This book answers questions from real classical music lovers about things they have always wondered but didn't know whom to ask. The information in this book is not readily found in music history or appreciation books, nor can it be found on line. Questions explored are: Do string players in orchestras get paid more because they play more than other instruments? Why does an orchestra tune to an oboe when there are electronic tuners? How does a composer decide what key to compose in? Why is the 1812 Overture played on the 4th of July? And many, many more! The answers represent behind the scenes, real world, insights into how classical musicians view and discuss these questions. There is even some insight into the jokes classical musicians find funny. This book is intended for the person who loves listening to classical music, either live or recorded and will provide hours of enjoyment as the reader invariably shakes his or her head and asks in wonderment "Who knew!"

In The Beat Stops Here: Lessons on and off the Podium for Today's Conductor, master conductor Mark Gibson addresses the technique of conducting as an extension of intimate knowledge of the score to the hands and arms. He employs a variety of everyday activities and motions (brushing the dog, Tinkerbelle, the "door knob") to describe the physical aspects of the role. He advocates a comprehensive, detailed approach to score study, addressing major works bar-by-bar in terms of both musical analysis and conducting method. Finally, Gibson explores the various roles a conductor plays, as a teacher, a scholar and a member of the musical community. His writing is highly focused, with an occasionally tongue-in-cheek, discussing everything from motivic development in Brahms to how to hold a knife and fork in public. In short, The Beat Stops Here is a compendium of style and substance in the real world of today's conductor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first detailed study of the working relationship and productive friendship between Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) and Adrian Boult (1889-1983). From 1918 onwards, Boult became one of Vaughan Williams's most important interpreters, giving the world premieres of the Pastoral, Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, performing almost all his major works (not only at home but with some of the world's greatest orchestras), and working in close collaboration with the composer on major projects including the first complete recording of Vaughan Williams's symphonies. Boult continued to be the most devoted advocate of Vaughan Williams's music to the end of his long career. As this book shows, Boult's scores include numerous annotations derived from conversations and correspondence with Vaughan Williams and these provide important evidence of the composer's wishes including adjustments to orchestration, comments on interpretation, dynamics, phrasing and revisions to Vaughan Williams's notoriously unreliable metronome marks. The evidence of these scores is considered alongside the extensive correspondence between Vaughan Williams and Boult, Boult's private diaries and other relevant documents including contemporary press reports. The book includes three substantial supplements: a detailed description of Boult's marked scores, a comprehensive list of Boult's Vaughan Williams performances and a discography including surviving recordings of unpublished broadcasts. It will be indispensable reading for scholars and students of Vaughan Williams and historical conducting, Vaughan Williams enthusiasts and those interested in the history of recorded music.

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.

Johann Sebastian Bach has loomed large in the imagination of scholars, performers, and audiences since the late nineteenth century.This new book, edited by veteran Bach scholar Bettina Varwig, gathers a diverse group of leading and emerging Bach researchers as well as a number of contributors from beyond the core of Bach studies. The book's fourteen chapters engage in active 'rethinking' of different topics connected with Bach; the iconic name which broadly encompasses the historical individual, the sounds and afterlives of his music, as well as all that those four letters came to stand for in the later popular and scholarly imagination. In turn, challenging the fundamental assumptions about the nineteenth-century Bach revival, the rise of the modern work concept, Bach's music as a code, and about editions of his music as monuments. Collectively, these contributions thus take apart, scrutinize, dust off and reassemble some of our most cherished narratives and deeply held beliefs about Bach and his music. In doing so, they open multiple pathways towards exciting future modesof engagement with the composer and his legacy.

Recent years have seen a rise in interest, from a diversity of fields, in the musical ensemble as an exemplary form of creative group behavior. Musical ensembles can be understood and investigated as high functioning small group organizations that have coordinative structures in place to perform under pressure within strict temporal boundaries. Rehearsals and performances exemplify fruitful contexts for emergent creative behaviour, where novel musical interpretations are negotiated and discovered through improvisatory interaction. Furthermore, group music-making can be an emotionally and socially rewarding experience that enables positive outcomes for wellbeing and development. This book brings together these different perspectives into one coherent volume, offering insight into the musical ensemble from different analytical levels. Part 1 starts from the meso-level, considering ensembles as creative teams and investigating how musical groups interact at a social and organizational level. Part 2 then zooms in to consider musical coordination and interaction at a micro-level, when considering group music-making as forms of joint action. Finally, a macro-level perspective is taken in Part 3, examining the health and wellbeing affordances associated with acoustical, expressive, and emotional joint behavior. Each part contains a balance of review chapters showcasing the most recent developments in each area of research, followed by demonstrative case studies featuring various ensemble practices and processes. A rich and multidisciplinary reflection on ensemble music practice, this volume will be an insightful read for music students, teachers, academics, and professionals with an interest in the dynamics of group behavior within a musical context.

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.