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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Classical music (c 1750 to c 1830)
In 1973, Western music was banned in the People's Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin's Beethoven in Beijing provides a fabulous photo-rich oral history of this boundary-breaking series of concerts the orchestra performed under famed conductor Eugene Ormandy. Lin draws from interviews, personal diaries, and news accounts to give voice to the American and Chinese musicians, diplomats, journalists, and others who participated in and witnessed this historic event. Beethoven in Beijing is filled with glorious images as well as anecdotes ranging from amusing sidewalk Frisbee sessions and acupuncture treatments for sore musicians to a tense encounter involving Madame Mao dictating which symphony was to be played at a concert. A companion volume to the film of the same name, Beethoven in Beijing shows how this 1973 tour came at the dawn of a resurgence of interest in classical music in China-now a vital source of revenue for touring orchestras.
Chopin's oeuvre holds a secure place in the repertoire, beloved by audiences, performers, and aesthetes. In Harmony in Chopin, David Damschroder offers a new way to examine and understand Chopin's compositional style, integrating Schenkerian structural analyses with an innovative perspective on harmony and further developing ideas and methods put forward in his earlier books Thinking about Harmony (Cambridge, 2008), Harmony in Schubert (Cambridge, 2010), and Harmony in Haydn and Mozart (Cambridge, 2012). Reinvigorating and enhancing some of the central components of analytical practice, this study explores notions such as assertion, chordal evolution (surge), collision, dominant emulation, unfurling, and wobble through analyses of all forty-three Mazurkas Chopin published during his lifetime. Damschroder also integrates analyses of eight major works by Chopin with detailed commentary on the contrasting perspectives of other prominent Chopin analysts. This provocative and richly detailed book will help transform readers' own analytical approaches.
Schubert's late music has proved pivotal for the development of diverse fields of musical scholarship, from biography and music history to the theory of harmony. This collection addresses current issues in Schubert studies including compositional technique, the topical issue of 'late' style, tonal strategy and form in the composer's instrumental music, and musical readings of the 'postmodern' Schubert. Offering fresh approaches to Schubert's instrumental and vocal works and their reception, this book argues that the music that the composer produced from 1822-8 is central to a paradigm shift in the history of music during the nineteenth century. The contributors provide a timely reassessment of Schubert's legacy, assembling a portrait of the composer that is very different from the sentimental Schubert permeating nineteenth-century culture and the postmodern Schubert of more recent literature.
David Damschroder's ongoing reformulation of harmonic theory continues with a dynamic exploration of how Beethoven molded and arranged chords to convey bold conceptions. This book's introductory chapters are organized in the manner of a nineteenth-century Harmonielehre, with individual considerations of the tonal system's key features illustrated by easy-to-comprehend block-chord examples derived from Beethoven's piano sonatas. In the masterworks section that follows, Damschroder presents detailed analyses of movements from the symphonies, piano and violin sonatas, and string quartets, and compares his outcomes with those of other analysts, including William E. Caplin, Robert Gauldin, Nicholas Marston, William J. Mitchell, Frank Samarotto, and Janet Schmalfeldt. Expanding upon analytical practices from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and strongly influenced by Schenkerian principles, this fresh perspective offers a stark contrast to conventional harmonic analysis - both in terms of how Roman numerals are deployed and how musical processes are described in words.
"Number One" was a phrase my father--and, for that matter, my
mother--repeated time and time again. It was a phrase spoken by my
parents' friends and by their friends' children. Whenever adults
discussed the great Chinese painters and sculptors from the ancient
dynasties, there was always a single artist named as Number One.
There was the Number One leader of a manufacturing plant, the
Number One worker, the Number One scientist, the Number One car
mechanic. In the culture of my childhood, being best was
everything. It was the goal that drove us, the motivation that gave
life meaning. And if, by chance or fate or the blessings of the
generous universe, you were a child in whom talent was evident,
Number One became your mantra. It became mine. I never begged my
parents to take off the pressure. I accepted it; I even enjoyed it.
It was a game, this contest among aspiring pianists, and although I
may have been shy, I was bold, even at age five, when faced with a
field of rivals.
Joseph Haydn is one of the greatest and most innovative of all composers, yet in some ways he is still curiously misunderstood. This engaging new Pocket Guide assesses what Haydn's music means to us today, and challenges some of the myths that have grown up around the composer. With suggestions for further reading and recommended CD recordings, Richard Wigmore's crisp and concise guide presents you with all you need to listen to and enjoy Haydn's music. It explores each of his key works, from his symphonies to his quartets, from his choral works to his sonatas, and invites a new generation of listeners to discover the depth and dazzling ingenuity of this most humane and life-affirming of composers.
Cultural, historical and reception-related contexts are central to understanding Mozart, one of the greatest and most famous musicians of all time. Widening and refining the lens through which the composer is viewed, the essays in Mozart Studies 2 focus on themes, issues, works and repertories perennially popular among Mozart scholars of all kinds, pointing to areas primed for future study and also suitable for investigation by musicians outside the scholarly community. Following on from the first Mozart Studies volume, internationally renowned contributors bring new perspectives to bear on many of Mozart's most popular works, as well as the composer's letters, biography, and reception. Chapters are grouped according to topics covered and collectively affirm the vitality of Mozart scholarship and the significant role it continues to play in defining and redefining musicological priorities in general.
The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life is well known. Austrian-born to a tyrannical father who worked him - fiercely; unhappily married to a spendthrift woman; a child-like character ill at ease amid the aristocratic splendour of the Viennese court; a musical genius who died young thus depriving the world of future glories. Yet only that last point is really true. In this comprehensive biography, John Suchet examines the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding the world's best-loved composer. From his early days as a child prodigy performing for the imperial royal family in Vienna to the last months of his short life, driven to exhaustion by a punitive workload, one thing remained constant: his happy disposition. Through trials and tribulations, grand successes and disheartening setbacks, Suchet shows us the real Mozart - blessed with an abundance of talent yet sometimes struggling to earn a living. His mischievous nature and earthy sense of humour, his ease and confidence in his own incredible abilities; these were traits that never left him. His music has brought comfort to countless generations; his life, though brief, is no less fascinating.
Beethoven and Rossini have always been more than a pair of famous composers. Even during their lifetimes, they were well on the way to becoming 'Beethoven and Rossini' - a symbolic duo, who represented a contrast fundamental to Western music. This contrast was to shape the composition, performance, reception and historiography of music throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini puts leading scholars of opera and instrumental music into dialogue with each other, with the aim of unpicking the origins, consequences and fallacies of the opposition between the two composers and what they came to represent. In fifteen chapters, contributors explore topics ranging from the concert lives of early nineteenth-century capitals to the mythmaking of early cinema, and from the close analysis of individual works by Beethoven and Rossini to the cultural politics of nineteenth-century music histories.
- 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
In 1829 Goethe famously described the string quartet as 'a conversation among four intelligent people'. Inspired by this metaphor, Edward Klorman's study draws on a wide variety of documentary and iconographic sources to explore Mozart's chamber works as 'the music of friends'. Illuminating the meanings and historical foundations of comparisons between chamber music and social interplay, Klorman infuses the analysis of sonata form and phrase rhythm with a performer's sensibility. He develops a new analytical method called multiple agency that interprets the various players within an ensemble as participants in stylized social intercourse - characters capable of surprising, seducing, outwitting, and even deceiving one another musically. This book is accompanied by online resources that include original recordings performed by the author and other musicians, as well as video analyses that invite the reader to experience the interplay in time, as if from within the ensemble.
The Italian opera company in Prague managed by Pasquale Bondini and Domenico Guardasoni played a central role in promoting Mozart's operas during the final years of his life. Using a wide range of primary sources which include the superb collections of eighteenth-century opera posters and concert programmes in Leipzig and the Indice de' teatrali spettacoli, an almanac of Italian singers and dancers, this study examines the annual schedules, recruitment networks, casting policies and repertoire selections of this important company. Ian Woodfield shows how Italian-language performances of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte and La clemenza di Tito flourished along the well-known cultural axis linking Prague in Bohemia to Dresden and Leipzig in Saxony. The important part played by concert performances of operatic arias in the early reception of Mozart's works is also discussed and new information is presented about the reception of Josepha Duschek and Mozart in Leipzig.
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.
How did revolutionary America appear to European audiences through their opera glasses? The operas studied in this volume are populated by gun-toting and slave-holding Quakers, handsome Native Americans, female middle-class political leaders, rebellious British soldiers and generous businessmen. Most of them display an unprecedented configuration of social and gender roles, which led leading composers of the time, including Mozart, Haydn, Anfossi, Piccinni and Paisiello, to introduce far-reaching innovations in the musical and dramatic fabric of Italian opera. Polzonetti presents a fresh perspective on the European cultural reception of American social and political identity. Through detailed but accessible analysis of music examples, including previously unpublished musical sources, the book documents and explains important transformations of opera at the time of Mozart's masterpieces, and its long-term consequences up to Puccini. Shedding new light on familiar and less-familiar operatic works, the study represents groundbreaking research in music, cultural and political history.
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.
Why couldn't Schubert get his 'great' C-Major Symphony performed? Why was he the first composer to consistently write four movements for his piano sonatas? Since neither Schubert's nor Beethoven's piano sonatas were ever performed in public, who did hear them? Addressing these questions and many others, John M. Gingerich provides a new understanding of Schubert's career and his relationship to Beethoven. Placing the genres of string quartet, symphony, and piano sonata within the cultural context of the 1820s, the book examines how Schubert was building on Beethoven's legacy. Gingerich brings new understandings of how Schubert tried to shape his career to bear on new hermeneutic readings of the works from 1824 to 1828 that share musical and extra-musical pre-occupations, centering on the 'Death and the Maiden' Quartet and the Cello Quintet, as well as on analyses of the A-minor Quartet, the Octet, and of the 'great' C-Major Symphony.
(Music Sales America). An exciting collection of classical tunes arranged for Grade 2-3 cellists to enjoy. There are simple piano accompaniments and the CD contains inspiring demonstration and play-along backing tracks. Contents: First Movement Rondo from Piano Concerto No. 4 (Beethoven) * Andante from Symphony No. 94 (Haydn) * Ave Maria (J.S. Bach/Gounod) * Finale from Symphony No. 1 (Brahms) * Gymnopedie No. 1 (Satie) * Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah (Handel) * Minuet from the Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach (J.S. Bach) * Minuet from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (Mozart) * Ode to Joy from Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven) * Pieds-en-l'air from Capriol Suite (Warlock) * To a Wild Rose from Woodland Sketches Op. 51 (Macdowell) * Trumpet Tune (Purcell).
David Damschroder's ongoing reformulation of harmonic theory continues with a dynamic exploration of how Beethoven molded and arranged chords to convey bold conceptions. This book's introductory chapters are organized in the manner of a nineteenth-century Harmonielehre, with individual considerations of the tonal system's key features illustrated by easy-to-comprehend block-chord examples derived from Beethoven's piano sonatas. In the masterworks section that follows, Damschroder presents detailed analyses of movements from the symphonies, piano and violin sonatas, and string quartets, and compares his outcomes with those of other analysts, including William E. Caplin, Robert Gauldin, Nicholas Marston, William J. Mitchell, Frank Samarotto, and Janet Schmalfeldt. Expanding upon analytical practices from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and strongly influenced by Schenkerian principles, this fresh perspective offers a stark contrast to conventional harmonic analysis - both in terms of how Roman numerals are deployed and how musical processes are described in words.
Of all the great composers of the eighteenth century, Handel was the supreme cosmopolitan, an early and extraordinarily successful example of a freelance composer. For thirty years the opera-house was the principal focus of his creative work and he composed more than forty operas over this period. In this book, David Kimbell sets Handel's operas in their biographical and cultural contexts. He explores the circumstances in which they were composed and performed, the librettos that were prepared for Handel, and what they tell us about his and his audience's values and the music he composed for them. Remarkably no Handel operas were staged for a period of 170 years between 1754 and the 1920s. The final chapter in this book reveals the differences and similarities between how Handel's operas were performed in his time and ours.
Analyzing Classical Form builds upon the foundations of the author's critically acclaimed Classical Form by offering an approach to the analysis of musical form that is especially suited for classroom use. Providing ample material for study in both undergraduate and graduate courses, Analyzing Classical Form presents the most up-to-date version of the author's "theory of formal functions." Students will learn how to make complete harmonic and formal analyses of music drawn from the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Part 1 introduces the principal theme-types of classical instrumental music; part 2 provides a methodology for analyzing sonata form, the most important formal type in this style period; and part 3 considers other full-movement forms found in this repertory (such as minuet, rondo, and concerto). The chapters are organized in a way that presents the most basic materials upfront and then leads the student through more details and finer points of theory. Every topic is illustrated with annotated musical examples; as well, the book contains many unannotated examples that can be used for in-class discussion and for out-of-class analytical exercises. A complete glossary of terms and questions for reviewing the theory will help students assimilate the many theoretical concepts employed in the book. A companion website provides audio and musical scores for all of the examples in the book as well as additional examples for the analysis of the simple theme-types presented in part 1.
Daniels' Orchestral Music is the gold standard for all orchestral professionals--from conductors, librarians, programmers, students, administrators, and publishers, to even instructors--seeking to research and plan an orchestral program, whether for a single concert or a full season. This sixth edition, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the original edition, has the largest increase in entries for a new edition of Orchestral Music: 65% more works (roughly 14,050 total) and 85% more composers (2,202 total) compared to the fifth edition. Composition details are gleaned from personal inspection of scores by orchestral conductors, making it a reliable one-stop resource for repertoire. Users will find all the familiar and useful features of the fifth edition as well as significant updates and corrections. Works are organized alphabetically by composer and title, containing information on duration, instrumentation, date of composition, publication, movements, and special accommodations if any. Individual appendices make it easy to browse works with chorus, solo voices, or solo instruments. Other appendices list orchestral works by instrumentation and duration, as well as works intended for youth concerts. Also included are significant anniversaries of composers, composer groups for thematic programming, a title index, an introduction to Nieweg charts, essential bibliography, internet sources, institutions and organizations, and a directory of publishers necessary for the orchestra professional. This trusted work used around the globe is a must-have for orchestral professionals, whether conductors or orchestra librarians, administrators involved in artistic planning, music students considering orchestral conducting, authors of program notes, publishers and music dealers, and instructors of conducting.
Most histories of nineteenth-century music portray 'the people' merely as an audience, a passive spectator to the music performed around it. Yet, in this reappraisal of choral singing and public culture, Minor shows how a burgeoning German bourgeoisie sang of its own collective aspirations, mediated through the voice of celebrity composers. As both performer and idealized community, the chorus embodied the possibilities and limitations of a participatory, national identity. Starting with the many public festivals at which the chorus was a featured participant, Minor's account of the music written for these occasions breaks new ground not only by taking seriously these often-neglected works, but also by showing how the contested ideals of German nationhood suffused the music itself. In situating both music and festive culture within the milieu of German bourgeois liberals, this study uncovers new connections between music and politics during a century that sought to redefine both spheres.
Internationally renowned scholars and performers present a wide range of new analytical, historical and critical perspectives on some of Mozart's most popular chamber music: his sonatas with violin, keyboard trios and quartets and the quintet with wind instruments. The chapters trace a broad chronology, from the childhood works, to the Mannheim and Paris sonatas with keyboard and violin, and the mature compositions from his Vienna years. Drawing upon the most recent research, this study serves the reader, be they a performer, listener or scholar, with a collection of writings that demonstrate the composer's innovative developments to generic archetypes and which explore and assess Mozart's creative response to the opportunities afforded by new and diverse instrumental combinations. Manners of performance of this music far removed from our own are revealed, with concluding chapters considering historically informed practice and the challenges for modern performers and audiences. |
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