(Vocal Collection). This all-in-one package includes the original Arias for Soprano book from the G. Schirmer Opera Anthology along with two accompaniment CDs AND the corresponding Diction Coach book/two CD set. Diction Coach includes recorded diction lessons, IPA, and word for word translations. In addition to piano accompaniments playable on both your CD player and computer, the enhanced accompaniment CDs also include tempo adjustment software for CD-ROM computer use.

This book contains the first complete translation in English of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s major musical writings, complementing the well-known Tales. It offers, therefore, a long-awaited opportunity to assess the thought and influence of one of the most famous of all writers on music and the musical links with his fiction. Containing the first complete appearance in English of Kreisleriana, it reveals a masterpiece of imaginative writing whose title is familiar to musicians (from Robert Schumann’s piano cycle) and whose profound humour and irony can now be fully appreciated. This volume offers translations aiming at the greatest fidelity to Hoffmann, as well as musical accuracy in the reviews. David Charlton’s three introductory essays provide extensive information on the background to Romantic music criticism; on the origins and internal structure of Kreisleriana; and on Hoffmann and opera. A concluding essay by the late Friedrich Schnapp lists Hoffmann’s planned reviews and those mistakenly attributed to him.

What makes a classical song a song? In a wide-ranging 2004 discussion, covering such contrasting composers as Brahms and Berberian, Schubert and Kurtag, Jonathan Dunsby considers the nature of vocality in songs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essence and scope of poetic and literary meaning in the Lied tradition is subjected to close scrutiny against the backdrop of 'new musicological' thinking and music-theoretical orthodoxies. The reader is thus offered the best insights available within an evidence-based approach to musical discourse. Schoenberg figures conspicuously as both songsmith and theorist, and some easily comprehensible Schenkerian approaches are used to convey ideas of musical time and expressive focus. In this work of scholarship and theoretical depth, Professor Dunsby's highly original approach and engaging style will ensure its appeal to all practising musicians and students of Romantic and modern music.

(BH Piano). Convenient, value-priced complete package includes Authentic Editions of all four piano concertos as well as the famous Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

Chances are you've probably heard Handel's Messiah at least once, if not many times. Maybe you've even performed it, as have countless musicians around the world. After all, it's probably one of the best-loved, and certainly one of the best-known, musical works in the standard repertoire. But if you thought you knew all there was to know about the great composer's famous oratorio, think again. For example, it may surprise you to learn that: Handel's first impulse to compose the work came not from religious or even musical inspiration. It had a whole lot more to do with money. The first performance of Messiah took place not in London but in Dublin - and not with a huge choir and orchestra but with only a relative handful of musicians. Although church groups and clergy members now praise Messiah as a fine example of religious music at its best, Handel had to disguise his oratorio for its first performance in London in order to sneak it past the church authorities. The Hallelujah chorus wasn't originally called that at all, but had a different name. Although Handel was proud of Messiah, he didn't think it was his best work. His favorite oratorio is one hardly anyone has ever heard of, much less heard. All these and many more entertaining (and entirely true ) facts await your discovery as internationally bestselling author David W. Barber takes you on another delightful romp through the pages of music history - as it ought to be taught

Why are finales different from other movements? Why can we nearly always tell whether a movement comes first or last in a work with several movements? Is the special character of finales necessary as well as traditional? Michael Talbot explores these questions in depth. His wide-ranging analytical and historical survey covers instrumental (and some vocal) music from the Renaissance up to the present day.

Performers include: * Early music ensembles, such as Chapelle Royale, Lionheart, Sequentia, and the Tallis Scholars * Singers Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Renee Fleming, and Joan Sutherland * Cellist Yo-Yo Ma * Pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Malcolm Bilson, and Artur Rubenstein * The Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra * Conductors Pierre Boulez, John Eliot Gardiner, James Levine, and Michael Tilson Thomas * String quartets, such as the Concord String Quartet and the Tokyo String Quartet * Jazz artists Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie

Since the 18th century, Western scholars and musicians have been fascinated by the music of India. Whether in the realms of musicological enquiry, or as an exotic flavour on the stage, or in popular songs, Indian music has been part of the West's consciousness for over two hundred years. Indian Music and the West traces the fascinating history of this complex cultural and musical encounter.

WE SANG BETTER consists of two volumes of very clear advice about singing from great singers of the past. Volume 2 (ISBN 978-84-940477-9-4) is entitled Why it was better and contains further evidence and reasoning from singers 1800 to 1960. This volume is 260 pages long, and contains 20 illustrations. One very important thing right from the start, said Puccini s star soprano Maria Jeritza, - not to scream and not to force. As Volume 1 made clear, the best singers of this period approached their art and their training gently. They built slowly upon the individual voice granted by nature. Volume 2 gives further proof that many of these singers knew exactly what they were doing and why. They were highly aware that singing can go wrong. But they said if you wanted superlative singing you had to keep approaching it their way. You would never master supreme singing: if you put your trust in scientific discoveries or fixes; if you rushed your training or forced; or if you tried to copy some academic style . The original Italian model for singers was uncomplicated: the aim was to be natural, spontaneous and simple. And, as Puccini added, We Italians love beauty of sound. This volume takes evidence from the singers on dozens of topics such as: pressure, exercises, forward, dans le masque, covering, from the chest, voix sombr e, portamento, attack, vowel modifications, support, golden ages, keeping up with instrumentalists, listening to others, performances of early music, etc - and also on the question of whether singing is a science, an art, or even something more - something spiritual. James Anderson is a musician who has worked for the Arts Council of Great Britain and has run major European Festivals. Regretting the scarcity of supreme singing today, he has spent the last 30 years researching and collating this advice. He now helps young singers through the Singers Legacy website. For your information, the first volume (ISBN 978-84-940477-8-7) is entitled How we sang and contains 250 tips on how to sing from singers 1800 to 1960; the first volume is 490 pages long, and contains 130 illustrations.

In this wide-ranging and challenging book, Ruth Smith shows that the words of Handel's oratorios reflect the events and ideas of their time and have far greater meaning than has hitherto been realized. She sheds new light on the oratorio librettists and explores literature, music, aesthetics, politics and religion to reveal Handel's texts as conduits for eighteenth-century thought and sensibility. This book enriches our understanding of Handel, his times, and the relationships between music and its intellectual contexts.

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, `difficult' and therefore `elitist'. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word 'lyric'. These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects and capacities.

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.

This innovative book examines the place and practice of musical life in eighteenth-century England among the upper classes. Focusing on the home, it shows how domestic music-making was shaped by socio-cultural forces while itself contributing to socio-cultural formation. Particular attention is given to visual representations of music in eighteenth-century paintings, drawings and prints. Other documentary material analyzed includes the music of the period, instruction manuals, tracts on education, courtesy and conduct books, sermons, diaries, letters and memoirs, fictional writing and journalism. Through these media the author examines the role played by construction, the human body via questions of physicality and sexuality in dancing, its agency in defining and replicating dominant ideologies of the family and its use in establishing and maintaining social and cultural boundaries.

A tale of passion and obsession from a philosophy professor who teaches himself to play Bach on the piano. Dan Moller grew up listening to heavy metal in the Boston suburbs. But something changed when he dug out his mother's record of The Art of the Fugue, inexplicably wedged between 16 ABBA Hits and Kenny Rogers. Moller became fixated on Bach and his music, but only learned to play it for himself as an adult. In The Way of Bach, Moller draws us into the strange and surprisingly funny world of the composer and his scene. Did you know The Goldberg Variations contain a song about having to eat too much cabbage? Or that Handel nearly died in a duel he fought while conducting an opera? Along the way, Moller takes up such questions as, just what is so special about Bach's music? What can Americans-steeped in pop culture-learn from European craftsmanship? And why do some people see a connection between Bach's music and God? By turns witty and thought-provoking, Moller infuses The Way of Bach with insights into music, culture, and philosophy alike.

50 Great Classics is a collection of pieces selected from works by some of the finest composers. The difficulty of the pieces varies considerably. This is quite deliberate - it is hoped that everyone will find something they have already mastered and many more pieces they would like to learn. The collection also includes a few works of particular difficulty!

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.

Melopoetics, the study of the multifarious relations between music and literature, has emerged in recent years as an increasingly popular field of interdisciplinary inquiry. In this volume, noted musicologists and literary critics explore diverse topics of shared concern such as literary theory as a model for musical criticism, genre theories in literature and music, the criticism and analysis of texted music and the role of aesthetic, historical and cultural understanding in concepts of text/music convergence. These fourteen essays - united here not by a common ideology but by common subject matter - demonstrate how musical and literary scholarship can combine forces effectively on the common ground of contemporary critical theory and interpretive practice. The concluding essay by interdisciplinary historian Hayden White locates this ambitious enterprise of contemplating 'music and text' in the larger context of intellectual history.

When the Nicholas Brothers danced, uptown at the Cotton Club, downtown at the Roxy, in segregated movie theatres in the South, and dance halls across the country, audiences cheered, clapped, stomped their feet, and shouted out uncontrollably. Their exuberant style of American theatrical dance-a melding of jazz, tap, acrobatics, black vernacular dance, and witty repartee-was dazzling. Though daredevil flips, slides, and hair-raising splits made them show-stoppers, the Nicholas Brothers were also highly sophisticated dancers who refined a centuries-old tradition of percussive dance into the rhythmic brilliance of jazz tap. In Brotherhood in Rhythm, author Constance Valis Hill interweaves an intimate portrait of these great performers with a richly detailed history of jazz music and jazz dance, both bringing their act to life and explaining their significance through a colourful analysis of their eloquent footwork, their full-bodied expressiveness, and their changing style. Hill vividly captures their soaring careers, from the Cotton Club appearances with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Jimmy Lunceford, to film-stealing big-screen performances with Chick Webb, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. Drawing on a deep well of research and endless hours of interviews with the Nicholas brothers themselves, she also documents their struggles against the nets of racism and segregation that constantly enmeshed their careers and denied them the recognition they deserved. More than a biography of two immensely talented but underappreciated performers, Brotherhood in Rhythm offers a profound understanding of this distinctively American art and its intricate links to the history of jazz.

Where previous accounts of the Renaissance have not fully acknowledged the role that music played in this decisive period of cultural history, Laurenz Lutteken merges historical music analysis with the analysis of the other arts to provide a richer context for the emergence and evolution of creative cultures across civilizations. This fascinating panorama foregrounds music as a substantial component of the era and considers musical works and practices in a wider cultural-historical context. Among the topics surveyed are music's relationship to antiquity, the position of music within systems of the arts, the emergence of the concept of the musical work, as well as music's relationship to the theory and practice of painting, literature, and architecture. What becomes clear is that the Renaissance gave rise to many musical concepts and practices that persist to this day, whether the figure of the composer, musical institutions, and modes of musical writing and memory.