Classical Recording: A Practical Guide in the Decca Tradition is the authoritative guide to all aspects of recording acoustic classical music. Offering detailed descriptions, diagrams, and photographs of fundamental recording techniques such as the Decca tree, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the essential skills involved in successfully producing a classical recording. Written by engineers with years of experience working for Decca and Abbey Road Studios and as freelancers, Classical Recording equips the student, the interested amateur, and the practising professional with the required knowledge and confidence to tackle everything from solo piano to opera.

'Beguiling ... Limpidly written, effortlessly learned' William Boyd, TLS, Books of the Year In November 1838 Frederic Chopin, George Sand and her two children sailed to Majorca to escape the Parisian winter. They settled in an abandoned monastery at Valldemossa in the mountains above Palma, where Chopin finished what would eventually be recognised as one of the great and revolutionary works of musical Romanticism - his 24 Preludes. There was scarcely a decent piano on the island (these were still early days in the evolution of the modern instrument), so Chopin worked on a small pianino made by a local craftsman, which remained in their monastic cell for seventy years after he and Sand had left. This brilliant and unclassifiable book traces the history of Chopin's 24 Preludes through the instruments on which they were played, the pianists who interpreted them and the traditions they came to represent. Yet it begins and ends with the Majorcan pianino, which during the Second World War assumed an astonishing cultural potency as it became, for the Nazis, a symbol of the man and music they were determined to appropriate as their own. The unexpected hero of the second part of the book is the great keyboard player and musical thinker Wanda Landowska, who rescued the pianino from Valldemossa in 1913, and who would later become one of the most influential musical figures of the twentieth century. Kildea shows how her story - a compelling account based for the first time on her private papers - resonates with Chopin's, while simultaneously distilling part of the cultural and political history of Europe and the United States in the central decades of the century. Kildea's beautifully interwoven narratives, part cultural history and part detective story, take us on an unexpected journey through musical Romanticism and allow us to reflect freshly on the changing meaning of music over time.

This study is an analysis of the first three of Beethoven's late quartets, Opp. 127, 132, and 130, commissioned by Prince Nikolai Galitzin. The five late quartets, usually considered as a group, were written in the same period as the "Missa solemnis" and the Ninth Symphony, and are among the composer's most profound musical statements. Daniel K. L. Chua believes that of the five quartets the three that he studies trace a process of disintegration, whereas the last two, Opp. 131 and 135, reintegrate the language that Beethoven himself had destabilized.

Through analyses that unearth peculiar features characteristic of the surface and of the deeper structures of the music, Chua interprets the "Galitzin" quartets as radical critiques of both music and society, a view first proposed by Theodore Adorno. From this perspective, the quartets necessarily undo the act of analysis as well, forcing the analytical traditions associated with Schenker and Schoenberg to break up into an eclectic mixture of techniques. Analysis itself thus becomes problematic and has to move in a dialectical and paradoxical fashion in order to trace Beethoven's logic of disintegration. The result is a new way of reading these works that not only reflects the preoccupations of the German Romantics of that time and the poststructuralists of today, but also opens a discussion of cultural, political, and philosophical issues.

Originally published in 1995.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In the 1930s swing music was everywhere--on radio, recordings, and in the great ballrooms, hotels, theatres, and clubs. Perhaps at no other time were drummers more central to the sound and spirit of jazz. Benny Goodman showcased Gene Krupa. Jimmy Dorsey featured Ray McKinley. Artie Shaw helped make Buddy Rich a star while Count Basie riffed with the innovative Jo Jones. Drummers were at the core of this music; as Jo Jones said, "The drummer is the key--the heartbeat of jazz."

An oral history told by the drummers, other musicians, and industry figures, Drummin' Men is also Burt Korall's memoir of more than fifty years in jazz. Personal and moving, the book is a celebration of the music of the time and the men who made it. Meet Chick Webb, small, fragile-looking, a hunchback from childhood, whose explosive drumming style thrilled and amazed; Gene Krupa, the great showman and pacemaker; Ray McKinley, whose rhythmic charm, light touch, and musical approach provided a great example for countless others, and the many more that populate this story.

Based on interviews with a collection of the most important jazzmen, Drummin' Men offers an inside view of the swing years that cannot be found anywhere else.

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 Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato's comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.

Over the years, many examination pieces have captured the imagination of teachers and students, but the stars of past syllabuses are often forgotten. The Best of Grade 4 Violin brings together best-loved pieces from current and past syllabuses, including Hindu Song (Rimsky-Korsakov), Sometime Maybe (Wedgwood) and Fly me to the Moon (Howard). Containing fresh editions of folk and classical masterpieces alongside contemporary favourites, all pieces have been rigorously researched by violin expert Jessica O'Leary. Online audio of performance and accompaniment tracks are available, as are useful practice tips. This book includes pieces from current and past Trinity and ABRSM syllabuses. Jessica O'Leary has a successful career as a teacher, professional violinist, ABRSM examiner and seminar presenter. She has toured and recorded extensively as a member of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and has performed with Madonna, Led Zeppelin, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Opera House. She teaches violin and viola and directs string ensembles at St Paul's Girls' School, Eltham College and Junior Guildhall London.

Follows the fascinating story of musical timekeeping, beginning in an age before the existence of external measuring devices and continuing to the present-day use of the Smartphone app. The book opens with an exploration of musical time keeping as expressed in the artwork and musical writing of the Renaissance, sources that inform our early understanding of an age when music making was bound up with motions of the body and the pulsing of the human heart. With the adoption of the simple pendulum and the subsequent incorporation of tempo-related language, musicians gained the ability to communicate concepts of speed and slowness with ever-increasing precision. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the development of a diverse array of musical time-keeping devices, yet it was not until the nineteenth century that a single device combined the critical elements of accuracy, functionality and affordability. Enter the metronome: portable and affordable, a triumph of innovation that enabled musicians to establish and faithfully reproduce musical time with accuracy and ease. From Beethoven to Ligeti, Moskovitz looks to a number of distinguished composers who used or refused this revolutionary machine and explores the complicated relationship that unfolded between the metronome, the musical world and practitioners in other disciplines who sought to exploit its potential. Engagingly written, Measure: In Pursuit of Musical Time will appeal to professionals and amateurs alike.

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.

Music scholarship has been rethinking its understanding of Franz Schubert and his work. How might our modern aesthetic values and historical knowledge of Schubert's life affect how we interpret his music? Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation demonstrates how updated analysis of Schubert and his instrumental works reveals expressive meaning. In six chapters, each devoted to one or two of Schubert's pieces, René Rusch explores alternate forms of unity and coherence, offers critical assessments of biographical and intertextual influence, investigates narrative, and addresses the gendering of the composer and his music. Rusch's comparative analyses and interpretations address four significant areas of scholarly focus in Schubert studies, including his use of chromaticism, his unique forms, the impact of events in his own life, and the influence of Beethoven. Drawing from a range of philosophical, hermeneutic, historical, biographical, theoretical, and analytical sources, Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation offers readers a unique and innovative foray into the poetics of contemporary analysis of Schubert's instrumental music and develops new ways to engage with his repertoire.