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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles
Eroticism in Early Modern Music contributes to a small but significant literature on music, sexuality, and sex in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Its chapters have grown from a long dialogue between a group of scholars, who employ a variety of different approaches to the repertoire: musical and visual analysis; archival and cultural history; gender studies; philology; and performance. By confronting musical, literary, and visual sources with historically situated analyses, the book shows how erotic life and sensibilities were encoded in musical works. Eroticism in Early Modern Music will be of value to scholars and students of early modern European history and culture, and more widely to a readership interested in the history of eroticism and sexuality.
Most classical musicians, whether in orchestral or ensemble situations, will have to face a piece by composers such as Ligeti, Messiaen, Varese or Xenakis, while improvisers face music influenced by Dave Holland, Steve Coleman, Aka Moon, Weather Report, Irakere or elements from the Balkans, India, Africa or Cuba. Rafael Reina argues that today's music demands a new approach to rhythmical training, a training that will provide musicians with the necessary tools to face, with accuracy, more varied and complex rhythmical concepts, while keeping the emotional content. Reina uses the architecture of the South Indian Karnatic rhythmical system to enhance and radically change the teaching of rhythmical solfege at a higher education level and demonstrates how this learning can influence the creation and interpretation of complex contemporary classical and jazz music. The book is designed for classical and jazz performers as well as creators, be they composers or improvisers, and is a clear and complete guide that will enable future solfege teachers and students to use these techniques and their methodology to greatly improve their rhythmical skills. An accompanying website of audio examples helps to explain each technique. For examples of composed and improvised pieces by students who have studied this book, as well as concerts by highly acclaimed karnatic musicians, please copy this link to your browser: http://www.contemporary-music-through-non-western-techniques.com/pages/1587-video-recordings
Unaccountably, Percy Grainger has remained on the margins of both American music history and twentieth-century modernism. This volume reveals the well-known composer of popular gems to be a self-described 'hyper-modernist' who composed works of uncompromising dissonance, challenged the conventions of folk song collection and adaptation, re-visioned the modern orchestra, experimented with 'ego-less' composition and designed electronic machines intended to supersede human application. Grainger was far from being a self-sufficient maverick working in isolation. Through contact with innovators such as Ferrucio Busoni, Leon Theremin and Henry Cowell; promotion of the music of modern French and Spanish schools; appreciation of vernacular, jazz and folk musics; as well as with the study and transcription of non-Western music; he contested received ideas and proposed many radical new approaches. By reappraising Grainger's social and historical connectedness and exploring the variety of aspects of modernity seen in his activities in the British, American and Australian contexts, the authors create a profile of a composer, propagandist and visionary whose modernist aesthetic paralleled that of the most advanced composers of his day, and, in some cases, anticipated their practical experiments.
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.
Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is often taken for granted. In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the voice-body relationship itself is a producer of meaning, she furthermore posits this relationship as one of the major driving forces in recent opera. She takes as her focus six contemporary operas - La Belle et la Bete (Philip Glass), Writing to Vermeer (Louis Andriessen, Peter Greenaway), Three Tales (Steve Reich, Beryl Korot), One (Michel van der Aa), Homeland (Laurie Anderson), and La Commedia (Louis Andriessen, Hal Hartley) - which she terms 'postoperas'. These pieces are sites for creative exploration, where the boundaries of the opera world are stretched. Central to this is the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a redefinition of body-voice-gender relationships. Novak dissects the singing body as a set of rules, protocols, effects, and strategies. That dissection shows how the singing body acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera's meanings.
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.
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.
Broadside ballads-folio-sized publications containing verse, a tune indication, and woodcut imagery-related cautionary tales, current events, and simplified myth and history to a wide range of social classes across seventeenth century England. Ballads straddled, and destabilized, the categories of public and private performance spaces, the material and the ephemeral, music and text, and oral and written traditions. Sung by balladmongers in the streets and referenced in theatrical works, they were also pasted to the walls of local taverns and domestic spaces. They titillated and entertained, but also educated audiences on morality and gender hierarchies. Although contemporaneous writers published volumes on the early modern controversy over women and the English witch craze, broadside ballads were perhaps more instrumental in disseminating information about dangerous women and their acoustic qualities. Recent scholarship has explored the representations of witchcraft and malfeasance in English street literature; until now, however, the role of music and embodied performance in communicating female transgression has yet to be investigated. Sarah Williams carefully considers the broadside ballad as a dynamic performative work situated in a unique cultural context. Employing techniques drawn from musical analysis, gender studies, performance studies, and the histories of print and theater, she contends that broadside ballads and their music made connections between various degrees of female crime, the supernatural, and cautionary tales for and about women.
American composer Louise Talma (1906-1996) was the first female winner of two back-to-back Guggenheim Awards (1946, 1947), the first American woman to have an opera premiered in Europe (1962), the first female winner of the Sibelius Award for Composition (1963), and the first woman composer elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1974). This book analyses Talma's works in the context of her life, focusing on the effects on her work of two major changes she made during her adult life: her conversion to Catholicism as an adult, under the guidance of Nadia Boulanger, and her adoption of serial compositional techniques. Employing approaches from traditional musical analysis, feminist and queer musicology, and women's autobiographical theory to examine Talma's body of works, comprising some eighty pieces, this is the first full-length study of this pioneering composer. Exploring Talma's compositional language, text-setting practices, and the incorporation of autobiographical elements into her works using her own letters, sketches, and scores, as well as a number of other relevant documents, this book positions Talma's contributions to serial and atonal music in the United States, considers her role as a woman composer during the twentieth century, and evaluates the legacy of her works and career in American music.
The extraordinary story of Malcolm Williamson is one of rare musical talent combined with outrageous behaviour. An Australian, Williamson was the first non-Briton to hold the post of Master of the Queen's Music. He was appointed in 1975 and looked set to embellish his already illustrious career as a composer. By the time of his death in 2003 he was unproductive and largely forgotten. Authors Anthony Meredith and Paul Harris tell his bizarre story unflinchingly, sifting fact from fiction and offering a strong case for re-evaluating this flawed man and multi-talented musician. An investigation of the myths, rumours and half truths surrounding this controversial and misunderstood figure. The authors reveal the rift between Williamson and the Royal family. He was pointedly not invited to contribute to several high profile occasions including the wedding of Charles and Diana. They discuss if his failed marriage and open bisexuality was deemed beyond the pale at the Palace.
This is the first book-length survey of 20th -century British music for solo organ. Beginning with a discussion of British organ music in the last decades of the Victorian era, the book focuses on the pieces that the composers wrote, their musical style, possible influences on the composition of specific works, and the details of their composition. Arranged in chronological order according to date of birth are detailed studies on important composers that made especially significant contributions to organ music including Parry, Stanford, Healey Willan, Herbert Howells, Percy Whitlock, Francis Jackson, Peter Racine Fricker, Arthur Wills, and Kenneth Leighton. Composers' biographies, the role of organs and organ building developments, influential political and sociological events, and aesthetic aspects of British musical life are also discussed in detail. In the concluding chapter, the author discusses the major phases and achievements of the century and gauges what may lie ahead in the new millennium. A comprehensive Catalog of Works provides titles of works, dates of composition, details of publishers, and the dates of publication. More than 60 music examples, 12 black and white photos, and an up-to-date bibliography are included.
This is the first book by an experienced conductor to explore the orchestra's contribution to Mozart's greatest operatic works: Idomeneo, Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, Die Schauspieldirektor, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte, La clemenza di Tito, and Die Zauberfloete. It is written for the concert and opera going public who are interested in enlarging their knowledge and appreciation of these masterpieces, but also contains many practical suggestions for aspiring conductors.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is one of the great icons of Western music. An amazing prodigy-he toured the capitals of Europe while still a child, astonishing royalty and professional musicians with his precocious skills-he wrote as an adult some of the finest music in the entire European tradition. Julian Rushton offers a concise and up-to-date biography of this musical genius, combining a well-researched life of the composer with an introduction to the works-symphonic, chamber, sacred, and theatrical-of one of the few musicians in history to have written undisputed masterpieces in every genre open to composers of his time. Rushton offers a vivid portrait of the composer, ranging from Mozart the Wunderkind-travelling with his family from Salzburg to Vienna, Paris, London, Rome, and Milan-to the mature author of such classic works as "The Marriage of Figaro", "Don Giovanni", and "The Magic Flute". During the past half-century, scholars have thoroughly explored Mozart's life and music, offering new interpretations of his compositions based on their historical context and providing a factual basis for confirming or, more often, debunking fanciful accounts of the man and his work. Rushton takes full advantage of these biographical and musical studies as well as the definitive New Mozart Edition to provide an accurate account of Mozart's life and, equally important, an insightful look at the music itself, complete with musical examples. An engaging biography for general readers that will also be an informative resource for scholars, this new addition to the prestigious Master Musicians series offers an authoritative portrait of one of the defining figures of European culture.
(Berklee Guide). This book/DVD pack teaches expressive, virtuosic, and healthy piano technique for contemporary and classical styles. Through integrated written directions and video examples, you will see exactly how to move your fingers, wrists, arms, feet, body and breath to achieve maximum expressive effect and technical facility. Developed by Berklee Piano Dept. Chair Stephany Tiernan as a continuation of the groundbreaking work of Mme. Margaret Chaloff, this approach to piano technique has been used by thousands of pianists worldwide. The DVD demonstrates each technique in isolation, and in the context of playing repertoire in jazz, rock, new age, Latin and classical styles.
John Wallis (1616-1703), was one of the foremost British mathematicians of the seventeenth century, and is also remembered for his important writings on grammar and logic. An interest in music theory led him to produce translations into Latin of three ancient Greek texts - those of Ptolemy, Porphyry and Bryennius - and involved him in discussions with Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, Thomas Salmon and other individuals as his ideas developed. The texts presented in this volume cover the relationship of ancient and modern tuning theory, the building of organs, the phenomena of resonance, and other musical topics.
Murray Schafer is one of Canada's few composers to have achieved an international reputation. His innovative and often controversial work extends beyond music into the areas of education, literary scholarship, journalism, theatre, and graphics, as well as a new field of his own making-environmental sound research. This comprehensive critical survey of his life and works reveals the unifying pattern within an amazingly productive and varied career. Adams examines Schafer's extensive writings, which form the intellectual context of his music. Though Schafer is both avant-gardist and self-confessed romantic, his writings solve this apparent paradox and show, as well, the central position of the 'soundscape' in his thought. Adam traces the development of Schafer's music from his early works in a mild neo-classical vein to his experimentation with various modernist procedures-serialism, electronic sound, stereophony, graphic notations, and elements of chance-all of which he fused together in his first stage of work or 'audio-visual poem,' Loving, in 1965. This volume includes a full bibliography, discography, and catalogue of his works.
Explores the world of women's professional and amateur musical activity as it developed on and beyond the island of Ireland. In a story which spans several centuries, the book highlights representative composers and performers in classical music, Irish traditional music, and contemporary art music whose contributions have been marginalised in music narratives. As well as investigating the careers of public figures, this edited collection brings attention to women who engaged with and taught music in a variety of domestic settings. It also shines a spotlight on women who worked behind the scenes to build infrastructures such as festivals and educational institutions which remain at the heart of the country's musical life today. The book addresses and reconsiders ideas about the intersections of music, gender, and Irish society, including how the national emblem of the harp became recast as a symbol of Irish womanhood in the twentieth century. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 surveys women musicians in Irish society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part 2 discusses women and practice in Irish traditional music. Part 3 studies gaps and gender politics in the history of twentieth-century women composers and performers. Part 4 situates discourses of women, gender, and music in the twenty-first century. The book's contributors encompass musicologists, cultural historians, composers, and performers.
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.
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.
The interdisciplinary nature of the volume allows for a more nuanced understanding of how court culture was connected with the political, confessional, spatial, material and performative. With a range of topics including dress, scent, portraiture, gardens, games, porcelain rooms, and beauty, accompanied by over 100 images, allows students and scholars to better comprehend the vitality of the early modern European court which will be useful for a number of disciplines. The volume includes 35 contributions from international leading scholars in the field, providing the most up-to-date and in-depth study of the early modern European court.
Discussion concerning the 'musicality' of Samuel Beckett's writing now constitutes a familiar critical trope in Beckett Studies, one that continues to be informed by the still-emerging evidence of Beckett's engagement with music throughout his personal and literary life, and by the ongoing interest of musicians in Beckett's work. In Beckett's drama and prose writings, the relationship with music plays out in implicit and explicit ways. Several of his works incorporate canonical music by composers such as Schubert and Beethoven. Other works integrate music as a compositional element, in dialogue or tension with text and image, while others adopt rhythm, repetition and pause to the extent that the texts themselves appear to be 'scored'. But what, precisely, does it mean to say that a piece of prose or writing for theatre, radio or screen, is 'musical'? The essays included in this book explore a number of ways in which Beckett's writings engage with and are engaged by musicality, discussing familiar and less familiar works by Beckett in detail. Ranging from the scholarly to the personal in their respective modes of response, and informed by approaches from performance and musicology, literary studies, philosophy, musical composition and creative practice, these essays provide a critical examination of the ways we might comprehend musicality as a definitive and often overlooked attribute throughout Beckett's work.
This work begins with the innovations of Monteverdi and developments in Northern Italy. By the end of the period under discussion the Baroque spirit is flourishing north of the Alps, at the courts in Paris, Vienna, London and the German states. Spain and Portugal also made distinctive contributions to the culture of the Baroque. Part of the "Man and Music" series, this book surveys music in its broadest social, political and cultural context.
Charles Ives (1874-1954) moved traditional compositional practice in new directions by incorporating modern and innovative techniques with nostalgic borrowings of 19th century American popular music and Protestant hymns. Matthew McDonald argues that the influence of Emerson and Thoreau on Ives's compositional style freed the composer from ordinary ideas of time and chronology, allowing him to recuperate the past as he reached for the musical unknown. McDonald links this concept of the multi-temporal in Ives s works to Transcendentalist understandings of eternity. His approach to Ives opens new avenues for inquiry into the composer's eclectic and complex style."
Enrique Granados (1867-1916) was one of the first modern Spanish composers to achieve international recognition. During a 1916 visit to the United States his opera Goyescas was premiered by the Metropolitan Opera and his symphonic poem, Dante, by the Chicago Symphony. Granados was also especially admired in Paris, where he knew Saint-Saens, d'Indy, and Faure. He had composed a remarkable body of work and was also at the height of his career as a concert pianist at his untimely death while a passenger on a torpedoed British ship. The biographical study, the first in English, draws on primary sources in English, Spanish, French, Catalan, and other languages. This material is carefully documented in the extensive annotated bibliography along with contemporaneous and recent analytical studies and other sources. Granados's oeuvre presents cataloging problems due to his habit of reworking pieces, long-delayed publication, and arbitrary opus numbers. In the Works and Performances section, however, every effort has been made to offer publication dates, manuscript locations, and information on premieres. Representative arrangements of his works by other composers are also given. An appendix classifies the works by scoring. A selective discography is also provided, and all parts of the volume are fully cross-referenced and indexed. Granados is placed in the context of the international artistic scene at the turn of the century, and a chronology notes related events.
Song offers a vital case study for examining the rich interplay of music, gender, and representation in the early modern period. This collection engages with the question of how gender informed song within particular textual, social, and spatial contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Bringing together ongoing work in musicology, literary studies, and film studies, it elaborates an interdisciplinary consideration of the embodied and gendered facets of song, and of song's capacity to function as a powerful-and flexible-gendered signifier. The essays in this collection draw vivid attention to song as a situated textual and musical practice, and to the gendered processes and spaces of song's circulation and reception. In so doing, they interrogate the literary and cultural significance of song for early modern readers, performers, and audiences. |
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