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Books > Music > Composers & musicians
J. A. Fuller Maitland (1856 1936), whose Masters of German Music is also reissued in this series, was music critic of The Times for 22 years, was the editor of the second edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, prepared an edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, and also worked on Purcell and on folk song. This biography of Schumann, in the 'Great Musicians' series edited by Francis Hueffer, was published in 1884, 28 years after its subject's death. It is dedicated to Schumann's widow, Clara, who the author consulted, along with Joachim and others; but he also acknowledges that those hoping for an exhaustive life of Schumann would be disappointed: 'The time for writing such a life is not yet come.' Nevertheless, this book contains a survey of Schumann's compositions as well as his critical writings and a range of contemporary critical responses to his work.
John Taverner was the leading composer of church music under Henry VIII. His contributions to the mass and votive antiphon are varied, distinguished and sometimes innovative; he has left more important settings for the office than any of his predecessors, and even a little secular music survives. Hugh Benham, editor of Taverner's complete works for Early English Church Music, now provides the first full-length study of the composer for over twenty years. He places the music in context, with the help of biographical information, discussion of Taverner's place in society, and explanation of how each piece was used in the pre-Reformation church services. He investigates the musical language of Taverner's predecessors as background for a fresh examination and appraisal of the music in the course of which he traces similarities with the work of younger composers. Issues confronting the performer are considered, and the music is also approached from the listener's point of view, initially through close analytical inspection of the celebrated votive antiphon Gaude plurimum.
- Applies cutting-edge musical-linguistic approach to the music of early modern England - Uses analysis of emphasis to produce new insights into composers' liturgical music, showing how their settings create different interpretations of the religious text - Relevant to musicology, music theory, and religious history
Greg Graffin is the lead vocalist and songwriter of Bad Religion, recently described as "America's most significant punk band." Since its inception in Los Angeles in 1980, Bad Religion has produced 18 studio albums, become a long-running global touring powerhouse, and has established a durable legacy as one of the most influential punk rock bands of all time. Punk Paradox is Graffin's life narrative before and during L.A. punk's early years, detailing his observations on the genre's explosive growth and his band's steady rise in importance. The book begins by exploring Graffin's Midwestern roots and his life-changing move to Southern California in the mid-'70s. Swept up into the burgeoning punk scene in the exhilarating and often-violent streets of Los Angeles, Graffin and his friends formed Bad Religion, built a fanbase, and became a touring institution. All these activities took place in parallel with Graffin's never ceasing quest for intellectual enlightenment. Despite the demands of global tours, recording sessions, and dedication to songwriting, the author also balanced a budding academic career. In so doing, he managed to reconcile an improbable double-life as an iconic punk rock front man and University Lecturer in evolution. Graffin's unique experiences mirror the paradoxical elements that define the punk genre-the pop influence, the quest for society's betterment, music's unifying power-all of which are prime ingredients in its surprising endurance. Fittingly, this book argues against the traditional narrative of the popular perception of punk. As Bad Religion changed from year to year, the spirit of punk-and its sonic significance-lived on while Graffin was ever willing to challenge convention, debunk mythology, and liberate listeners from the chains of indoctrination. As insightful as it is exciting, this thought-provoking memoir provides both a fly on the wall history of the punk scene and astute commentary on its endurance and evolution.
Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) was one of the leading international composers of the post-war period as well as one of the most productive. Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) was one of the leading international composers of the post-war period as well as one of the most productive. This book provides a global view of his music, integrating a number of resonant themes in the composer's work while covering a representative cross-section of his vast output - his work list encompasses nearly 550 compositions in every established genre. Each chapter focuses on specific major works and offers generaldiscussion of other selected works connected to the main themes. These themes include compositional technique and process; genre; form and architecture; tonality and texture; allusion, quotation and musical critique; and place and landscape. Throughout, the book contends that Davies's works are not created in a vacuum but are intimately connected to, and are a reflection of, 'the past'. This deep engagement occurs on a number of levels, fluctuating and interacting with the composer's own predominantly modernist idiom and evoking a chain of historical resonances. Making sustained reference to Davies's own words, articles and programme notes as well as privileged access to primary source material from his estate, the book illuminates the composer's practices and approaches while shaping a discourse around his music.
Demonstrating the vibrant nature of current research on Maurice Ravel, one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century French music, a team of distinguished international scholars provides new interdisciplinary perspectives and insights. Through historical, critical, and analytical means, the volume reveals the symbiotic relationships between Ravel's music and aesthetic, cultural, literary, gender, performance-based, and medical studies. While the chapters progress from French aesthetic-literary association, including Colette and Proust, to more extended disciplinary couplings, with American history, jazz, dance, and neurology, the organization is relatively free to enable other thematic links to emerge. The volume presents a refreshing variety of scholarly approaches to Ravel and his music, set within broad contexts and current musicological debates. In a Ravelian spirit, it is intended that the essays will serve collectively as a model for expanding the agendas of other composer-based studies.
Franz Liszt's colleagues considered him to be one of the most accomplished and innovative practitioners in the field of musical reproduction, a reputation for which he is still admired today. Yet, while his transcriptions are widely performed, few studies have investigated the role that transcriptions played in Liszt's artistry, to say nothing of the impact they had on the music-making experience of his day. Using a host of interdisciplinary methods and primary source materials, this book provides a comprehensive survey of Liszt's lifelong involvement with the transcription, in which he assumed the roles of composer, collaborator, propagandist, commemorator, philosopher, and artist while simultaneously disseminating - often critically - the music of Beethoven, Berlioz, Schubert, Wagner, and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers. By recognizing transcription as an extraordinarily flexible tool for Liszt and his contemporaries, Liszt as Transcriber provides numerous musical, cultural, and historical contexts for this fundamentally important practice of the period.
To tell the story of Morris Day is to tell the story of Prince. Not because they were inseparable or because their paths never diverged, but because, even when their paths did diverge, they always intersected again. Each artist lifted the other up, pushing one another to be something bigger and better than they thought themselves capable of. There was plenty of one-upmanship and some (un)healthy competition, but the respect Day and Prince had for one another never wavered, from the time they met in junior high until His Royal Badness's untimely death in 2016. In telling his own story and writing about Prince, Day turns Prince into the narrative's Greek chorus. Prince is there to protect his legacy, argue with Morris's interpretation of events, and continue the dialogue that started when both musicians were in their early teens. Because of their lifelong friendship emotional intimacy, the founder and still current leader of The Time is the one man who can pull this off, and in so doing shed a new light on Prince and the culture from which the Minneapolis funk scene was born. On Time recounts Day's fight to overcome cocaine addiction, his search for meaning in both music and romance, and his subsequent second-act success by once again leading The Time, whose music is his lifeblood and soul. Day's book is a comprehensive, free-wheeling extension of his music--the ride is wild and the funk unfiltered.
Graham Collier's career in jazz lasted over five decades. He was a bassist, a band-leader, a composer, an educator and an author, who wrote extensively about the music. His working life was littered with `firsts'. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first British jazz musician to study at the Berklee School of music in Boston and the first to receive an Arts Council grant. In 1985, Collier began teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, where he later established the first full-time jazz degree course in the UK in 1987. Mosaics draws extensively on Collier's personal archive, as well as on interviews with fellow musicians, ex-students and colleagues from the Royal Academy of Music. It locates Collier and his work within the social and cultural changes which occurred during his life and, particularly, in relation to developments in British and European jazz of the 1960s and 70s. Collier's work as a composer-bandleader represented an attempt to resolve the paradoxes inherent in jazz between composition and improvisation, familiarity and spontaneity and change and tradition. In this regard, Mosaics compares Collier's work with other composers such as Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Mike Westbrook, Stan Tracey, Barry Guy and Butch Morris. Throughout, Collier emerges as a contradictory figure falling between several different camps. He was never an out-and-out musical, cultural or political radical but rather an individualist continually forced to confront the contradictions in his own position - a musical outsider working within a marginalised area of cultural activity; a gay man operating in a very male area of the music business and within heterosexist culture in general; a man of working class origins stepping outside traditionally prescribed class boundaries; and a musician-composer seeking individual solutions to collective problems of aesthetic and ethical value.
The widely held belief that Beethoven was a rough pianist, impatient with his instruments, is not altogether accurate: it is influenced by anecdotes dating from when deafness had begun to impair his playing. Presenting a new, detailed biography of Beethoven's formative years, this book reviews the composer's early career, outlining how he was influenced by teachers, theorists and instruments. Skowroneck describes the development and decline of Beethoven's pianism, and pays special attention to early pianos, their construction and their importance for Beethoven and the modern pianist. The book also includes new discussions of legato and Beethoven's trills, and a complete annotated review of eyewitnesses' reports about his playing. Skowroneck presents a revised picture of Beethoven which traces his development from an impetuous young musician into a virtuoso in command of many musical resources.
Shooting at the Moon celebrates the music and lyrics of Kevin Ayers, one of the great bohemian voices of British music. Kevin Ayers was an English singer-songwriter who was a major influential force in the English psychedelic movement and a founding member of the band Soft Machine in the 60s. With introductions by Galen Ayers, Josh Payne and Robert Wyatt, this book includes all the lyrics from Ayers' solo career and documents a period of the UK music scene between Psychedelia and Glam Rock. Immerse yourself in the world of this influential cult singer-songwriter, with pages from his own notebooks, exclusive photographs, Ayers' own collages and the occasional recipe.
In 1972, a group of creative Brazilian musicians and poets informally led by singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento recorded a landmark double-LP titled Clube da Esquina (Corner Club). The album saw highly original songs by Milton, already an award-winning international star, sharing vinyl with those of Lo Borges, an unknown eighteen-year-old from Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais. There, where the street "corner" still exists, grew their collective also known as the Corner Club, as the artists collaborated on many subsequent albums boasting innovative blends of pop, jazz, rock, folk, classical influences, and, before Brazil's return to civilian rule in 1985, poignant protest songs aimed at a cruel dictatorship. Drawing on a thirty-year relationship with Minas Gerais that includes interviews with Corner Club members and extensive research of Portuguese language sources, Jonathon Grasse presents an analysis of the artists, songs, and ideas comprising the LP that helps define this Brazilian generation. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.
The Go-Go’s debut album Beauty and the Beat was released on July 8, 1981. The album spent six weeks in the number one spot on the Billboard charts, produced two hit singles and sold more than two million copies making it one of the most successful debut albums of all time. Beauty and the Beat made the Go-Go’s the first, and to date only, female band to have a number one album who not only wrote their own songs, but also played their own instruments. Beauty and the Beat is a ground-breaking album, but the Go-Go’s are often overlooked when we talk about influential female musicians. The Go-Go’s were a feminist band and Beauty and the Beat a call to arms that inspired generations of women. The band embraced the DIY spirit of Riot Grrrl before there was a Bikini Kill or a Bratmobile. Girls making music on their own terms didn’t start with Courtney Love or Beyoncé or Billie Eilish, it started with the Go-Go’s. It started with Beauty and the Beat. While they may have controlled their music, the Go-Go’s couldn’t control the misogyny of the music industry, media and fans. The sexist and tired stereotypes the Go-Go’s experienced 40 years ago still exist today. The legacy of Beauty and the Beat is both a celebration of how the record inspired countless girls to make art and music on their own terms, but also a painful reminder of how little has changed in how female musicians are marketed, manipulated, and discarded.
In The Gaithers and Southern Gospel, Ryan P. Harper examines songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaither's Homecoming video and concert series-a gospel music franchise that, since its beginning in 1991, has outperformed all Christian and much secular popular music on the American music market. The Homecomings represent "southern gospel." Typically that means a musical style popular among white evangelical Christians in the American South and Midwest, and it sometimes overlaps in style, theme, and audience with country music. The Homecomings' nostalgic orientation-their celebration of "traditional" kinds of American Christian life-harmonize well with southern gospel music, past and present. But amidst the backward gazes, the Homecomings also portend and manifest change. The Gaithers' deliberate racial integration of their stages, their careful articulation of a relatively inclusive evangelical theology, and their experiments with an array of musical forms demonstrate that the Homecoming is neither simplistically nostalgic, nor solely "southern." Harper reveals how the Gaithers negotiate a tension between traditional and changing community norms as they seek simultaneously to maintain and expand their audience as well as to initiate and respond to shifts within their fan base. Pulling from hisfield work at Homecoming concerts, behind the scenes with the Gaithers, and with numerous Homecoming fans, Harper reveals the Homecoming world to be a dynamic, complicated constellation in the formation of American religious identity.
The Routledge Handbook to the Music of Alfred Schnittke is a comprehensive study of the work of one of the most important Russian composers of the late 20th century. Each piece is discussed in detail, with particular attention to the composer's groundbreaking polystylism, as well as his unique approach to musical symbolism and his deep engagement with Christian themes. This is the first publication to look at Schnittke's output in its entirety, and for most works it represents either the first ever published analysis or the first in a language other than Russian. The volume presents new research from the Ivashkin-Schnittke Archive at Goldsmiths, University of London and the collection of Schnittke's compositional sketches at the Julliard Library in New York. It also draws on the substantial research on Schnittke's music published in the Russian language. Including a work list and bibliography of primary and secondary sources, this is an essential reference for all those interested in Russian music, 20th-century music and performance studies.
The Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899-1944) is commonly positioned in the history of twentieth-century music as a representative of Leos Janacek's compositional school and as one of the Jewish composers imprisoned by the Nazis in the concentration camp of Terezin (Theresienstadt). However, the nature of Janacek's influence remains largely unexplained and the focus on the context of the Holocaust tends to yield a one-sided view of Haas's oeuvre. The existing scholarship offers limited insight into Haas's compositional idiom and does not sufficiently explain the composer's position with respect to broader aesthetic trends and artistic networks in inter-war Czechoslovakia and beyond. This book is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive (albeit necessarily selective) discussion of Haas's music since the publication of Lubomir Peduzzi's 'life and work' monograph in 1993. It provides the reader with an enhanced understanding of Haas's music through analytical and hermeneutical interpretation as well as cultural and aesthetic contextualisation, and thus reveal the rich nuances of Haas's multi-faceted work which have not been sufficiently recognised so far.
Modern scholars have often portrayed the method of hexachordal solmization - the sight-singing method introduced by the 11th-century monk Guido of Arezzo - as the diatonic foundation of early music. Stefano Mengozzi challenges this view by examining a representative sample of the primary sources of solmization theory from Guido of Arezzo to Gioseffo Zarlino. These texts show that six-syllable solmization was only an option for sight-singing that never imposed its operational 'sixth-ness' onto the diatonic system, already grounded on the seven pitch letters. It was primarily through the agency of several 'classicizing' theorists of the humanist era that the six syllables came to be mistakenly conceived as a fundamental diatonic structure - a 'hexachord' built from the 'tetrachord' of the Ancient Greeks. The book will be of particular interest to readers seeking to deepen their knowledge of medieval and Renaissance musical thought with an eye to major intellectual trends of the time.
Providing a detailed analysis of Bach's Passions, this 2010 book represents an important contribution to the debate about the culture of 'classical music', its origins, priorities and survival. The angles from which each chapter proceeds differ from those of a traditional music guide, by examining the Passions in the light of the mindsets of modernity, and their interplay with earlier models of thought and belief. While the historical details of Bach's composition, performance and theological context remain crucial, the foremost concern of this study is to relate these works to a historical context that may, in some threads at least, still be relevant today. The central claim of the book is that the interplay of traditional imperatives and those of early modernity renders Bach's Passions particularly fascinating as artefacts that both reflect and constitute some of the priorities and conditions of the western world.
Presents a first analytical study that looks at the overarching designs of Benjamin Britten's John Donne, Thomas Hardy and William Blake solo song cycles. By questioning when a group of songs ought to be understood not merely as a collection, but as a cycle, Sly shows that Britten's personal selection and arrangement is indispensable to understanding these cycles' extra-musical communication. The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Winter Words (poems by Hardy) and Songs and Proverbs of William Blake - composed in 1945, 1953 and 1965 respectively - each represent a philosophical exploration. The terrains set out by the three poets are distinct, but also engage one another in important and unexpected ways. Their cyclic architectures are expressed not only in their poetic arrangement, but in their musical settings. Key relationships and motive remain central for Britten. Keys convey a network of interconnections, create groupings of songs, and establish levels of tonal affinity or distance. Motive - often intervals that can fit into any melodic, harmonic or rhythmic context - is used to create aural affinities between or among individual songs. This book also offers a broader narrative revealing Britten's evolving philosophical convictions in post-war Britain. While it may not be the case that Britten intended any broader philosophical comment, the works together outline the cold and brittle state that emerges from loss and aligns with their composer's increasingly stark outlook on humanity.
The seminal British band Motorhead have been rocking since 1975
and, led by the legendary Lemmy, show no signs of letting up. From
early classics "Ace Of Spades," "Overkill" and "No Sleep 'Til
Hammersmith" the band have racked up an incredible 25 albums, with
2011's "The World Is Yours" the latest success.
This 1845 biography of Mozart by the music journalist Edward Holmes was the first to be published in English. Holmes, who numbered the poet Keats and the publisher Vincent Novello amongst his friends, wrote extensively for periodicals including the Musical Times and The Atlas. A lifelong admirer of Mozart's work, Holmes's keen understanding of its significance is evident throughout the biography. It is based on a thorough study of the then available printed and manuscript sources, in particular many of Mozart's letters which Holmes translated and included as he 'endeavoured throughout to let the composer tell his own story'. He was also able to consult Mozart's own catalogue of his works, that compiled by the publisher Johann Andre, and the Mozart autograph manuscripts bought by Andre from Mozart's widow Constanze. The work is written in a very approachable style and will appeal to anyone with an interest in Mozart.
Francis Hueffer (1843-1889) was music critic for The Times from 1878 to 1889 and was also secretary of the Wagner Society founded in 1873. This 1874 book, much of it originally published in the Fortnightly Review, considers Wagner's role in the musical developments of the nineteenth century that followed the watershed of Beethoven's ninth symphony. It is one of the first works in English to explore the nature of Wagner's genius, and builds on an essay published by the author in The Academy about Wagner's own pamphlet on Beethoven. Hueffer's analysis of the formation of Wagner's artistic values and musical philosophy as embodied in his writings and music dramas is complemented by discussion of the songs of Schubert, Schumann and Liszt. The appendix provides an account of the performance of Beethoven's ninth which Wagner conducted at Bayreuth in 1872, and the laying of the foundation stone of the Festspielhaus.
Early in his long career, the self-taught English music critic Ernest Newman (1868 1959) wrote this influential account of Gluck's life and musical achievements in relation to the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. First published in 1895, Gluck and the Opera traces the composer's ideas and his efforts to move opera forward after a period of stagnation. Musicians, thinkers and satirists had been writing for generations about the need to reform the opera, but it was Gluck who brought about far-reaching changes that paved the way for Mozart, Weber and Wagner. His most notable innovation was the fusing of the Italian and French operatic traditions. The first part of the book is a chronological account of Gluck's eventful career, which took him all over Europe but was centred on Paris and Vienna. The second part deals with Gluck in his broader cultural and intellectual context, and lists his works. |
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