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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles
Malcolm Arnold's music encompassed a variety of forms from opera and ballet through orchestral and chamber music to film scores. His most famous film score, for which he won an Oscar award in 1957, is The Bridge on the River Kwai. In 1953 he was commissioned to compose Homage to the Queen, a ballet to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Arnold was knighted by the Queen in 1993 in honor of his contributions to English music. As with the other volumes in the Greenwood Bio-Bibliographies in Music series, this work includes a brief biography, discography, complete list of works and performances, and an annotated bibliography. Music scholars, musicians, and those with an interest in the music of Malcolm Arnold will appreciate the extensive information gathered in this one volume. Since Malcolm Arnold has retired from composing, this book features the most complete list of his compositions, including some of his newly discovered early works. The works are listed alphabetically within genre. The author also provides a chronological listing of the works through which trends and developments in Arnold's compositions may be traced. Sir Malcolm Arnold's input with the project assures the accuracy and completeness of this bio-bibliography.
Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) was the epitome of the New England iconoclast. A composer of the American avant-garde movement, he wrote, in a very concise and dissonant style, a small body of truly unique musical works. He lived to be 95, composing to the very end of his life, but left behind a mere eight sanctioned works which he had rewritten and refined over decades. In the 1920s, he was at the focal point of ultra-modern music-making. Since there is currently a renewed interest in his work, this bio-bibliography is timely and needed, and of interest to scholars, students, and performers. During the 1920s, had Edgard Varese or Charles Ives been asked to name America's greatest living composer, the response would have been Carl Ruggles. Forty years later, such eminent experts on American music as Nicolas Slonimsky, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland would each describe Ruggles as our most technically refined composer. Ruggles, with Varese and Ives, was the standard-bearer of the atonal movement in this century's third decade. With the rise of American realism, he slipped out of the public eye. Recent years have seen a resurgence of performances of his works and research on his music; consequently, there is a need for this timely bio-bibliography.
During the nineteenth century, nearly one hundred symphonies were written by over fifty composers living in the United States. With few exceptions, this repertoire is virtually forgotten today. In Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise, author Douglas W. Shadle explores the stunning stylistic diversity of this substantial repertoire and uncovers why it failed to enter the musical mainstream. Throughout the century, Americans longed for a distinct national musical identity. As the most prestigious of all instrumental genres, the symphony proved to be a potent vehicle in this project as composers found inspiration for their works in a dazzling array of subjects, including Niagara Falls, Hiawatha, and Western pioneers. With a wealth of musical sources at his disposal, including never-before-examined manuscripts, Shadle reveals how each component of the symphonic enterprise-from its composition, to its performance, to its immediate and continued reception by listeners and critics-contributed to competing visions of American identity. Employing an innovative transnational historical framework, Shadle's narrative covers three continents and shows how the music of major European figures such as Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Brahms, and Dvorak exerted significant influence over dialogues about the future of American musical culture. Shadle demonstrates that the perceived authority of these figures allowed snobby conductors, capricious critics, and even orchestral musicians themselves to thwart the efforts of American symphonists despite widespread public support of their music. Consequently, these works never entered the performing canons of American orchestras. An engagingly written account of a largely unknown repertoire, Orchestrating the Nation shows how artistic and ideological debates from the nineteenth century continue to shape the culture of American orchestral music today.
In a music business amply buffered against surprise, Danny Gatton swam stubbornly, from country, to gospel, rockabilly, soul, and standards. "Redneck Jazz" became Gatton's calling card for playing whatever and whenever he wanted. Hailed as the best unknown guitar player by both Rolling Stone and Guitar player magazines, he was a players' player who never received the popular acclaim he deserved. The struggle to reach a wider audience while staying true to his own muse proved to much for him to bear, and in 1994 he took his own life. Gatton's legend has only grown since his untimely death, along with appreciation for his blinding speed, effortless genre-hopping, flawless technique, and never-ending appetitie for tinkering and problem-solving. Unfinished Business places Gatton's musical contributions into context, as well as his influence on those peers who admired him most, including Albert Lee, Vince Gill, Arlen Roth, and Lou Reed.
Ephemeral, fragile, often left unbound, sixteenth-century songbooks led fleeting lives in the pockets of singers and on the music desks of instrumentalists. Constantly in action, they were forever being used up, replaced, or abandoned as ways of reading changed. As such they document the acts of early musicians and the practices of everyday life at the unseen margins of elite society. Materialities is a cultural history of song on the page. It addresses a series of central questions concerning the audiences for written music by concentrating on the first genre to be commercialized by music printers: the French chanson. Scholars have long stressed that chansons represent the most broadly disseminated polyphony of the sixteenth century, but Materialities is the first book to account for the cultural reach of the chanson across a considerable cross-section of European society. Musicologist Kate van Orden brings extensive primary research and new analytical models to bear in this remarkable history of songbooks, music literacy, and social transformation during the first century of music printing. By tracking chansons into private libraries and schoolrooms and putting chansonniers into dialogue with catechisms, civility manuals, and chapbooks, Materialities charts the social distribution of songbooks, the gradual moralization of song, and the ways children learned their letters and notes. Its fresh conclusions revise several common assumptions about the value early moderns attributed to printed music, the levels of literacy required to perform polyphony, and the way musicians did or did not "read" their songbooks. With musical perspectives that can invigorate studies of print culture and the history of reading, Materialities is an essential guide for musicologists working with original sources and historians of the book interested in the vocal performances that operated alongside print.
This annotated chronology of western music from 313-1425 is the first in a series of outlines covering the history of music in western civilization. The present volume covers the background, philosophy, theory, notation, style, and forms or classes of music of the periods stated and also the works of theorists or composers. Sources, facsimiles, and transcriptions of musical manuscripts and sources of treatises by musical theorists, in the original language and in English translation, are indicated where possible. The instruments of each historical period are listed and described. Musical terms are defined at the end of each chapter. Foreign words, parts of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church, musical terms, titles of theoretical works and musical manuscripts, and names of composers, theorists, and places of interest are defined in the section entitled Definition and Pronunciation. This section also includes the translation and pronunciation of words in Classical and Ecclesiastical Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Old English, and Old French. At the end of each section of the book are maps that show pertinent Empires and Kingdoms, and the areas of musical development and activity of each historical period. Appendices have been added in order to discuss notation and rhythm in greater depth and to divulge some different theories concerning the material found in the text. Supplemental sources for further study are found at the end of each historical period.
Irwin Bazelon, one of the most original figures in American music in the second half of the 20th century, devoted his life to the art of composition. He was also well known for his musical compositions for films, television, commercials, and documentaries. His music was inspired by his experiences in the fast-paced environments of Chicago and New York. This major bibliography presents a biographical sketch, which details the influence of city life on the composer's artistic creativity, a catalogue of his compositions and performances, and a discography. A bibliography includes excerpts from the composer's lectures and other unpublished writings. This thorough research tool will appeal to scholars of 20th-century music and to Bazelon fans. An archive of the composer's collections is included, and the separate book sections are cross-referenced throughout.
Granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) was an extraordinary musician who left well over four hundred compositions, most of which fell into oblivion until their rediscovery late in the twentieth century. In Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, R. Larry Todd offers a compelling, authoritative account of Hensel's life and music, and her struggle to emerge as a publicly recognized composer.
Over the last decade, the theatre and opera of the French
Revolution have been the subject of intense scholarly reassessment,
both in terms of the relationship between theatrical works and
politics or ideology in this period and on the question of
longer-scale structures of continuity or rupture in aesthetics.
Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris
Opera, 1789-1794 moves these discussions boldly forward, focusing
on the Paris Opera (Academie Royale de Musique) in the cultural and
political context of the early French Revolution. Both
institutional history and cultural study, this is the first ever
full-scale study of the Revolution and lyric theatre. The book
concentrates on three aspects of how a royally-protected theatre
negotiates the transition to national theatre: the external
dimension, such as questions of ownership and governance and the
institution's relationship with State institutions and popular
assemblies; the internal management, finances, selection and
preparation of works; and the cultural and aesthetic study of the
works themselves and of their reception.
Even after acquiring the Doctor of Laws degree from both the University of Berlin and the Sorbonne (discussed in a letter, along with the effects of living in Europe during the Nazi era), Konrad Wolff's enthusiasm for music was so overwhelming that he became a professional musician in his mid-thirties. That enthusiasm is contagious. The more one reads his work, the more one understands music, but perhaps of greater importance, the more one loves it. This is the only collection of a substantial quantity of his prolific writings (many never published before) under one cover. With almost 200 musical illustrations and his engaging style of writing, teachers, students, and sophisticated music lovers will find articles such as Schubert's Reaction to Beethoven, Bach's Last Work, and Beethovenian Dissonances in Listz's Piano Music a pleasurable read and an easy way to learn. Correspondence with Sviatoslav Richter, among others, and a brilliant debate between Wolff and Alfred Brendel are unique contributions. Also impressive is the breadth of Wolff's culture. As one scholar who had read the manuscript exclaimed: The writing is so brilliant that it can be applied to fields other than music, as well.
In July of 1884, pianist Calixa Lavallee performed a recital of works by American composers that began a highly influential series of such concerts. Over the course of the next decade, hundreds of all-American concerts were performed in the United States and Europe, a movement that fostered both the development and the perception of American music as a unique art form. "A Tidal Wave of Encouragement"-the title of which is derived from one observer's description of the movement-is the first in-depth study of this significant period in American music. Providing a comprehensive history of the Concerts as well as detailed accounts of the intense critical debate surrounding them, author E. Douglas Bomberger reveals how one decade shaped the future of American classical music and very much impacted the way we hear it today. The movement, crucial in focusing discussion on American music and providing performance opportunities for composers and musicians for whom no such opportunities had before existed, was far more extensive and widespread than most scholarship had credited it. This oversight is due in large part to the dearth of objective studies of the Concerts; previous considerations have tended either toward the merely nostalgic or toward the unnecessarily disparaging. Bomberger's work is a corrective to this, as well as much-needed historical and critical account of a project whose influence had yet to be fully acknowledged.
This catalogue completes the bibliographic survey of French harpsichord music begun in Bruce Gustafson's French Harpsichord Music of the Seventeenth Century: A Thematic Catalogue of Sources with Commentary (Ann Arbor, 1979). It has entries for all of the printed music known to have existed, over 230 volumes, and 150 manuscripts. It offers precise transcriptions of the title pages, full contents, dating, locations, editions, facsimiles, evaluations in the contemporary press, identifications of dedicatees, and stylistic comments. The eighteenth-century French harpsichord repertory is shown to extend from 1699 to about 1780, from Louis Marchand's Pieces de clavecin to the four Symphonies concertantes by Jean-Francois Tapray that juxtapose the harpsichord and piano as solo instruments. All original keyboard music is included. Since the introduction of the piano into France occurred during the twenty years preceding 1780, this Catalogue includes some music that may have been intended for that instrument rather than for the harpsichord. This period of transition is discussed in full in the Introduction.
Regina Mingotti was the first female impresario to run London's opera house. Born in Naples in 1722, she was the daughter of an Austrian diplomat, and had worked at Dresden under Hasse from 1747. Mingotti left Germany in 1752, and travelled to Madrid to sing at the Spanish court, where the opera was directed by the great castrato, Farinelli. It is not known quite how Francesco Vanneschi, the opera promoter, came to hire Mingotti, but in 1754 (travelling to England via Paris), she was announced as being engaged for the opera in London 'having been admired at Naples and other parts of Italy, by all the Connoisseurs, as much for the elegance of her voice as that of her features'. Michael Burden offers the first considered survey of Mingotti's London years, including material on Mingotti's publication activities, and the identification of the characters in the key satirical print 'The Idol'. Burden makes a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of eighteenth-century singers' careers and status, and discusses the management, the finance, the choice of repertory, and the pasticcio practice at The King's Theatre, Haymarket during the middle of the eighteenth century. Burden also argues that Mingotti's years with Farinelli influenced her understanding of drama, fed her appreciation of Metastasio, and were partly responsible for London labelling her a 'female Garrick'. The book includes the important publication of the complete texts of both of Mingotti's Appeals to the Publick, accounts of the squabble between Mingotti and Vanneschi, which shed light on the role a singer could play in the replacement of arias.
In Chopin's set of 24 interconnected "Preludes (Op. 28)," we are presented with 24 distinct compositional surfaces, aiming at as many distinguishable emotional expressions. As such, the Preludes stand as a virtual survey of the developing musical manners of the 19th century--which was, after all, the stylistic period in which mood was promoted most energetically and frankly. Under analytic investigation, the technical means to these varied expressive ends can be discovered and assessed. 24 separate explorations reveal themselves to the inquiring musician, who can investigate any or as many of the pieces as is wished or needed. At the same time, the Preludes form a fairly compelling total entity, related by precise balances of mood and key, as well as certain subtler interconnecting details. The individual analyses aim at conjoined descriptive statements that take into account the various separable, but ultimately fused, musical elements: line and harmony in the pitch domain; rhythm in terms of local detail, but also at the levels of meter, phrase, and form; and the various expressive modifications of dynamics and articulation. Form is seen to grow out of the harnessed progress of these elements, which together determine expressive content. "The Chopin Preludes," a centerpiece of 19th-century Romanticism, are unique: two dozen distinct moods that seem to summarize the musical manners of the time, they also function as an organic whole. This book is a detailed guide through the "Preludes," both individually and as a group. The analyses assess technical and expressive means and ends.
Essays illuminating a complex and sophisticated musical manuscript. The Segovia Manuscript (Cathedral of Segovia, Archivo Capitular) has puzzled musicologists ever since its rediscovery at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is unique: no other manuscript of the period transmits a comparable blend of late fifteenth-century music, consisting of 204 sacred works and vernacular pieces in Flemish, French, Italian, and Spanish. An important group of pedagogical pieces by French and Flemish composers may preserve transcriptions of instrumental improvisation. This summary might suggest a messy collection, but on the contrary the manuscript is arranged with care, copied by one proficient scribe (except perhaps for the Spanish texts), who obviously followed a predetermined master plan. But which plan, who designed it, and why was the person responsible so interested in this combination? The essays here aim to treat every dimension of this fascinating source. New discoveries help date the manuscript and explain how it came to Segovia; particular attention is paid to the main scribe, now determined to be Flemish, and his relation with northern composers and repertory, above all that of Jacob Obrecht, Alexander Agricola, and Henricus Isaac; and the vexed question of the conflicting attributions is considered afresh and found to affect only a few of the fascicles. The contributors also look at questions of ownership and function. . WOLFGANG FUHRMANN is Professor of Musicology at Leipzig University; CRISTINA URCHUEGUIA is Professor of Musicology at the University of Bern. Contributors: Bonnie J. Blackburn, Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Tess Knighton, Kenneth Kreitner, Honey Meconi, Emilio Ros-Fabregas, Cristina Urchueguia, Rob C. Wegman
This book develops an authentic and at the same time revolutionary musical analysis of ancient Greek poetry. It departs from the abstract metrical analyses of the past in that it conceives the rhythmic and harmonic elements of poetry as integral to the whole expression, and decisive in the interpretation of its meaning. David offers a thoroughgoing treatment of Homeric poetics: here some remarkable discoveries in the harmonic movement of epic verse, when combined with some neglected facts about the origin of the hexameter in a "dance of the Muses," lead to essential new thinking about the genesis and the form of Homeric poetry. He also gives a foretaste of the fruits to be harvested in lyric by a musical analysis, which applies a new theory of the Greek tonic accent and considers concretely the role of dance in performance.
Juxtaposing artistic and musical representations of the emotions with medical, philosophical and scientific texts in Western culture between the Renaissance and the twentieth century, the essays collected in this volume explore the ways in which emotions have been variously conceived, configured, represented and harnessed in relation to broader discourses of control, excess and refinement. Since the essays explore the interstices between disciplines (e.g. music and medicine, history of art and philosophy) and thereby disrupt established frameworks within the histories of art, music and medicine, traditional narrative accounts are challenged. Here larger historical forces come into perspective, as these papers suggest how both artistic and scientific representations of the emotions have been put to use in political, social and religious struggles, at a variety of different levels.
"The Mendelssohn Companion" represents a collection of advanced scholarly research in Mendelssohn studies that examines the composer's life and music. In recent decades, studies of his music manuscripts have discovered much previously overlooked work, and a reconsideration of his biography has permitted a more realistic portrayal of Mendelssohn. The first three chapters of this volume place the composer in his intellectual context and discuss his family and social circle and his professional activities. Later chapters examine the major areas of his compositional work, providing new analytical observations, contextual perspectives, and interpretations. Historical views and documents are included with each chapter and are all newly translated. The new material in this fully documented study will appeal to scholars, students, and music enthusiasts alike. An updated bibliographic list of Mendelssohn's works, which identifies the autograph manuscripts and the most important published editions will be of special interest.
There is a striking similarity between Marian devotional songs and secular love songs of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Two disparate genres-one sacred, the other secular; one Latin, the other vernacular-both praise an idealized, impossibly virtuous woman. Each does so through highly stylized derivations of traditional medieval song forms - Marian prayer derived from earlier Gregorian chant, and love songs and lyrics from medieval courtly song. Yet despite their obvious similarities, the two musical and poetic traditions have rarely been studied together. Author David Rothenberg takes on this task with remarkable success, producing a useful and broad introduction to Marian music and liturgy, and then coupling that with an incisive comparative analysis of this devotional form with the words and music of secular love songs of the period. The Flower of Paradise examines the interplay of Marian devotional and secular poetics within polyphonic music from c. 1200 to c. 1500. Through case studies of works that demonstrate a specific symbolic resonance between Marian devotional and secular song, the book illustrates the distinctive ethos of this period in European culture. Rothenberg makes use of an impressive command of liturgical and religious studies, literature and poetry, and art history to craft a study with wide application across disciplinary boundaries. With its broad scope and unique, incisive analysis, this book is suited for scholars, students, and general readers alike. Undergraduate and graduate students of musicology, Medieval and Renaissance studies, comparative literature, art history, Western reglious history, and music history-especially that of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and sacred music-will find this book a useful and informative resource on the period. The Flower of Paradise is also of interest to those with a particular dedication to any of its diverse subject areas. For individuals involved in religious organizations or those who frequent Medieval or Renaissance cultural sites and museums, this book will deepen their knowledge and open up new ways of thinking about the history and development of secular and sacred music and the Marian tradition.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Nor-tec phenomenon emerged from the border city of Tijuana, and through modern Internet technology quickly conquered a global audience. Marketed as a kind of "ethnic" electronic dance music, Nor-tec samples sounds of traditional music from the north of Mexico, transforming these sounds through computer technology used in European and American techno music and electronica. Mostly middle-class artists in their thirties, and with few exceptions all from Tijuana, Nor-tec musicians tend to avoid the mainstream music industry's channels, distributing works instead through the underground, global means of the Internet, enabling a loyal international following to grow rapidly. Perched on the border between Mexico and the United States, Tijuana has media links to both countries, with peoples, currencies, and cultural goods -perhaps especially music- from both sides circulating intensely within the city. Tijuana's older residents and their more mobile, cosmopolitan-minded children thus engage in a constant struggle with identity and nationality, appropriation and authenticity. Nor-tec music in its very composition encapsulates this city's struggle. It resonates with issues felt on the global level, while holding vastly different meanings to the variety of communities that embrace it. In Nor-tec Rifa!, Alejandro L. Madrid crafts a fascinating account of this music and the city that fostered its birth. With an impressive hybrid of musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural and performance studies, urbanism, and border studies, Nor-tec Rifa! offers compelling insights into the cultural production of Nor-tec as it stems from ortena, banda, and grupera traditions. The book is also amongst the first to offer detailed accounts of Nor-tec music's composition process.
The biography of a fascinating cultural hero, Rene Blum and the
Ballets Russes uncovers the events in the life of the enigmatic and
brilliant writer and producer who perished in the Holocaust.
Brother of Leon Blum, the first socialist prime minister of France,
Rene Blum was a passionate and prominent litterateur. He was the
editor of the chic literary journal Gil Blas where he met such
celebrated figures as Claude Debussy, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard
Vuillard, Andre Gide, and Paul Valery. As author Judith
Chazin-Bennahum's research illustrates, Blum actually arranged for
the publication of Proust's Swann's Way. But Blum's accomplishments
and legacy do not end there: after enlisting in World War I, he won
the Croix de Guerre and became a national hero. And Blum
resurrected the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo after Diaghilev's
death. Tragically, he was arrested in 1941 during a roundup of
Jewish intellectuals and ultimately sent to Auschwitz.
The Harlem Renaissance, from 1910 to 1927, was the time when Harlem came alive with theater, drama, sports, dance, and politics. Looking at events as diverse as the prizefight between Jack Johnson and Jim “White Hope” Jeffries, the choreography of Aida Walker and Ethel Waters, the writing of Zora Neale Hurston and the musicals of the period, Krasner paints a vibrant portrait of those years. This was the time when the residents of northern Manhattan were leading their downtown counterparts at the vanguard of artistic ferment while at the same time playing a pivotal role in the evolution of Black Nationalism. This is a thrilling piece of work, a classic destined to become the standard work on the Harlem Renaissance for years to come.
Leslie Bassett is a 20th-century composer, lecturer, university professor, and winner of many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He is unique among contemporary composers because he has written for many categories of music: brass, band and wind ensemble, chamber, choral, solo voice, instrumental solo, orchestra, organ, and piano. A favorite with students, he has also endeared himself as a guest composer at festivals and symposia in many states for over 30 years. This volume collects for the first time the widely scattered source materials on Bassett and thus documents his preeminence in the history and development of contemporary American music. The biographical section of this volume first sketches Bassett's life and career and then gives an evaluative description of the progression of his musical compositions. To give a feeling for his music, illustrations of selected scores accompany some of the discussion. Next is a classified list of works arranged in alphabetical order and divided into 11 categories of performance, followed by a discography. The bibliography is annotated; there is a separate section for reviews of performances and concerts. Also included is an appendix that gives a chronological list of guest composer appearances, featuring festivals, symposia, and major educational events. Three other appendices round out the thorough coverage of source materials that have until now been difficult to see as a whole. Here they are readily accessible; thus, the book becomes a ready reference for the study of this acknowledged master of music. |
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