|
Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles > General
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.
Articles on masterpieces of European religious music, from the
middle ages to Stravinsky and Tavener. The late Wilfrid Mellers,
who occupies a special place among music critics, described himself
as a non-believer; but his preference for music that "displays a
sense of the numinous" (in his words) will strike a chord with many
wholisten to religious music nowadays, and who share his view that
music that confronts first and last things is likely to offer more
than music that evades them. The essays form five groups, which
together offer a survey of religious music from around the first
millennium to the beginning of the second, in the context of the
difficult issues of what religious music is, and, for good measure,
what is religion? The parts are: The Ages of Christian Faith; The
Re-birth of a Re-birth: From Renaissance to High Baroque; From
Enlightenment to Doubt; From "the Death of God" to "the Unanswered
Question"; and The Ancient Law and the Modern Mind. Musical
discussion, with copious examples, is conducted throughout the book
in a context that is also religious - and indeed philosophical,
social, and political, with the open-endedness that such an
approach demands in the presentation of ideas aboutmusic's most
fundamental nature and purposes. COMPOSERS: Hildegard of Bingen;
Perotin; Machaut; Dunstable, Dufay; William Corniyshes father and
son; Tallis; Byrd; Monteverdi; Schutz; J.S. Bach; Couperin; Handel;
Haydn;Mozart; Beethoven; Schubert; Bruckner; Berlioz, Faure; Verdi,
Brahms; Elgar, Delius; Holst, Vaughan Williams, Howells; Britten;
Janacek; Messiaen, Poulenc; Rachmaninov; Stravinsky; Part, Tavener,
Gorecki, Macmillan, Finnissy; Copland.
"Interpreting Music" is a comprehensive essay on understanding
musical meaning and performing music meaningfully - 'interpreting
music' in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two
decades of highly influential work, Lawrence Kramer fundamentally
rethinks the concepts of work, score, performance, performativity,
interpretation, and meaning - even the very concept of music -
while breaking down conventional wisdom and received ideas. Kramer
argues that music, far from being closed to interpretation, is
ideally open to it, and that musical interpretation is the paradigm
of interpretation in general. The book illustrates the many
dimensions of interpreting music through a series of case studies
drawn from the classical repertoire, but its methods and principles
carry over to other repertoires just as they carry beyond music by
working through music to wider philosophical and cultural
questions.
|
|