An original study of the history of the symphony in Vienna during Beethoven's lifetime, this 2006 book explores the context in which the composer worked. Based on an extensive study of the wider symphonic repertoire of the period and of the characteristics of musical life that shaped the changing fortunes of the genre, from manuscript and printed dissemination to concert life, David Wyn Jones provides a multi-faceted account of the development of the symphony in one of the most crucial periods in its history. The volume offers a wide perspective on musical development in the period, and will be of interest to musicologists and cultural historians. As well as dealing with unfamiliar works by Czerny, Eberl, Krommer, Reicha, Anton Wranitzky, Paul Wranitzky and others, it charts the changing reception of the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, and offers insights into the symphonic careers of Beethoven and Schubert.

Few works in the nineteenth-century repertoire have aroused such extremes of hostility and admiration, or have generated so many scholarly problems, as Anton Bruckner's symphonies. In this 2004 book, Julian Horton seeks fresh ways of understanding the symphonies and the problems they have accrued by treating them as the focus for a variety of inter-disciplinary debates and methodological controversies. He isolates problematic areas in the works' analysis and reception, and approaches them from a range of analytical, historical, philosophical, literary, critical and psychoanalytical viewpoints. The symphonies are thus explored in the context of a number of crucial and sometimes provocative themes, including the political circumstances of the works' production, Bruckner and post-war musical analysis, issues of musical influence, the problem of editions, Bruckner and psychobiography, and the composer's controversial relationship to the Nazis.

This guide to the orchestra and orchestral life combines orchestral repertory history with critical thought. It includes topics such as the art of orchestration, scorereading, conducting, international orchestras, recording, and becoming an orchestral musician, educator or informed listener.

Digital technology is transforming the musical score as a broad array of innovative score systems have become available to musicians. From attempts to mimic the print score, to animated and graphical scores, to artificial intelligence-based options, digital scoring affects the musical process by opening up new possibilities for dynamic interaction between the performer and the music, changing how we understand the boundaries between composition, score, improvisation and performance. The Digital Score: Musicianship, Creativity and Innovation offers a guide into this new landscape, reflecting on what these changes mean for music-making from both theoretical and applied perspectives. Drawing on findings from over a decade's worth of practice-based experimentation in the field, author Craig Vear builds a framework for understanding how digital scores create meaning. He considers the interactions between affect, embodiment and digital scores, offering the first comprehensive and critical consideration of an exciting field with no agreed-upon borders. Featuring insights from interviews with over fifty musicians and composers from across four continents, this book is a valuable resource for music researchers and practitioners alike.

Since its premiere Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) has been widely regarded as his finest masterpiece. It was written in the wake of personal events that shook the foundations of his life in 1907 and, like all his earlier works, it is deeply influenced by the composer's individual and philosophical worldview. Stephen Hefling provides a background to this symphony for voice and orchestra, describes its genesis, summarizes reviews of the premiere, and gives a careful account of all six movements.

Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony (1890), one of the last of the great Romantic symphonies, is a grandly complex masterpiece. This book explores this many-faceted work from several angles. It documents the complicated and often misunderstood history of the symphony's composition and revision and provides an accessible guide to its musical design. It demonstrates, by means of a study of well-known recordings, how performance styles have evolved in this century. It also revisits the conventional wisdom about the various versions and editions of the symphony and comes to some provocative new conclusions.

Tchaikovsky's final symphony has fascinated generations of music lovers, amateur and specialist alike, since its first performance just over a century ago. Timothy L. Jackson explores sensitively and without prejudice the question of the Pathetique's program and its relation to Tchaikovsky's homosexuality and death. The book covers the work's conception, genesis, and reception, and presents an in-depth analysis of its remarkable formal structure. The reception chapter investigates the Pathetique's impact on Tchaikovsky's younger contemporaries, most notably Mahler and Rachmaninov, and on more recent Russian composers like Shostakovich and Schnittke. Also explored is the dark side of the symphony's political interpretation in the twentieth century, especially its transformation into a cultural icon of the Third Reich.

Although Dvorák's cello concerto is enormously popular, no extended study of it has been undertaken hitherto. This book is a comprehensive study intended for concertgoers and students of this well-loved work. It considers aspects of historical background, form, virtuosity, performance and the concerto's rich personal content. This guide sees the work as a crucial means of exploring the composer's emotional life and links it intimately to the woman who was probably his first love.

Vivaldi's celebrated Four Seasons are among the most popular works of all time and these, with the rest of the concertos in Op. 8, represent the composer's remarkable innovation in the field of the Baroque concerto. This detailed guide examines the work's origin and construction in a way that enables the reader to distinguish what is extraordinary about the Seasons, at the same time providing an ideal introduction to Vivaldi's music in general.

Conductors John Yaffe and David Daniels have created a one-stop sourcebook for orchestras, opera companies, conductors, and librarians who research and/or prepare programs of vocal excerpts-such as solos, ensembles, and choruses-for concert performance. In this book, readers will find detailed information on a vast repertoire of vocal pieces commonly extracted from operas, operettas, musicals, and oratorios-more than 1,750 excerpts from 450 parent works. Modeled on Daniels' Orchestral Music, Arias, Ensembles, & Choruses includes basic historical details about each parent work as well as extract titles, subtitles, voice types, keys, durations, locations in the original work (with page numbers in both full scores and piano-vocal scores), and exact instrumentation. It also lists the publishers that make available the orchestral materials for just the excerpt being programmed, independent of the full parent work. Until now, conductors and orchestra librarians commonly had to first leaf through full scores, searching for one elusive three-minute aria after another, only to then consult multiple publishers' catalogues to compile crucial information on all the excerpts proposed for a concert or recording. This book constitutes a single source for finding that information. In many cases, the individual entries include valuable insider information on common performance practice, including start- and stop-points, transpositions, and conventional cuts. Searching for repertoire is made easy with the detailed title index and appendixes devoted to ensemble excerpts, all categorized by personnel (e.g., duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, choruses) and language (Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian). This book is the ideal tool for the working conductor and orchestral librarian, as well as music program directors at colleges and conservatories, opera companies, and symphony orchestras. As of October 2015, a new printing of this book has occurred to correct errors in the index. A PDF version of the new index is available to previous purchasers of the volume. Please contact Rowman & Littlefield's music editor for assistance.

The Brandenburg Concertos represent a pinnacle in the history of the Baroque concerto, as well as being among the most universally admired of all Bach's works. This fascinating new guide places the concertos in their historical context, investigates their sources, traces their origins and discusses the changing traditions of performance that have affected the way listeners have understood them since Bach's time. The work's rich instrumentarium is carefully described, and a substantial chapter considers each concerto individually, revealing those aspects of their style and structure that make this group of works a unique and towering landmark in the history of the genre.

This classic study of Mozart's piano concertos is, in the words of Alfred Einstein, `full of penetrating remarks not only about the piano concerto but about Mozart's art in general'. It is here reissued with a new introduction by noted Mozart scholar Cliff Eisen, who, as well as drawing the reader's attention to the virtues of the volume, also examines at the developments in Mozart scholarship since the volume's original publication.

The final book in Norman Del Mar's `Conducting...' series. This study of a collection of shorter orchestral pieces by composers whose output would not make a whole book is full of expert advice and broad-minded appreciation of a wide range of music. Easily readable by conducting student or music-lover, it is equally an invaluable handbook for the expert. Once again, the book has been edited and seen through the press by Jonathan Del Mar, son of the late Norman Del Mar.

Improvisation was a crucial aspect of musical life in Europe from the late eighteenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth, representing a central moment in both public occasions and the private lives of many artists. Composers dedicated themselves to this practice at length while formulating the musical ideas later found at the core of their published works; improvisation was thus closely linked to composition itself. The full extent of this relation can be inferred from both private documents and reviews of concerts featuring improvisations, while these texts also inform us that composers quite often performed in public as both improvisers and interpreters of pieces written by themselves or others. Improvisations presented in concert were distinguished by a remarkable degree of structural organisation and complexity, demonstrating performers' consolidated abilities in composition as well as their familiarity with the rules for improvising outlined by theoreticians.

How are conductors' silent gestures magicked into sound by a group of more than a hundred brilliant but belligerent musicians? The mute choreography of great conductors has fascinated and frustrated musicians and music-lovers for centuries. Orchestras can be inspired to the heights of musical and expressive possibility by their maestros, or flabbergasted that someone who doesn't even make a sound should be elevated to demigod-like status by the public. This is the first book to go inside the rehearsal rooms of some of the most inspirational orchestral partnerships in the world - how Simon Rattle works at the Berlin Philharmonic, how Mariss Jansons deals with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, and how Claudio Abbado creates the world's most luxurious pick-up band every year with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. From London to Budapest, Bamberg to Vienna, great orchestral concerts are recreated as a collection of countless human and musical stories.

A companion to his The Symphony: A Listener's Guide , Steinberg's new book covers the orchestral concerto repertoire from Bach to the present and featuring all instruments.

for SATB chorus and orchestra This joyous arrangement of a traditional spiritual for choir and orchestra is propelled by a light swing tempo. The mood grows more and more euphoric with each succeeding stanza of text, and the uplifting music surges towards an opulent conclusion.

for SATB chorus and orchestra This joyous arrangement of a traditional spiritual for choir and orchestra is propelled by a light swing tempo. The mood grows more and more euphoric with each succeeding stanza of text, and the uplifting music surges towards an opulent conclusion.

Those who choose to make the orchestra enterprise their life's work face a host of challenges that have beset orchestra managers since the very beginning of the art form, alongside new challenges that continue to arise in the twenty-first century. Written for those who are contemplating jumping into the orchestra management realm, the Orchestra Management Handbook will provide a significant head-start for people entering this complicated, exciting, and challenging line of work. Whether short-term, long-term, internal, external or existential, an intentional approach to building, maintaining, and sustaining relationships must be at the core of the orchestra manager's daily routine. Few arts organizations have more potential for building community than orchestras. With a typically large permanent complement of artists, a high volume of performances, and a need for large audiences, building community should be central to the internal and external operations of the modern orchestra. Each chapter of this handbook provides practical strategies, tools, and a variety of resources to workers in the orchestra management field, always with an emphasis on building relationships. Throughout the book, author and experienced orchestra manager, violinist, and professor Travis Newton regularly features illustrative case studies highlighting innovative practices being undertaken at orchestras across the country, providing the reader an opportunity to learn from the experiences of others. Additionally, each chapter concludes with a series of discussion questions to ponder, teasing out some of the key concepts.

Before Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony became one of the most universally beloved pieces of classical music, it exposed the deep wounds of racism at the dawn of the Jim Crow era while serving as a flashpoint in broader debates about the American ideals of freedom and equality. Drawing from a diverse array of historical voices, author Douglas W. Shadle's richly textured account of the symphony's 1893 premiere shows that even the classical concert hall could not remain insulated from the country's racial politics.

Where would classical music be without the orchestra? Whether they are of the symphony or chamber variety, every orchestra is made up of a group of musicians playing together as one body to bring the music of the great composers to life. This handy reference guide from Classic FM takes you on a whistle-stop tour of the greatest orchestras at home and abroad, stopping off to explore the world of orchestral instruments, as well as making plenty of musical recommendations along the way. The orchestra is one of the cornerstones of classical music, beloved of music lovers around the world. Packed full of essential information, this pocket-sized handbook explores the make-up and functions of the different sections, from strings to percussion, as well as some of the greatest orchestras around the world and the incredible music that they perform. Classic FM's Handy Guides are a fun and informative set of introductions to standout subjects within classical music, each of which can be read and digested in one sitting: a perfect collectible series whether you're new to the world of classical music or an aficionado.

Symphony No. 9 in E minor was the last symphony written by Ralph Vaughan Williams and was premiered by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent on 2nd April 1958. It is described in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as 'the most impressive achievement' of the composer's final decade. This scholarly edition replaces the original 1958 edition, and includes detailed preliminary matter comprising a preface, sources and editorial method, and detailed textual notes. Orchestral material is available on hire/rental.

Symphony No. 9 in E minor was the last symphony written by Ralph Vaughan Williams and was premiered by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent on 2nd April 1958. It is described in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as 'the most impressive achievement' of the composer's final decade. This scholarly edition replaces the original 1958 edition, and includes detailed preliminary matter comprising a preface, sources and editorial method, and detailed textual notes. Orchestral material is available on hire/rental.

Before Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony became one of the most universally beloved pieces of classical music, it exposed the deep wounds of racism at the dawn of the Jim Crow era while serving as a flashpoint in broader debates about the American ideals of freedom and equality. Drawing from a diverse array of historical voices, author Douglas W. Shadle's richly textured account of the symphony's 1893 premiere shows that even the classical concert hall could not remain insulated from the country's racial politics.

One of today's most widely acclaimed composers, Arvo Part broke into the soundscape of the Cold War West with Tabula Rasa in 1977, a work that introduced his signature tintinnabuli style to listeners throughout the world. In the first book dedicated to this pathbreaking composition, author Kevin C. Karnes tells the story of Tabula Rasa as one of Part and of Europe itself, traced over the course of a quarter-century that saw momentous transitions in European culture and politics, history and memory. Beginning at the site of the work's creation in the Estonian SSR, and drawing extensively upon a range of previously unexamined archival materials, Karnes recounts Part's discovery of tintinnabuli amidst his experiments with the music of the Western and Soviet avant-gardes. He examines Tabula Rasa in relation to modernist conceptions of musical structure, the ascetic practice of Orthodox Christianity, postwar experiences of electronic music, and the polystylistic approaches to composition that have become emblematic of the Soviet 1970s. Tracing the export of Tabula Rasa to the West and Part's emigration in 1980, the book reveals intersections of critical commentary with visions of the "end of history" that attended the collapse of European communism to suggest that it was in this confluence of listening, discovery, and geopolitical reordering that enduring lines of conversation about Part and his music took shape.