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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles
This book (published in German by Bärenreiter in 1988 and now available in English translation for the first time) is a comprehensive guide to the genesis, transmission, structure, meaning, and performance considerations of Bach's St John Passion. One of Bach's most fascinating works, its text demonstrates a profound understanding of St John's Gospel. The musical design of the choruses with their numerous interrelationships is quite unique and demands some explanation. The fact that the Passion exists in four different versions leads Dürr to ask which changes were intentional and which were the result of practical constraints or of orders issued by church authorities.
Sound film captivated Sergey Prokofiev during the final two decades of his life: he considered composing for nearly two dozen pictures, eventually undertaking eight of them, all Soviet productions. Hollywood luminaries such as Gloria Swanson tempted him with commissions, and arguably more people heard his film music than his efforts in all other genres combined. Films for which Prokofiev composed, in particular those of Sergey Eisenstein, are now classics of world cinema. Drawing on newly available sources, Composing for the Red Screen examines-for the first time-the full extent of this prodigious cinematic career. Bartig examines how Prokofiev's film music derived from a self-imposed challenge: to compose "serious" music for a broad audience. The picture that emerges is of a composer seeking an individual film-music voice, shunning Hollywood models and objecting to his Soviet colleagues' ideologically expedient film songs. Looking at Prokofiev's film music as a whole-with well-known blockbusters like Alexander Nevsky considered alongside more obscure or aborted projects-reveals that there were multiple solutions to the challenge, each with varying degrees of success. Prokofiev carefully balanced his own populist agenda, the perceived aesthetic demands of the films themselves, and, later on, Soviet bureaucratic demands for accessibility.
This edited volume of case studies presents a selective history of French music and culture, but one with a dynamic difference. Eschewing a traditional chronological account, the book explores the nature of relationships between one main period, broadly the 'long' modernist era between 1860-1960, and its own historical 'others', referencing topics from the Romantic, classical, baroque, renaissance and medieval periods. It probes the emergent interplay, intertextualities and scope for reinterpretation across time and place. Notions of cultural meaning are paramount, especially those pertaining to French identity, national and individual. While founded on historical musicology, the approach benefits from interdisciplinary association with philosophy, political history, literature, fine art, film studies and criticism. Attention is paid to French composers' celebrations and remakings of their predecessors. Editions of and writings about earlier music are examined, together with the cultural reception of performances of past repertoire. Organized into two parts, each of the eleven chapters characterizes a specific cultural network or temporal interplay, which may result in synthesis, disjunction, or historical misreading. The interwar years and those surrounding the Second World War prove particularly rich sources of enquiry. This volume aims to attract a wide readership of musicologists and musicians, as well as cultural historians, other humanities scholars and concert-goers.
Composer, pianist, and critic Claude Debussy's musical aesthetic represents the single most powerful influence on international musical developments during the long fin de siecle period. The development of Debussy's musical language and style was affected by the international political pressures of his time, beginning with the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the rise of the new Republic in France, and was also related to the contemporary philosophical conceptualization of what constituted art. The Debussy idiom exemplifies the ways in which various disciplines - musical, literary, artistic, philosophical, and psychological - can be incorporated into a single, highly-integrated artistic conception. Rethinking Debussy draws together separate areas of Debussy research into a lucid perspective that reveals the full significance of the composer's music and thought in relation to the broader cultural, intellectual, and artistic issues of the twentieth century. Ranging from new biographical information to detailed interpretations of Debussy's music, the volume offers significant multidisciplinary insight into Debussy's music and musical life, as well as the composer's influence on the artistic developments that followed. Chapters include: "Russian Imprints in Debussy's Piano Music"; "Music as Encoder of the Unconscious in Pelleas et Melisande"; "An Artist High and Low, or Debussy and Money"; "Debussy's Ideal Pelleas and the Limits of Authorial Intent"; "Debussy in Daleville: Toward Early Modernist Hearing in the United States"; and more. Rethinking Debussy will appeal to students and scholars of French music, opera, and modernism, and literary and French studies scholars, particularly concerned with Symbolism and theatre. General readers will be drawn to the book as well, particularly to chapters focusing on Debussy's finances, dramatic works, and reception.
Olivier Messiaen: A Research and Information Guide, Second Edition presents researchers with the most significant and helpful resources on Olivier Messiaen, one of the twentieth century's greatest composers. With multiple indices, this annotated bibliography will serve as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars sorting through the massive amount of material in the field. The second edition has been fully revised and updated.
This is the first volume to explore the reception of the Pythagorean doctrine of cosmic harmony within a variety of contexts, ranging chronologically from Plato to 18th-century England. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning the relationship between music, philosophy, and science, and challenges the view that Renaissance discussions on cosmic harmony are either mere repetitions of ancient music theory or pre-figurations of the 'Scientific Revolution'. Utilizing this interdisciplinary approach, Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony offers a new perspective on the reception of an important classical theme in various cultural, sequential and geographical contexts, underlying the continuities and changes between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This project will be of particular interest within these emerging disciplines as they continue to explore the ideological significance of the various ways in which we appropriate the past.
The American Wind Symphony Editions comprises the more than 150 works commissioned by Robert Austin Boudreau for the American Waterways Wind Orchestra and published by the C. F. Peters Corporation. They are here presented for the first time in a complete catalog with detailed descriptive data, biographical information on the composers or arrangers, and score facsimiles. The published music represents about half of the over 300 works commissioned by the orchestra since 1957 in the largest such project in wind instrument history. Presented in this catalog are the published works of 83 composers from 28 countries, including such notables as Alan Hovhaness, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Krzysztof Penderecki, Ned Rorem, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. Genres include original concert and chamber music, incidental and occasional music, and theatrical and pop pieces, as well as arrangements of past masters. The compositional characteristics of each work are described, and data on number of performers, date of composition, duration, score accessibility, composer nationality and dates, and itemized instrumentation is listed. The catalog further provides appendixes classifying the music by composer nationality, duration of works, type of soloist, number of performers, programming category, and other fields. A selective discography is included, as are indexes of works by composer and title. Background history on the wind orchestra and music publisher is also provided.
This book examines the origin, content, and development of the musical thought of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg. One of the premises is that Schenker's and Schoenberg's inner musical lives are inseparable from their inner spiritual lives. Curiously, Schenker and Schoenberg start out in much the same musical-spiritual place, yet musically they split while spiritually they grow closer. The reception of Schenker's and Schoenberg's work has sidestepped this paradox of commonality and conflict, instead choosing to universalize and amplify their conflict. Bringing to light a trove of unpublished material, Arndt argues that Schenker's and Schoenberg's conflict is a reflection of tensions within their musical and spiritual ideas. They share a particular conception of the tone as an ideal sound realized in the spiritual eye of the genius. The tensions inherent in this largely psychological and material notion of the tone and this largely metaphysical notion of the genius shape both their musical divergence on the logical (technical) level in theory and composition, including their advocacy of the Ursatz versus twelvetone composition, and their spiritual convergence, including their embrace of Judaism. These findings shed new light on the musical and philosophical worlds of Schenker and Schoenberg and on the profound artistic and spiritual questions with which they grapple.
One of the momentous events in twentieth century music was the advent of atonality and serialism, and the consequent proliferation of such avant-garde genres as total serialism, electronic music, and aleatory music. This book examines serialism and its progeny, formulates criteria that are applicable both to serialism and to the traditional harmony from which it developed, and focuses on the failure of serialism to solve the problem of coherent harmonic progression. Rather than seeking to denounce serialism, the work attempts to restore a balance by questioning whether its esteem is justified. In this work, Schoffman applies the criterion of the degree of indeterminacy of the chords to both traditional functional harmony and to serial and avant-garde music. Consequently, serialism and avant-garde music are placed in a historical perspective and evaluated in terms of their chordal behavior. The study is divided into four separate sections, examining the indeterminacy of progression, the indeterminacy of members of chords, chords in serial music, and destructive aspects of indeterminacy. Also included is an extensive list of musical examples, a guide to references, and a comprehensive index. With its correlations to literature, painting, and history, this volume will be an important addition to academic and public libraries, university music departments, and academies of music, as well as a valuable resource for courses in music theory and analysis, esthetics of music, and music history.
Howard Hanson details the career and works of a composer called by several critics "the most important figure in American music in the second quarter of the 20th century." Hanson's compositions elicited the broadest possible range of critical reaction. While early works from the 1920s were viewed as dissonant, avant-garde experimentations, within a decade his compositions in a similar style were viewed as solid, conservative works. Within this range, it was generally agreed that Hanson represented the best in solid compositional and orchestrational technique, and audiences greeted his new compositions with unquestioned approval throughout his 60-plus year career. As an important proponent of American music during his forty year tenure as Director of the Eastman School of Music, he conducted premieres of literally thousands of works by American composers and always encouraged young American composers.
Again and again people turn to music in order to assist them make sense of traumatic life events. Music can help process emotions, interpret memories, and create a sense of collective identity. While the last decade has seen a surge in academic studies on trauma and loss in both the humanities and social sciences, how music engages suffering has not often been explored. Performing Pain uncovers music's relationships to trauma and grief by focusing upon the late 20th century in Eastern Europe. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a cultural preoccupation with the meanings of historical suffering, particularly surrounding the Second World War and the Stalinist era. Journalists, historians, writers, artists, and filmmakers repeatedly negotiated themes related to pain and memory, truth and history, morality and spirituality both during glasnost and the years prior. In the copious amount of scholarship devoted to cultural politics during this era, the activities of avant-garde composers stands largely silent. Performing Pain considers how works by Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Part, and Henryk Gorecki musically address contemporary concerns regarding history and suffering through composition, performance, and reception. Drawing upon theories from psychology, sociology, literary and cultural studies, this book offers a set of hermeneutic essays that demonstrate the ways in which people employ music in order to make sense of historical traumas and losses. Seemingly postmodern compositional choices-such as quotation, fragmentation, and stasis-provide musical analogies to psychological and emotional responses to trauma and grief. The physical realities of embodied performance focus attention on the ethics of pain and representation while these works' inclusion as film music interprets contemporary debates regarding memory and trauma. Performing Pain promises to garner wide attention from academic professionals in music studies as well as an interdisciplinary audience interested in Eastern Europe and aesthetic articulations of suffering.
After Robert Armin joined the Chamberlain's Men, singing in Shakespeare's dramas catapulted from 1.25 songs and 9.95 lines of singing per play to 3.44 songs and 29.75 lines of singing, a virtually unnoticed phenomenon. In addition, many of the songs became seemingly improvisatory-similar to Armin's personal style as an author and solo comedian. In order to study Armin's collaborative impact, this interdisciplinary book investigates the songs that have Renaissance music that could have been heard on Shakespeare's stage. They occur in some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and The Tempest. In fact, Shakespeare's plays, as we have them, are not complete. They are missing the music that could have accompanied the plays' songs. Significantly, Renaissance vocal music, far beyond just providing entertainment, was believed to alter the bodies and souls of both performers and auditors to agree with its characteristics, directly inciting passions from love to melancholy. By collaborating with early modern music editor and performing artist Lawrence Lipnik, Catherine Henze is able to provide new performance editions of seventeen songs, including spoken interruptions and cuts and rearrangement of the music to accommodate the dramatist's words. Next, Henze analyzes the complete songs, words and music, according to Renaissance literary and music primary sources, and applies the new information to interpretations of characters and scenes, frequently challenging commonly held literary assessments. The book is organized according to Armin's involvement with the plays, before, during, and after the comic actor joined Shakespeare's company. It offers readers the tools to interpret not only these songs, but also vocal music in dramas by other Renaissance playwrights. Moreover, Robert Armin and Shakespeare's Performed Songs, written with non-specialized terminology, provides a gateway to new areas of research and interpretation in an increasingly significant interdisciplinary field for all interested in Shakespeare and early modern drama.
We can hear the universe! This was the triumphant proclamation at a February 2016 press conference announcing that the Laser Interferometer Gravity Observatory (LIGO) had detected a "transient gravitational-wave signal." What LIGO heard in the morning hours of September 14, 2015 was the vibration of cosmic forces unleashed with mind-boggling power across a cosmic medium of equally mind-boggling expansiveness: the transient ripple of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago. The confirmation of gravitational waves sent tremors through the scientific community, but the public imagination was more captivated by the sonic translation of the cosmic signal, a sound detectable only through an act of carefully attuned listening. As astrophysicist Szabolcs Marka remarked, "Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and we couldn't hear the music. The skies will never be the same." Taking in hand this current "discovery" that we can listen to the cosmos, Andrew Hicks argues that sound-and the harmonious coordination of sounds, sources, and listeners-has always been an integral part of the history of studying the cosmos. Composing the World charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within a late-ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. The specific historical terrain of Hicks' discussion centers upon the world of twelfth-century philosophy, and from there he offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmological discourse, a discourse which itself focused on the reception and development of Platonism. Hicks illuminates how a cosmological aesthetics based on the "music of the spheres" both governed the moral, physical, and psychic equilibrium of the human, and assured the coherence of the universe as a whole. With a rare convergence of musicological, philosophical, and philological rigor, Hicks presents a narrative tour through medieval cosmology with reflections on important philosophical movements along the way, raising connections to Cartesian dualism, Uexkull's theoretical biology, and Deleuze and Guattari's musically inspired language of milieus and (de)territorialization. Hicks ultimately suggests that the models of musical cosmology popular in late antiquity and the twelfth century are relevant to our modern philosophical and scientific undertakings. Impeccably researched and beautifully written, Composing the World will resonate with a variety of readers, and it encourages us to rethink the role of music and sound within our greater understanding of the universe.
Consisting of six studies that present hermeneutical analyses of Wagnerian dramas, this book discusses Wagner's mature single dramas from Hollander to Parsifal with reference to the concept of Romantic irony and the basic theoretical orientation of post-structuralism. Wagner is best known as a composer of mythological works, but these music-dramas contain basic problems that essentially contradict what is regarded as their mythological or legendary nature. They all self-referentially play out certain critical processes. Focusing on the very issue of interpretation, this work asks how Wagner's dramas use their legendary or mythological raw material in a specifically 19th-century Romantic way to create meaning. It is argued that by means of Romantic irony, internal self-reflection or self-consciousness, each work deconstructs its own mythological or legendary nature. Musicologists with an interest in Wagner's works, and literary scholars who are interested in interdisciplinary applications of literary-critical theory, will appreciate this unique application of literary, theoretical, and critical concepts to the understanding of his music-dramas. This work will also appeal to scholars of German literature and of German cultural history. It discusses Wagner's single dramas from Hollander to Parsifal.
John McCabe is a thoroughly documented bio-bibliography of one of Britain's leading composers. John McCabe has an international reputation, both as a composer and a pianist, whose compositions cover most of the established forms. The complete list of his works and performances have never before been presented in such detail. Articles and features by and about the composer contain annotations, often in the form of quotations from the material. National, academic, and public libraries, as well as specialized music libraries and archives, will find this work a valuable research tool. The work begins with a brief biography of John McCabe prepared with the composer's assistance and is followed by a complete list of works and performances classified by genre and arranged alphabetically by title of composition. Performance and publication information is provided for each work, including its first and other selected performances. A list of McCabe's publishers is followed by a discography of commercially produced sound recordings divided into sections on McCabe as a composer and as a performer. A bibliography of writings by and about McCabe includes gramaphone record reviews written by McCabe for the British journal Records and Recordings between 1967 and 1974. An alphabetical and a chronological list of compositions appear in appendices.
Although Berg decided immediately after seeing Buchner's play Woyzeck in May 1914 to set it to music, he did not complete his opera until 1922, with the Berlin premiere taking place in 1925. Berg's Wozzeck traces the composer's slow but determined progress. Using compositional sketches, diaries, notebooks and other archival material, author Patricia Hall reveals the challenges Berg faced--from his induction as a soldier in World War I, to the hyperinflation of the twenties. In addition to the precise chronology of the opera, the sketches show how Berg derived large-scale form from the Buchner text, and how his compositional style evolved during the nine years in which he composed the opera. A comprehensive visual database on the book's companion website of the extant sketches from seven archives in the United States, Germany and Austria allows the reader to examine, for the first time, Berg's sketches in high resolution color scans.
A study in contrasts, the career of Sergey Prokofiev spanned the
globe, leaving him witness to the most significant political and
historical events of the first half of the twentieth century. In
1918, after completing a program of studies at the St. Petersburg
conservatory, Prokofiev escaped Russia for the United States and
later France where, like most emigre artists of the time, he made
Paris his home. During these hectic years, he composed three
ballets and three operas, fulfilled recording contracts, and played
recitals of tempestuous music. Scores were stored in suitcases,
scenarios and librettos drafted on hotel letterhead. The constant
uprooting and transience fatigued him, but he regarded himself as a
person of action who, personally and professionally, traveled
against rather that with the current. Thus, in 1936, as political
anxieties increased in Western Europe, Prokofiev escaped back to
Russia. Though at first pampered by the totalitarian regime,
Prokofiev soon suffered official correction and censorship. He
wrote and revised his late ballets and operas to appease his
bureaucratic overseers but, more often than not, his labors came to
naught. Following his official condemnation in 1948, many of his
compositions were withdrawn from performance. Physical illness and
mental exhaustion characterized his last years. Housebound, he
journeyed inward, creating a series of works on the theme of youth
whose music sounds despondently optimistic.
The Oxford Book of Choral Music by Black Composers is a landmark collection of non-idiomatic compositions from the sixteenth century to the present day, providing a comprehensive introduction to an area of choral music that has been historically under-represented. This unique anthology seeks both to improve representation in the historical canon and to showcase the music of some of the best names in choral music today.
for SSATB unaccompanied A Gaelic Blessing was commissioned by the University of Edinburgh, McDowall's alma mater, for performance by the Edinburgh University Singers conducted by Calum Robertson. This meditative, folk-style anthem is given a Scottish lilt through the use of Scotch snap rhythms and held drone-like vocal lines. The text is a traditional Scottish Gaelic blessing, translated by the Right Reverend Ian Paton, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane. McDowall chose this text for the 'warmth and simplicity' of the words that seem to 'resonate with the times in which we live'.
The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Agnew persuasively connects the English traveler and music scholar Charles Burney with the ancient myth of Orpheus. She uses Burney as a guide through wide-ranging discussions of eighteenth-century musical travel, views on music's curative powers, interest in non-European music, and concerns about cultural identity. Arguing that what people said about music was central to some of the great Enlightenment debates surrounding such issues as human agency, cultural difference, and national identity, Agnew adds a new dimension to postcolonial studies, which has typically emphasized the literary and visual at the expense of the aural. She also demonstrates that these discussions must be viewed in context at the era's broad and well-entrenched transnational network, and emphasizes the importance of travel literature in generating knowledge at the time. A new and radically interdisciplinary approach to the question of the power of music - its aesthetic and historical interpretations and political uses - Enlightenment Orpheus will appeal to students and scholars in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, German studies, eighteenth-century history, and comparative studies.
In Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage, Inna
Naroditskaya investigates the musical lives of four female monarchs
who ruled Russia for most of the eighteenth century - Catherine I,
Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great. Engaging with
ethnomusicological, historical, and philological approaches, her
study traces the tsarinas' deeply invested interest in musical
drama, as each built theaters, established drama schools,
commissioned operas and ballets, and themselves wrote and produced
musical plays. Naroditskaya examines the creative output of the
tsarinas across the contexts in which they worked and lived,
revealing significant connections between their personal creative
aspirations and contemporary musical-theatrical practices, and the
political and state affairs conducted during their reigns.
Bewitching Russian Opera ultimately demonstrates that the theater
served as an experimental space for these imperial women, in which
they rehearsed, probed, and formulated gender and class roles, and
enacted on the musical stage political ambitions and international
conquests which they would later carry out on the world stage
itself.
Barcelonian Gaspar Cassado (1897-1966) was one of the greatest cello virtuosi of the twentieth century and a notable composer and arranger, leaving a vast and heterogeneous legacy. In this book, Gabrielle Kaufman provides the first full-length scholarly work dedicated to Cassado, containing the results of seven years of research into his life and legacy, after following the cellist's steps through Spain, France, Italy and Japan. The study presents in-depth descriptions of the three main parts of Cassado's creative output: composition, transcription and performance, especially focusing on Cassado's plural and multi-facetted creativity, which is examined from both cultural and historical perspectives. Cassado's role within the evolution of twentieth-century cello performance is thoroughly examined, including a discussion regarding the musical and technical aspects of performing Cassado's works, aimed directly at performers. The study presents the first attempt at a comprehensive catalogue of Cassado's works, both original and transcribed, as well as his recordings, using a number of new archival sources and testimonies. In addition, the composer's significance within Spanish twentieth-century music is treated in detail through a number of case studies, sustained by examples from recovered score manuscripts. Illuminated by extraordinary source material Gaspar Cassado: Cellist, Composer and Transcriber expands and deepens our knowledge of this complex figure, and will be of crucial importance to students and scholars in the fields of Performance Practice and Spanish Music, as well as to professional cellists and advanced cello students.
Written in Williams' "warm, relaxed, chatty style" ("The New York Times"), this book is a veritable portable jukebox of rock and roll and the stories behind the songs. "(Williams is) one of the most original thinkers and writers working within the dimension of rock. His ideas are fresh, fierce, and singularly alive."--"Fusion." (Music)
Composer, diplomat, bishop: Agostino Steffani (1654-1728) was one of the most remarkable figures in late-17th and early-18th century Europe. Steffani began his life as a composer, musician, and courtier, but his accomplishments brought him high-level positions in the courts of Germany and in the Catholic Church. This book is the first to discuss all the periods and facets of Agostino Steffani's extraordinary career and to examine his entire output of musical works.
This fully updated second edition is a selective annotated bibliography of all relevant published resources relating to church and worship music in the United States. Over the past decade, there has been a growth of literature covering everything from traditional subject matter such as the organ works of J.S. Bach to newer areas of inquiry including folk hymnology, women and African-American composers, music as a spiritual healer, to the music of Mormon, Shaker, Moravian, and other smaller sects. With multiple indices, this book will serve as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars sorting through the massive amount of material in the field. |
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