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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles
'An alternately funny and moving book about the most important art
form on Planet Earth. Destined to become a classic (pun intended)'
Jarvis Cocker Music critic and writer Paul Morley weaves together
memoir and history in a spiralling tale that establishes classical
music as the most rebellious genre of all. Paul Morley had stopped
being surprised by modern pop music and found himself retreating
into the sounds of artists he loved when, as an emerging music
journalist in the 70s, he wrote for NME. But not wishing to give in
to dreary nostalgia, endlessly circling back to the bands he wrote
about in the past, he went searching for something new, rare and
wondrous - and found it in classical music. A soaring polemic, a
grumpy reflection on modern rock, and a fan's love note, A Sound
Mind rejects the idea that classical music is establishment; old; a
drag. Instead, the book reveals this genre to be the most exciting
and varied in music. A Sound Mind is a multi-layered memoir of
Morley's shifting musical tastes, but it is also a compelling
history of classical music that reveals the genre's rich and often
deviant past - and, hopefully, future. Like a conductor, Morley
weaves together timelines and timeframes in an orchestral narrative
that declares the transformative and resilient power of classical
music from Bach to Shostakovich, Brahms to Birtwistle, Mozart to
Cage, travelling from eighteenth century salons to the modern age
of Spotify.
This book explores how the Enlightenment aesthetics of theater as a
moral institution influenced cultural politics and operatic
developments in Vienna between the mid-eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. Moralistic viewpoints were particularly
important in eighteenth-century debates about German national
theater. In Vienna, the idea that vernacular theater should
cultivate the moral sensibilities of its German-speaking audiences
became prominent during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa, when
advocates of German plays and operas attempted to deflect the
imperial government from supporting exclusively French and Italian
theatrical performances. Morality continued to be a dominant aspect
of Viennese operatic culture in the following decades, as critics,
state officials, librettists, and composers (including Gluck,
Mozart, and Beethoven) attempted to establish and define German
national opera. Viennese concepts of operatic didacticism and
national identity in theater further transformed in response to the
crisis of Emperor Joseph II's reform movement, the revolutionary
ideas spreading from France, and the war efforts in facing
Napoleonic aggression. The imperial government promoted good morals
in theatrical performances through the institution of theater
censorship, and German-opera authors cultivated intensely didactic
works (such as Die Zauberfloete and Fidelio) that eventually became
the cornerstones for later developments of German culture.
In 1864, Union soldier Charles George described a charge into
battle by General Phil Sheridan: "Such a picture of earnestness and
determination I never saw as he showed as he came in sight of the
battle field . . . What a scene for a painter!" These words proved
prophetic, as Sheridan's desperate ride provided the subject for
numerous paintings and etchings as well as songs and poetry. George
was not alone in thinking of art in the midst of combat; the
significance of the issues under contention, the brutal intensity
of the fighting, and the staggering number of casualties combined
to form a tragedy so profound that some could not help but view it
through an aesthetic lens, to see the war as a concert of death. It
is hardly surprising that art influenced the perception and
interpretation of the war given the intrinsic role that the arts
played in the lives of antebellum Americans. Nor is it surprising
that literature, music, and the visual arts were permanently
altered by such an emotional and material catastrophe. In The Arts
and Culture of the American Civil War, an interdisciplinary team of
scholars explores the way the arts - theatre, music, fiction,
poetry, painting, architecture, and dance - were influenced by the
war as well as the unique ways that art functioned during and
immediately following the war. Included are discussions of familiar
topics (such as Ambrose Bierce, Peter Rothermel, and minstrelsy)
with less-studied subjects (soldiers and dance, epistolary songs).
The collection as a whole sheds light on the role of race, class,
and gender in the production and consumption of the arts for
soldiers and civilians at this time; it also draws attention to the
ways that art shaped - and was shaped by - veterans long after the
war.
From the outset, French opera generated an enormous diversity of
literature, familiarity with which greatly enhances our
understanding of this unique art form. Yet relatively little of
that literature is available in English, despite an upsurge of
interest in the Lully-Rameau period during the past two decades.
This book presents a wide-ranging and informative picture of the
organization and evolution of French Baroque opera, its aims and
aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on official
documents, theoretical writings, letters, diaries, dictionary
entries, contemporary reviews and commentaries, it provides an
often entertaining insight into Lully's once-proud Royal Academy of
Music and the colourful characters who surrounded it. The
translated passages are set in context, and readers are directed to
further scholarly and critical writings in English. Readers will
find this new, updated edition easier to use with its revised and
expanded translations, supplementary explanatory content and new
illustrations.
Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) was Victorian Britain's most celebrated
and popular composer, whose music to this day reaches a wider
audience than that of any of his contemporaries. Yet the comic
operas on which Sullivan's reputation is chiefly based have been
consistently belittled or ignored by the British musicological
establishment, while his serious works have until recently remained
virtually unknown. The time is thus long overdue for scholarly
re-engagement with Sullivan. The present book offers a new
appraisal of the music of this most notable nineteenth-century
British composer, combining close analytical attention to his music
with critical consideration of the wider aesthetic and social
context to his work. Focusing on key pieces in all the major genres
in which Sullivan composed, it includes accounts of his most
important serious works - the music to The Tempest, the 'Irish'
Symphony, The Golden Legend, Ivanhoe - alongside detailed
examination of the celebrated comic operas created with W.S.
Gilbert to present a balanced portrayal of Sullivan's musical
achievement.
Mabel Daniels (1877-1971): An American Composer in Transition
assesses Daniels within the context of American music of the first
half of the twentieth century. Daniels wrote fresh sounding works
that were performed by renowned orchestras and ensembles during her
lifetime but her works have only recently begun to be performed
again. The book explains why works by Daniels and other women
composers fell out of favor and argues for their performance today.
This study of Daniels's life and works evinces transition in
women's roles in composition, the professionalization of women
composers, and the role that Daniels played in the
institutionalization of American art music. Daniels's dual role as
a patron-composer is unique and expressive of her transitional
status.
Examining nineteenth-century British hymns for children, Alisa
Clapp-Itnyre argues that the unique qualities of children's hymnody
created a space for children's empowerment. Unlike other literature
of the era, hymn books were often compilations of many writers'
hymns, presenting the discerning child with a multitude of
perspectives on religion and childhood. In addition, the agency
afforded children as singers meant that they were actively engaged
with the text, music, and pictures of their hymnals. Clapp-Itnyre
charts the history of children's hymn-book publications from early
to late nineteenth century, considering major denominational
movements, the importance of musical tonality as it affected the
popularity of hymns to both adults and children, and children's
reformation of adult society provided by such genres as missionary
and temperance hymns. While hymn books appear to distinguish 'the
child' from 'the adult', intricate issues of theology and poetry -
typically kept within the domain of adulthood - were purposely
conveyed to those of younger years and comprehension. Ultimately,
Clapp-Itnyre shows how children's hymns complicate our
understanding of the child-adult binary traditionally seen to be a
hallmark of Victorian society. Intersecting with major aesthetic
movements of the period, from the peaking of Victorian hymnody to
the Golden Age of Illustration, children's hymn books require
scholarly attention to deepen our understanding of the complex
aesthetic network for children and adults. Informed by extensive
archival research, British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900
brings this understudied genre of Victorian culture to critical
light.
First published in 1994. This study sets out to investigate English
opera from 1834 to 1864. The author attempts to understand the
circumstances influencing the development of English
nineteenth-century opera, its characteristic features, and the
reasons why these traits held sway. This title will be of great
interest to students of art and cultural history.
The Keyboard Music of J.S. Bach provides an introduction to and
comprehensive discussion of all the music for harpsichord and other
stringed keyboard instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).
Often played today on the modern piano, these works are central not
only to the Western concert repertory but to musical pedagogy and
study throughout the world.
Intended as both a practical guide and an interpretive study, the
book consists of three introductory chapters on general matters of
historical context, style, and performance practice, followed by
fifteen chapters on the individual works, treated in roughly
chronological order. The works discussed include all of Bach's
individual keyboard compositions as well as those comprising his
famous collections, such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, the English
and French Suites, and the Art of Fugue.
Studies in the history of French nineteenth-century stage music
have blossomed in the last decade, encouraging a revision of the
view of the primacy of Austro-German music during the period and
rebalancing the scholarly field away from instrumental music (key
to the Austro-German hegemony) and towards music for the stage.
This change of emphasis is having an impact on the world of opera
production, with new productions of works not heard since the
nineteenth century taking their place in the modern repertory. This
awakening of enthusiasm has come at something of a price. Selling
French opera as little more than an important precursor to Verdi or
Wagner has entailed a focus on works produced exclusively for the
Paris Opera at the expense of the vast range of other types of
stage music produced in the capital: opera comique, operette,
comedie-vaudeville and melodrame, for example. The first part of
this book therefore seeks to reintroduce a number of norms to the
study of stage music in Paris: to re-establish contexts and
conventions that still remain obscure. The second and third parts
acknowledge Paris as an importer and exporter of opera, and its
focus moves towards the music of its closest neighbours, the
Italian-speaking states, and of its most problematic partners, the
German-speaking states, especially the music of Weber and Wagner.
Prefaced by an introduction that develops the volume's overriding
intellectual drivers of cultural exchange, genre and institution,
this collection brings together twelve of the author's previously
published articles and essays, fully updated for this volume and
translated into English for the first time.
The history of music at the Maison royale de Saint-Louis at
Saint-Cyr - the famous convent school founded by Madame de
Maintenon and established by Louis XIV in 1686 as a royal
foundation - is both rich and intriguing; its large repertory of
music was composed expressly for young female voices by important
composers working within significant contemporary musical genres:
liturgical chant, sacred motets, theatrical music, and cantiques
spirituels. While these genres reflect contemporary styles and
trends, at the same time the works themselves were made to conform
to the sensibilities and abilities of their intended performers.
Even as Jean-Baptiste Moreau's music for Jean Racine's biblical
tragedies Esther and Athalie shows a number of similarities to
contemporary tragedies lyriques, it departs from that more public
genre in its brevity, generally simpler solo writing, and the
integral use of the chorus. The musical style of the choral numbers
closely parallels that of other choral music in the repertory at
Saint-Cyr. The liturgical chant sung in the church was composed by
Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, and is an example of plain-chant musical,
a type of new ecclesiastical composition written during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, primarily for female
religious communities in France. The large repertory of petits
motets (short sacred Latin pieces for solo voice), mostly composed
by Nivers and Louis-Nicolas Clerambault, are simpler and more
restrained than works by their contemporaries. A close study of the
motets reveals much about changes to musical style and performance
practices at Saint-Cyr during the eighteenth century. The cantique
spirituel, a song with a spiritual text in the vernacular French
language, played a significant role in both the education and
recreation of the girls at Saint-Cyr. Cantiques composed for the
girls vary widely in terms of their style and difficulty, ranging
from simple strophic melodies to more sophisticated works in the
style of contemporary airs. In all cases, the stylistic features of
the music for Saint-Cyr reflect a careful consideration of the
needs and capabilities of the young singers of the school, as well
as an awareness of the rigorous requirements of Madame de
Maintenon, who kept a close watch over the propriety of all things
relating to the piety, behavior, and image of her charges.
- Takes an innovative musicological approach to the Book of Hours -
Author uses survey of large number of manuscripts to produce
insights about larger trends - By addressing musical aspects of
Book of Hours, sheds light on lived experience of users of these
books and how music was incorporated into lay practices of prayer
in the late Middle Ages
Helie Salomon's Scientia artis musice (1274), is a practical manual
devoted to basic concepts, psalmody, vocal pedagogy, the musical
hand in singing, clefs as indicators of the tone (mode) to which a
piece belongs, and practical instruction in the singing of
four-voice parallel organum. Joseph Dyer presents the first,
much-needed, modern edition of Salomon's treatise, accompanied by a
full English translation, comprehensive introduction and
commentary. This edition corrects errors in the 1784 edition of
Martin Gerbert, includes the music of chants omitted by Gerbert
from the tonary, and makes available reproductions in colour of the
eight illustrations in the treatise.
This annotated bibliography uncovers the wealth of resources
available to prospective researchers and supports emerging
scholarship and inquiry into the life and music of this Czech
composer. It includes all secondary sources on Martinu and his
music, as well as chronology of his life and a complete list of
works.
Icons of Sound: Voice, Architecture, and Imagination in Medieval
Art brings together art history and sound studies to offer new
perspectives on medieval churches and cathedrals as spaces where
the perception of the visual is inherently shaped by sound. The
chapters encompass a wide geographic and historical range, from the
fifth to the fifteenth century, and from Armenia and Byzantium to
Venice, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. Contributors offer
nuanced explorations of the intangible sonic aura produced in these
places by the ritual music and harness the use of digital
technology to reconstruct historical aural environments. Rooted in
a decade-long interdisciplinary research project at Stanford
University, Icons of Sound expands our understanding of the
inherently intertwined relationship between medieval chant and
liturgy, the acoustics of architectural spaces, and their visual
aesthetics. Together, the contributors provide insights that are
relevant across art history, sound studies, musicology, and
medieval studies.
Teaching Music History with Cases introduces a pedagogical approach
to music history instruction in university coursework. What
constitutes a music-historical "case?" How do we use them in the
classroom? In business and the hard sciences, cases are problems
that need solutions. In a field like music history, a case is not
always a problem, but often an exploration of a context or concept
that inspires deep inquiry. Such cases are narratives of rich,
complex moments in music history that inspire questions of similar
or related moments. This book guides instructors through the
process of designing a curriculum based on case studies, finding
and writing case studies, and guiding class discussions of cases.
How did the tumult caused by German composer Richard Wagner result
in the first modernist painting? In the first full-length book
dedicated to the study of Edouard Manet and music, art historian
Therese Dolan demonstrates that the 1862 painting Music in the
Tuileries represents the progressive musical culture of his time,
heretofore read by scholars predominantly through the words of
Charles Baudelaire. Dolan sees in this painting's radical style the
conceptual shift to modernism in both painting and music, a
transition that, she convincingly argues, received a strong impetus
from Manet's Music in the Tuileries and Wagner's controversial
Tannhauser, which premiered the previous year. Supplemental to
analysis of the painting, Dolan incorporates discussion of texts by
Theophile Gautier, Champfleury, and Baudelaire who are represented
in the painting. This book incorporates studies of the major
artistic, literary, and musical figures of nineteenth-century
France. It represents an important contribution to an understanding
of French culture in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a
period of intense literary, artistic, and musical activity that
formed the crucible for modernism.
Recent scholarship has vanquished the traditional perception of
nineteenth-century Britain as a musical wasteland. In addition to
attempting more balanced assessments of the achievements of British
composers of this period, scholars have begun to explore the web of
reciprocal relationships between the societal, economic and
cultural dynamics arising from the industrial revolution, the
Napoleonic wars, and the ever-changing contours of British music
publishing, music consumption, concert life, instrument design,
performance practice, pedagogy and composition. Muzio Clementi
(1752-1832) provides an ideal case-study for continued exploration
of this web of relationships. Based in London for much of his life,
whilst still maintaining contact with continental developments,
Clementi achieved notable success in a diversity of activities that
centred mainly on the piano. The present book explores Clementi's
multivalent contribution to piano performance, pedagogy,
composition and manufacture in relation to British musical life and
its international dimensions. An overriding purpose is to
interrogate when, how and to what extent a distinctive British
musical culture emerged in the early nineteenth century. Much
recent work on Clementi has centred on the Italian National Edition
of his complete works (MiBACT); several chapters report on this
project, whilst continuing to pursue the book's broader themes.
This companion volume to The Courtly Consort Suite in
German-Speaking Europe surveys an area of music neglected by modern
scholars: the consort suites and dance music by musicians working
in the seventeenth-century German towns. Conditions of work in the
German towns are examined in detail, as are the problems posed by
the many untrained travelling players who were often little more
than beggars. The central part of the book explores the
organisation, content and assembly of town suites into carefully
ordered printed collections, which refutes the concept of the
so-called 'classical' suite. The differences between court and town
suites are dealt with alongside the often-ignored variation suite
from the later decades of the seventeenth century and the separate
suite-writing traditions of Leipzig and Hamburg. While the
seventeenth-century keyboard suite has received a good deal of
attention from modern scholars, its often symbiotic relationship
with the consort suite has been ignored. This book aims to redress
the balance and to deal with one very important but often ignored
aspect of seventeenth-century notation: the use of blackened notes,
which are rarely notated in a meaningful way in modern editions,
with important implications for performance.
'Exhilarating' - Sunday Times 'Funny and moving' - Jarvis Cocker
Music critic and writer Paul Morley weaves together memoir and
history in a spiralling tale that establishes classical music as
the most rebellious genre of all. Paul Morley had stopped being
surprised by modern pop music and found himself retreating into the
sounds of artists he loved when, as an emerging music journalist in
the 70s, he wrote for NME. But not wishing to give in to dreary
nostalgia, endlessly circling back to the bands he wrote about in
the past, he went searching for something new, rare and wondrous -
and found it in classical music. A soaring polemic, a grumpy
reflection on modern rock, and a fan's love note, A Sound Mind
rejects the idea that classical music is establishment; old; a
drag. Instead, the book reveals this genre to be the most exciting
and varied in music. A Sound Mind is a multi-layered memoir of
Morley's shifting musical tastes, but it is also a compelling
history of classical music that reveals the genre's rich and often
deviant past - and, hopefully, future. Like a conductor, Morley
weaves together timelines and timeframes in an orchestral narrative
that declares the transformative and resilient power of classical
music from Bach to Shostakovich, Brahms to Birtwistle, Mozart to
Cage, travelling from eighteenth century salons to the modern age
of Spotify. 'His passion for centuries of music - both celebrated
and obscure - is infectious' - Irish Independent
The viola da gamba was a central instrument in European music from
the late 15th century well into the late 18th. In this
comprehensive study, Bettina Hoffmann offers both an introduction
to the instrument -- its construction, technique and history -- for
the non-specialist, interweaving this information with a wealth of
original archival scholarship that experts will relish. The book
begins with a description of the instrument, and here Hoffmann
grapples with the complexity of various names applied to this and
related instruments. Following two chapters on the instrument's
construction and ancestry, the core of the book is given to a
historical and geographical survey of the instrument from its
origins into the classical period. The book closes with a look at
the revival of interest in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Taking as axiomatic the concept that artistic output does not
simply reflect culture but also shapes it, the essays in this
interdisciplinary collection take a holistic approach to the
cultural fashioning of sexualities, drawing on visual art, theatre,
music, and literature, in sacred and secular contexts. Although
there is diversity in disciplinary approach, the interpretations
and readings offered in each essay have a historical basis.
Approaching the topic from the point of view of both visual and
auditory media, this volume paints a comprehensive picture of
artists' challenges to erotic boundaries, and contributes to new
historicizing thinking on sexualities. Collectively, the essays
demonstrate the role played by artistic production-visual arts,
literature, theatre and music-in fashioning, policing, and
challenging early modern sexual boundaries, and thus help to
identify the ways in which the arts contributed to both the
disciplining and the exploration of a range of sexualities.
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