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

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.

Today's most famous cellists as well as up-and-coming talents are subjects of this extraordinary photographic reportage book. For years, Uta Ssse-Krause took pictures at festivals, workshops, competitions, rehearsals and concerts of performing cellists, newly discovered and established leading musicians. Her photographs capture the individuality of each cellist; all the photographs were taken live without any posing. This collection was taken from her own photo archives, and these were selected for their absolute authenticity ? portraying faces as the mirror of musical sentiment. As different as each cellist's state of mind may be, they all have one thing in common: unconditional dedication to their play.

(Vocal Collection). This all-in-one package includes the original Arias for Soprano book from the G. Schirmer Opera Anthology along with two accompaniment CDs AND the corresponding Diction Coach book/two CD set. Diction Coach includes recorded diction lessons, IPA, and word for word translations. In addition to piano accompaniments playable on both your CD player and computer, the enhanced accompaniment CDs also include tempo adjustment software for CD-ROM computer use.

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.

These studies, a series of short etudes designed to improve technique and musicianship, are intended to supplement or follow any elementary method.

This new edition of The Oxford Companion to Music is a comprehensive and authoritative reference work, which, like its famous predecessors, will be invaluable to both professional and amateur musicians, and general music lovers. A distinguished and international team of contributors covers a broad sweep of musical subjects, ranging from composers and performers to instruments and genres.

Community music projects always spread harmony... don't they? When players in Stockwell Park Orchestra fear they may be getting out of touch with the community, they invite children from two nearby schools to join them for a season. Supercilious, rich Oakdean College pupils have never mixed with the rough Sunbridge Academy kids, and when things go missing and rumours spread, the situation threatens to turn ugly. DCI Noel Osmar has to tread carefully: after all, he's off duty. Step forward, Carl the trombonist. Can music heal social rifts? Who has been stealing and why? And will the orchestra's newly-composed fanfare turn out to be fantastic... or farcical? Praise for The Stockwell Park Orchestra Series: "I was charmed... a very enjoyable read." Marian Keyes "Friendly insults between musicians, sacrosanct coffee-and-biscuit breaks, tedious committee meetings: welcome to the world of the amateur orchestra." BBC Music Magazine "...a witty and irreverent musical romp, full of characters I'd love to go for a pint with. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the Stockwell Park Orchestra and can't wait for the next book in the series." Claire King, author of The Night Rainbow "Sharp, witty and richly entertaining." Lev Parikian, author of Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? "With its retro humour bordering on farce, this novel offers an escape into the turbulent (and bonkers) world of the orchestra." Isabel Costello, author of Paris Mon Amour "...a very funny tale of musical shenanigans set in the febrile atmosphere of the Stockwell Park Orchestra" Ian Critchley

"What can be done about the state of classical music?" Lawrence Kramer asks in this elegant, sharply observed, and beautifully written extended essay. Classical music, whose demise has been predicted for at least a decade, has always had its staunch advocates, but in today's media-saturated world there are real concerns about its viability. "Why Classical Music Still Matters" takes a forthright approach by engaging both skeptics and music lovers alike.
In seven highly original chapters, "Why Classical Music Still Matters" affirms the value of classical music--defined as a body of nontheatrical music produced since the eighteenth century with the single aim of being listened to--by revealing what its values are: the specific beliefs, attitudes, and meanings that the music has supported in the past and which, Kramer believes, it can support in the future.
"Why Classical Music Still Matters" also clears the air of old prejudices. Unlike other apologists, whose defense of the music often depends on arguments about the corrupting influence of popular culture, Kramer admits that classical music needs a broader, more up-to-date rationale. He succeeds in engaging the reader by putting into words music's complex relationship with individual human drives and larger social needs. In prose that is fresh, stimulating, and conversational, he explores the nature of subjectivity, the conquest of time and mortality, the harmonization of humanity and technology, the cultivation of attention, and the liberation of human energy.

WE SANG BETTER consists of two volumes of very clear advice about singing from great singers of the past. Volume 1 (ISBN 978-84-940477-8-7) is entitled How we sang and contains 250 tips on how to sing from singers 1800 to 1960. This volume is 490 pages long, and contains 130 illustrations. Tamagno never scooped his notes - so said star soprano Amelita Galli-Curci of the famous tenor. In the two volumes of We Sang Better, 200 of the greatest singers explain their art in over 70,000 of their own words. In Volume 1 the singers show you their approach, their ideals, and how they learnt to sing. Anderson arranges their evidence coherently, in easily followed tips. Their advice was uniform - work patiently on developing your own natural voice, with no forcing. The singers then provide the details by which you grow your voice and acquire a firm but flexible technique. Finally you will have a singing voice that is: personal beautiful easy accurate true on the note, and carries well in a large hall with clear diction & the ability to move your audience. As Verdi said, any art worthy of the name must be natural, spontaneous and simple. These singers explain how they kept to this ideal, staying clear of scientific 'discoveries', over-muscularity, and teachers with set 'methods'. These singers worked with Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Auber, Meyerbeer, Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Verdi, Wagner, Brahms, Gounod, Massenet, Debussy, Puccini, Strauss, Elgar, etc & kept to nearly all the recommendations that came from the castrati in the previous two centuries. James Anderson is a musician who has worked for the Arts Council of Great Britain and has run major European Festivals. Regretting the scarcity of supreme singing today, he has spent the last 30 years researching and collating this advice. He now helps young singers through the Singers Legacy website. For your information, the second volume (ISBN 978-84-940477-9-4) is entitled Why it was better and contains further evidence & reasoning from singers 1800 to 1960. Volume 2 is 260 pages long and has 20 illustrations.

The Bolsheviks' 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian culture migrated West, transforming itself as it interacted with the new cultural environment and clashed with exported Soviet trends. In this book, Klara Moricz explores the transnational emigrant space of Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Lourie in interwar Paris. Their music reflected the conflict between a modernist narrative demanding innovation and a narrative of exile wedded to the preservation of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The emigrants' and the Bolsheviks' contrasting visions of Russia and its past collided frequently in the French capital, where the Soviets displayed their political and artistic products. Russian composers in Paris also had to reckon with Stravinsky's disproportionate influence: if they succumbed to fashions dictated by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if they kept to their old ways, they quickly became irrelevant. Although Stravinsky's neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle ground between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the exilic experience. Moricz offers this unexplored context for Stravinsky's neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely elusive term.

Of all the things we can know about J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor and Christmas Oratorio, the most profound come from things we can hear. Listening to Bach explores musical style as it was understood in the early eighteenth century. It encourages ways of listening that take eighteenth-century musical sensibilities into account and that recognize our place as inheritors of a long tradition of performance and interpretation. Daniel R. Melamed shows how to recognize old and new styles in sacred music of Bach's time, and how movements in these styles are constructed. This opens the possibility of listening to the Mass in B Minor as Bach's demonstration of the possibilities of contrasting, combining, and reconciling old and new styles. It also shows how to listen for elements that would have been heard as most significant in the early eighteenth century, including markers of sleep arias, love duets, secular choral arias, and other movement types. This offers a musical starting point for listening for the ways Bach put these types to use in the Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio. The book also offers ways to listen to and think about works created by parody, the re-use of music for new words and a new purpose, like almost all of the Mass in B Minor and Christmas Oratorio. And it shows that modern performances of these works are stamped with audible consequences of our place in the twenty-first century. The ideological choices we make in performing the Mass and Oratorio, part of the legacy of their performance and interpretation, affect the way the work is understood and heard today. All these topics are illustrated with copious audio examples on a companion Web site, offering new ways of listening to some of Bach's greatest music.

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 editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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 part a compendium of information currently available, in part a dialectical examination of musical causation and function, this book contains a wide-ranging survey of musics of the world, in historical and social contexts, from ancient times to the present day. It aims to lead students, teachers, and, in general, those who practise Western music towards a deeper understanding of the various musical traditions that contribute to the modern, multi-cultural environment. It is preceded by a thought-provoking essay on music and ethnomusicology by Laurence Picken.