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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Classical music (c 1750 to c 1830)
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's greatest works were written in Vienna in the decade before his death (1781-1791). This biography focuses on Mozart's dual roles as a performer and composer and reveals how his compositional processes are affected by performance-related concerns. It traces consistencies and changes in Mozart's professional persona and his modus operandi and sheds light on other prominent musicians, audience expectations, publishing, and concert and dramatic practices and traditions. Giving particular prominence to primary sources, Simon P. Keefe offers new biographical and critical perspectives on the man and his music, highlighting his extraordinary ability to engage with the competing demands of singers and instrumentalists, publishing and public performance, and concerts and dramatic productions in the course of a hectic, diverse and financially uncertain freelance career. This comprehensive and accessible volume is essential for Mozart lovers and scholars alike, exploring his Viennese masterpieces and the people and environments that shaped them.
(Ensemble Collection). This classic series of duets for like instruments is recognizable to nearly everyone who has ever studied an instrument. The wealth of material supplements musical development and provides a rich experience for growing musicians. Duet playing is often a student's first form of ensemble experience - technique, tone quality, intonation and balance are introduced as students do one of the things they enjoy most - making music with a friend. And duet playing leads easily and naturally to competent performance in larger ensembles. (Vol. I Easy to Medium, Vol. 2 Medium to Advanced)
Franz Liszt was preoccupied with a fundamental but difficult question: what is the content of music? His answer lay in his symphonic poems, a group of orchestral pieces intended to depict a variety of subjects drawn from literature, visual art and drama. Today, the symphonic poems are usually seen as alternatives to the symphony post-Beethoven. Analysts stress their symphonic logic, thereby neglecting their 'extramusical' subject matter. This book takes a different approach: it returns these influential pieces to their original performance context in the theatre, arguing that the symphonic poem is as much a dramatic as a symphonic genre. This is evidenced in new analyses of the music that examines the theatricality of these pieces and their depiction of voices, mise-en-scene, gesture and action. Simultaneously, the book repositions Liszt's legacy within theatre history, arguing that his contributions should be placed alongside those of Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Wagner.
The vibrant intellectual, social and political climate of mid eighteenth-century Europe presented opportunities and challenges for artists and musicians alike. This book focuses on Mozart the man and musician as he responds to different aspects of that world. It reveals his views on music, aesthetics and other matters; on places in Austria and across Europe that shaped his life; on career contexts and environments, including patronage, activities as an impresario, publishing, theatrical culture and financial matters; on engagement with performers and performance, focusing on Mozart's experiences as a practicing musician; and on reception and legacy from his own time through to the present day. Probing diverse Mozartian contexts in a variety of ways, the contributors reflect the vitality of existing scholarship and point towards areas primed for further study. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of late eighteenth-century music and for Mozart aficionados and music lovers in general.
As both composer and critic, Peggy Glanville-Hicks contributed to the astonishing cultural ferment of the mid-twentieth century. Her forceful voice as a writer and commentator helped shape professional and public opinion on the state of American composing. The seventy musical works she composed ranged from celebrated operas like Nausicaa to intimate, jewel-like compositions created for friends. Her circle included figures like Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, John Cage, and Yehudi Menuhin. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and fifty-four years of extraordinary pocket diaries, Suzanne Robinson places Glanville-Hicks within the history of American music and composers. "P.G.H." forged alliances with power brokers and artists that gained her entrance to core American cultural entities such as the League of Composers, New York Herald Tribune, and the Harkness Ballet. Yet her impeccably cultivated public image concealed a private life marked by unhappy love affairs, stubborn poverty, and the painstaking creation of her artistic works. Evocative and intricate, Peggy Glanville-Hicks clears away decades of myth and storytelling to provide a portrait of a remarkable figure and her times.
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.
Brahms in Context offers a fresh perspective on the much-admired nineteenth-century German composer. Including thirty-nine chapters on historical, social and cultural contexts, the book brings together internationally renowned experts in music, law, science, art history and other areas, including many figures whose work is appearing in English for the first time. The essays are accessibly written, with short reading lists aimed at music students and educators. The book opens with personal topics including Brahms's Hamburg childhood, his move to Vienna, and his rich social life. It considers professional matters from finance to publishing and copyright; the musicians who shaped and transmitted his works; and the larger musical styles which influenced him. Casting the net wider, other essays embrace politics, religion, literature, philosophy, art, and science. The book closes with chapters on reception, including recordings, historical performance, his compositional legacy, and a reflection on the power of composer myths.
In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity. Somewhat counter-intuitively, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights. The book's theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates over relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.
The vibrant intellectual, social and political climate of mid eighteenth-century Europe presented opportunities and challenges for artists and musicians alike. This book focuses on Mozart the man and musician as he responds to different aspects of that world. It reveals his views on music, aesthetics and other matters; on places in Austria and across Europe that shaped his life; on career contexts and environments, including patronage, activities as an impresario, publishing, theatrical culture and financial matters; on engagement with performers and performance, focusing on Mozart's experiences as a practicing musician; and on reception and legacy from his own time through to the present day. Probing diverse Mozartian contexts in a variety of ways, the contributors reflect the vitality of existing scholarship and point towards areas primed for further study. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of late eighteenth-century music and for Mozart aficionados and music lovers in general.
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.
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.
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.
**WINNER of Presto Books' Best Composer Biography** NINE WORKS OF BEETHOVEN, NINE WINDOWS INTO THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF A MUSICAL GENIUS. 'We are doubly blessed that Beethoven should have led such an extraordinary life. Laura has combined the two - the genius of his music and the richness of his experiences - to shine a revealing light on our greatest composer' John Humphrys _________________________ Ludwig van Beethoven: to some, simply the greatest ever composer of Western classical music. Yet his life remains shrouded in myths. In Beethoven, Oxford professor Laura Tunbridge cuts through the noise. With each chapter focusing on a period of his life, piece of music and revealing theme - from family to friends, from heroism to liberty - she provides a rich insight into the man and the music. Revealing a wealth of never-before-seen material, this tour de force is a compelling, accessible portrayal of one of the world's most creative minds and it will transform how you listen for ever. _________________________ 'Tunbridge has come up with the seemingly impossible: a new way of approaching Beethoven's life and music . . . profoundly original and hugely readable' John Suchet, author Beethoven: The Man Revealed 'This well researched and accessible book is a must read for all who seek to know more about the flesh and blood tangible Beethoven.' John Clubbe, author of Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary 'This book is really wonderful! ... However many books on Beethoven you own, find the space for one more. This one' Stephen Hough, pianist, composer, writer 'In a year when everyone's looking for a new take on Beethoven, Laura Tunbridge has found nine. Fresh and engaging' Norman Lebrecht, author of Genius and Anxiety 'Remarkable . . . she captures the essence of his genius and character. I'll always want to keep it in easy reach' Julia Boyd, author of Travellers in the third Reich
Reverence for J. S. Bach's music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public. Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals--amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners--inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced recreation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works.
Pianists will find unlimited fun in this collection of 24 easy piano arrangements of the world's most familiar musical themes from movies and television. Spanning several decades of entertainment history, the 24 selections in this book will delight audiences of all ages. Titles: As Time Goes By (Casablanca) * The Ballad of Gilligan's Island * The Big Bang Theory (Main Title Theme) * Cantina Band (Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) * Concerning Hobbits (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)* Doctor Who Theme * Downton Abbey - The Suite * Falling Slowly (Once) * Harry's Wondrous World (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) *Hedwig's Theme (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) * The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme) * Into the West (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) * James Bond Theme * Let Me Be Your Star (SMASH) * Song from M*A*S*H (Suicide Is Painless) * Misty Mountains (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey) * The Notebook (Main Title) * Over the Rainbow * The Pink Panther * Raiders March * Secondhand White Baby Grand (SMASH) * Star Wars (Main Title) * Theme from Superman * A Very Respectable Hobbit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A must-have for any conductor, conducting student and orchestral librarian. How does a conductor know whether the score they use is what the composer wrote? How do orchestral players know that their parts are reliable and reflect the latest scholarship? As Jonathan Del Mar reminds us in this ground-breaking book, editions of the orchestral repertoire are beset by textual problems: simple misprints, mistakes in the score or player's part, or hopelessly outdated scores at odds with current scholarship. Driven by a fundamental respect for what the composer actually wrote, Jonathan Del Mar addresses these problems through textual reports on over 100 orchestral masterpieces of classical music. Each report is introduced with essential guidance and succinct commentary on the first performance and publication of the work. Critical editions are compared with commonly used editions, and in those cases where no Urtext Edition exists, this much-needed reference work functions as a replacement for an Urtext Edition. Orchestral Masterpieces under the Microscope will be an indispensable reference tool for all who care about performances honouring the correct text that composers have left us. It serves as an essential survival guide for conductors and musicians to make informed choices, and it offers much-needed clarity on the latest scholarship for musicologists and music librarians alike |
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