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

Featuring all 29 pieces from the album Lang Lang Piano Book, this is a collection of the most significant pieces from Lang Lang's personal musical journey. It is beautifully presented as a high-end cased book, featuring marbled endpapers, page-finder ribbon and sewn binding. It includes exclusive photographs, comments from Lang Lang on every piece and an edition of Fur Elise annotated with Lang Lang's own performance notes. This is a book for all pianists to treasure and revisit again and again.

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.

Composed in 1914, Ravel's sole work for the classical ensemble of piano, violin and cello was first heard in Paris at the Salle Gaveau on January 28, 1915, with Alfredo Casella on the piano, Gabriel Willaume on violin and Louis Feuillard on cello. The work was quickly recognized as a worthy addition to an already wealthy repertoire and remains popular today. The score reproduced here was first issued in 1915 by Durand. As with all PLP scores a percentage of each sale is donated to the amazing online archive of free music scores and recordings, IMSLP - Petrucci Music Library.

Children can discover the magic of Bach's music by hearing the five beautiful tunes in this enchanting sound book. The animal orchestra travels around, playing Bach's music and telling us a little bit about his life as they go. This is a perfect introduction to one of the greatest composers of all time.

Holst's popular suite was named for the St. Paul's Girls' School of Hammersmith, London - where he was the music director from 1904 until his death thirty years later. Composed in 1912 as a token of gratitude for the installation of a sound-proof teaching studio. Holst composed this and nearly all subsequent works in this studio. Now available in a newly-engraved, easy-to-read score edited by Richard Sargeant.

Three of the most outstanding waltzes from Tchaikovsky's ballet masterpiece have been thoughtfully arranged as a 15-minute dance suite by Carl Simpson, who also prepared the new critical edition of the complete ballet. The final waltz is the most familar, but the two others offer quite different perspectives on the familar dance form from the Russian master.

"Liszt's Dante Symphony" is a thrilling tale of murder and covert spy rings amid the turbulent rise of Bismarck's Prussia, thus leading to Hitler's infernal Third Reich. Following the lives of a student of Liszt's, named Angelo Di Purezza, and his son, the reader is taken on a journey of suspense that cascades over two generations. During those years Europe would experience numerous revolutions, the unification of Italy, and witness two World Wars that would feature ghastly chemical weapons, atomic bombs, and insidious poison gas called Zyklon-B. Franz Liszt is joined by a huge cast of historical characters, including Napoleon III, Pope Pius IX, Rossini, Saint-Saens, Gustave Dore, Victor Hugo, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler and many others. The tale is an exciting amalgamation of history, politics, religion, music, the fine arts, secret codes, murder, suspense, sacrifices, and even romance.

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.

(Guitar). A Modern Approach to Classical Guitar is designed for anyone just learning to play guitar. Written by one of the premier classical guitarists of our time and based on years of teaching students of all ages, this revised edition includes many new pieces and an in-depth introduction to two-part music (thumb-and-fingers technique) the heart of the classical style Book 1 includes: rest stroke and free stroke, how to read music, playing in open position, sharps and flats, basic notes and dotted notes, time signatures (4/4, 3/4, 2/4), melody with bass accompaniment, solos and duets, and more

Richard Taruskin's sweeping collection of essays distills a half century of professional experience, demonstrating an unparalleled insider awareness of relevant debates in all areas of music studies, including historiography and criticism, representation and aesthetics, musical and professional politics, and the sociology of taste. Cursed Questions, invoking a famous catchphrase from Russian intellectual history, grapples with questions that are never finally answered but never go away. The writings gathered here form an intellectual biography that showcases the characteristic wit, provocation, and erudition that readers have come to expect from Taruskin, making it an essential volume for anyone interested in music, politics, and the arts.

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.

Contents: 1. Magnificat Anima Mea (Coro) 2. Et Exultavit (Aria) 3. Quia Respexit (Aria) 4. Omnes Generationes (Coro) 5. Quia Fecit Mihi Magna (Aria) 6. Et Misericordia (Duetto) 7. Fecit Potentiam (Coro) 8. Deposuit (Aria) 9. Esurientes (Aria) 10. Suscepit Israel (Terzetto) 11. Sicut Locutus (Coro) 12. Gloria Patri (Coro) Unabridged digitally enhanced reprint of the vocal score prepared by musicologist Karl Straube and published by C.F. Peters, Leipzig in the late 19th century. Bach composed the initial version in E flat in 1723 for the Christmas Vespers in Leipzig which contained several Christmas texts. Over the years he removed the Christmas-specific texts to make it suitable for year-round performance, transposing it into D major to provide better sonority for the trumpets. The work is divided into twelve parts which can be grouped into three movements, each beginning with an aria and completed by the choir. This large-format, easy-to-read vocal score, a welcome addition to the libraries of choruses and orchestras everywhere, is completely compatible with the widely available orchestra material reprinted by E. F. Kalmus.

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.

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.

The Third Symphony is Brahms at his most masterful and most appealing, from the great fanfare motive of its opening measures to the lyrical melancholy of the world-famous POCO ALLEGRETTO movement. The work appears here in full score, with bar-numbered movements and ample margins at the bottom of each page for notes and analysis.

Essays by prominent scholars and organists examine the music of Franck and other nineteenth-century French organist-composers through stylistic analysis, study of compositional process, and exploration of how ideas about organ technique and performance-practice traditions developed and became codified. Nineteenth-century French organ music attracts an ever-increasing number of performers and devotees. The music of Cesar Franck and other distinguished composers-Boely, Guilmant, Widor-and the impact upon this repertoire of the organ-building achievements of Aristide Cavaille-Coll, are here explored through stylistic analysis, the study of the compositional process, and the exploration of how ideas about organ technique and performance practice traditions developed and became codified. New consideration is also given to the political and cultural contexts within which Franck and other French organist-composers worked. Contributors: Kimberley Marshall, William J. Peterson,Benjamin van Wye, Craig Cramer, Jesse E. Eschbach, Karen Hastings-Deans, Marie-Louise Jaquet-Langlasi, Daniel Roth, Edward Zimmerman, Lawrence Archbold, Rollin Smith

Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) was arguably one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century music, and certainly among the most prominent musicians of her time. For many composers-- especially Americans from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass--studying with Boulanger in Paris or Fontainebleau was a formative moment in a creative career. Composer, performer, conductor, impresario, and charismatic and inspirational teacher, Boulanger engaged in a vast array of activities in a variety of media, from private composition lessons and lecture-recitals to radio broadcasts, recordings, and public performances. But how to define and account for Boulanger's impact on the music world is still unclear. Nadia Boulanger and Her World takes us from a time in the late nineteenth century, when many careers in music were almost entirely closed to women, to the moment in the late twentieth century when those careers were becoming a reality. Contributors consider Boulanger's work in the worlds of composition, musical analysis, and pedagogy and explore the geographies of transatlantic and international exchange and disruption within which her career unfolded. Ultimately, this volume takes its title as a topic for exploration--asking what worlds Boulanger belonged to, and in what sense we can consider any of them to be "hers."

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.