his own prodigious, globe-trotting research, a project spanning twenty-five years. The result is a textured portrait of Liszt and his times without rival." Elliot Ravetz, Time "The prose is so lively that the reader is often swept along by the narrative. . . . This three-part work . . . is now the definitive work on Liszt in English and belongs in all music collections." Library Journal"
Written by one of the world's outstanding music historians and critics, the late Alfred Einstein, this classic study of Mozart's character and works brings to light many new facts about his relationship with his family, his susceptibility to ambitious women, and his associations with musical contemporaries, as well as offering a penetrating analysis of his operas, piano music, chamber music, and symphonies.
A new look at the life, times, and music of Polish composer and piano virtuoso Fryderyk Chopin Fryderyk Chopin (1810-49), although the most beloved of piano composers, remains a contradictory figure, an artist of virtually universal appeal who preferred the company of only a few sympathetic friends and listeners. Chopin and His World reexamines Chopin and his music in light of the cultural narratives formed during his lifetime. These include the romanticism of the ailing spirit, tragically singing its death-song as life ebbs; the Polish expatriate, helpless witness to the martyrdom of his beloved homeland, exiled among friendly but uncomprehending strangers; the sorcerer-bard of dream, memory, and Gothic terror; and the pianist's pianist, shunning the appreciative crowds yet composing and improvising idealized operas, scenes, dances, and narratives in the shadow of virtuoso-idol Franz Liszt. The international Chopin scholars gathered here demonstrate the ways in which Chopin responded to and was understood to exemplify these narratives, as an artist of his own time and one who transcended it. This collection also offers recently rediscovered artistic representations of his hands (with analysis), and--for the first time in English--an extended tribute to Chopin published in Poland upon his death and contemporary Polish writings contextualizing Chopin's compositional strategies. The contributors are Jonathan D. Bellman, Leon Botstein, Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Halina Goldberg, Jeffrey Kallberg, David Kasunic, Anatole Leikin, Eric McKee, James Parakilas, John Rink, and Sandra P. Rosenblum. Contemporary documents by Karol Kurpi?ski, Adam Mickiewicz, and Jozef Sikorski are included.
In the early eighteenth century, the benefit performance became an essential component of commercial music-making in Britain. Benefits, adapted from the spoken theatre, provided a new model from which instrumentalists, singers, and composers could reap financial and professional rewards. Benefits could be given as theatre pieces, concerts, or opera performances for the benefit of individual performers; or in aid of specific organizations. The benefit changed Britain's musico-theatrical landscape during this time and these special performances became a prototype for similar types of events in other European and American cities. Indeed, the charity benefit became a musical phenomenon in its own right, leading, for example, to the lasting success of Handel's Messiah. By examining benefits from a musical perspective - including performers, audiences, and institutions - the twelve chapters in this collection present the first study of the various ways in which music became associated with the benefit system in eighteenth-century Britain.
The sublime - that elusive encounter with overwhelming height, power or limits - has been associated with music from the early-modern rise of interest in the Longinian sublime to its saturation of European culture in the later nineteenth century and beyond. This volume offers a historically situated study of the relationship between music, sound and the sublime. Together, the authors distinguish between the different aesthetics of production, representation and effect, while understanding these as often mutually reinforcing approaches. They demonstrate music's strength in playing out the sublime as transfer, transport and transmission of power, allied to the persistent theme of destruction, deaths and endings. The volume opens up two avenues for further research suggested by the adjective 'sonorous': a wider spectrum of sounds heard as sublime, and (especially for those outside musicology) a more multifaceted idea of music as a cultural practice that shares boundaries with other sounding phenomena.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is one of the great icons of Western music. An amazing prodigy who toured the capitals of Europe as a child, astonishing royalty and professional musicians with his precocious skills, in his adulthood he wrote some of the finest music in the European tradition. Julian Rushton offers a concise and up-to-date biography of this musical genius, combining a well-researched life of the composer with an introduction to the works-symphonic, chamber, sacred, and theatrical-of one of the few who have composed undisputed masterpieces in every genre of his time. Rushton presents a vivid portrait, ranging from Mozart the Wunderkind-travelling with his family from Salzburg to Vienna, Paris, London, Rome, and Milan-to the mature composer of perennially fascinating operas such as "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "The Magic Flute." During the past half-century, scholars have thoroughly explored Mozart's life and music, offering new interpretations based on their historical context, and providing a factual basis for confirming or more often debunking, fanciful accounts of the man and his work. Rushton takes full advantage of these biographical and musical studies as well as the definitive New Mozart Edition to provide an accurate account of Mozart's life and, equally important, an insightful look at the music itself, complete with illustrative musical examples. An engaging biography for general readers that will also be an informative resource for scholars, this new addition to the prestigious Master Musicians series puts forward an authoritative interpretation of one of the defining figures of European culture. "Crisp, learned." -Alex Ross, The New Yorker "The finest short biography of Mozart that I know-incisive, insightful, and elegantly written. If I had to recommend one book that explained the man and his music, this would be it." -Cliff Eisen, Department of Music, King's College London "Always sensitive, judicious, and stimulating. It is too short-not too short for Mozart but for Rushton, who has certainly much more to say that would be of interest." -Charles Rosen, The New York Review of Books "A valuable addition to the ever-growing literature on Mozart." -Library Journal
Mozart's Sonatas for Pianoforte are published as part of ABRSM's 'Signature' Series - a series of authoritative performing editions of standard keyboard works, prepared from original sources by leading scholars. Includes informative introductions and performance notes.
In the years spanning from 1800 to 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven completed nine symphonies, now considered among the greatest masterpieces of Western music. Yet despite the fact that this time period, located in the wake of the Enlightenment and at the peak of romanticism, was one of rich intellectual exploration and social change, the influence of such threads of thought on Beethoven's work has until now remained hidden beneath the surface of the notes. Beethoven's Symphonies presents a fresh look at the great composer's approach and the ideas that moved him, offering a lively account of the major themes unifying his radically diverse output. Martin Geck opens the book with an enthralling series of cultural, political, and musical motifs that run throughout the symphonies. A leading theme is Beethoven's intense intellectual and emotional engagement with the figure of Napoleon, an engagement that survived even Beethoven's disappointment with Napoleon's decision to be crowned emperor in 1804. Geck also delves into the unique ways in which Beethoven approached beginnings and finales in his symphonies, as well as his innovative use of particular instruments. He then turns to the individual symphonies, tracing elements a pitch, a chord, a musical theme that offer a new way of thinking about each work and will make even the most devoted fans of Beethoven admire the symphonies anew. Offering refreshingly inventive readings of the work of one of history's greatest composers, this book shapes a fascinating picture of the symphonies as a cohesive oeuvre and of Beethoven as a master symphonist.
The Garden of Eden was originally published in its solo piano version in 1974. The four rags that make up the suite - Old Adam, The Eternal Feminine, The Serpent's Kiss and Through Eden's Gates - tell the story of the Fall in ragtime.
"Programming the Absolute" discusses the notorious opposition between absolute and program music as a true dialectic that lies at the heart of nineteenth-century German music. Beginning with Beethoven, Berthold Hoeckner traces the aesthetic problem of musical meaning in works by Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Mahler, and Schoenberg, whose private messages and public predicaments are emblematic for the cultural legacy of this rich repertory. After Romanticism had elevated music as a language "beyond" language, the ineffable spurred an unprecedented proliferation of musical analysis and criticism. Taking his cue from Adorno, Hoeckner develops the idea of a "hermeneutics of a moment," which holds that musical meaning crystallizes only momentarily--in a particular passage, a progression, even a single note. And such moments can signify as little as a fleeting personal memory or as much as the whole of German music. Although absolute music emerged with a matrix of values--the integrity of the subject, the aesthetic autonomy of art, and the intrinsic worth of high culture--that are highly contested in musicology today, Hoeckner argues that we should not completely discard the ideal of a music that continues to offer moments of transcendence and liberation. Passionately and artfully written, Hoeckner's quest for an "essayistic musicology" displays an original intelligence willing to take interpretive risks. It is a provocative contribution to our knowledge about some of Europe's most important music--and to contemporary controversies over how music should be understood and experienced.
Dass Mahlers Symphonien in der Geschichte der Gattung als reprasentative Form der burgerlichen Musikkultur einen gleichsam resumierenden Schlusspunkt des 19. Jahrhunderts bilden, gehoert mittlerweile zur communis opinio der Musikgeschichtsschreibung. Wie sich allerdings Mahlers Position aus der Perspektive der Gattungstradition darstellt, ist langst nicht hinreichend geklart. Eben darum bemuhen sich die Beitrage des Bonner Symposions zumindest in einigen wichtigen Aspekten. Mahlers Aneignung von Grundelementen der Gattungstradition, Herkunft und Bedeutung des Vokalen in der Symphonik Mahlers, asthetische Kategorien und deren Verhaltnis zur Tradition, Beziehungen Mahlers zu Zeitgenossen und unmittelbaren "Vorgangern", Mahler als symphonisches und biographisches Subjekt sind Themen, die den Schwerpunkt in der Auseinandersetzung mit Mahlers Werk bilden.
The launch CD of Huddersfield label, Pennine Records, dedicated to historically interesting new recordings. A disc experimenting with modern instruments and a fusion of contemporary and historical performance aesthetics.
- Emphasis on hearing musical forms is pedagogically effective and unique among form textbooks - Offers a complete course package, with workbook pages included in the Textbook, while the accompanying Anthology makes full scores of pieces covered in the book easily available - Offers clear and accessible explanations that are up to date with current scholarship
- Emphasis on hearing musical forms is pedagogically effective and unique among form textbooks - Offers a complete course package, with workbook pages included in the Textbook, while the accompanying Anthology makes full scores of pieces covered in the book easily available - Offers clear and accessible explanations that are up to date with current scholarship For the ANTHOLOGY: - Provides full scores to accompany the examples addressed in the text, creating a convenient package for instructors - This edition has been updated with 8 new pieces, bringing in additional composers
Granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) was an extraordinary musician who left well over four hundred compositions, most of which fell into oblivion until their rediscovery late in the twentieth century. In Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, R. Larry Todd offers a compelling, authoritative account of Hensel's life and music, and her struggle to emerge as a publicly recognized composer.
The second volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt. "You can't help but keep turning the pages, wondering how it will all turn out: and Walker's accumulated readings of Liszt's music have to be taken seriously indeed." D. Kern Holoman, New York Review of Books "A conscientious scholar passionate about his subject. Mr. Walker makes the man and his age come to life. These three volumes will be the definitive work to which all subsequent Liszt biographies will aspire." Harold C. Schonberg, Wall Street Journal "What distinguishes Walker from Liszt's dozens of earlier biographers is that he is equally strong on the music and the life. A formidable musicologist with a lively polemical style, he discusses the composer's works with greater understanding and clarity than any previous biographer. And whereas many have recycled the same erroneous, often damaging information, Walker has relied on his own prodigious, globe-trotting research, a project spanning twenty-five years. The result is a textured portrait of Liszt and his times without rival." Elliot Ravetz, Time "The prose is so lively that the reader is often swept along by the narrative. . . . This three-part work . . . is now the definitive work on Liszt in English and belongs in all music collections." Library Journal" |
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