Despite much triumph in adversity, illness fuelling composition is a misconception. The health - and especially deaths - of composers excite controversy. Was Mozart really poisoned? Did Tchaikovsky commit suicide? How did Beethoven lose his hearing? Much good previous scholarship has been sullied by unsubstantiated views, and many composers' reputations have been unfairly tarnished by scandalous commentary, often involving alcoholism or syphilis. This book, by a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, charts the disturbed physical and mental health of 70 great composers. It attempts to unpick the evidence forensically and to define the cause of death based on the legal paradigm of a balance of probabilities. The author reviews where the composer was when thefinal illness or death overtook him and considers how many of them would have fared with modern treatment. Chapters are organised thematically, by illness; and numerous misconceptions, such as madness fuelling creativity, are challenged. The book relates the nature of composition to composers' suffering, showcasing much triumph in adversity, and, importantly, rehabilitates reputations. JONATHAN NOBLE is a retired surgeon, who has spent many years researching the illnesses and deaths of composers. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and was President of the British Association of Knee Surgeons as well as the British Orthopaedic Sports Trauma Association. He looked after Test cricketers, Manchester United, and dancers and musicians in the North of England.

San Francisco's Grateful Dead brought its psychedelic blend of folk, bluegrass, and blues to the 1960s counterculture, along with a romance for the Beats and a love of anarchy that made it something more than a bond. Without radio play and virtually unnoticed by the press, the Dead forged a vast underground following whose loyalty survives to the present day.

National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Carol Brightman returns to the bond's roots -- to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, the acid tests and the heady days of Haight-Ashhury, the free concerts in Golden Gate Park and the formative shows of New York's Fillmore East -- to uncover the secrets of the band's longevity. Drawing on exclusive interviews With band members, staff and crew, Deadheads, other musicians, journalists -- and her own experience as a '60s activist -- Brightman shows us how, amid the turbulent Free Speech Movement and antiwar rallies, the Grateful Dead's abandonment to music, drugs, and dance offered the faithful a shelter in the storm. Her riveting, in-depth portrait of Jerry Garcia, the "nonleader leader" who held to a vision of the Grateful Dead's destiny even as he recoiled from the juggernaut it became, shows us how it was that a Dead concert become something halfway between a revival meeting and a family reunion.

An absorbing and exhilarating exploration, Sweet Chaos offers, at last, a complete understanding of the Dead phenomenon and its place in American culture.

(Schott). Inspired through a visit to an exhibition with pictures by the painter Viktor Hartmann, Mussorgsky wrote this cycle of piano pieces in 1874. 'Pictures at an Exhibition' is generally regarded as the most important work for piano by this Russian master. Easy version for piano.

Exoticism has flourished in western music since the seventeenth century. A blend of familiar and unfamiliar gestures, this vibrant musical language takes the listener beyond the ordinary by evoking foreign cultures and forbidden desires.
In this pioneering collection, distinguished musicologists explore the ways in which western composers have used exotic themes for dramatic and striking effect. Interweaving historical, musical, and cultural perspectives, the contributors examine the compositional use of exotic styles and traditions in the works of artists as diverse as Mozart and George Harrison.
The volume sheds new light on a significant yet largely neglected art form, and it makes a valuable contribution to music history and cultural studies.

This collection of lectures, talks, and essays focuses on three major composers of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Contemporary Christian music has an increasing yet controversial influence on church worship today. This book discusses the topic from a biblical viewpoint and makes a case for using contemporary music in worship -- with theological integrity.

Written in Williams' "warm, relaxed, chatty style" ("The New York Times"), this book is a veritable portable jukebox of rock and roll and the stories behind the songs. "(Williams is) one of the most original thinkers and writers working within the dimension of rock. His ideas are fresh, fierce, and singularly alive."--"Fusion." (Music)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Joy H. Calico examines the cultural history of postwar Europe through the lens of the performance and reception of Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw--a short but powerful work, she argues, capable of irritating every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been one of the Nazis' prime exemplars of entartete (degenerate) music. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, Schoenberg had immigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. This book investigates the meanings attached to the work as it circulated through Europe during the early Cold War in a kind of symbolic musical remigration, focusing on six case studies: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Each case is unique, informed by individual geopolitical concerns, but this analysis also reveals common themes in anxieties about musical modernism, Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, anti-Semitism, dislocation, and the presence of occupying forces on both sides of the Cold War divide.

Portrays the musical era between 1750 and 1830 against its intellectual and cultural background and describes both its famous and obscure composers.

One of our top-selling sheet arrangements of this famous piece. Canon in D is the most famous piece of music by Johann Pachelbel, written in or around 1680 as a piece of chamber music for three violins and basso continuo. Robert Schultz's faithful setting is for the advanced pianist. Tasteful use of arpeggios, rolled chords, and dynamics brings out a rich, sonorous sound that evokes the original string arrangement. Perfect for weddings, recitals, or any other special occasion.

All genres, styles, and instrumental combinations are included. The minor composers who labored industriously throughout Europe to supply the growing audiences with the latest in musical fashion are generously represented. For the geniuses of the period, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, there are examples of all the major forms in which each worked. The very clearest, most authentic editions are used in all cases and most of the works are available on commerical recordings. A glossary of terms found in the scores is included.

A rare case among history's great music contemporaries, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed a close friendship until Mahler's death in 1911. Unlike similar musical pairs (Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Schoenberg and Stravinsky), these two composers may have disagreed on the matters of musical taste and social comportment, but deeply respected one another's artistic talents, freely exchanging advice from the earliest days of professional apprenticeship through the security and aggravations of artistic fame. Using a wealth of documentary material, this book reconstructs the 24-year relationship between Mahler and Strauss through collage-"a meaning that arises from fragments," to borrow Adorno's characterization of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Fourteen different topics, all of central importance to the life and work of the two composers, provide distinct vantage points from which to view both the professional and personal relationships. Some address musical concerns: Wagnerism, program music, intertextuality, and the craft of conducting. Others treat the connection of music to related disciplines (philosophy, literature), or to matters relevant to artists in general (autobiography, irony). And the most intimate dimensions of life-childhood, marriage, personal character-are the most extensively and colorfully documented, offering an abundance of comparative material. This integrated look at Mahler and Strauss discloses provocative revelations about the two greatest western composers at the turn of the 20th century.

(Vocal Score). Italian only, with an introductory plot synopsis in English.

LEO SMITH-cellist, journalist, composer, and teacher-was one of the most picturesque and frequently idolized artists on the Canadian scene. His career spanned the years between the old music and the new, between the time when artistic education was private and the time when people fasten their cultural hopes on public education and government funds, between the last days when white gloves were worn to drawing room musicales and the days when men dash to recitals without ties. Throughout this period, Leo Smith not only composed and performed for the public, but carried his public with him into the new era. His history, then, provides a changing picture of the Canadian cultural scene through one of the most formative periods in the country's social history. To the crowds at large popular concerts such as the Toronto Proms, this elderly, contented musician represented the epitome of the music maker. In his music, Leo Smith bridged the gap between the old orthodoxies and new idioms, and as a teacher of theory and composition, he showed a younger generation, intent on yet newer innovations, how to be consistent as creative experimentalists. And in the last years of his life he moved out of the scholar's study into the hurly-burly of a metropolitan newspaper to become one of Canada's most trenchant and informed music critics. Pearl McCarthy's biography vividly recapitulates the Canadian musical scene between 1910 and 1952 and provides a coda to the career of an important influecne in Canadian music.

This book talks about music. It incorporates modal and tonal music. It talks about Arnold Schoenberg, the founder of contempoary music, Alban Berg and how the past plays on contemporary music and Anton Webern and the future of contemporary music. As well as the structure of contemporary musical speech. Rene Leibowitz was a French composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher born in Warsaw, Poland. During the early 1930s, Leibowitz studied composition and orchestration with Ravel in Paris, where he was introduced to Schoenberg's Twelve-note technique by the German pianist and composer Erich Itor Kahn. He subsequently studied with Schoenberg's pupil Webern. Many of the works of the Second Viennese School were first heard in France at the International Festival of Chamber Music established by Leibowitz in Paris in 1947. Leibowitz was highly influential in establishing the reputation of the Second Viennese School, both through activity as a teacher in Paris after WWII and through his book Schoenberg et son ecole, published in 1947 and translated by Dika Newlin as Schoenberg and his School (US and UK editions 1949). This was among the earliest theoretical treatises written on Schoenberg's 12-tone method of composition. Leibowitz's advocacy of the Schoenberg school was taken further by his two most gifted pupils, each taking different paths in promoting the musics of Schoenberg, Webern and the development of serialism, namely Pierre Boulez and Jacques-Louis Monod. His American students include the composers Will Ogdon, Janet Maguire, and the avant-garde film director-animator John Whitney. As conductor, Leibowitz was active in many recording projects. One of the most widely circulated and most notable is a set of the Beethoven symphonies made for Reader's Digest Recordings; it was apparently the first recording of the symphonies to follow Beethoven's original metronome markings. In choosing this approach, Leibowitz was influenced by his friend and colleague Rudolf Kolisch. Leibowitz likewise made many recordings for Reader's Digest in their various compilation albums. He also wrote for Les Temps modernes, applying existentialist ideas to musicology.

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.

Get Started in Classical Music is a clear, concise yet comprehensive introduction to the world of classical music for the newcomer. It takes your listening experience as the starting point and fills in factual details along the way. New topics are introduced step by step and are always presented from the listener's point of view. These topics include: - Listening to music: developing skills - What is classical music? - The architecture of music: forms and structures - Historical background: different periods and different styles - The instruments of the orchestra - Starting a collection of recorded music Examples from well-known pieces are examined in a clear and non-technical way. Whether you dip into Get Started in Classical Music from time to time or read it straight through, you will feel that your musical horizons have been broadened and that you have gained the knowledge and confidence to extend your musical experiences further.