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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Composers & musicians
Giovanni Battista Buonamente was among the most original and inventive Italian composers of the seventeenth century. Peter Allsop reveals his importance as part of a tradition that stands in direct antithesis to that of the Corellian sonata today regarded as the 'norm'. This development is traced in a series of likely teacher-pupil relationships from Salamone Rossi to Marco Uccellini, the most prolific Italian composers of instrumental ensemble music in the first half of the seventeenth century. The first half of the book sets out what is known of Buonamente's turbulent career as he moved from the courtly environments of the Gonzaga household and Habsburg court to several less auspicious posts at various religious institutions, ending his life as maestro di cappella at the mother house of his order, S. Francesco in Assisi. A fascinating picture emerges of the nature of musical patronage against a background of war and plague in this time of great political instability. The later chapters comprise detailed discussions, supported with over 100 music examples, of the unusually wide range of genres for which Buonamente wrote: sinfonias, free sonatas, sets of variations, canzonas, dances; and he was the first Italian to cultivate the ensemble suite to any extent. The book concludes with an examination of his influence on his probable pupil Marco Uccellini and the interest Buonamente instigated in canonic writing, which was passed via Uccellini to a succession of Modenese composers.
Tomasz Stanko is arguably the greatest jazz musician Poland has ever produced. His career spanned almost 60 years until his death in 2018. A visionary trumpeter and composer, a protege of Krzysztof Komeda and a colleague of musicians from Poland, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Cuba and the USA, his impact on jazz internationally was profound, proving that jazz was not exclusively an American art form but truly world-wide. In 2014 he was awarded the Polytika Passport in Poland, the Prix du Musicien European in Paris and the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik. The book is a no-holds-barred extended interview with broadcaster Rafal Ksiezyk originally published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie.
First published in 1997, This volume brings together a wide selection of those articles which include interviews, personal recollections of Brian and several detailed analyses of some of his works, generously illustrated with music examples. The book concludes with a recently updated catalogue of works.
A grand and panoramic biograhical history of the giants of
classical music, The Lives and Times of Great Composers is a new,
unique, and lovingly constructed modern reference--and a beguiling
read which you will return to again and again.
A compelling portrait of rock's greatest guitarist at the moment of his ascendance, Stone Free is the first book to focus exclusively on the happiest and most productive period of Jimi Hendrix's life. As it begins in the fall of 1966, he's an under-sung, under-accomplished sideman struggling to survive in New York City. Nine months later, he's the toast of Swinging London, a fashion icon, and the brightest star to step off the stage at the Monterey International Pop Festival. This momentum-building, day-by-day account of this extraordinary transformation offers new details into Jimi's personality, relationships, songwriting, guitar innovations, studio sessions, and record releases. It explores the social changes sweeping the U.K., Hendrix's role in the dawning of "flower power," and the prejudice he faced while fronting the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In addition to featuring the voices of Jimi, his bandmates, and other eyewitnesses, Stone Free draws extensively from contemporary accounts published in English- and foreign-language newspapers and music magazines. This celebratory account is a must-read for Hendrix fans.
A candid exploration of the genius, shame, and celebrity of Whitney Houston a decade after her passing—now in paperback!In the decade since Whitney Houston’s passing, the world has mourned her death as a once–in–a–generation talent and queen of the pop charts. Didn’t We Almost Have It All is an exploration of Whitney’s life as a woman in the spotlight. This is the story of Whitney’s whole life, told with grace and honesty.Gerrick Kennedy deftly peels back the layers of Whitney’s story and pulls the narrative apart into the key elements that informed her life—growing up in a famous family; her relationships with Robyn Crawford and Bobby Brown; her connection to her own Blackness and the Black community; her drug addiction; and, finally, shame. Kennedy takes readers back to a time when someone like Whitney could not simply be and explains the myriad ways in which her fame could not protect her. A sweeping look at Whitney’s life, Didn’t We Almost Have It All contextualizes her struggles against the backdrop of tabloid culture, mental health stigmas, and racial divisions in America. It explores how and why we lost a beloved icon far too soon.
Francois Couperin's contribution to the literature of baroque keyboard music has long been recognized. Francois Couperin and 'The Perfection of Music' updates and expands upon David Tunley's valuable 1982 BBC Music Guide to the composer, and examines the whole of Couperin's output including the organ masses, motets and chamber music, in addition to the well-known works for harpsichord. Taking as its focal point Couperin's concept of the perfection of music through the union of the French and Italian styles, this book takes a more analytical approach to Couperin's work. Early chapters outline the main contrasting features of the two schools in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries, and it becomes clear that Couperin's expressive power owed much to his fusion of the polarities of the French classical tradition with that of the Italian baroque. The book features a number of appendices, including the prefaces to Couperin's work both in the original French and in English translation, and a glossary of dances of the French baroque.
Xenakis: His Life in Music is a full-length study of the influential contemporary composer Iannis Xenakis. Following the trajectory of Xenakisa (TM)s compositional development, James Harley, who studied with Xenakis, presents the works together with clear explanations of the technical and conceptual innovations that shaped them. Harley examines the relationship between the composer and two early influences: Messiaen and Le Corbusier. Particular attention is paid to analyzing works which were vital to the composera (TM)s creative development, from early, unpublished works to the breakthrough pieces Metastasis and Pithoprakta, through the oft-discussed decade of formalization and the evolving styles of the succeeding three decades.
Drawing on new documentary information, Lehmer provides new facts about "the day the music died"--the last tour of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Richie Valens, and the fatal air crash that took their lives. With 50 photos.
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.
By the late 1960s, popular British prog-rock outfit Pink Floyd were experiencing a creative voltage drop, so they turned to composer Ron Geesin for help in writing their next album.The Flaming Cow offers a rare insight into the brilliant but often fraught collaboration between the band and Geesin, the result of which became known as Atom Heart Mother - the title track from the Floyd's first UK number one album. From the time drummer Nick Mason visited Geesin's damp basement flat in Notting Hill, to the last game of golf between bassist Roger Waters and Geesin, this book is an unflinching account about how one of Pink Floyd's most celebrated compositions came to life. Alongside unpublished photographs from the Abbey Road recording sessions (the only ones taken) and the subsequent performances in London and Paris, Geesin goes on to describe how the title was chosen, why he was not credited on the record, how he left Hyde Park in tears, and why the group did not much like the work. The Flaming Cow rose again, firstly in France, then in London in 2008. After 40 years Atom Heart Mother remains a much-loved record, and The Flaming Cow explores its new-found cult status that has led to it being studied for the French Baccalaureat.
Based on lengthy interviews with Ellington's bandmates, family, and friends, Duke Ellington and His World offers a fresh look at this legendary composer. The first biography of the composer written by a fellow musician and African-American, the book traces Ellington's life and career in terms of the social, cultural, political, and economic realities of his times. Beginning with his birth in Washington, DC, through his first bands and work at the legendary Cotton Club, to his final great extended compositions, this book gives a thorough introduction to Ellington's music and how it was made. It also illuminates his personal life because, for Ellington, music was his life and his life was a constant inspiration for music. When A. H. Lawrence was a young trombone player in the '40s, he met Ellington and befriended the elder musician. From that point forward, he closely followed Ellington's career. Because of his deep love for Ellington's music, he began interviewing many of the stars of Ellington's early bands, hoping to capture from them, before they passed away, their memories and insights. Drawing on these interviews with legendary musicians-including many who worked with Ellington from his earliest days, such as drummer Sonny Greer, who played with Ellington's first bands in the '20s and who continued in his bands through the early '50s-the book offers a rounded and human portrait of the great composer and musician. Ellington's son Mercer was particularly forthcoming, offering new information about his childhood and experiences working with his father. The insights into the family that he shared have not previously been published. The result is a thorough biography that offers unique insights into Ellington: the man and his music. This fresh and balanced portrayal will undoubtedly add to our understanding of one of America's greatest artists and bring renewed attention to his distinguished body of work.
"An occasion to appreciate Dexter's resounding musical genius as well as his wish for major social transformation."-Angela Y. Davis, political activist, scholar, author, and speaker Sophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923-1990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a context of biography, history, and memoir, Maxine Gordon has completed the book that her late husband began, weaving his "solo" turns with her voice and a chorus of voices from past and present. Reading like a jazz composition, the blend of research, anecdote, and a selection of Dexter's personal letters reflects his colorful life and legendary times. It is clear why the celebrated trumpet genius Dizzy Gillespie said to Dexter, "Man, you ought to leave your karma to science." Dexter Gordon the icon is the Dexter beloved and celebrated on albums, on film, and in jazz lore--even in a street named for him in Copenhagen. But this image of the cool jazzman fails to come to terms with the multidimensional man full of humor and wisdom, a figure who struggled to reconcile being both a creative outsider who broke the rules and a comforting insider who was a son, father, husband, and world citizen. This essential book is an attempt to fill in the gaps created by our misperceptions as well as the gaps left by Dexter himself.
Regarded by his contemporaries as the leading madrigal composer of his time, Luca Marenzio was an important figure in sixteenth-century Italian music, and also highly esteemed in England, Flanders and Poland. This English translation of Marco Bizzarini's study of the life and work of Marenzio provides valuable insights into the composer's influence and place in history, and features an extensive, up-to-date bibliography and the first published list of archival sourcesA containing references to Marenzio. Women play a decisive role as dedicatees of Marenzio's madrigals and in influencing the way in which they were performed. Bizzarini examines in detail the influence of both female and male patrons and performers on Marenzio's music and career, including his connections with the confraternity of SS TrinitA and other institutions. Dedications were also a political tool, as the book reveals. Many of Marenzio's dedications were made at the request of his employer Cardinal d'Este who wanted to please his French allies. Bizzarini examines these extra-musical dimensions to Marenzio's work and discusses the composer's new musical directions under the more austere administration of Pope Clement VIII.
Claudio Monteverdi: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography that navigates the vast scholarly resources on the composer with the most updated compilation since 1989. Claudio Monteverdi transformed and mastered the principal genres of his day and his works influenced generations of musicians and other artists. He initiated one of the most important aesthetic debates of the era by proposing a new relationship between poetry and harmony. In addition to scholarship by musicologists and music theorists, Monteverdi's music has attracted attention from literary scholars, cultural historians, and critical theorists. Research into Monteverdi and Renaissance and early baroque studies has expanded greatly, with the field becoming more complex as scholars address such issues as gender theory, feminist criticism, cultural theory, new criticism, new historicism, and artistic and popular cultures. The guide serves both as a foundational starting point and as a gateway for future inquiry in such fields as court culture, opera, patronage, and Italian poetry.
Serious scholarship on the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams is currently enjoying a lively revival after a period of relative quiescence, and is only beginning to address the enduring affection of concert audiences for his music. The essays that comprise this volume extend the study of Vaughan Williams's music in new directions that will be of interest to scholars, performers and listeners alike. This volume contains the work of eleven North American scholars who have been recipients of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship based at the composer's own school, Charterhouse, which was created and has been supported by the Carthusian Trust since 1985. This wide-ranging and detailed collection of essays covers the spectrum of genres in which Vaughan Williams wrote, including dance, symphony, opera, song, hymnody and film music. The contributors also employ a range of analytical and historical methods of investigation to illuminate aspects of Vaughan Williams's compositional techniques and influences, musical, literary and visual.
This first book in English on the French composer Andre Jolivet (1905-1974) investigates his music, life and influence. A pupil of Varese and colleague of Messiaen in La Jeune France, Jolivet is a major figure in French music of the twentieth century. His music combines innovative language with spirituality, summarised in his self-declared axiom to 'restore music's ancient original meaning when it was the magic and incantatory expression of the sacred in human communities'. The book's contextual introduction is followed by contributions, edited by Caroline Rae, from leading international scholars including the composer's daughter Christine Jolivet-Erlih. These assess Jolivet's output and activities from the 1920s through to his last works, exploring creative process, aesthetic, his relationship with the exotic and influences from literature. They also examine, for the first time, the significance of Jolivet's involvement with the visual arts and his activities as conductor, teacher and critic. A chronology of Jolivet's life and works with details of first performances provides valuable overview and reference. This fascinating and comprehensive volume is an indispensable source for research into French music and culture of the twentieth century.
The eleven essays that comprise this volume represent some of the most significant strands of current Schubert research. Arising from an international conference organized by the Schubert Institute (UK) and the University of Leeds in 2000, the emphasis of the papers is on issues of performance practice, analysis and hermeneutics. In the opening essay of the book, Charles Rosen illuminates some of Schubert's compositional practices and their implications for performers. Further performance problems are explored by Walther Durr who highlights the paradox between Schubert's precise notation of pitches and rhythm and his imprecision in relation to dynamics and articulation. As Roy Howat makes clear in his essay, the performer needs to read between the lines of even the best Schubert editions. Aspects of Schubert's style are explored in other essays. Clive McClelland discusses the composer's use of ombra style, while Brian Newbould examines Schubert's techniques of compression and expansion as illustrated in his dances and in sonata movements. Robert Hatten explores the G major Piano Sonata as pastoral, and James Sobaskie and Nicholas Rast provide complementary analyses of the A minor Quartet. The organization of musical time in Schubert and his relationship in this regard to later composers is the subject of Susanne Kogler's essay, while Walburga Litschauer discusses Schubert's early piano sonatas and previously unknown versions of them. Various enigmas surrounding Schubert's life and music are discussed by Roger Neighbour. With contributions from both internationally acclaimed and younger scholars, this volume represents a further step in the multifaceted direction that Schubert research is taking.
It is the inner meaning of Handel's music, and its power of searching the profoundest recesses of the soul, that in the following pages I have endeavoured, so far as I am able, to elucidate. Its merely technical qualities have already been discussed enough and to spare. Books on Handel written by musicians already abound, but musicians as a rule take more interest in the means by which an end is attained than the end itself. They tell us a great deal about the methods by which a composer expresses himself, but very little about what he actually has to express. I have tried, how feebly and with what little success no one knows better than myself, to find the man Handel in his music, to trace his character, his view of life, his thoughts, feelings, and aspirations, as they are set forth in his works.
The second volume of Carl Friedrich Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.
Fourth volume of Carl Francis Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.
"I was impressed by The Stones. They were dressed casually, had mischief in them and were different to other bands." Terry O'Neill. In July 1962, a group of young men played a gig at The Marquee Club on Oxford Street, London. They called themselves 'The Rollin' Stones' and little did they know they would soon be making music history. This brilliant new book captures the youth, the times and the spirit of The Stones' formative early years. And documenting 1963-1965 were two young photographers just starting out in their careers. Terry O'Neill, aged just 25, had a few years' experience photographing musicians and knew that this group had the same magic as another British phenomenon that just recently started to chart, The Beatles. As the band was starting to record and tour, Gered Mankowitz came along. His first shoot, the now famous Mason's Yard session, was so fruitful, Gered was asked to tag along on tour to America. Gered was a mere 19 when he picked up his camera and joined the band on stage in 1965. Between these two legendary photographers, they document the band's beginnings and these indelible images are forever placed in music's consciousness.The photography throughout this book is embellished with various memoires and interviews, celebrating the early days and giving an inisght into what it must have felt like to go from a small club in Soho with no record deal to touring the world a few years later with a number one record. Terry O'Neill and Gered Mankowitz, two of the most respected, collected and exhibited photographers in the world were sitting in the front row. There are quotes from Andrew Loog Oldman, Norman Jopling, Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Bill Wyman, full interviews with Terry O'Neill and Gered Mankowitz, original articles from the Record Mirror (1963), Evening Standard (1964) and Detroit Free Press (1965), and many rare and previously unseen photographs and contact sheets are included. |
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