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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Classical music (c 1750 to c 1830)

The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia (Hardcover): Cliff Eisen, Simon P. Keefe The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia (Hardcover)
Cliff Eisen, Simon P. Keefe
R6,066 Discovery Miles 60 660 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Mozart's enduring popularity, among music lovers as a composer and among music historians as a subject for continued study, lies at the heart of The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. This reference book functions both as a starting point for information on specific works, people, places and concepts as well as a summation of current thinking about Mozart. The extended articles on genres reflect the latest in scholarship and new ways of thinking about the works while the articles on people and places provide a historical framework, as well as interpretation. The book also includes a series of thematic articles that cast a wide net over the eighteenth century and Mozart's relationship to it: these include Austria, Germany, aesthetics, travel, Enlightenment, Mozart as a reader, and contemporaneous medicine, among others. Many of the topics covered have never been written about before in English-language Mozart publications or in such detail ...

Haydn and His World (Paperback, New): Elaine R. Sisman Haydn and His World (Paperback, New)
Elaine R. Sisman
R1,087 Discovery Miles 10 870 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Joseph Haydn's symphonies and string quartets are staples of the concert repertory, yet many aspects of this founding genius of the Viennese Classical style are only beginning to be explored. From local Kapellmeister to international icon, Haydn achieved success by developing a musical language aimed at both the connoisseurs and amateurs of the emerging musical public. In this volume, the first collection of essays in English devoted to this composer, a group of leading musicologists examines Haydn's works in relation to the aesthetic and cultural crosscurrents of his time.

"Haydn and His World" opens with an examination of the contexts of the composer's late oratorios: James Webster connects the "Creation" with the sublime--the eighteenth-century term for artistic experience of overwhelming power--and Leon Botstein explores the reception of Haydn's "Seasons" in terms of the changing views of programmatic music in the nineteenth century. Essays on Haydn's instrumental music include Mary Hunter on London chamber music as models of private and public performance, fortepianist Tom Beghin on rhetorical aspects of the Piano Sonata in D Major, XVI:42, Mark Evan Bonds on the real meaning behind contemporary comparisons of symphonies to the Pindaric ode, and Elaine R. Sisman on Haydn's Shakespeare, Haydn as Shakespeare, and "originality." Finally, Rebecca Green draws on primary sources to place one of Haydn's Goldoni operas at the center of the Eszterhaza operatic culture of the 1770s.

The book also includes two extensive late-eighteenth-century discussions, translated into English for the first time, of music and musicians in Haydn's milieu, as well as a fascinating reconstruction of the contents of Haydn's library, which shows him fully conversant with the intellectual and artistic trends of the era."

Distant Melodies - Music in Search of Home (Hardcover, Main): Edward Dusinberre Distant Melodies - Music in Search of Home (Hardcover, Main)
Edward Dusinberre
R540 R488 Discovery Miles 4 880 Save R52 (10%) Ships in 9 - 17 working days

How does music heard and played over many years inform one's sense of home? In Distant Melodies, Edward Dusinberre, the English first violinist of the Takacs Quartet, explores changing ideas of home, exile and return in the lives and particular chamber works of four composers: Antonin Dvorak, Edward Elgar, Bela Bartok and Benjamin Britten. A resident of Boulder, Colorado for nearly three decades, Dusinberre discovers ways in which music may both accentuate and ameliorate homesickness, as he visits and imagines some of the places crucial to these composers' creative inspiration. Drawn to the storiesof Dvorak, Bartok and Britten's American sojourns as they try to reconcile their new surroundings with nostalgiafortheir homelands, Dusinberre looks at his own evolving relationship to England through the prism of Elgar's unusual Piano Quintet and the landscapes that inspired it. New aspects of familiar music reveal themselves under altered circumstances. In the forty-eight years since the Takacs Quartet was founded in Budapest, the ensemble has undergone several significant changes of personnel. During a concert tour in Hong Kong and a return to Budapest to perform in the same hall where Bartok gave his last concert in Hungary, Dusinberre examines how a piece of music may both reinforce roots and cross borders. When travel is forbidden, the ability of music to affirm home and transcend distance takes on extra significance. As the Takacs welcomes a new violist during the COVID-19 pandemic, Britten's string quartets shape the ensemble's experience of rehearsing at home. Combining travel writing with revealing and humorous insights into the working lives of string quartet musicians, Distant Melodies illuminates the relationship between music and home.

The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700-1914 - Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists (Hardcover): William E. Weber The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700-1914 - Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists (Hardcover)
William E. Weber
R1,098 R1,028 Discovery Miles 10 280 Save R70 (6%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

To be successful, a musician often has to be an entrepreneur: someone who starts a performing venue, develops patrons, and promotes the project aggressively. Accomplishing this requires musicians to acquire social and business skills and to be highly opportunistic in what they do. In The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700 1914, international scholars investigate cases of musical entrepreneurship between around 1700 and 1914 in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. By uncovering the ways in which musicians such as Telemann, Beethoven, Paganini, and Liszt conducted their daily business, the authors reveal how musicians reshaped the frameworks of musical culture and, in the process, the nature of the music itself."

Mozart's Grace (Paperback): Scott Burnham Mozart's Grace (Paperback)
Scott Burnham
R638 Discovery Miles 6 380 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

Lumbye-katalog (Paperback): Dan Fog Lumbye-katalog (Paperback)
Dan Fog
R807 R747 Discovery Miles 7 470 Save R60 (7%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Text in Danish with an introduction in German. The Lumbye-catalogue is a catalogue of printed ballet and dance compositions by the Danish composer H C Lumbye. It provides us with a chronological survey of his printed works including a detailed index. The works were performed by Tivoli's orchestra which he conducted from its establishment in 1843. Co-published by The Royal Library in Copenhagen and Museum Tusculanum Press.

Elements of Sonata Theory - Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Paperback): James Hepokoski,... Elements of Sonata Theory - Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Paperback)
James Hepokoski, Warren Darcy
R2,319 Discovery Miles 23 190 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Elements of Sonata Theory is a comprehensive, richly detailed rethinking of the basic principles of sonata form in the decades around 1800. This foundational study draws upon the joint strengths of current music history and music theory to outline a new, up-to-date paradigm for understanding the compositional choices found in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries: sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, overtures, and concertos. In so doing, it also lays out the indispensable groundwork for anyone wishing to confront the later adaptations and deformations of these basic structures in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.
Combining insightful music analysis, contemporary genre theory, and provocative hermeneutic turns, the book brims over with original ideas, bold and fresh ways of awakening the potential meanings within a familiar musical repertory. Sonata Theory grasps individual compositions-and each of the individual moments within them-as creative dialogues with an implicit conceptual background of flexible, ever-changing historical norms and patterns. These norms may be recreated as constellations "compositional defaults," any of which, however, may be stretched, strained, or overridden altogether for individualized structural or expressive purposes. This book maps out the terrain of that conceptual background, against which what actually happens-or does not happen-in any given piece may be assessed and measured.
The Elements guides the reader through the standard (and less-than-standard) formatting possibilities within each compositional space in sonata form, while also emphasizing the fundamental role played by processes of large-scale circularity, or "rotation," in the crucially important ordering of musical modules over an entire movement. The book also illuminates new ways of understanding codas and introductions, of confronting the generating processes of minor-mode sonatas, and of grasping the arcs of multimovement cycles as wholes. Its final chapters provide individual studies of alternative sonata types, including "binary" sonata structures, sonata-rondos, and the "first-movement form" of Mozart's concertos.

Schubert's Winter Journey - Anatomy of an Obsession (Hardcover): Ian Bostridge Schubert's Winter Journey - Anatomy of an Obsession (Hardcover)
Ian Bostridge
R788 R615 Discovery Miles 6 150 Save R173 (22%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Ways of Hearing - Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces (Hardcover): Scott Burnham, Marna Seltzer, Dorothea Von Moltke Ways of Hearing - Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces (Hardcover)
Scott Burnham, Marna Seltzer, Dorothea Von Moltke
R534 Discovery Miles 5 340 Ships in 9 - 17 working days

An outstanding anthology in which notable musicians, artists, scientists, thinkers, poets, and more-from Gustavo Dudamel and Carrie Mae Weems to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Paul Muldoon-explore the influence of music on their lives and work Contributors include: Laurie Anderson Jamie Barton Daphne A. Brooks Edgar Choueiri Jeff Dolven Gustavo Dudamel Edward Dusinberre Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim Frank Gehry James Ginsburg Ruth Bader Ginsburg Jane Hirshfield Pico Iyer Alexander Kluge Nathaniel Mackey Maureen N. McLane Alicia Hall Moran Jason Moran Paul Muldoon Elaine Pagels Robert Pinsky Richard Powers Brian Seibert Arnold Steinhardt Susan Stewart Abigail Washburn Carrie Mae Weems Susan Wheeler C. K. Williams Wu Fei What happens when extraordinary creative spirits-musicians, poets, critics, and scholars, as well as an architect, a visual artist, a filmmaker, a scientist, and a legendary Supreme Court justice-are asked to reflect on their favorite music? The result is Ways of Hearing, a diverse collection that explores the ways music shapes us and our shared culture. These acts of musical witness bear fruit through personal essays, conversations and interviews, improvisatory meditations, poetry, and visual art. They sound the depths of a remarkable range of musical genres, including opera, jazz, bluegrass, and concert music both classical and contemporary. This expansive volume spans styles and subjects, including Pico Iyer's meditations on Handel, Arnold Steinhardt's thoughts on Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, and Laurie Anderson and Edgar Choueiri's manifesto for spatial music. Richard Powers discusses the one thing about music he's never told anyone, Daphne Brooks draws sonic connections between Toni Morrison and Cecile McLorin Salvant, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg reveals what she thinks is the sexiest duet in opera. Poems interspersed throughout further expand how we can imagine and respond to music. Ways of Hearing is a book for our times that celebrates the infinite ways music enhances our lives.

Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911 (Hardcover): Derek Miller Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911 (Hardcover)
Derek Miller
R2,541 Discovery Miles 25 410 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

In the nineteenth century, copyright law expanded to include performances of theatrical and musical works. These laws transformed how people made and consumed performances. Exploring precedent-setting litigation on both sides of the Atlantic, this book traces how courts developed definitions of theater and music to suit new performance rights laws. From Gilbert and Sullivan battling to protect The Mikado to Augustin Daly petitioning to control his spectacular 'railroad scene', artists worked with courts to refine vague legal language into clear, functional theories of drama, music, and performance. Through cases that ensnared figures including Lord Byron, Laura Keene, and Dion Boucicault, this book discovers how the law theorized central aspects of performance including embodiment, affect, audience response, and the relationship between scripts and performances. This history reveals how the advent of performance rights reshaped how we value performance both as an artistic medium and as property.

Mozart - Piano Sonata No. 6 in D major, K. 284 (Paperback): Samwise Publishing, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Mozart - Piano Sonata No. 6 in D major, K. 284 (Paperback)
Samwise Publishing, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
R267 Discovery Miles 2 670 Ships in 18 - 22 working days
Hearing Form - Musical Analysis With and Without the Score (Paperback, 3rd edition): Matthew Santa Hearing Form - Musical Analysis With and Without the Score (Paperback, 3rd edition)
Matthew Santa
R1,466 Discovery Miles 14 660 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

- 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

Rethinking Schubert (Paperback): Lorraine Byrne Bodley, Julian Horton Rethinking Schubert (Paperback)
Lorraine Byrne Bodley, Julian Horton
R1,574 Discovery Miles 15 740 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

In Rethinking Schubert, today's leading Schubertians offer fresh perspectives on the composer's importance and our perennial fascination with him. Subjecting recurring issues in historical, biographical and analytical research to renewed scrutiny, the twenty-two chapters yield new insights into Schubert, his music, his influence and his legacy, and broaden the interpretative context for the music of his final years. With close attention to matters of style, harmonic and formal analysis, and text setting, the essays gathered here explore a significant portion of the composer's extensive output across a range of genres. The most readily explicable aspect of Schubert's appeal is undoubtedly our continuing engagement with the songs. Schubert will always be the first port of call for scholars interested in the relationship between music and the poetic text, and several essays in Rethinking Schubert offer welcome new inquiries into this subject. Yet perhaps the most striking feature of modern scholarship is the new depth of thought that attaches to the instrumental works. This music's highly protracted dissemination has combined with a habitual critical hostility to produce a reception history that is hardly congenial to musical analysis. Empowered by the new momentum behind theories of nineteenth-century harmony and form and recently-published source materials, the sophisticated approaches to the instrumental music in Rethinking Schubert show decisively that it is no longer acceptable to posit Schubert's instrumental forms as flawed lyric alternatives to Beethoven. What this volume provides, then, is not only a fresh portrait of one of the most loved composers of the nineteenth century but also a conspectus of current Schubertian research. Whether perusing unknown repertoire or refreshing canonical works, Rethinking Schubert reveals the extraordinary methodological variety that is now available to research, painting a portrait of Schubert that is vibrant, plural, trans-national, and complex.

Eighteen Little Preludes (Sheet music): Johann Sebastian Bach, Hans Bischoff Eighteen Little Preludes (Sheet music)
Johann Sebastian Bach, Hans Bischoff
R289 Discovery Miles 2 890 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This collection, edited by Dr. Hans Bischoff, consists of the Six Little Preludes, BWV 933-938, along with twelve preludes taken from The Little Piano Book (Clavierbuchlein) of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. Also included is an outstanding CD recording from the Alfred library. Titles: Prelude No. 1 in C Major (BWV 933) * Prelude No. 2 in C Minor (BWV 934) * Prelude No. 3 in D Minor (BWV 935) * Prelude No.4 in D Major (BWV 936) * Prelude No. 5 in E Major (BWV 937) * Prelude No. 6 in E Minor (BWV 938) * Prelude No. 7 in C Major * Prelude No. 8 in C Major * Prelude No. 9 in C Minor * Prelude No. 10 in D Major * Prelude No. 11 in D Minor * Prelude No. 12 in D Minor * Prelude No. 13 in E Minor * Prelude No. 14 in F Major * Prelude No. 15 in F Major * Prelude No. 16 in G Minor * Prelude No. 17 in G Minor * Prelude No. 18 in A Minor.

Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900 (Paperback): Clive Brown Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900 (Paperback)
Clive Brown
R2,808 Discovery Miles 28 080 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The past ten years have seen a rapidly growing interest in performing and recording Classical and Romantic music with period instruments; yet the relationship of composers' notation to performing practices during that period has received only sporadic attention from scholars, and many aspects of composers' intentions have remained uncertain. Brown here identifies areas in which musical notation conveyed rather different messages to the musicians for whom it was written than it does to modern performers, and seeks to look beyond the notation to understand how composers might have expected to hear their music realized in performance. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that, in many respects, the sound worlds in which Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms created their music were more radically different from ours than is generally assumed.

The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia (Hardcover): Caryl Clark, Sarah Day-O'connell The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia (Hardcover)
Caryl Clark, Sarah Day-O'connell
R4,674 Discovery Miles 46 740 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

For well over two hundred years, Joseph Haydn has been by turns lionized and misrepresented - held up as celebrity, and disparaged as mere forerunner or point of comparison. And yet, unlike many other canonic composers, his music has remained a fixture in the repertoire from his day until ours. What do we need to know now in order to understand Haydn and his music? With over eighty entries focused on ideas and seven longer thematic essays to bring these together, this distinctive and richly illustrated encyclopedia offers a new perspective on Haydn and the many cultural contexts in which he worked and left his indelible mark during the Enlightenment and beyond. Contributions from sixty-seven scholars and performers in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania, capture the vitality of Haydn studies today - its variety of perspectives and methods - and ultimately inspire further exploration of one of western music's most innovative and influential composers.

Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680-1880 (Hardcover): Sarah Hibberd, Miranda Stanyon Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680-1880 (Hardcover)
Sarah Hibberd, Miranda Stanyon
R2,678 Discovery Miles 26 780 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music - The Cambridge History of Music (Book): Simon P. Keefe The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music - The Cambridge History of Music (Book)
Simon P. Keefe
R1,369 Discovery Miles 13 690 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The eighteenth century arguably boasts a more remarkable group of significant musical figures, and a more engaging combination of genres, styles and aesthetic orientations, than any century before or since, yet huge swathes of its musical activity remain under-appreciated. The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music provides a comprehensive survey, examining little-known repertories, works and musical trends alongside more familiar ones. Rather than relying on temporal, periodic and composer-related phenomena to structure the volume, it is organised by genre; chapters are grouped according to the traditional distinctions of music for the church, music for the theatre and music for the concert room that conditioned so much thinking, activity and output in the eighteenth century. A valuable summation of current research in this area, the volume also encourages readers to think of eighteenth-century music less in terms of overtly teleological developments than of interacting and mutually stimulating musical cultures and practices.

Beethoven'S Theatrical Quartets - Opp. 59, 74 and 95 (Hardcover, New): Nancy November Beethoven'S Theatrical Quartets - Opp. 59, 74 and 95 (Hardcover, New)
Nancy November
R2,675 Discovery Miles 26 750 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Beethoven's middle-period quartets, Opp. 59, 74 and 95, are pieces that engage deeply with the aesthetic ideas of their time. In the first full contextual study of these works, Nancy November celebrates their uniqueness, exploring their reception history and early performance. In detailed analyses, she explores ways in which the quartets have both reflected and shaped the very idea of chamber music and offers a new historical understanding of the works' physical, visual, social and ideological aspects. In the process, November provides a fresh critique of three key paradigms in current Beethoven studies: the focus on his late period; the emphasis on 'heroic' style in discussions of the middle period; and the idea of string quartets as 'pure', 'autonomous' artworks, cut off from social moorings. Importantly, this study shows that the quartets encompass a new lyric and theatrical impetus, which is an essential part of their unique, explorative character.

Gluck: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in Letters and Documents (Hardcover): Patricia Howard Gluck: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in Letters and Documents (Hardcover)
Patricia Howard
R5,448 Discovery Miles 54 480 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Christoph Willibald Gluck took the most hidebound musical conventions and shook opera free of them. Celebrated today for his historical significance, as the one composer who did most to effect the transition between baroque and classical opera, Gluck in his lifetime was both a controversial figure and a colourful one: the sources portray a man of enormous energy, relish for good food and good company, and passion for his art. This book brings together a variety of eighteenth century sources in an attempt to construct a portrait of Gluck - the eccentric genius with a larger-than-life character. Based primarily on Gluck's vast body of letters to and from his friends and colleagues, the book also includes a wealth of factual documents and informal anecdotes, not easily accessible in the original German, French and Italian , almost none of which has ever been translated.

The Entrepreneurial Muse - Inspiring Your Career in Classical Music (Paperback): Jeffrey Nytch The Entrepreneurial Muse - Inspiring Your Career in Classical Music (Paperback)
Jeffrey Nytch
R962 Discovery Miles 9 620 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The Entrepreneurial Muse: Inspiring your career in classical music explores principles of entrepreneurship in a classical music setting, inspiring students, emerging professionals, and educators alike to gain the broader perspective and strategic understanding required to negotiate the complex and ever-changing landscape of a professional music career. The author's own career journey creates an additional narrative intended to inspire a broader and more creative view of career possibilities. Readers will acquire strategic and observational tools designed to expand their view of possible career paths, stimulate creative thinking about how their unique skills can find value in the 21st-century marketplace, and realize their goals through the entrepreneurial process. And because entrepreneurship is itself a creative endeavor, readers will learn how entrepreneurship and artistic integrity can not only peacefully coexist, but actually nurture and inspire each other. The Entrepreneurial Muse explains and illustrates a new approach to developing and maintaining a career in classical music, and to supplement, not replace, traditional music career development texts. The Entrepreneurial Muse inspires readers' creative imaginations and gives them practical tools to help realize a personally authentic career that is sustainable, fulfilling, and impactful.

Political Beethoven - New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Hardcover, New): Nicholas Mathew Political Beethoven - New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Hardcover, New)
Nicholas Mathew
R2,670 Discovery Miles 26 700 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his career - from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the 1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of Vienna - to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define serious music in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's much-maligned political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre, thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice - a voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the present day.

The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna - A Poetics of Entertainment (Hardcover): Mary Hunter The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna - A Poetics of Entertainment (Hardcover)
Mary Hunter
R3,473 Discovery Miles 34 730 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in the lively theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. Opera buffa (Italian-language comic opera) persistently entertained audiences at a time when Joseph was striving for a German national theater. Hunter attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide "sheer" pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. She argues that opera buffa, like mainstream film today, projects a social world both recognizable and distinct from reality. It raises important issues while containing them in the "merely entertaining" frame of the occasion, as well as presenting them as a series of easily identifiable dramatic and musical conventions.

Exploring nearly eighty comic operas, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discusses "Cos" fan tutte" as a work profoundly concerned with the conventions of its repertory and with the larger idea of convention itself and reveals the ways Mozart and da Ponte pointedly converse with their immediate contemporaries.

Thinking About Harmony - Historical Perspectives on Analysis (Paperback): David Damschroder Thinking About Harmony - Historical Perspectives on Analysis (Paperback)
David Damschroder
R1,258 Discovery Miles 12 580 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Focusing on music written in the period 1800 1850, Thinking about Harmony traces the responses of observant musicians to the music that was being created in their midst by composers including Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin. It tells the story of how a separate branch of musical activity - music analysis - evolved out of the desire to make sense of the music, essential both to its enlightened performance and to its appreciation. The book integrates two distinct areas of musical inquiry - the history of music theory and music analysis - and the various notions that shape harmonic theory are put to the test through practical application, creating a unique and intriguing synthesis. Aided by an extensive compilation of carefully selected and clearly annotated music examples, readers can explore a panoramic projection of the era's analytical responses to harmony, thereby developing a more intimate rapport with the period.

Mozart (Paperback): Julian Rushton Mozart (Paperback)
Julian Rushton
R659 Discovery Miles 6 590 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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

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