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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
Handel enjoyed considerable popularity at the end of the eighteenth century, when his music was performed in London, Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna and Breslau. However, interest in him had waned by the mid-nineteenth century, when it was rekindled by a small group of music-lovers including Georg Gervinus (1805 71), a historian of literature based in Heidelberg. Gervinus lobbied for a Handel memorial in Halle, was a founder of the first German Handel society in 1856, and in 1858 published H ndel und Shakespeare, which drew parallels between his favourite writer and favourite composer. In it, after two long chapters on music history and aesthetics, he compared their intellectual development and attributed the similarities between them to their shared Germanic roots. Although the book was not a great success in its day, it marked an important turning point in European Handel studies, and is still referred to today.
Francis Hueffer (1845 89) was born and studied music in Germany, but moved to London in 1869 to pursue a career as a critic and writer on music. He edited the series 'The Great Musicians' for Novello and Co., was music critic of The Times, and was an early advocate and interpreter to the British of Wagner. His Musical Studies of 1880 is a collection of essays on Beethoven, Chopin, French opera, Schopenhauer ('among the numerous German metaphysicians, the only one who has said anything worth listening to about music'), and of course Wagner: an article on the Ring written before the first performance of the complete cycle, and an account of that performance at Bayreuth. The collection finishes with the provocative essay 'The chances of English opera' (1879), which contrasts the lively opera scene in the rest of Europe with the lack of a tradition of English opera.
Francis Hueffer (1845 89) was born and studied music in Germany, but moved to London in 1869 to pursue a career as a critic and writer on music. He edited the series 'The Great Musicians' for Novello and Co., was music critic of The Times, wrote libretti for some now-forgotten operas, and was an early advocate and interpreter to the British of Wagner. Between his Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future (1874) and his translation of the correspondence of Wagner and Liszt (1888), he wrote Wagner in his own 'Great Musicians' series in 1881 (two years before the composer's death). The book surveys Wagner's life and his musical writings, and a separate chapter is devoted to each of the operas (except Parsifal, which was not performed until 1882). This is a fascinating contemporary assessment of the standard-bearer of the 'music of the future'.
Henry Sutherland Edwards (1828-1906) wrote this volume in Francis Hueffer's 'Great Musicians' series, published by Novello, in 1881. It was unusual for this series because of the addition of 'the School': most of the other books dealt with an individual composer, but Edwards discusses Bellini and provides chapters on Donizetti and Verdi (still alive, and at the height of his powers, at the time this book was published) as well as his main subject. The book covers Rossini's life and deals in detail with what the author regarded as his most significant works - a selection which may surprise or even outrage Rossini enthusiasts today.
Francis Hueffer (1845-89) was born and studied music in Germany, but moved to London in 1869 to pursue a career as a critic and writer on music. He edited the series 'The Great Musicians' for Novello and Co., was music critic of The Times, wrote libretti for some now-forgotten operas, and was an early advocate and interpreter to the British of Wagner. As well as writing Wagner in his own 'Great Musicians' series (1881), and Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future (1874), he translated the correspondence of Wagner and Liszt. This fascinating two-volume selection, published in 1888, covers the period 1841-61. Hueffer signals in his preface the importance to Wagner of the encouragement of Liszt - an established performer when Wagner was barely known and widely ridiculed, a musical mentor, an enthusiastic critic and eventually a father-in-law.
Hermann Deiters (1833 1907) first met Brahms in 1856, and became an enthusiastic supporter of his work. This 'biographical sketch' was published in English in 1888, edited by J. A. Fuller Maitland, the English musicologist whose Schumann in the Novello 'Great Musicians' series and Masters of German Music are also reissued in this series. Brahms was still alive and composing at this time: the book consists of a short account of his life followed by a critical review of all his works up to 1887. The preface states: 'That Johannes Brahms is by far the greatest composer of our time ... will not be contested by any musician whose claim to an opinion is based on an exhaustive knowledge of his works. ... Brahms has a place in the line of supreme masters in the craft of music, that line which stretches down without interruption through Palestrina, from a far earlier time.'
J. A. Fuller Maitland (1856 1936), whose Schumann in the Novello 'Great Musicians' series is also reissued in this series, had a wide-ranging interest in music. He 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 book, published in 1894, surveys the then current state of German music, with essays on Brahms, Bruch, Goldmark and Rheinberger. Bruckner is mentioned as a 'Little Master', and Richard Strauss appears in the final chapter, entitled 'New Paths (?)' but the surprise for present-day readers is that the composer fulsomely claimed by Fuller Maitland as the natural successor to Wagner, Cyrill Kistler, is now almost completely unknown.
'Keeping time', along with artistic accentuation and intelligent phrasing, is essential to successful musical performance. Rhythm alone had rarely been the subject of specialised study until the late nineteenth century, when several books on this topic by Rudolf Westphal were published in Leipzig. Westphal's work inspired Charles Francis Abdy Williams's 1911 book which is reissued here. Williams re-examines the classical and romantic repertoire from Handel to Tchaikovsky in the light of ancient Greek musical theory, focusing particularly on the earliest writings by Artistoxenus of Tarentum (fourth century BCE). In Williams's view, the rhythmic forms used by the Greeks are universally intelligible, and appear in all ages and cultures, unlike melodies or scales, which vary hugely. He provides insights into the microstructure of works including Bach's oratorios, Beethoven's sonatas and Schubert's songs, which will continue to intrigue musicians, classicists and mathematicians today.
Jazz great Gerald Wilson (1918-2014), born in Shelby, Mississippi, left a global legacy of paramount significance through his progressive musical ideas and his orchestra's consistent influence on international jazz. Aided greatly by interviews that bring Wilson's voice to the story, Steven Loza presents a perspective on what the musician and composer called his ""jazz pilgrimage."" Wilson uniquely adapted Latin influences into his jazz palette, incorporating many Cuban and Brazilian inflections as well as those of Mexican and Spanish styling. Throughout the book, Loza refers to Wilson's compositions and arrangements, including their historical contexts and motivations. Loza provides savvy musical readings and analysis of the repertoire. He concludes by reflecting upon Wilson's ideas on the place of jazz culture in America, its place in society and politics, its origins, and its future. With a foreword written by Wilson's son, Anthony, and such sources as essays, record notes, interviews, and Wilson's own reflections, the biography represents the artist's ideas with all their philosophical, historical, and cultural dimensions. Beyond merely documenting Wilson's many awards and recognitions, this book ushers readers into the heart and soul of a jazz creator. Wilson emerges a unique and proud African American artist whose tunes became a mosaic of the world.
An eclectic study of wide-ranging but carefully chosen case studies and examples, from nineteenth century literature, through 1930s Broadway and film, to twentieth and twenty- first century jazz and popular music. Six thematically- linked but stand-alone chapters ensure the book can be employed in a variety of music, cultural studies, arts, humanities, and social sciences courses No immediate or direct competitors, especially in terms of the book's particular theoretical and analytical approach, its historical and cultural breadth, its diverse musical and cultural references, and its original and challenging insights
The Companion to Music in the Age of the Catholic Monarchs, edited by Tess Knighton, offers a major new study that deepens and enriches our understanding of the forms and functions of music that flourished in late medieval Spanish society. The fifteen essays, written by leading authorities in the field, present a synthesis based on recently discovered material that throws new light on different aspects of musical life during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel (1474-1516): sacred and secular music-making in royal and aristocratic circles; the cathedral music environment; liturgy and power; musical connections with Rome, Portugal and the New World; theoretical and unwritten musical practices; women as patrons and performers; and the legacy of Jewish musical tradition. Contributors are Mercedes Castillo Ferreira, Giuseppe Fiorentino, Roberta Freund Schwartz, Eleazar Gutwirth, Tess Knighton, Kenneth Kreitner, Javier Marin Lopez, Ascension Mazuela-Anguita, Bernadette Nelson, Pilar Ramos Lopez, Emilio Ros-Fabregas, Juan Ruiz Jimenez, Richard Sherr, Ronald Surtz, and Jane Whetnall.
The concept of intertextuality - namely, the meaning generated by interrelations between different texts - was coined in the 1960s among literary theorists and has been widely applied since then to many other disciplines, including music. Intertextuality in Music: Dialogic Composition provides a systematic investigation of musical intertextuality not only as a general principle of musical creativity but also as a diverse set of devices and techniques that have been consciously developed and applied by many composers in the pursuit of various artistic and aesthetic goals. Intertextual techniques, as this collection reveals, have borne a wide range of results, such as parody, paraphrase, collage and dialogues with and between the past and present. In the age of sampling and remix culture, the very notion of intertextuality seems to have gained increased momentum and visibility, even though the principle of creating new music on the basis of pre-existing music has a long history both inside and outside the Western tradition. The book provides a general survey of musical intertextuality, with a special focus on music from the second half of the twentieth century, but also including examples ranging from the nineteenth century to the second decade of the twenty-first century. The volume is intended to inspire and stimulate new work in intertextual studies in music.
The manuscript Seville, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular 5-2-25, a composite of dozens of theoretical treatises, is one of the primary witnesses to late medieval music theory. Its numerous copies of significant texts have been the focus of substantial scholarly attention to date, but the shorter, unattributed, or fragmentary works have not yet received the same scrutiny. In this monograph, Cook demonstrates that a small group of such works, linked to the otherwise unknown Magister Johannes Pipudi, is in fact much more noteworthy than previous scholarship has observed. The not one but two copies of De arte cantus are in fact one of the earliest known sources for the Libellus cantus mensurabilis, purportedly by Jean des Murs and the most widely copied music theory treatise of its day, while Regulae contrapunctus, Nota quod novem sunt species contrapunctus, and a concluding set of notes in Catalan are early witnesses to the popular Ars contrapuncti treatises also attributed to des Murs. Disclosing newly discovered biographical information, it is revealed that Pipudi is most likely one Johannes Pipardi, familiar to Cardinal Jean de Blauzac, Vicar-General of Avignon. Cook provides the first biographical assessment for him and shows that late fourteenth-century Avignon was a plausible chronological and geographical milieu for the Seville treatises, hinting provocatively at a possible route of transmission for the Libellus from Paris to Italy. The monograph concludes with new transcriptions and the first English translations of the treatises.
Featuring a distinguished editorial team who have brought together a group of international and reputable scholars. The collection is interdisciplinary by design, encompassing cultural theory, gender and race studies, musicology, and record production analysis Offering analysis of tracks from the blues, hip-hop, R&B, pop, Motown, funk, disco, rock, metal, and country An ideal companion to William Moylan's previous work, Recording Analysis, which outlines the framework upon which these analyses are developed
Putting forward an extensive new argument for a humanities-based approach to big-data analysis, The Music in the Data shows how large datasets of music, or music corpora, can be productively integrated with the qualitative questions at the heart of music research. The author argues that as well as providing objective evidence, music corpora can themselves be treated as texts to be subjectively read and creatively interpreted, allowing new levels of understanding and insight into music traditions. Each chapter in this book asks how we define a core music-theory topic, such as style, harmony, meter, function, and musical key, and then approaches the topic through considering trends within large musical datasets, applying a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative interpretation. Throughout, several basic techniques of data analysis are introduced and explained, with supporting materials available online. Connecting the empirical information from corpus analysis with theories of musical and textual meaning, and showing how each approach can enrich the other, this book provides a vital perspective for scholars and students in music theory, musicology, and all areas of music research.
This book develops ways of discussing musical practices to articulate a new approach to understanding connections between recordings, singers, and singing. Centred around materials from the mid-twentieth century, this book focuses on a time when composers and performers were questioning the idea of authorship within their musical practice. Materials drawn upon include recordings, scores, archival content, visual art, interviews, and liner notes to develop a rich conception of practices of performance. Analysis of performances include recordings of singers such as Cathy Berberian, Linda Hirst, Lore Lixenberg, Angelika Luz, and Meredith Monk. Compositions by Cathy Berberian, Luciano Berio, John Cage, and Manuel De Falla are considered. The book utilizes these sources to examine the collective way in which singers and composers form practices as multiple, transforming, emergent, and not hierarchical. The book articulates - with a detailed, close consideration of specific instances in recordings and scores - a relational understanding of performance. This book will be useful reading for students and scholars of music analysis, musicology, performance practice, and twentieth century vocal music.
The monograph concerns one of the most important trends in contemporary classical Polish music. The ânew romanticismâ represented the reaction to the crisis of the avant-garde in the 70s. It appeared in works by the â1933 generationâ (Penderecki, GĂłrecki, Kilar), âthe Stalowa Wola generationâ (Knapik, LasoĆ, Krzanowski), and others. This music matched tradition with contemporary techniques and strong emotionalism. Its romantic dimension and seriousness were in sheer contrast to the âdouble-codingâ of Postmodernism. It stemmed from the political situation in Poland during the âIron Curtainâ times. The book also focuses on the topicâs American (Schonberg, Rochberg) and European contexts. The author also analyzes 104 compositions and 30 interviews (incl. with Penderecki) to present an even fuller picture.
American composer Morton Feldman is increasingly seen to have been one of the key figures in late-twentieth-century music, with his work exerting a powerful influence into the twenty-first century. At the same time, much about his music remains enigmatic, largely due to long-standing myths about supposedly intuitive or aleatoric working practices. In Composing Ambiguity, Alistair Noble reveals key aspects of Feldman's musical language as it developed during a crucial period in the early 1950s. Drawing models from primary sources, including Feldman's musical sketches, he shows that Feldman worked deliberately within a two-dimensional frame, allowing a focus upon the fundamental materials of sounding pitch in time. Beyond this, Feldman's work is revealed to be essentially concerned with the 12-tone chromatic field, and with the delineation of complexes of simple proportions in 'crystalline' forms. Through close reading of several important works from the early 1950s, Noble shows that there is a remarkable consistency of compositional method, despite the varied experimental notations used by Feldman at this time. Not only are there direct relations to be found between staff-notated works and grid scores, but much of the language developed by Feldman in this period was still in use even in his late works of the 1980s.
Essays - collected in honour of Margaret Bent - examining how medieval and Renaissance composers responded to the tradition in which they worked through a process of citation of and commentary on earlier authors. Essays in honour of Margaret Bent. The chapters of this book probe the varied functions of citation and allusion in medieval and renaissance musical culture. At its most fundamental level musical culture relied on shared models for musical practice, used by singers and composers as they learned their craft. Several contributors to this volume investigate general models, which often drew on earlier musical works, internalized in the process of composers' own training as singers. In written theoretical musical pedagogy, conversely, citation of authority is deliberate and intentional. The adaptation of accepted wisdom in theoretical treatises was the means by which newer authors stamped their own authority. Further kinds of citation occur in specific musical texts, either within the words set to music or in the music itself. The diverse functions of citation and allusion for the creator, reader, scribe, performer and listener are here given due consideration. In doing so, this volume is a fitting tribute to Margaret Bent, whose pedagogy, publications, and presence are honoured in this Festschrift. Contributors: SUSAN RANKIN, GILLES RICO, CHRISTIAN THOMAS LEITMEIR, BARBARA HAGGH, LEOFRANC HOLFORD-STREVENS, ANDREW WATHEY, KEVIN BROWNLEE, ALICE V. CLARK, LAWRENCE M. EARP, VIRGINIA NEWES, JOHN MILSOM, DAVID HOWLETT, REINHARD STROHM, THEODOR DUMITRESCU, CRISTLE COLLINS JUDD, BONNIE J. BLACKBURN
The Sound of Ontology: Music as a Model for Metaphysics explores connections between Western art music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the ideas that dominated philosophy leading up to and during that period. In the process of establishing John Cage as Richard Wagner's heir via Arnold Schoenberg, the author discovers that the old metaphysics of representation is still in charge of how we think about music and about experience in general. Instead of settling for the positivist definition of music as mere sound framed by time, LaFave provides a phenomenology of music that reveals pitch as the ontological counterpart to frequency, and music as a vehicle for understanding how, as Heidegger observed, the Being of "things of value" are invariably grounded in the Being of "things of nature." Numerous musical examples and a poem by Wallace Stevens illustrate LaFave's case that hierarchy is intrinsic to this understanding. Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy is brought to bear alongside Heidegger's phenomenological ontology to show that not only music, but reality itself, depends on a play of interlocking hierarchies to effect the nature-value connection, making aesthetics first philosophy.
From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, SalomĂ© Voegelin expands âpossible world theoryâ to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Pontyâs phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible. This revised edition continues Voegelinâs exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to work by Ăine OâDwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worldsâ radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a different body from its sound: Hearing the Continuum Between Plural Bodies; between humans, humanoid aliens, monsters, vampires, plants, things and anything we have no name for yet but which a sonic philosophy might start to hear and call.
This monograph offers a comprehensive study of the topos of the malmariee or the unhappily married woman within the thirteenth-century motet repertory, a vocal genre characterized by several different texts sounding simultaneously over a foundational Latin chant. Part I examines the malmariee motets from three vantage points: (1) in light of contemporaneous canonist views on marriage; (2) to what degree the French malmariee texts in the upper voices treat the messages inherent in the underlying Latin chant through parody and/or allegory; and (3) interactions among upper-voice texts that invite additional interpretations focused on gender issues. Part II investigates the transmission profile of the motets, as well as of their refrains, revealing not only intertextual refrain usage between the motets and other genres, but also a significant number of shared refrains between malmariee motets and other motets. Part II furthermore offers insights on the chronology of composition within a given intertextual refrain nexus, and examines how a refrain's meaning can change in a new context. Finally, based on the transmission profile, Part II argues for a lively interest in the topos in the 1270s and 1280s, both through composition of new motets and compilation of earlier ones, with Paris and Arras playing a prominent role.
Concerto Grosso no. 1 is one of Alfred Schnittke's best-known and most compelling works, sounding the surface of late Soviet life while resonating with contemporary compositional currents around the world such as postmodernism. It marked a decisive point in Schnittke's development of the approach he called polystylism, which aimed to contain in a single composition the wide range of contemporary musical styles, including "jazz, pop, rock, or serial music." Thanks to it and his other similar compositions, Schnittke became one of the most-performed and most-recorded living composers at the end of the twentieth century. Peter J. Schmelz's Alfred Schnittke's Concerto Grosso no. 1 represents the first accessible and comprehensive study of this composition. The novel structure of the book engages with the piece conceptually, historically, musically, and phenomenologically, with the six movements of the composition framing the six chapters. Augmenting and complicating the insights of existing English, Russian, and German publications on the Concerto Grosso no. 1, the book adds new information from underused primary sources, including Schnittke's unpublished correspondence and his many published interviews. It engages further with his sketches for the piece, and with contemporary Soviet musical criticism, resulting in a more objective, historical account of this rich, multifaceted composition, its influences, and its impact on music making in the USSR and worldwide.
This practical book describes the specific use of receptive (listening) methods and techniques in music therapy clinical practice and research, including relaxation with music for children and adults, the use of visualisation and imagery, music and collage, song-lyric discussion, vibroacoustic applications, music and movement techniques, and other forms of aesthetic listening to music. The authors explain these receptive methods of intervention using a format that enables practitioners to apply them in practice and make informed choices about music suitable for each of the different techniques. Protocols are described step-by-step, with reference to the necessary environment, conditions, skills and appropriate musical material. Receptive Methods in Music Therapy will prove indispensable to music therapy students, practitioners, educators and researchers
James H. Donelan describes how two poets, a philosopher and a composer - Hoelderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel and Beethoven - developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of the nineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: the understanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creative mind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four major figures - all born in 1770 - developed this idea in both metaphorical and actual musical structures, thereby establishing both the theory and the practice of asserting self-identity in music. Beethoven still carries the image of the heroic composer today; this book describes how it originated in both his music and in how others responded to him. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, musicology, and literary criticism, Donelan shows how this development emerged from the complex changes in European cultural life taking place between 1795 and 1831. |
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