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.

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 II provides a comprehensive exploration of the period's rich and varied repertoire. The lessons in Volume II cover the early seventeenth-century Italian sonata, music of the French Baroque, the Galant style, and the sonatas of composers like Schmelzer, Biber, and Bach. 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 II: A Fifty-Lesson Course will enhance performances of professional and amateur musicians alike.

The Educated Listener: A New Approach to Music Appreciation helps students develop the skills they need to creatively and intelligently discuss and listen to classical music. Readers will learn about the musical genres, forms, and techniques used by composers of classical music, which will help them become educated listeners. Section One of the text presents readers with basic information regarding the basic elements of music, including rhythm, tempo, and dynamics; the instruments and voice types used in music; and the most common ensembles of music, such as choirs, bands, and orchestras. The remaining sections focus on specific time periods and delve into the compositional and performance techniques, musical forms and genres, and composers that were important and influential. These sections explore the music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque Era, Classical Era, Romantic Era, Twentieth Century, and Contemporary Era. The third edition features tables highlighting historical context, a much-expanded index, new images, and fresh material regarding contemporary music. With an accessible approach, The Educated Listener is an ideal textbook for courses in music appreciation or music history.

Irony, one of the most basic, pervasive, and variegated of rhetorical tropes, is as fundamental to musical thought as it is to poetry, prose, and spoken language. In this wide-ranging study of musical irony, Michael Cherlin draws upon the rich history of irony as developed by rhetoricians, philosophers, literary scholars, poets, and novelists. With occasional reflections on film music and other contemporary works, the principal focus of the book is classical music, both instrumental and vocal, ranging from Mozart to Mahler. The result is a surprising array of approaches toward the making and interpretation of irony in music. Including nearly ninety musical examples, the book is clearly structured and engagingly written. This interdisciplinary volume will appeal to those interested in the relationship between music and literature as well as to scholars of musical composition, technique, and style.

Reverence for J. S. Bach's music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public. Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals--amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners--inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced recreation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works.

Gabriel Faure's melodies offer an inexhaustible variety of style and expression that have made them the foundation of the French art song repertoire. During the second half of his long career, Faure composed all but a handful of his songs within six carefully integrated cycles. Faure moved systematically through his poetic contemporaries, exhausting Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal before immersing himself in the Parnassian poets. He would set nine poems by Armand Silvestre in swift succession (1878-84), seventeen by Paul Verlaine (1887-94), and eighteen by Charles Van Lerberghe (1906-14). As an artist deeply engaged with some of the most important cultural issues of the period, Faure reimagined his musical idiom with each new poet and school, and his song cycles show the same sensitivity to the poetic material. Far more than Debussy, Ravel, or Poulenc, he crafted his song cycles as integrated works, reordering poems freely and using narratives, key schemes, and even leitmotifs to unify the individual songs. The Faure Song Cycles explores the peculiar vision behind each synthesis of music and verse, revealing the astonishing imagination and insight of Faure's musical readings. This book offers not only close readings of Faure's musical works but an interdisciplinary study of how he responded to the changing schools and aesthetic currents of French poetry.

Theory for Today's Musician, Third Edition, recasts the scope of the traditional music theory course to meet the demands of the professional music world, in a style that speaks directly and engagingly to today's music student. It uses classical, folk, popular, and jazz repertoires with clear explanations that link music theory to musical applications. The authors help prepare students by not only exploring how music theory works in art music, but how it functions within modern music, and why this knowledge will help them become better composers, music teachers, performers, and recording engineers. This broadly comprehensive text merges traditional topics such as part writing and harmony (diatonic, chromatic, neo-tonal and atonal), with less traditional topics such as counterpoint and musical process, and includes the non-traditional topics of popular music songwriting, jazz harmony and the blues. The accompanying companion website provides interactive exercises that allow students to practice foundational theory skills. Written by experienced authors, both active classroom teachers for many years, Theory for Today's Musician is the complete and ideal theory text to enable today's student to accomplish their musical goals tomorrow. Updated and corrected throughout, the Third Edition includes: Expanded coverage of atonality and serialism, now separated into two chapters. Broadened treatment of cadences, including examples from popular music. Substantially rewritten chapter on songwriting. Interactive features of the text simplified to two types, "Concept Checks" and "Review and Reinforcement," for greater ease of use. New and updated musical examples added throughout. Charts, illustrations, and musical examples revised for increased clarity. Audio of musical examples now provided through the companion website. The accompanying Workbook offers exercises and assignments to accompany each chapter in the book. A companion website houses online tutorials with drills of basic concepts, as well as audio. The hardback TEXTBOOK is also paired with the corresponding paperback WORKBOOK in a discounted PACKAGE (9780815371731).

The definitive edition (1987) of the piano teaching classic. Includes an introduction by the composer's son Peter Bartok. (English/French/German/Hungarian text). 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 2: Staccato, legato, accompaniment in broken triads, accents

This full-score anthology for Hearing Rhythm and Meter: Analyzing Metrical Consonance and Dissonance in Common-Practice Period Music supports the textbook of the same name, the first book to present a comprehensive course text on advanced analysis of rhythm and meter. From the Baroque to the Romantic era, Hearing Rhythm and Meter emphasizes listening, enabling students to recognize meters and metrical dissonances by type both with and without the score. Found here are masterworks carefully chosen as the ideal context for the presentation of foundational concepts. PURCHASING OPTIONS Textbook (Print Paperback): 978-0-8153-8448-9 Textbook (Print Hardback): 978-0-8153-8447-2 Textbook (eBook): 978-1-351-20431-6 Anthology (Print Paperback): 978-0-8153-9176-0 Anthology (Print Hardback): 978-0-367-34924-0 Anthology (eBook): 978-1-351-20083-7

In this book Steven Vande Moortele offers a comprehensive account of operatic and concert overtures in continental Europe between 1815 and 1850. Discussing a broad range of works by German, French, and Italian composers, it is at once an investigation of the Romantic overture within the context of mid-nineteenth century musical culture and an analytical study that focuses on aspects of large-scale formal organization in the overture genre. While the book draws extensively upon the recent achievements of the 'new Formenlehre', it does not use the overture merely as a vehicle for a theory of romantic form, but rather takes an analytical approach that engages with individual works in their generic context.

(Piano Collection). Contents: Kuhlau: Sonatinas Op. 20 (No. 1 in C, No. 2 in G, No. 3 in F), Sonatinas Op. 55 (No. 1 in C, No. 2 in G, No. 3 in C) * Clementi: Sonatinas Op. 36 (No. 1 in C, No. 2 in G, No. 3 in C, No. 4 in F, No. 5 in G, No. 6 in D) * Haydn: Sonatina in C * Mozart: Rondo in D, Sonata I in C * Beethoven: Rondo, Op. 51, No. 1 in C, Andante from Symphony No. 1, Sonatinas Op. 49 (No. 1 in G minor, No. 2 in G) * Dussek: Sonatina Op. 20, No. 1 in G * J.S. Bach: Prelude No. 1 in C * Haydn: Adagio in E, Andante grazioso in Bo, Allegro in F, Andante in C * Schubert: from Impromptu Op. 142, No. 3; Scherzo in Bo, Op. posth.; from Sonata in A, Op. 120 * Weber: Variation on "Vien qua Dorina bella" Op. 7 * Mendelssohn: Fantasia in A minor, Op. 16, No. 1.

Play Piazzolla is a unique collection of 13 tangos by the Argentinian master of tango nuevo arranged for easy solo guitar.

for SATB and piano or orchestra This subtle setting of the popular carol is soft and gentle, never louder than mezzo-piano. The ethereal background starts in a high register with a repeated figure that evokes tranquility. A different setting for TTBB unaccompanied is also available. Orchestral material is available on rental.

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

Written by fourteen leading experts in the field, this Companion covers almost every aspect of the harpsichord - the history of the instrument, tuning systems, the role of the harpsichord in ensemble, its use in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and includes separate chapters devoted to Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach and Handel. Chapters featuring almost every national style are written by authors with close connections to the countries about which they are writing, including England, The Netherlands, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, as well as the less extensive harpsichord traditions of Russia, the Nordic and Baltic countries, and colonial Spanish and Portuguese America. With musical examples, illustrations, a timeline of the harpsichord, and an appendix of composers, reliable editions and original sources, this book is for all who love the harpsichord, or want to learn more about it.

Written by fourteen leading experts in the field, this Companion covers almost every aspect of the harpsichord - the history of the instrument, tuning systems, the role of the harpsichord in ensemble, its use in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and includes separate chapters devoted to Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach and Handel. Chapters featuring almost every national style are written by authors with close connections to the countries about which they are writing, including England, The Netherlands, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, as well as the less extensive harpsichord traditions of Russia, the Nordic and Baltic countries, and colonial Spanish and Portuguese America. With musical examples, illustrations, a timeline of the harpsichord, and an appendix of composers, reliable editions and original sources, this book is for all who love the harpsichord, or want to learn more about it.

Exercises for the left hand and bow. Trills, Scales, Arpeggios, Double stopping etc. * 1st Part: Exercises in the neck positions * 2nd Part: Exercises in the whole compass of the cello * 3rd Part: Exercises in the thumb positions * 4th Part: Double stopping * 5th Part: Bowing Exercises * Examples from each of the five parts should be studied daily. The exercises should be practised slowly at first gradually increasing the speed. Care should be taken that they are played very evenly.

New research throws light on the history of the viol after Purcell, including its revival in the late eighteenth century through Charles Frederick Abel. It is normally thought that the bass viol or viola da gamba dropped out of British musical life in the 1690s, and that Henry Purcell was the last composer to write for it. Peter Holman shows how the gamba changed its role and function in the Restoration period under the influence of foreign music and musicians; how it was played and composed for by the circle of immigrant musicians around Handel; how it was part of the fashion for exotic instruments in themiddle of the century; and how the presence in London of its greatest eighteenth-century exponent, Charles Frederick Abel, sparked off a revival in the 1760s and 70s. Later chapters investigate the gamba's role as an emblem of sensibility among aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals, including the Countess of Pembroke, Sir Edward Walpole, Ann Ford, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Gainsborough and Benjamin Franklin, and trace Abel's influence and legacy far into the nineteenth century. A concluding chapter is concerned with its role in the developing early music movement, culminating with Arnold Dolmetsch's first London concerts with old instruments in 1890. PETER HOLMAN is Professor of Historical Musicology at Leeds University, and director of The Parley of Instruments, the choir Psalmody, and the Suffolk Villages Festival.