We have long regarded Beethoven as a great composer, but we rarely appreciate that he was also an eminently political artist. This book unveils the role of politics in his oeuvre, elucidating how the inherently political nature of Beethoven's music explains its power and endurance. William Kinderman presents Beethoven as a civically engaged thinker faced with severe challenges. The composer lived through many tumultuous events--the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Congress of Vienna among them. Previous studies of Beethoven have emphasized the importance of his personal suffering and inner struggles; Kinderman instead establishes that musical tensions in works such as the Eroica, the Appassionata, and his final piano sonata in C minor reflect Beethoven's attitudes toward the political turbulence of the era. Written for the 250th anniversary of his birth, Beethoven takes stock of the composer's legacy, showing how his idealism and zeal for resistance have ensured that masterpieces such as the Ninth Symphony continue to inspire activists around the globe. Kinderman considers how the Fifth Symphony helped galvanize resistance to fascism, how the Sixth has energized the environmental movement, and how Beethoven's civic engagement continues to inspire in politically perilous times. Uncertain times call for ardent responses, and, as Kinderman convincingly affirms, Beethoven's music is more relevant today than ever before.

By bringing together the most recent scholarship, this book sheds new light on Berg's life and music. The three main sections are each devoted to a particular genre. The first essay in each section surveys Berg's development within the genre concerned, whilst the subsequent chapters discuss particular works in more detail. An introductory section to the book sets Berg's music in the context of other artistic and musical developments of the period from 1890 to the 1930s.

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.

(Piano Method). Contents: Arabesque No. 2 * Ave Maria * Ballade * Barcarolle * Consolation, Op. 33, No. 1 (Karg-Elert) * Douce Plainte * Innocence * Inquietude No. 18 * L'adieu * L'harmonie des Anges * L'hirondelle * La Babillarde * La Bergeronnette * La Candeur * La Chasse * La Chevaleresque * La Gracieuse * La Petite Reunion * La Styrienne * La Tarentelle * Le Courant Limpide * Le Retour * Pastorale No. 3 * Progres * Tendre Fleur.

Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion charts a path through American music and musical life using as guides the words of composers, performers, writers and the rest of us ordinary folks who sing, dance, and listen. The anthology of primary sources contains about 160 selections from 1540 to 2000. Sometimes the sources are classics in the literature around American music, for example, the Preface to the Bay Psalm Book, excerpts from Slave Songs of the United States, and Charles Ives extolling Emerson. But many other selections offer uncommon sources, including a satirical story about a Yankee music teacher; various columns from 19th-century German American newspapers; the memoirs of a 19th-century diva; Lottie Joplin remembering her husband Scott; a little-known reflection of Copland about Stravinsky; an interview with Muddy Waters from the Chicago Defender; a letter from Woody Guthrie on the "spunkfire" attitude of a folk song; a press release from the Country Music Association; and the Congressional testimony around "Napster." "Sidebar" entries occasionally bring a topic or an idea into the present, acknowledging the extent to which revivals of many kinds of music play a role in American contemporary culture. This book focuses on the connections between theory and practice to enrich our understanding of the diversity of American musical experiences. Designed especially to accompany college courses which survey American music as a whole, the book is also relevant to courses in American history and American Studies.

Approaches the topic of classical music in the GDR from an interdisciplinary perspective, questioning the assumption that classical music functioned purely as an ideological support for the state. Classical music in the German Democratic Republic is commonly viewed as having functioned as an ideological support or cultural legitimization for the state, in the form of the so-called "bourgeois humanist inheritance." The largenumbers of professional orchestras in the GDR were touted as a proof of the country's culture. Classical music could be seen as the polar opposite of Americanizing pop culture and also of musical modernism, which was decried as formalist. Nevertheless, there were still musical modernists in the GDR, and classical music traditions were not only a prop of the state. This collection of new essays approaches the topic of classical music in the GDR from an interdisciplinary perspective, presenting the work of scholars in a number of complementary disciplines, including German Studies, Musicology, Aesthetics, and Film Studies. Contributors to this volume offer a broad examination of classical music in the GDR, while also uncovering nonconformist tendencies and questioning the assumption that classical music in the GDR meant nothing but (socialist) respectability. Contributors: Tatjana Boehme-Mehner, Martin Brady, Lars Fischer, Kyle Frackman, Golan Gur, Peter Kupfer, Albrecht von Massow, Carola Nielinger-Vakil, Jessica Payette, Larson Powell, Juliane Schicker, Martha Sprigge, Matthias Tischer, Jonathan L. Yaeger, Johanna Frances Yunker Kyle Frackman is Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Larson Powell is Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

- Shows how a specialized music performance course can be reimagined to achieve greater inclusivity and foster student creativity - Connects traditional music teaching with contemporary education goals and issues - By centering African American vocal repertoire, enables instructors to challenge the Eurocentrism of traditional vocal music canon

Only Nick Tosches, bestselling author of Dino and The Devil and Sonny Liston, could have woven this irresistible tale: part mystery, part biography, part meditation on the meaning and power of music.

A forgotten singer from the early days of jazz is at the center of this riveting narrative. For twenty years, Nick Tosches searched for facts about the life of Emmett Miller, a yodeling blackface performer whose songs prefigured jazz, country, blues, and much of the popular music of the twentieth century. Beginning with a handful of 78-rpm records and ending at a tombstone in a Macon, Georgia graveyard, Tosches pieces together a life—and illuminates the spirit of musicmakers from Cab Calloway to Bob Dylan, from Homer to the Rolling Stones.

This is a brilliant, inspired journey by one of the most original writers at work today.

The Lute in Britain is the first comprehensive account of the lute's history and music in Britain from medieval times to the present. Writing for the music student, the serious listener, the player, maker, and lute enthusiast, Spring makes available for the first time over forty years of musical scholarship that has previously been the preserve of academic journals.

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901) was an Italian Romantic opera composer, best known for Rigoletto, Aida, and La Traviata -- which follows the life, lioves and death of a courtesan, Violetta, from tuberculosis. Francesco Maria Piave (1810-1876) was an Italian opera librettist who worked with many of the significant composers of his day, writing 10 libretti for Verdi.

Disaster Songs as Intangible Memorials in Atlantic Canada draws on a collection of over 600 songs relating to Atlantic Canadian disasters from 1891 up until the present and describes the characteristics that define them as intangible memorials. The book demonstrates the relationship between vernacular memorials - informal memorials collectively and spontaneously created from a variety of objects by the general public - and disaster songs. The author identifies the features that define vernacular memorials and applies them to disaster songs: spontaneity, ephemerality, importance of place, motivations and meaning-making, content, as well as the role of media in inspiring and disseminating memorials and songs. Visit the companion website: www.disastersongs.ca.

Putting forward an extensive new argument for a humanities-based approach to big-data analysis, The Music in the Data shows how large datasets of music, or music corpora, can be productively integrated with the qualitative questions at the heart of music research. The author argues that as well as providing objective evidence, music corpora can themselves be treated as texts to be subjectively read and creatively interpreted, allowing new levels of understanding and insight into music traditions. Each chapter in this book asks how we define a core music-theory topic, such as style, harmony, meter, function, and musical key, and then approaches the topic through considering trends within large musical datasets, applying a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative interpretation. Throughout, several basic techniques of data analysis are introduced and explained, with supporting materials available online. Connecting the empirical information from corpus analysis with theories of musical and textual meaning, and showing how each approach can enrich the other, this book provides a vital perspective for scholars and students in music theory, musicology, and all areas of music research.

'In this highly readable biography of Nellie Melba...Robert Wainwright tells the story of the girl with the incredible voice who, by sheer force of her personality and power of her decibels, took the operatic world by storm and managed to escape from her violent husband' Ysenda Maxtone Graham, DAILY MAIL Nellie Melba is remembered as a squarish, late middle-aged woman dressed in furs and large hats, an imperious Dame whose voice ruled the world for three decades and inspired a peach and raspberry dessert. But to succeed, she had to battle social expectations and misogyny that would have preferred she stay a housewife in outback Queensland rather than parade herself on stage. She endured the violence of a bad marriage, was denied by scandal a true love with the would-be King of France, and suffered for more than a decade the loss of her only son - stolen by his angry, vengeful father. Despite these obstacles, she built and maintained a career as an opera singer and businesswoman on three continents which made her one of the first international superstars. Award-winning biographer Robert Wainwright presents a very different portrait of this great diva, one that celebrates both her musical contributions and her rich and colourful personal life.