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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Classical music (c 1750 to c 1830)
This is a new, digitally enhanced reprint of the score originally published in 1936 by Edition Suecia. Stenhammar began work on what most consider to be his finest orchestral work while on vacationing in Italy in 1911. The Serenade was completed two years later and given its premiere under the composer's baton in Stockholm in January 1914. Revisions were made a few years later and the final version was premiered in Gothenburg in 1920. While unmistakably Scandinavian, Stenhammar's music often takes a more lyrical and classical approach than his fellow Scaninavians Sibelius and Nielsen. The Serenade is widely considered to be the finest example of the Swedish composer's style.
Grand Tours is a chronicle of the American visits of five charismatic pianists--Leopold de Meyer, Henri Herz, Sigismund Thalberg, Anton Rubenstein, and Hans von Bulow--during the late nineteenth century. Performing Beethoven and Chopin in gold-rush era California, these pianists introduced many Americans to the delights of the concert hall. With humor and insight, Lott describes the clash between the flamboyant, elegant, European pianists and American audiences more accustomed to circuses and rodeos than these "serious" entertainments. Lott also explores the creative and sometimes outlandish publicity techniques of managers seeking to capitalize on rich but uncharted American markets. The tours, which included almost a thousand concerts in more than one hundred cities in America and Canada, illustrate the rigors of the performing life, the wide range of nineteenth-century audiences and their gradual transformation from boisterous participators to respectful listeners, and the establishment of the piano recital as it exists today. With the colorful personalities of the pianists, the juxtaposition of high art and unsophisticated audiences, and the predilection of Americans to treat even the most serious subjects with humor, the book is illuminating and entertaining. The text is illustrated with ads, newspaper clippings, and correspondence that bring to life this collision of cultures.
Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 18th century, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. Surprisingly, heretofore there has been no truly extensive, broad-based treatment of the genre, and the best of the existing studies are now several decades old. In this five-volume series, A. Peter Brown explores the symphony from its 18th-century beginnings to the end of the 20th century. Synthesizing the enormous scholarly literature, Brown presents up-to-date overviews of the status of research, discusses any important former or remaining problems of attribution, illuminates the style of specific works and their contexts, and samples early writings on their reception. The Symphonic Repertoire provides an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur. The series is being launched with two volumes on the Viennese symphony. Volume II Volume II considers some of the best-known and most universally admired symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, who created what A. Peter Brown designates as the first golden age of the Viennese symphony during the late 18th and first three decades of the 19th century. The last two dozen symphonies by Haydn, half dozen by Mozart, and three by Schubert, together with Beethoven s nine symphonies became established in the repertoire and provided a standard against which every other symphony would be measured. Most significantly, they imparted a prestige to the genre that was only occasionally rivaled by other cyclic compositions. More than 170 symphonies from this repertoire are described and analyzed in The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony, the first volume of the series to appear."
Philosophy of music has flourished in the last thirty years, with great advances made in the understanding of the nature of music and its aesthetics. Peter Kivy has been at the centre of this flourishing, and now offers his personal introduction to philosophy of music, a clear and lively explanation of how he sees the most important and interesting philosophical issues relating to music. Anyone interested in music will find this a stimulating introduction to some fascinating questions and ideas.
The Guarneri Quartet is fabled for its unique longevity and high-spirited virtuosity. Here is its story from the inside--a story filled with drama, humor, danger, compassion, and, of course, glorious music.
This book combines a performance guide for violinists, an analytical study, an exploration of Bach's style, and an investigation of musical form and continuity. J.S. Bach's three sonatas and three partitas for solo violin have been mainstays of the violin concert repertoire since the mid-nineteenth century; their long performance history, evidenced in recordings as well as in editions, offers an opportunity to study the ways in which notions of Baroque style have evolved. Central to the book is the question what type of analysis is best applied to Bach's music: wherever possible, Lester draws his analytical tools from eighteenth-century techniques, developed for this repertoire.
Mozart's unfinished Requiem has long been shrouded in mystery.
Mozart undertook the commission for an Austrian nobleman, little
knowing that he was to write a requiem for himself. Inevitably, the
secrecy surrounding the anonymous commission, the circumstances of
Mozart's death, the unfinished state of the work, and its
completion under the direction of Mozart's widow, Constanze, have
precipitated two centuries of romantic speculation and scholarly
controversy.
The complex relationship between Mozart and his father has fascinated music lovers for centuries, and much effort has been spent examining the letters exchanged by the two men. This provocative book offers a new reading of these letters, placing them in the context of the stylized strategies of the eighteenth-century epistolary tradition and arguing that they reveal a rebelliousness deep within Mozart's life and work. David Schroeder contends that Mozart's father, Leopold, intended to write a biography of his son and designed his correspondence to be published as a type of moral biography. He bombarded his son with letters that often began with amusing anecdotes and then offered a torrent of advice on every imaginable subject. Dealing with these often biting letters presented Mozart with a challenge. He could react with anger, but that type of revolt only fired Leopold's criticism, and it proved much more effective to be evasive or dissimulating. Mozart's letters, in contrast to the moral German-styled letters he received, came closer to the more wily French letters of the philosophes, Voltaire especially, whose style he would have discovered while living in Paris. Like Voltaire, Mozart wore different epistolary masks, playing the comedian, moralist, intimate friend, or even, with scatological outbursts, protester against the sanitized moral and enlightened world of authority. Eventually Mozart turned the correspondence into an epistolary game, willfully making his letters unprintable and deliberately subverting his father's plans.
During the nineteenth century, nearly one hundred symphonies were written by over fifty composers living in the United States. With few exceptions, this repertoire is virtually forgotten today. In the award-winning Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise, author Douglas W. Shadle explores the stunning stylistic diversity of this substantial repertoire and uncovers why it failed to enter the musical mainstream. Throughout the century, Americans longed for a distinct national musical identity. As the most prestigious of all instrumental genres, the symphony proved to be a potent vehicle in this project as composers found inspiration for their works in a dazzling array of subjects, including Niagara Falls, Hiawatha, and Western pioneers. With a wealth of musical sources at his disposal, including never-before-examined manuscripts, Shadle reveals how each component of the symphonic enterprise-from its composition, to its performance, to its immediate and continued reception by listeners and critics-contributed to competing visions of American identity. Employing an innovative transnational historical framework, Shadle's narrative covers three continents and shows how the music of major European figures such as Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Brahms, and Dvorak exerted significant influence over dialogues about the future of American musical culture. Shadle demonstrates that the perceived authority of these figures allowed snobby conductors, capricious critics, and even orchestral musicians themselves to thwart the efforts of American symphonists despite widespread public support of their music. Consequently, these works never entered the performing canons of American orchestras. An engagingly written account of a largely unknown repertoire, Orchestrating the Nation shows how artistic and ideological debates from the nineteenth century continue to shape the culture of American orchestral music today.
A greatly expanded edition of a masterpiece by a world-class pianist and writer on music.
The question whether the text, music, singers, or setting is the most important feature of an opera has long been debated. At one time, the courts of Vienna and Munich imported Italian opera before the German language gained acceptance. Once established, German opera, from Mozart to Schoenberg, reached the highest peak--as seen in the libretti of this volume.
Winner of the Belmont University Prize for Best Book on Country Western Music. Alan Munde and Joe Carr are the best known as superb bluegrass musicians. In this book they demonstrate that they are also good historians, and that they understand the full range of styles generally associated with country music. And better than anyone else so far, they have described and explained the vital contributions made by West Texas musicians to the music of America and the world. Ever since the Amarillo fiddler Eck Robertson inaugurated country music's commercial history with his first recordings in 1922, West Texas musicians have played major innovative roles in the shaping and popularization of the nation's popular music forms. The Beatles emerged from the gritty industrial world of Liverpool, but their musical roots run directly to Buddy Holly and the Texas plains. People who have wondered how such remarkable music talent could emerge from the vast seemingly empty landscape of West Texas need look no farther than this important and compelling book. --Bill C. Malone West Texas music, like the West Texas wind, is hard to describe, but once it blows by, it's hard to forget. This book is a powerful historical documentation of that music and the musicians who brought it to life. I love it --Sonny Curtis It's a wonderful book, and the title says it all. When you grow up with country music, you never stray far from it because a Texan is a Texan is a Texan. --Waylon Jennings. Picker/teachers Joe Carr and Alan Munde have written a wholly delightful, informative book.... --Billboard Magazine
In a theological study of Mozart's music, Kung discusses the composer's Catholic background--something that, surprisingly, has hardly been treated by scholars--and reveals, among other things, the possibility of a new creative understanding of Mozart's "Coronation Mass," as interpretated by Mozart's music. A provocative study that may even surpass Karl Barth's famous work.
From the Renaissance to the Baroque, French noels joined sacred texts with profane music and dance. They relate tales of shepherds and shepherdesses along with stories of Mary and the Child. This performing edition contains sixteen noels that appeared in an anthology of popular tunes published in 1725, where they were arranged for two flutes by the instrument maker Jean-Jacques Rippert. Betty Bang Mather and Gail Gavin present them here in modern notation in a form that may also be sung. They provide the original lyrics - which had disappeared from song collections - and include all the verses for each piece as well as English translations of first verses. Part I discusses the meaning of the word Noel, the noel as sacred parody and rustic poetry, and its place in the church. It also explores the relationship between noels and dance, the musical notation and styles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century noel settings, and the long-standing relationship between flutes, shepherds, angels, and song. The volume is enhanced by facsimiles from early collections of noels, including several pages from Rippert's publication. Mather and Gavin define the noel's place in history and encourage today's readers to play these charming pieces, sing them, and dance to their music.
This book examines two notable forms of chamber music involving piano and strings. Smallman surveys the development of these genres from their origins in the mid-eighteenth century to the present day.
A search for a grammar of music with the aid of generative linguistics. This work, which has become a classic in music theory since its original publication in 1983, models music understanding from the perspective of cognitive science.The point of departure is a search for the grammar of music with the aid of generative linguistics.The theory, which is illustrated with numerous examples from Western classical music, relates the aural surface of a piece to the musical structure unconsciously inferred by the experienced listener. From the viewpoint of traditional music theory, it offers many innovations in notation as well as in the substance of rhythmic and reductional theory.
Richard Luckett, librarian at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and an acknowledged authority on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, explores the background and composition of Messiah; the often stormy relations between Handel and his librettist, Charles Jennens; the colorful lives and personalities of the original soloists; and the circumstances of the first performance in Dublin, 1742, at which ladies were asked not to wear hoops or gentlemen their swords, so there would be more room. Luckett also gives the complex subsequent history of the work - its success in small towns and among humble people, its grand Victorian spectacle in Westminster Abbey, with thousands on stage and tens of thousands in the audience, and its "restoration" in the twentieth century. Paintings, engravings, caricatures, and facsimiles of Handel's autograph score illustrate a text written with erudition and wit. Handel's Messiah: A Celebration is a fascinating account of a great and beloved work of music.
In this fascinating study of Mozart's operas, Nicholas Till shows that the composer was not a "divine idiot" but an artist whose work was informed by the ideas and discoveries of the Enlightenment. Examining the dramatic emergence of a modern society in eighteenth-century Austria, the author draws on such famous writers and thinkers of the time as Richardson, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, and Blake to reappraise the history and meaning of the Enlightenment and of Mozart's role within it. He evokes for us the Vienna of the 1780s, a world of intense intellectual argument, political debate, and religious inquiry, which deeply influenced the philosophical content of Mozart's operas. From the early La Finta Giardiniera, based on Richardson's Pamela, to Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, designed to support the political aims of Emperor Joseph II; from Le nozze di Figaro, a profound exploration of marriage as a human and social institution, to the post-Enlightenment Zauberflote, the operas bear witness to the era's changing views and to Mozart's own quest for personal and artistic identity.
Of the few composers who possessed an intrinsic mastery of the string quartet, Haydn was the first and, Hans Keller argues, the greatest. This seminal study of forty-five quartets by one of the leading music critics of his day provides an extraordinarily deep understanding of Haydn's methods and genius.
More than any other of the classic masters of music except perhaps Bach, Mozart continues to be the subject of intensive investigation. Every phase of his career and output, the workings of his mind, and his relations with other composers are being studied by scholars in various countries. This collection of articles were written for the Musical Quarterly by internationally known authorities who examine various aspects of Mozart's style, his works, and his life. The introduction is an essay on the special nature of Mozart's genius. Erich Hartzmann leads us into the composer's workshop; Edward E. Lowinsky and Hans T. David analyze his rhythm and harmony; Nathan Broder describes the instrument for which the piano works were written; Ernst Fritz Schmid contrasts Mozrt's personality and output with those of his friend and older contemporary, Haydn; Friedrich Blume unravels the tangled skein of the creation of the requiem; Frederick W. Sternfeld establishes the relationship between Papageno's song and Bach's motet Singet dem Herren ein neues lied; Nathan Broder assesses A. E. Muller's Guide to the accurate performance of Mozartean Piano Concertos; and Otto Erich Deutsch investigates the errors and fallacies in Mozart biography.
I like these songs better than all the rest, and someday you will too, Franz Schubert told the friends who were the first to hear his song cycle, Winterreise. These lieder have always found admiring audiences, but the poetry he chose to set them to has been widely regarded as weak and trivial. In Retracing a Winter's Journey, Susan Youens looks not only at Schubert's music but at the poetry, drawn from the works of Wilhelm Muller, who once wrote in his diary, "perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me " Youens maintains that Muller, in depicting the wanderings of the alienated lover, produced poetry that was simple but not simple-minded, poetry that embraced simplicity as part of its meaning. In her view, Muller used the ruder folk forms to give his verse greater immediacy, to convey more powerfully the wanderer's complex inner state. Youens addresses many different aspects of Winterreise the cultural milieu to which it belonged, the genesis of both the poetry and the music, Schubert's transformation of poetic cycle into music, the philosophical dimension of the work, and its musical structure."
"Few musical repertoires have attracted such a convenient andthorough compendium of knowledge." -- Early MusicNews "A. Peter Brown has performed an excellent service fordevotees of early keyboard music, and for all students of eighteenth-centurymusic... " -- Early Keyboard Journal "A. Peter Brown hascreated a unique compendium, discussing all of Haydn's works with keyboard, comparing them and placing them in a variety of contexts, historical, social andscholarly." -- Journal of the American MusicologicalSociety ..". stimulating... a book for which pianists... mustbe thankful." -- Journal of the American Liszt Society Haydnscholar A. Peter Brown offers the first detailed and comprehensive study of thecomposer's keyboard works, encompassing the solo sonatas, keyboard trios, accompanied divertimentos, concertos, concertinos, and Klavierst cke.
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 ... |
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