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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles
Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries
and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book
challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and
philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of
premodern texts and contexts, from the musicality of sodomy in
twelfth-century polyphony to Chaucer's representation of
pedagogical violence in the Prioress's Tale, from early Christian
writings on the music of the body to the plainchant and poetry of
Hildegard of Bingen, the author argues that medieval music was
quintessentially a practice of the flesh.
Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination explores the intersection of gender, art religion (Kunstreligion) and other aesthetic currents in Brahms reception of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the theme of the self-sacrificing musician devoted to his art, or "priest of music," with its quasi-mystical and German Romantic implications of purity seemingly at odds with the lived reality of Brahms's bourgeois existence. While such German Romantic notions of art religion informed the thinking on musical purity and performance, after the failed socio-political revolutions of 1848/49, and in the face of scientific developments, the very concept of musical priesthood was questioned as outmoded. Furthermore, its essential gender ambiguity, accommodating such performing mothers as Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, could suit the bachelor Brahms but leave the composer open to speculation. Supportive critics combined elements of masculine and feminine values with a muddled rhetoric of prophets, messiahs, martyrs, and other art-religious stereotypes to account for the special status of Brahms and his circle. Detractors tended to locate these stereotypes in a more modern, fin-de-siecle psychological framework that questioned the composer's physical and mental well-being. In analyzing these receptions side by side, this book revises the accepted image of Brahms, recovering lost ambiguities in his reception. It resituates him not only in a romanticized priesthood of art, but also within the cultural and gendered discourses overlooked by the absolute music paradigm.
Time is of the essence in music because the ear can only perceive sequentially-one thing at a time-unlike the eye, which is capable of panoramic view. Silence and Slow Time proposes a way of thinking about music that is faithful to the experience of playing or listening during a real performance. Boykan argues against the common assumption that thematic relationships automatically insure musical coherence, because the repetition or the transformation of a theme is only meaningful if we consider when it occurs. This argument is developed through a close reading of passages from the full range of Western music. Analyses of dramatic narratives in Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin reveal a richness that can only be captured if thematic or voice-leading relationships are placed within a temporal context. Other kinds of narrative are explored in a Renaissance motet, and in the music of Wolf and Debussy at the end of the 19th Century. The book devotes several chapters to the great innovators of the 20th Century, and concludes with a detailed study of the Schoenberg Trio that traces its thematic and harmonic process to suggest a somewhat oblique relation to the apocalyptic moment when it was composed.
This reference provides a new perspective on the work of music's great composers from Bach to Stravinsky, by compiling the comments and criticism offered by other composers, such as Mahler, Wagner, Ravel, Tchaikovsky, and many others. Holmes presents an assessment of composers and musical developments as seen not specifically by the critics but by the composers' peers. While acknowledging that not all composers were necessarily perceptive critics and that few were able to sufficiently distance themselves from their own and others' work to be objective, the book offers many insights in the comments made by composers. The book is organized into 78 short chapters, each focussing on one composer and relating the complimentary or caustic comments made about him by as many as 20 other composers. The chapters are arranged alphabetically by composer and presented in a narrative form, offering years of birth and death and an introductory sentence along with the quotations. The sources of all quotations are documented in a separate note section, and an index of the 85 composers quoted and their subjects is also included. More than just a book of musical anecdotes, this reference will be an important addition to both public and university libraries. It will also be of interest to scholars of music criticism and history, critics and writers who will find it a useful source of quotes, and the general reader interested in music.
This study is the first to consider all three of Rachmaninoff's careers in detail. After surveying his place in Russian musical history and his creative activity, the author examines, with musical examples, each working chronological order against the background of the composer's life. Among the the many subjects upon which new light is shed are the operas, the songs, and the religious music. Rachmaninoff's remarkable career as a pianist, his style of playing and repertoire are analysed along with his historically important contribution to the gramophone and his work for the reproducing piano. The book includes a survey of his activity as a conductor. There are extensive references to Russian sources and the first appearance of a complete Rachmaninoff disconography is included. This book is the only comprehensive study in any language of the three aspects of Rachmaninoff's musical career and is a stimulating read for music lovers everywhere.
First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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.
Although he is the son of J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach is an important composer in his own right, this long-awaited annotated bibliography presents a complete listing of the works of C. P. E. Bach. This volume in the RoutledgeMusic Bibliographies series includes many different aspects of his work: the editing of his father's masterpieces, his concertos and sonatas and theoretical essays. Doris Powers also collects writings that consider C. P. E. Bach's influence, the reception of his works and the cultural milieu in which Bach composed.
This book explores the part played by music, especially group singing, in the Protestant reforms in Strasbourg. It considers both ecclesiastical and 'popular' songs in the city, how both genres fitted into people's lives during this time of strife and how the provision and dissemination of music affected the new ecclesiastical arrangement.
Mozart's emergence as a mature artist coincides with the rise to prominence of the piano, an instrument that came alive under his fingers and served as medium for many of his finest compositions. In Mozart's Piano Music, William Kinderman reconsiders common assumptions about Mozart's life and art while offering comprehensive and incisive commentary on the solo music and concertos. After placing Mozart's pianistic legacy in its larger biographical and cultural context, Kinderman addresses the lively gestural and structural aspects of Mozart's musical language and explores the nature of his creative process. Incorporating the most recent research throughout this encompassing study, Kinderman expertly surveys each of the major genres of the keyboard music, including the four-hand and two-piano works. Beyond examining issues such as Mozart's earliest childhood compositions, his musical rhetoric and expression, the social context of his Viennese concertos, and affinities between his piano works and operas, Kinderman's main emphasis falls on detailed discussion of selected individual compositions.
The Spanish Republican exile of 1939 impacted music as much as it did literature and academia, with well-known figures such as Adolfo Salazar and Roberto Gerhard forced to leave Spain. Exile is typically regarded as a discontinuity - an irreparable dissociation between the home country and the host country. Spanish exiled composers, however, were never totally cut off from the musical life of Francoist Spain (1939-1975), be it through private correspondence, public performances of their work, honorary appointments and invitations from Francoist institutions, or a physical return to Spanish soil. Music and Exile in Francoist Spain analyses the connections of Spanish exiled composers with their homeland throughout 1939-1975. Taking the diversity and heterogeneity of the Spanish Republican exile as its starting point, the volume presents extended comparative case studies in order to broaden and advance current conceptions of, and debates surrounding, exile in musicology and Spanish studies. In doing so, it significantly furthers academic research on individual composers including Salvador Bacarisse, Julian Bautista, Roberto Gerhard, Rodolfo Halffter, Julian Orbon and Adolfo Salazar. As the first English-language monograph to explore the exiled composers from the perspectives of historiography, music criticism, performance and correspondence, Eva Moreda Rodriguez's vivid reconception of the role of place and nation in twentieth-century music history will be of particular interest for scholars of Spanish music, Spanish Republican history, and exile and displacement more broadly.
This is a critical bibliography of choral compositions accessible to the high school choir, representing major composers and stylistic trends during this century. The 1990 edition of the bibliography includes over 360 titles, providing a convenient sourcebook for secondary school choral directors, choral methods classes, and collegiate choral directors to use in building repertoire for their programs.
First Published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This book brings together music and visual arts, especially the art of landscape gardening, in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English and German culture. The aesthetic of the picturesque, derived from the controlled wilderness of the landscape garden, provided writers on music with a language in which to describe the musical genre of the free fantasia, and the picturesque emerges here as a vital means for understanding the fantastical elements in the music of C. P. E. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven.
John Antill (1904-1986) was one of the foremost composers of Australia's post-colonial period. Although a relatively prolific and much esteemed composer in Australia, Antill's wider reputation is sustained chiefly by his famous ballet Corroboree - a work which was perceived to bring an authentic Australian musical style before both a national and international audience for the first time. Through Sir Eugene Goossens' championship, the work was heard by enthusiastic audiences in Australia, Britain, Europe and the USA, and was, for many years, the best-known work of any Australian-born and resident composer. Indeed it has remained, for both Australian and overseas audiences, an Australian musical icon. David Symons traces Antill's development as a composer from his early, pre-Corroboree works, which display a late Romantic to post-impressionist style, through an analysis of the virile, dissonant, primitivist idiom of his magnum opus, to an examination of his later output of theatrical, orchestral and vocal/choral works. The book provides comprehensive and valuable insight into Antill's musical output, at the same time focussing on more detailed analyses of his major works which have reached public performances and/or recordings. In this way the book not only presents a developmental picture of Antill's works, but also demonstrates why they have made him one of Australia's most prominent musical creators of the post-colonial period.
The first large-scale study of the music of Herbert Howells, prodigiously gifted musician and favourite student of the notoriously hard-to-please Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Herbert Howells (1892-1983) was a prodigiously gifted musician and the favourite student of the notoriously hard-to-please Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Throughout his long life, he was one of the country's most prominent composers, writing extensively in all genres except the symphony and opera. Yet today he is known mostly for his church music, and there is as yet relatively little serious study of his work. This book is the first large-scale study of Howells's music, affording both detailed consideration of individual works and a broad survey of general characteristics and issues. Its coverage is wide-ranging, addressing all aspects of the composer's prolific output and probing many of the issues that it raises. The essays are gathered in five sections: Howells the Stylist examines one of the most striking aspect of the composer's music, its strongly characterised personal voice; Howells the VocalComposer addresses both his well-known contribution to church music and his less familiar, but also important, contribution to the genre of solo song; Howells the Instrumental Composer shows that he was no less accomplished for his work in genres without words, for which, in fact, he first made his name; Howells the Modern considers the composer's rather overlooked contribution to the development of a modern voice for British music; and Howells in Mourning explores the important impact of his son's death on his life and work. The composer that emerges from these studies is a complex figure: technically fluent but prone to revision and self-doubt; innovative but also conservative; a composer with an improvisational sense of flow who had a firm grasp of musical form; an exponent of British musical style who owed as much to continental influence as to his national heritage. This volume, comprising a collection of outstanding essays by established writers and emergent scholars, opens up the range of Howells's achievement to a wider audience, both professional and amateur. PHILLIP COOKE is Lecturer in Composition at theUniversity of Aberdeen. DAVID MAW is Tutor and Research Fellow in Music at Oriel College, Oxford, holding Lectureships also at Christ Church, The Queen's and Trinity Colleges. CONTRIBUTORS: Byron Adams, Paul Andrews, Graham Barber, Jonathan Clinch, Phillip A. Cooke, Jeremy Dibble, Lewis Foreman, Fabian Huss, David Maw, Diane Nolan Cooke, Lionel Pike, Paul Spicer, Jonathan White. Foreword by John Rutter.
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.
First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Paul Hindemith: 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 musician and teacher. The second edition includes research published since the publication of the first edition and provides electronic resources.
John Harley's Thomas Tallis is the first full-length book to deal comprehensively with the composer's life and works. Tallis entered the Chapel Royal in the middle of a long life, and remained there for over 40 years. During a colourful period of English history he famously served King Henry VIII and the three of Henry's children who followed him to the throne. His importance for English music during the second half of the sixteenth century is equalled only by that of his pupil, colleague and friend William Byrd. In a series of chronological chapters, Harley describes Tallis's career before and after he entered the Chapel. The fully considered biography is placed in the context of larger political and cultural changes of the period. Each monarch's reign is treated with an examination of the ways in which Tallis met its particular musical needs. Consideration is given to all of Tallis's surviving compositions, including those probably intended for patrons and amateurs beyond the court, and attention is paid to the context within which they were written. Tallis emerges as a composer whose music displays his special ability in setting words and creating ingenious musical patterns. A table places most of Tallis's compositions in a broad chronological order.
First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Under the dictatorships of the twentieth century, music never ceased to sound. Even when they did not impose aesthetic standards, these regimes tended to favour certain kinds of art music such as occasional works for commemorations or celebrations, symphonic poems, cantatas and choral settings. In the same way, composers who were more or less ideologically close to the regime wrote pieces of music on their own initiative, which amounted to a support of the political order. This book presents ten studies focusing on music inspired and promoted by regimes such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, France under Vichy, the USSR and its satellites, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Maoist China, and Latin-American dictatorships. By discussing the musical works themselves, whether they were conceived as ways to provide "music for the people", to personally honour the dictator, or to participate in State commemorations of glorious historical events, the book examines the relationship between the composers and the State. This important volume, therefore, addresses theoretical issues long neglected by both musicologists and historians: What is the relationship between art music and propaganda? How did composers participate in musical life under the control of an authoritarian State? What was specifically political in the works produced in these contexts? How did audiences react to them? Can we speak confidently about "State music"? In this way, Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth Century Dictatorships is an essential contribution to our understanding of musical cultures of the twentieth century, as well as the symbolic policies of dictatorial regimes.
In Essays in Honor of Christopher Hogwood: The Maestro's Direction, Thomas Donahue has collected several essays from authors who have been motivated and inspired by the distinguished keyboard player, music editor, writer, and conductor, Christopher Hogwood, in honor of his 70th birthday in 2011. As is clearly shown in the assembled articles, Hogwood has had considerable influence in the latter half of the 20th century in advocating the historically informed performance of early music. Contributions from such scholars as Yo Tomita, Richard Troeger, Sabine K. Klaus, Bridget Cunningham, and Annette Richards pay tribute to this major musician of the 20th century, one of the strongest advocates for the performance of early music. The volume begins with a foreword by Bernard Brauchli, followed by a chronology of Hogwood's education and career, including his publications and awards. The succeeding essays cover a variety of subjects associated with Hogwood's approach to early music, including the interpretation of composers' notations, discussions of musical instrument construction and use, elucidation of performance traditions and conventions of the past, and analysis of the music itself. The essays provide insights on the music of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and J.S. and C.P.E. Bach and consider various keyboard instruments such as the clavichord, square piano, spinet, and claviorgan. An afterword by Hogwood himself completes this well rounded collection. |
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