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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Romantic music (c 1830 to c 1900)
This collection of essays by musicologists and art historians explores the reciprocal influences between music and painting during the nineteenth century, a critical period of gestation when instrumental music was identified as the paradigmatic expressive art and theoretically aligned with painting in the formulation utpictura musica (as with music, so with painting). Under music's influence, painting approached the threshold of abstraction; concurrently many composers cultivated pictorial effects in their music. Individual essays address such themes as visualization in music, the literary vs. pictorial basis of the symphonic poem, musical pictorialism in painting and lithography, and the influence of Wagner on the visual arts. In these and other ways, both composers and painters actively participated in interarts discourses in seeking to redefine the very identity and aims of their art. Also includes 17 musical examples.
Now in Paperback! Music Melting Round: A History of Music in the United States provides a colorful introduction for students and nonspecialists alike to the scope of musical styles and venues in America from colonial to contemporary times. Covering all aspects of music, including classical, ragtime, blues, jazz, popular, minstrel shows, and music on radio and television and in film, the text also contains a variety of photographs and illustrations, three time lines presenting highlights in American history, the arts, and music, an appendix of basic musical concepts, a glossary, and two indexes. Cloth edition 1-880157-17-9 previously published in 1995 by Ardsley House. Instructor's Manual 1-880157-18-7 available upon request.
Green's study is more than a biography of an Anglo-African composer.The first comprehensive study of Coleridge-Taylor's life for almost a century, it reveals how class-ridden Britain could embrace even the most unlikely of cultural icons.
Roy Johnston and Declan Plummer provide a refreshing portrait of Belfast in the nineteenth century. Before his death Roy Johnston, had written a full draft, based on an impressive array of contemporary sources, with deep and detailed attention especially to contemporary newspapers. With the deft and sensitive contribution of Declan Plummer the finished book offers a telling view of Belfast's thriving musical life. Largely without the participation and example of local aristocracy, nobility and gentry, Belfast's musical society was formed largely by the townspeople themselves in the eighteenth century and by several instrumental and choral societies in the nineteenth century. As the town grew in size and developed an industrial character, its townspeople identified increasingly with the large industrial towns and cities of the British mainland. Efforts to place themselves on the principal touring circuit of the great nineteenth-century concert artists led them to build a concert hall not in emulation of Dublin but of the British industrial towns. Belfast audiences had experienced English opera in the eighteenth century, and in due course in the nineteenth century they found themselves receiving the touring opera companies, in theatres newly built to accommodate them. Through an energetic groundwork revision of contemporary sources, Johnston and Plummer reveal a picture of sustained vitality and development that justifies Belfast's prominent place the history of nineteenth-century musical culture in Ireland and more broadly in the British Isles.
This study explores a wide range of Victorian and Edwardian musical life including brass bands, choral societies, music hall and popular concerts, and analyzes the way in which popular cultural practice was shaped by, and in turn, helped shape social and economic structures. The text has been fully revised in order to consider recent work in the field.
Isaac Albeniz is one of the most important figures in the history of Spanish music. A legendary child prodigy, he went on to become one of the leading concert pianists of his generation in Europe. However, he aspired to compose music rooted in the folklore of his native Spain, contributing seminal masterpieces that defined the sound of Spanish art music in the 20th century and served as an inspiration to his most eminent successors. This annotated bibliography and research guide provides an up-to-date and thorough presentation of all the sources any aficionado, performer, or scholar would need to deepen his or her understanding of this fascinating pianist and composer.
It was Carl Dahlhaus who coined the phrase 'dead time' to describe the state of the symphony between Schumann and Brahms. Christopher Fifield argues that many of the symphonies dismissed by Dahlhaus made worthy contributions to the genre. He traces the root of the problem further back to Beethoven's ninth symphony, a work which then proceeded to intimidate symphonists who followed in its composer's footsteps, including Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann. In 1824 Beethoven set a standard that then had to rise in response to more demanding expectations from both audiences and the musical press. Christopher Fifield, who has a conductor's intimacy with the repertory, looks in turn at the five decades between the mid-1820s and mid-1870s. He deals only with non-programmatic works, leaving the programme symphony to travel its own route to the symphonic poem. Composers who lead to Brahms (himself a reluctant symphonist until the age of 43 in 1876) are frequently dismissed as epigones of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann but by investigating their symphonies, Fifield reveals their respective brands of originality, even their own possible influence upon Brahms himself and in so doing, shines a light into a half-century of neglected nineteenth century German symphonic music.
Giochino Rossini: A Research and Information Guide is designed as a tool for those beginning to study the life and works of Gioachino Rossini as well as for those who wish to explore beyond the established biographies and commentaries. The first edition was published in 2001, and represented a survey of some 878 publications relating to the composer's life and works. The second edition is revised and updated to include the more than 150 books and articles written in the field of Rossini studies since then. Contents range from sources published in the early decades of the nineteenth century to works currently in progress. General subject areas include Rossini's biography, historical and analytical studies of his operatic and non-operatic compositions, his personal and professional associations, and the reassessment of his role in the development of nineteenth-century music.
Following the author's acclaimed biographical dictionaries on Schubert and Mozart, Peter Clive here examines Beethoven's relations with the multitude of persons who formed his circle: relatives, friends, acquaintances, librettists, poets, publishers, artists, patrons, and musicians. With over 450 entries, this volume is the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the subject currently available in any language. It will appeal to all music lovers, both the scholar and the non-specialist alike.
Frederick Delius is among the most celebrated English composers of the 20th century. Widely studied and performed, his works are considered models of the British impressionist school and continue to fascinate students and scholars centuries later. This research guide serves as a ready reference for students and scholars, but will also be interesting to read and useful for anyone who wants to know where to begin to learn more about this important composer.
Gaetano Donizetti: A Research and Information Guide offers an annotated reference guide to the life and works of this important Italian opera composer. The book opens with a complete chronology of Donizetti's life (1797-1848) and career, relating it to contemporary events. The balance of the book details secondary resources and other works, including general sources, catalogs, correspondence, biographical sources, critical works; production/review sources, singers and theaters, and the individual operas.
Nikolay Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov: A Research and Information Guide, Second Edition is an annotated bibliography of all substantial, relevant published resources relating to the Russian composer. First published in 1988, this revised and expanded volume incorporates new information about the composer appearing over the last two decades, including literary publications, articles and reviews. Other sections provide a brief biographical sketch, selective discography, chronology and list of Rimsky-Korsakov's works.
New studies of the great French composer by Jacques Barzun, David Cairns, Joel-Marie Fauquet, Hugh Macdonald, Julian Rushton, and other prominent experts. These twelve essays bring new breadth and depth to our knowledge of the life and work of the composer of the Symphonie fantastique. A distinguished international array of scholars here treat such matters as Berlioz's "aesthetics" and what it means to write about the meaning of his music; the political implications of his fiction and the affinities of his projects as composer and as critic; what the Germans thought of his work before his travels in Germany and what the English made of him when he visited their capital city; what he seems to have written immediately after encountering Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (a surprise), and where he profited from Beethoven in what later became Romeo et Juliette. The volume closes with two reflective essays on Berlioz's literary masterpiece, the Memoires. Contributors: Lord Aberdare (Alastair Bruce), Jean-Pierre Bartoli, JacquesBarzun, Peter Bloom, David Cairns, Gunther Braam, Gerard Conde, Pepijn van Doesburg, Joel-Marie Fauquet, Frank Heidlberger, Hugh Macdonald, and Julian Rushton Peter Bloom (Smith College) is author of The Life of Berlioz (1998) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (2000).
In recent years, the assumption that traditional songs originated from a primarily oral tradition has been challenged by research into 'street literature' - that is, the cheap printed broadsides and chapbooks that poured from the presses of jobbing printers from the late sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. Not only are some traditional singers known to have learned songs from printed sources, but most of the songs were composed by professional writers and reached the populace in printed form. Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America engages with the long-running debate over the origin of traditional songs by examining street literature's interaction with, and influence on, oral traditions.
* Dismisses traditional, chronological format designed around European western canon to meets needs of today's ethnically diverse students, who identify their heritage as Asian, African, or Central American rather than European * Builds on a series of chapter-long theme-oriented narratives such as ethnicity, gender, spirituality, love, technology, that interweave the musical "here and now" * Focuses on how music creates and reflects social meaning in a variety of cultures and time periods. * Leads the student from music or ideas with which they are familiar to music that is unfamiliar, always through the connecting thread of the original social concept.
Music theory is often seen as independent from - even antithetical to - performance. While music theory is an intellectual enterprise, performance requires an intuitive response to the music. But this binary opposition is a false one, which serves neither the theorist nor the performer. In Interpreting Chopin Alison Hood brings her experience as a performer to bear on contemporary analytical models. She combines significant aspects of current analytical approaches and applies that unique synthetic method to selected works by Chopin, casting new light on the composer's preludes, nocturnes and barcarolle. An extension of Schenkerian analysis, the specific combination of five aspects distinguishes Hood's method from previous analytical approaches. These five methods are: attention to the rhythms created by pitch events on all structural levels; a detailed accounting of the musical surface; 'strict use' of analytical notation, following guidelines offered by Steve Larson; a continual concern with what have been called 'strategies' or 'premises'; and an exploration of how recorded performances might be viewed in terms of analytical decisions, or might even shape those decisions. Building on the work of such authors as William Rothstein, Carl Schachter and John Rink, Hood's approach to Chopin's oeuvre raises interpretive questions of central interest to performers.
Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony (1893), widely recognized as one of the world's most deeply tragic compositions, is also known for the mystery surrounding its hidden programme and for Tchaikovsky's unexpected death nine days after its premiere. While the sensational speculations about the composer's possible planned suicide and the suggestion that the symphony was intended as his own requiem have long been discarded, the question of its programme remains. Tchaikovsky's mention of the extreme subjectivity lying behind the work's artistic concept has usually led scholars to seek clues to the programme in his inner emotional world, and some have mooted his homosexuality as the source of personal tragedy that may be at the work's roots.
This innovative study of nineteenth-century cellists and cello playing shows how simple concepts of posture, technique and expression changed over time, while acknowledging that many different practices co-existed. By placing an awareness of this diversity at the centre of an historical narrative, George Kennaway has produced a unique cultural history of performance practices. In addition to drawing upon an unusually wide range of source materials - from instructional methods to poetry, novels and film - Kennaway acknowledges the instability and ambiguity of the data that supports historically informed performance. By examining nineteenth-century assumptions about the very nature of the cello itself, he demonstrates new ways of thinking about historical performance today. Kennaway's treatment of tone quality and projection, and of posture, bow-strokes and fingering, is informed by his practical insights as a professional cellist and teacher. Vibrato and portamento are examined in the context of an increasing divergence between theory and practice, as seen in printed sources and heard in early cello recordings. Kennaway also explores differing nineteenth-century views of the cello's gendered identity and the relevance of these cultural tropes to contemporary performance. By accepting the diversity and ambiguity of nineteenth-century sources, and by resisting oversimplified solutions, Kennaway has produced a nuanced performing history that will challenge and engage musicologists and performers alike.
Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music offers a range of approaches central to the performance of French piano music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors include scholars and active performers who see performance not as an independent activity but as a practice enriched by a wealth of historical and analytical approaches. To underline the usefulness of contextual understanding for performance, each author highlights the choices performers must confront with examples drawn from particular repertoires and composers. Topics explored include editorial practice, the use of early recordings, emergent disciplines such as analysis-and-performance, and traditions passed down from teacher to student. Themes that emerge demonstrate the importance of editions as a form of communication, the challenges of notation, the significance of detail and of deeper continuity, the importance of performing and teaching traditions, and the influence of cross disciplinary frameworks. A link to a set of performed examples on the Brigham Young University-Hawai'i website allows readers to hear and compare performances and interpretations of the music discussed. The volume will appeal to musicologists and analysts interested in performance, performers, students, and piano teachers.
This study of Franz Schubert's settings of poetry by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis introduces the fascinating world of early German Romanticism in the 1790s, when an energetic group of bold young thinkers radically changed the landscape of European thought. Schubert's encounters with early Romantic poetry some twenty years later reanimated some of the movement's central ideas. Schubert set eleven texts from Schlegel's AbendrAte poetic cycle and six poems drawn from Novalis' religious and erotic poetry. Through detailed analyses of how various musical structures in these songs mirror and sometimes even explicate the central ideas of the poems, this book argues that Schubert was an abstract thinker who used his medium of music to diagram the complex ideas of a highly intellectual movement. A comparison is made to the hermeneutic theory of that time, primarily that of Schleiermacher, who was himself linked to the early Romantics. Through exploration of ideas such as Schlegel's representation of the necessary interdependence of part and whole and Novalis' strong association of religious and erotic experience, along with their musical representations by Schubert, this book opens an intriguing world of thought for modern readers. At the same time, Feurzeig explores some of Schubert's little-known songs, which range from quirky to charming to exquisite.
A major study sure to fascinate musicians, Brahms enthusiasts and those interested in the history of recorded music. How did Brahms conduct his four symphonies? What did he want from other conductors when they performed these works, and to which among them did he give his approval? And crucially, are there any stylistic pointers to these performances in early recordings of the symphonies made in the first half of the twentieth century? For the first time, Christopher Dyment provides a comprehensive and in-depth answer to these important issues. Drawing together thestrands of existing research with extensive new material from a wide range of sources - the views of musicians, contemporary journals, memoirs, biographies and other critical literature - Dyment presents a vivid picture of historic performance practice in Brahms's era and the half-century that followed. Here is a remarkable panorama showcasing Brahms himself conducting, together with those conductors whom he heard, among them Levi, Richter, Nikisch, Weingartner and Fritz Steinbach, and their disciples, such as Toscanini, Stokowski, Boult and Fritz Busch. Here, too, are other famed Brahms conductors of the early twentieth century, including Furtwangler and Abendroth, whose connections with the Brahms tradition are closely examined. Dyment then analyses recordings of the symphonies by these conductors and highlights aspects which the composer might well have commended. Finally, Dyment suggests the importanceof his conclusions for those contemporary conductors who are currently attempting to rediscover genuine performance traditions in their own re-creations of the symphonies. This major study is complemented with forty photographs and a frontispiece. It is sure to fascinate musicians, Brahms enthusiasts and those interested in the history of recorded music. CHRISTOPHER DYMENT is author of Felix Weingartner: Recollections and Recordings(Triad Press 1976) and Toscanini in Britain (The Boydell Press 2012). He has published many articles about historic conductors over the last forty years.
Felix Mendelssohn is one of the most celebrated figures of the early Romantic period. As a composer of sacred texts, he is chiefly remembered today for the oratorios Paulus (1836) and Elijah (1846). In this groundbreaking study, Siegwart Reichwald offers a meticulous analysis of Paulus, beginning with a general overview of the oratorio traditions of the early nineteenth century. He details the phases of the compositional process of Paulus as well as principles governing its development. Numerous musical examples, figures, and tables accompany the text. This thorough treatment of Paulus, while shedding light on Mendelssohn's approach to the oratorio and to sacred music in general, will be of interest to students of musicology.
Richard Wagner has arguably the greatest and most long-term influence on wider European culture of all nineteenth-century composers. And yet, among the copious English-language literature examining Wagner's works, influence, and character, research into the composer's impact and role in Russia and Eastern European countries, and perceptions of him from within those countries, is noticeably sparse. Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands aims to redress imbalance and stimulate further research in this rich area. The eight essays are divided in three parts - one each on Russia, the Czech lands and Poland - and cover a wide historical span, from the composer's first contacts with and appearances in these regions, through to his later reception in the Communist era. The contributing authors examine his influences in a wide range of areas such as music, literary and epistolary heritage, politics, and the cultural histories of Russia, the Czech lands, and Poland, in an attempt to establish Wagner's place in a part of Europe not commonly addressed in studies of the composer.
Franz Liszt: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and performer. The second edition includes research published since the publication of the first edition and provide electronic resources.
Music in Boston: Composers, Events, and Ideas, 1852-1918 is a history of the city's classical-music culture in the period that begins a decade before the American Civil War and extends to the close of the Great War. The book provides insights into the intellectual foundation of Boston's musical development as revealed in the writings of its significant critics and thinkers, including John Sullivan Dwight, John Knowles Paine, William Foster Apthorp, and others. It also examines the influence of outsiders-Patrick Gilmore, Theodore Thomas, Richard Wagner, New York's Metropolitan Opera, and Richard Strauss-on Boston's performance and composition scene while also considering events that affected music in Boston, such as the building of the Music Hall, the acquisition of its Great Organ, the National Peace Jubilee, Chicago's Columbian Exposition, Boston's first Wagner Festival, and the rise and fall of the Boston Opera Company. Music in Boston also accounts for the ascent of the Second New England School of composers-John Knowles Paine, Edward MacDowell, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach and others-and discusses their key compositions and legacy. Finally, the book explores Boston itself: its transformations via immigration, its ever-changing topography, and its economy. |
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