The decades from 1900 to 1920 saw important changes in the very language of music. Traditional tonal organization gave way to new forms of musical expression and many of the foundations of modern music were laid. Samson first explores tonal expansion in the music of such nineteenth-century composers as Liszt and Wagner and its reinterpretation in the music of Debussy, Busoni, Bartok, and Stravinsky. He then traces the atonal revolution, revealing the various paths taken by Schoenberg and his followers and describing their very different stylistic development.

Over the centuries of its history the Piano Trio has gained a repertoire of exceptional size and richness, one which includes some of the greatest and most widely admired of all chamber works. This book, the first to be devoted solely to a study of genre, reviews the development of the trio in different countries, against the background of general musical history, showing how it has reflected changes in style and technique from Mozart and Haydn in the late eighteenth century to the avant-garde composers of the present day. The author's survey focuses on the principal works in the trio repertoire, and his clear analytical descriptions are illustrated by a number of musical examples. In parallel with this he gives particular consideration to the problems involved in scoring for the ensemble, and to the way in which the participating instruments were gradually developed in range and power from the earliest times of the genre.

For students learning the principles of music theory, it can often seem as though the tradition of tonal harmony is governed by immutable rules that define which chords, tones, and intervals can be used where. Yet even within the classical canon, there are innumerable examples of composers diverging from these foundational "rules." Drawing on examples from composers including J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms, and more, Bending the Rules of Music Theory seeks to take readers beyond the basics of music theory and help them to understand the inherent flexibility in the system of tonal music. Chapters explore the use of different rule-breaking elements in practice and why they work, introducing students to a more nuanced understanding of music theory.

The author is a drummer with experience in a variety of musical genres and contexts, with emphasis on rock and related styles. This auto ethnographic Element presents the author's philosophy of playing drum kit. The text explains how playing drum kit matters to this musician and may resonate with others to whom making music matters in similar ways. The Element contains audio files of music in which the author plays drum kit in the ensemble settings described. There are photos of the author's drums and of him drumming. Based on June Boyce-Tillman's non-religious model of holistic spirituality and Tim Ingold's notion of correspondences, the author describes how playing drum kit enables him to experience transcendence - the magical nexus at which Materials, Construction, Values/Culture and Expression meet. Each of these domains, and the magic derived from their combination, is illustrated through examples of the author's live and recorded musical collaborations.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story!" With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story!" With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

Contents: Bassani: Dormi, bella, dormi tu? * Postate, dormite * Seguita a piangere - Bononcini: Per la gloria d'adorarvi - Caccini: Amarilli, mia bella - Cavalli: Delizie contente - Cesti: Tu mancavi a tormentarmi - del Leuto: Dimmi, Amor - de Luca: Non posso disperar - Durante: Vergin, tutto amor * Danza, danza, fanciulla gentile - Falconieri: Vezzosette e care - Fasolo: Cangia, cangia tue voglie - Gasparini: Caro laccio, dolce nodo * Lasciar d'amarti - Giordani: Caro mio ben - Marcello: Non m'e grave morir per amore - Monteverdi: Lasciatemi morire! - Paradies: M'ha preso alla sua ragna - Piccini: Se il ciel me divide - Rotani: Se bel rio - Sarri: Sen corre l'agnelletta - A. Scarlatti: Sento nel core * Su, venite a consiglio * Gia il sole dal Gange * All aquisto di gloria - Stradella: Ragion sempre addita * Se amor m'annoda il piede - Tenaglia: E quando ve n'andante * Quando sara quel di.

Patrick Kavanaugh shows that great music was written to be enjoyed, not merely admired. In Music of the Great Composers, he displays his gift for making the classics easy to understand and a delight to listen to. This practical book lets you select a listening program that's based on your needs and interests. Choose from a variety of approaches to pick the one that fits you best. From chorales to concertos to solo repertoire, Music of the Great Composers lets you customize your listening to broaden your understanding and love of music. You'll find: - Guidance for building a personal listening library - Fascinating insights into instruments, history, composers, compositions, musical terms--even simple music theory for the layperson - A lively guide to hundreds of masterworks--for hours of reading and listening enjoyment. Kavanaugh removes the intimidations from "highbrow" music, taking it out of its ivory tower so everyone can enjoy it. Written in a refreshing, popular style, Music of the Great Composers will bring an exciting new depth to your enjoyment of the classics.

In 1893 the composer Antonin Dvorak prophesied a "great and noble" school of American classical music based on the searing "negro melodies" he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would found popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, he looks back to literary figures-Emerson, Melville and Twain-to ponder how American music can connect with a "usable past". The result is a new paradigm, that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Dawson and Florence Price, to redefine the classical canon.

The authoritative Beethoven biography, endorsed by and produced in close collaboration with the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, is timed for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. With unprecedented access to the archives at the Beethoven House in Bonn, renowned Beethoven conductor and scholar Jan Caeyers expertly weaves together a deeply human and complex image of Beethoven-his troubled youth, his unpredictable mood swings, his desires, relationships, and conflicts with family and friends, the mysteries surrounding his affair with the "immortal beloved," and the dramatic tale of his deafness. Caeyers also offers new insights into Beethoven's music and its gradual transformation from the work of a skilled craftsman into that of a consummate artist. Demonstrating an impressive command of the vast scholarship on this iconic composer, Caeyers brings Beethoven's world alive with elegant prose, memorable musical descriptions, and vivid depictions of Bonn and Vienna-the cities where Beethoven produced and performed his works. Caeyers explores how Beethoven's career was impacted by the historical and philosophical shifts taking place in the music world, and conversely, how his own trajectory changed the course of the music industry. Equal parts absorbing cultural history and lively biography, Beethoven, A Life paints a complex portrait of the musical genius who redefined the musical style of his day and went on to become one of the great pillars of Western art music.

A Performer's Guide to Transcribing, Editing, and Arranging Early Music provides instruction on three important tasks that early music performers often undertake in order to make their work more noticeable and appealing to their audiences. First, the book provides instruction on using early sources-manuscripts, prints, and treatises-in score, parts, or tablature. It then illuminates priorities behind basic editorial decisions-determining what constitutes a "version" of a musical piece, how to choose a version, and how to choose the source for that version. Lastly, the book offers advice about arranging both early and new music for early instruments, including how to consider instruments' ranges and various registers, how to exploit the unique characteristics of period instruments, and how to produce convincing textures of accompaniment. Drawing on methods based on early models (for example, how baroque composers arranged the music of their contemporaries), Alon Schab pays tribute to the ideas and ideals promoted by the pioneers of the early music revival and examines how these could be implemented in an early music field revolutionized by technology and unprecedented artistic independence.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story " With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

The definitive edition (1987) of the piano teaching classic. Includes an introduction by the composer's son Peter Bartok. In 1945 Bela Bartok described Mikrokosmos as a cycle of 153 pieces for piano written for "didactic" purposes, seeing them as a series of pieces in many different styles, representing a small world, or as the "world of the little ones, the children." Stylistically Mikrokosmos reflects the influence of folk music on Bartok's life and the rhythms and harmonies employed create music that is as modern today as when the cycle was written. The 153 pieces making up Mikrokosmos are divided into six volumes arranged according to technical and musical difficulty. Major teaching points highlighted in Mikrokosmos 1: Unison melodies, Question and answer, Imitation and Inversion. Volume with pink covers have text in English, French, German, and Hungarian.

A group of resourceful kids start solution-seekers.com, a website where cybervisitors can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of S words that reveal a spectacular story With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The S Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

(Dowani Book/CD). This edition features a full performance recording as well as three separate speeds of accompaniment tracks for rehearsal.

"It is hard to think of any music in which the composer is more spontaneous and masterful, and uncompromising in his thought."--Olin Downes, Thompson's International Cyclopedia.These revolutionary works brought a strikingly organic--almost architectural--unity to the symphony that music historians recognized as being far in advance of anything in the classical masters. Planted with seeds of change already evident in the beautiful, dark third symphony, the fourth symphony presented the most individual work in this form that the twentieth century had yet witnessed. Harmonically new, boldly innovative, and structured on a subtle continuity of line, this was a kind of music previously unheard in the concert hall. Austere and intensely concentrated, Sibelius's symphonies of 1907 and 1911 are frequently performed around the world by major orchestras.

An "Economist "Best Book of the Year
A" Christian Science Monitor" Best Book of the Year
A "Financial Times" Best Book of the Year
Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque--and occasionally so intemperate?
John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents' house, where it hung for safety during World War II. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as one of the composer's greatest living interpreters. The fruits of this lifetime's immersion are distilled in this remarkable book, grounded in the most recent Bach scholarship but moving far beyond it, and explaining in wonderful detail the ideas on which Bach drew, how he worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects--and what it can tell us about Bach the man.
Gardiner's background as a historian has encouraged him to search for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and fruitfully coalesce. This has entailed piecing together the few biographical shards, scrutinizing the music, and watching for those instances when Bach's personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Gardiner's aim is "to give the reader a sense of inhabiting the same experiences and sensations that Bach might have had in the act of music-making. This, I try to show, can help us arrive at a more human likeness discernible in the closely related processes of composing and performing his music."
It is very rare that such an accomplished performer of music should also be a considerable writer and thinker about it. John Eliot Gardiner takes us as deeply into Bach's works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists.

Dowani 3 Tempi Play Along is an effective and time-tested method of practicing that offers more than conventional play-along editions. Dowani 3 Tempi Play Along enables you to learn a work systematically and with accompaniment at different tempi. The first thing you hear on the CD is the concert version in a first-class recording with solo instrument and orchestral, continuo, or piano accompaniment. Then the piano or harpsichord accompaniment follows in slow and medium tempo for practice purposes with the solo instrument heard softly in the background at a slow tempo. Finally, you can play at the original tempo to the accompaniment of an orchestra, piano, or basso continuo. All versions appearing on the CD were recorded live by renowned soloists, accompanists, and orchestras. There are no synthesised sounds in a Dowani edition!

In the early seventeenth century, enthusiasm for the violin swept across Europe-this was an instrument capable of bewitching virtuosity, with the power to express emotions in a way only before achieved with the human voice. With this new guide to the Baroque violin, and its close cousin, the Baroque viola, distinguished performer and pedagogue Walter Reiter puts this power into the hands of today's players. Through fifty lessons based on the Reiter's own highly-renowned course at The Royal Conservatory of the Hague, The Baroque Violin & Viola, Volume I provides a comprehensive exploration of the period's rich and varied repertoire. Volume I covers the basics of choosing a violin, techniques to produce an ideal sound, and sonatas by Vivaldi and Corelli. Practical exercises are integrated into each lesson, and accompanied by rich video demonstrations on the book's companion website. Brought to life by Reiter's deep insight into key repertoire based on a lifetime of playing and teaching, The Baroque Violin & Viola, Volume I: A Fifty-Lesson Course will enhance performances of professional and amateur musicians alike.

A companion to his The Symphony: A Listener's Guide , Steinberg's new book covers the orchestral concerto repertoire from Bach to the present and featuring all instruments.