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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles

Poulenc - The Life in the Songs (Hardcover): Graham Johnson Poulenc - The Life in the Songs (Hardcover)
Graham Johnson
R1,223 R1,139 Discovery Miles 11 390 Save R84 (7%) Ships in 9 - 15 working days

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) is widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's most significant masters of vocal music-solo, choral and operatic-quite apart from his achievements in instrumental spheres. But what it cost him has been underestimated. In this seminal biography, which will serve as the definitive guide to the songs, Graham Johnson shows that it is in Poulenc's extraordinary songs and seeing how they fit into his life-his hidden sexuality, addiction and all-that we discover the composer's essential artistic being. With Jeremy Sams's song translations, the first in over forty years, and the insight that comes from a lifetime of performing this music, Johnson provides an essential volume for singers, pianists, listeners and readers interested in the artistic milieu of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Cavalier Giovanni Battista Buonamente - Franciscan Violinist (Paperback): Peter Allsop Cavalier Giovanni Battista Buonamente - Franciscan Violinist (Paperback)
Peter Allsop
R1,621 Discovery Miles 16 210 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Giovanni Battista Buonamente was among the most original and inventive Italian composers of the seventeenth century. Peter Allsop reveals his importance as part of a tradition that stands in direct antithesis to that of the Corellian sonata today regarded as the 'norm'. This development is traced in a series of likely teacher-pupil relationships from Salamone Rossi to Marco Uccellini, the most prolific Italian composers of instrumental ensemble music in the first half of the seventeenth century. The first half of the book sets out what is known of Buonamente's turbulent career as he moved from the courtly environments of the Gonzaga household and Habsburg court to several less auspicious posts at various religious institutions, ending his life as maestro di cappella at the mother house of his order, S. Francesco in Assisi. A fascinating picture emerges of the nature of musical patronage against a background of war and plague in this time of great political instability. The later chapters comprise detailed discussions, supported with over 100 music examples, of the unusually wide range of genres for which Buonamente wrote: sinfonias, free sonatas, sets of variations, canzonas, dances; and he was the first Italian to cultivate the ensemble suite to any extent. The book concludes with an examination of his influence on his probable pupil Marco Uccellini and the interest Buonamente instigated in canonic writing, which was passed via Uccellini to a succession of Modenese composers.

Schnittke Studies (Hardcover): Gavin Dixon Schnittke Studies (Hardcover)
Gavin Dixon
R4,368 Discovery Miles 43 680 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) was arguably the most important Russian composer since Shostakovich, and his music has generated a great deal of academic interest in the years since his death. Schnittke Studies provides a variety of perspectives on the composer and his music. The field is currently diverse and vibrant, and this book demonstrates the range of academic approaches being applied to Schnittke's work and the insights they provide, covering: polystylism, for which Schnittke is best known, the significance of the composer's Christian faith, and detailed formal analyses of key works, with connections drawn between the apparently divergent periods of the composer's career. This book has been prepared as a memorial to Professor Alexander Ivashkin, a leading scholar in the field, who died in 2014, and will be of interest not only to those studying Schnittke's music, but also those with an interest in late Soviet-era music in general.

Michael Nyman: Collected Writings (Paperback): Pwyll Ap Sion Michael Nyman: Collected Writings (Paperback)
Pwyll Ap Sion
R1,621 Discovery Miles 16 210 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

For over three decades Michael Nyman's music has succeeded in reaching beyond the small community of contemporary music aficionados to a much wider range of listeners. An important element in unlocking the key to Nyman's success lies in his writings about music, which preoccupied him for over a decade from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. During this time Nyman produced over 100 articles, covering almost every conceivable musical style and genre - from the Early Music revival and the West's interest in 'world' music, or from John Cage and minimalism to rock and pop. Nyman initiated a number of landmark moments in the course of late twentieth-century music along the way: he was one of the first to critique the distinction between the European avant-garde and the American experimental movement; he was the first to coin the term 'minimalism' in relation to the music of (then largely unknown) Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and later Philip Glass; the first to seriously engage with the music of the English experimental tradition and the importance of Cornelius Cardew, and to identify the importance of Art Colleges in nurturing and developing a radical alternative to modernism; and one of the first writers to grasp the significance of post-minimalists such as Brian Eno and Harold Budd, and to realize how these elements could be brought together into a new aesthetic vision for his own creative endeavours, which was formulated during the late 1970s and early 80s. Much of what transformed and defined Nyman's musical character may be found within the pages of this volume of his writings, comprehensively edited and annotated for the first time, and including previously unpublished material from Nyman's second interview with Steve Reich in 1976. There is also much here to engage the minds of those who are interested in pre-twentieth century music, from Early and Baroque music (Handel and Purcell in particular) to innovative features in Haydn, spatial elements in Berlioz, or Bruckner and Mahler's symphonic works.

Roman Catholic Church Music in England, 1791-1914: A Handmaid of the Liturgy? (Paperback): T.E. Muir Roman Catholic Church Music in England, 1791-1914: A Handmaid of the Liturgy? (Paperback)
T.E. Muir
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Roman Catholic church music in England served the needs of a vigorous, vibrant and multi-faceted community that grew from about 70,000 to 1.7 million people during the long nineteenth century. Contemporary literature of all kinds abounds, along with numerous collections of sheet music, some running to hundreds, occasionally even thousands, of separate pieces, many of which have since been forgotten. Apart from compositions in the latest Classical Viennese styles and their successors, much of the music performed constituted a revival or imitation of older musical genres, especially plainchant and Renaissance Polyphony. Furthermore, many pieces that had originally been intended to be performed by professional musicians for the benefit of privileged royal, aristocratic or high ecclesiastical elites were repackaged for rendition by amateurs before largely working or lower middle class congregations, many of them Irish. However, outside Catholic circles, little attention has been paid to this subject. Consequently, the achievements and widespread popularity of many composers (such as Joseph Egbert Turner, Henry George Nixon or John Richardson) within the English Catholic community have passed largely unnoticed. Worse still, much of the evidence is rapidly disappearing, partly because it no longer seems relevant to the needs of the modern Catholic Church in England. This book provides a framework of the main aspects of Catholic church music in this period, showing how and why it developed in the way it did. Dr Muir sets the music in its historical, liturgical and legal context, pointing to the ways in which the music itself can be used as evidence to throw light on the changing character of English Catholicism. As a result the book will appeal not only to scholars and students working in the field, but also to church musicians, liturgists, historians, ecclesiastics and other interested Catholic and non-Catholic parties.

Roger Smalley: A Case Study of Late Twentieth-Century Composition (Paperback): Christopher Mark Roger Smalley: A Case Study of Late Twentieth-Century Composition (Paperback)
Christopher Mark
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

How does one go about writing the history of musical composition in the late twentieth century when, on the one hand, so much of it seems impossibly fractured and disassociated, and, on the other, there has been so little certainty about what the notion of 'music history' might entail under the critiques of post-modernism? One of the most productive ways forward is to pursue case studies involving single composers whose music reflects several aspects of recent activity. This enables the discussion of broad issues in a relatively focussed way whilst avoiding the pitfalls of traditional narrative histories and the centrifugal tendencies of the relativistic approach that some have called for. The music of the English-born (1943) and Australia-domiciled composer Roger Smalley is ideal material for such a study, because of his involvement with and response to an unusually large number of the myriad concerns and practices of post-1950s composition, including post-serial constructivism; parody; electro-acoustic composition and the electronic modification of conventionally-produced sound; Moment Form; aleatorism; minimalism; the use of non-Western resources (Aboriginal and South-East Asian sonorities); neo-Romanticism; and, arguably, the 'new classicism', as well as a brief flirtation with rock music in the late '60s. Employing an interview with the composer as a kind of cantus firmus, the book - the first extended single-author study of Smalley's music to be published - incorporates critical commentary on the composer's major works in a chronological narrative that engages with broad issues of central relevance to Smalley's generation, such as the process of learning the craft of composition in the early '60s; the motivation behind the adoption of certain technical and aesthetic positions; the effects on technical and aesthetic orientation of both the changing relationships between composer, performer, and audience and technological change; and the distinction betwe

Brahms and the Scherzo - Studies in Musical Narrative (Paperback): Ryan McClelland Brahms and the Scherzo - Studies in Musical Narrative (Paperback)
Ryan McClelland
R1,621 Discovery Miles 16 210 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Despite the incredible diversity in Brahms's scherzo-type movements, there has been no comprehensive consideration of this aspect of his oeuvre. Professor Ryan McClelland provides an in-depth study of these movements that also contributes significantly to an understanding of Brahms's compositional language and his creative dialogue with musical traditions. McClelland especially highlights the role of rhythmic-metric design in Brahms's music and its relationship to expressive meaning. In Brahms's scherzo-type movements, McClelland traces transformations of primary thematic material, demonstrating how the relationship of the initial music to its subsequent versions creates a musical narrative that provides structural coherence and generates expressive meaning. McClelland's interpretations of the expressive implications of Brahms's fascinatingly intricate musical structures frequently engage issues directly relevant to performance. This illuminating book will appeal to music theorists, musicologists working on nineteenth-century instrumental music and performers.

Composition, Chromaticism and the Developmental Process - A New Theory of Tonality (Paperback): Henry Burnett Composition, Chromaticism and the Developmental Process - A New Theory of Tonality (Paperback)
Henry Burnett
R1,621 Discovery Miles 16 210 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Musicology, having been transmitted as a compilation of disparate events and disciplines, has long necessitated a 'magic bullet', a 'unified field theory' so to speak, that can interpret the steady metamorphosis of Western art music from late medieval modality to twentieth-century atonality within a single theoretical construct. Without that magic bullet, discussions of this kind are increasingly complicated and, to make matters worse, the validity of any transformational models and ideas of the natural evolution of styles is questioned and even frowned upon today as epitomizing a grotesque teleological bigotry. Going against current thinking, Henry Burnett and Roy Nitzberg claim that the teleological approach to observing stylistic change is still valid when considered from the purely compositional perspective. The authors challenge the traditional understanding of development, and advance a new theory of eleven-pitch tonality as it relates to the corpus of Western composition. The book plots the evolution of tonality and its bearing on style and the compositional process itself. The theory is not based on the diatonic aspect of the various tonal systems exploited by composers; rather, the theory is chromatically based - the chromatically inflected octave being the source not only of a highly ingenious developmental dialectic, but also encompassing the moment-to-moment progression of the musical narrative itself. Even the most profound teachings of Schenker, and the often startlingly original and worthwhile speculations of Riemann, Tovey, Dahlhaus and others, still provide no theory of development and so are ultimately unable to unite the various tendrils of the compositional organism into a unified whole. Burnett and Nitzberg move beyond existing theory and analysis to base their theory from the standpoint of chromatic 'pitch fields'. These fields are the specific chromatic pitch choices that a composer uses to inform and design a complete composition, utilizing specific chromatic inflections to control a large-scale working out process that is the very essence of 'development'. In short, the authors claim that a chromatic background that coexists with a diatonic contrapuntal background may define the process of compositional development. These chromatic and diatonic events are the two genus expressions of slowly unfolding tonic octaves.

Prometheus in Music - Representations of the Myth in the Romantic Era (Paperback): Paul Bertagnolli Prometheus in Music - Representations of the Myth in the Romantic Era (Paperback)
Paul Bertagnolli
R1,621 Discovery Miles 16 210 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

The ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, the primordial Titan who defied the Olympian gods by stealing fire from the heavens as a gift for humanity, enjoyed unprecedented popularity during the Romantic era. An international coterie of writers such as Goethe, Monti, Byron, the Shelleys, Sainte-Helene, Coleridge, Browning, and Bridges engaged with the legend, while composers such as Beethoven, Reichardt, Schubert, Wolf, Liszt, Halevy, Saint-SaA"ns, Holmes, Faure, Parry, Goldmark, and Bargiel based works of diverse genres on the fable. Romantic authors and composers developed a unique perspective on the myth, emphasizing its themes of rebellion, punishment for transgression and creative autonomy, in great contrast to artists of the preceding era, who more characteristically ignored the tribulations of Prometheus and depicted him as the animator of a naA-ve, Arcadian mankind who, when awakened from their spiritual dormancy, expressed astonishment at the wonders of nature and paid homage to the Titan as a new god. Paul Bertagnolli charts the progress of the myth during the nineteenth century, as it articulates an extraordinary variety of issues pertaining to culture, society, aesthetics, and philosophy. Drawing on archival research, dance history, sketch studies, literary theory, linear analysis, topos theory, and reception history, individual chapters demonstrate that the legend served as a vehicle to express opinions on subjects as diverse as aristocratic patronage, movements of the body on the public stage, rebellion against political and religious authority, outright atheism, humanitarianism of the German Enlightenment, interest in the music of Greek antiquity, industrialization, nationalism inflamed by war, populism, and the aesthetics of musical form. Composers often resorted to varied and unorthodox musical techniques in order to reflect such remarkable subjects: Beethoven outraged critics by implying a key other than the tonic at the outset of the overture to

Composing the Modern Subject: Four String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich (Paperback): Sarah Reichardt Composing the Modern Subject: Four String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich (Paperback)
Sarah Reichardt
R1,621 Discovery Miles 16 210 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Since the publication of Solomon Volkov's disputed memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer and his music has been subject to heated debate concerning how the musical meaning of his works can be understood in relationship to the composer's life within the Soviet State. While much ink has been spilled, very little work has attempted to define how Shostakovich's music has remained so arresting not only to those within the Soviet culture, but also to Western audiences - even though such audiences are often largely ignorant of the compositional context or even the biography of the composer. This book offers a useful corrective: setting aside biographically grounded and traditional analytical modes of explication, Reichardt uncovers and explores the musical ambiguities of four of the composer's middle string quartets, especially those ambiguities located in moments of rupture within the musical structure. The music is constantly collapsing, reversing, inverting and denying its own structural imperatives. Reichardt argues that such confrontation of the musical language with itself, though perhaps interpretable as Shostakovich's own unique version of double-speak, also poignantly articulates the fractured state of a more general form of modern subjectivity. Reichardt employs the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis to offer a cogent explanation of this connection between disruptive musical process and modern subjectivity. The ruptures of Shostakovich's music become symptoms of the pathologies at the core of modern subjectivity. These symptoms, in turn, relate to the Lacanian concept of the real, which is the empty kernel around which the modern subject constructs reality. This framework proves invaluable in developing a powerful, original hermeneutic understanding of the music. Read through the lens of the real, the riddles written into the quartets reveal the arbitrary and contingent state of the musical subject's constructed reality, reflecting pathologies ende

Identity and Locality in Early European Music, 1028-1740 (Paperback): Jason Stoessel Identity and Locality in Early European Music, 1028-1740 (Paperback)
Jason Stoessel
R1,621 Discovery Miles 16 210 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

This collection presents numerous discoveries and fresh insights into music and musical practices that shaped distinctly localized individual and collective identities in pre-modern and early modern Europe. Contributions by leading and emerging European music experts fall into three areas: plainchant traditions in Aquitania and the Iberian peninsula during the first 700 years of the second millennium; late medieval musical aesthetics, traditions and practices in Paris, Padua, Prague and more generally England, Germany and Spain; and local traditions in Renaissance Augsburg and Baroque Naples and Dresden. In addition to in-depth readings of anonymous musical traditions, contributors provide new details concerning the lives and music of well-known composers such as Ademar de Chabannes, Bartolino da Padova, Ciconia, Josquin, Senfl, Alessandro Scarlatti, Heinichen and Zelenka. This book will appeal to a broad range of readers, including chant scholars, medievalists, music historians, and anyone interested in music's place in pre-modern and early modern European culture.

Understanding Mozart's Piano Sonatas (Paperback): John Irving Understanding Mozart's Piano Sonatas (Paperback)
John Irving
R1,562 Discovery Miles 15 620 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Mozart's piano sonatas are among the most familiar of his works and stand alongside those of Haydn and Beethoven as staples of the pianist's repertoire. In this study, John Irving looks at a wide selection of contextual situations for Mozart's sonatas, focusing on the variety of ways in which they assume identities and achieve meanings. In particular, the book seeks to establish the provisionality of the sonatas' notated texts, suggesting that the texts are not so much identifiers as possibilities and that their identity resides in the usage. Close attention is paid to reception matters, analytical approaches, organology, the role of autograph manuscripts, early editions and editors, and aspects of historical performance practice - all of which go beyond the texts in opening windows onto Mozart's sonatas. Treating the sonatas collectively as a repertoire, rather than as individual works, the book surveys broad thematic issues such as the role of historical writing about music in defining a generic space for Mozart's sonatas, their construction within pedagogical traditions, the significance of sound as opposed to sight in these works (and in particular their sound on fortepianos of the later eighteenth-century) , and the creative role of the performer in their representation beyond the frame of the text. Drawing together and synthesizing this wealth of material, Irving provides an invaluable reference source for those already familiar with this repertoire.

Karol Szymanowski - His Life and Work (Paperback): Alistair Wightman Karol Szymanowski - His Life and Work (Paperback)
Alistair Wightman
R1,622 Discovery Miles 16 220 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

The music of the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in recent years. Despite wide recognition in his own lifetime, Szymanowski's works were somewhat overlooked in the decades following his death. Outside Poland, changing fashions militated against acceptance of his achievement, and subsequent generations of Polish composers regarded his music as too reactionary to provide a basis on which to found a national musical identity. In this full-scale study of Karol Szymanowski's life and music, Alistair Wightman explores the composer's position as a constant outsider in his own country, yet a 'good European' in the ways in which he responded positively to a diverse range of musical talents, in particular as Stravinsky, Strauss, Berg, Hindemith, Prokofiev and Ravel. The book throws light on Szymanowski's relationship to the Polish musical establishment, the reception of his works at home and abroad, his work as an educationalist, and the essentially European dimension of his art, drawing on letters, polemical writings, verse, theatrical sketches and the memoirs of family, friends and contemporaries. All of Szymanowski's significant works are discussed, illustrated with nearly 140 music examples. Evaluation is made of the close links existing between the composer's musical and literary works from the earliest stages of his career, as well as the various ideological strands that went together to form the unique, humanistic synthesis, characteristic of his mature work.

Shelley and the Musico-Poetics of Romanticism (Paperback): Jessica K Quillin Shelley and the Musico-Poetics of Romanticism (Paperback)
Jessica K Quillin
R1,613 Discovery Miles 16 130 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Addressing a gap in Shelley studies, Jessica K. Quillin explores the poet's lifelong interest in music. Quillin connects the trope of music with Shelley's larger formal aesthetic, political, and philosophical concerns, showing that music offers a new critical lens through which to view such familiar Shelleyan concerns as the status of the poetic, figural language, and the philosophical problem posed by idealism versus skepticism. Quillin's book uncovers the implications of Shelley's use of music by means of four musico-poetic concerns: the inherently interdisciplinary nature of musical imagery and figurative language; the rhythmic and sonoric dimensions of poetry; the extension of poetry into the performative realms of the theatre and drawing room through close links between most poetic genres and music; and the transformation of poetry into music through the setting and adaptation of poetic lyrics to music. Ultimately, Quillin argues, Shelley exhibits a fundamental recognition of an interdependence between music and poetry which is expressed in the form and content of his highly sonorous works. Equating music with love allows him to create a radical model in which poetry is the highest form of imaginative expression, one that can affect the mind and the senses at once and potentially bring about the perfectibility of mankind through a unique mode of visionary experience.

Furtwangler on Music - Essays and Addresses by Wilhelm Furtwangler (Paperback, Annotated Ed): Ronald Taylor Furtwangler on Music - Essays and Addresses by Wilhelm Furtwangler (Paperback, Annotated Ed)
Ronald Taylor
R1,621 Discovery Miles 16 210 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Wilhelm FurtwAngler left not only some of the greatest interpretations of operatic and symphonic music on record, but also expressed his views on musical issues of the moment in a number of outspoken essays and talks. His writings range from practical matters of performance and interpretation to aesthetic reflections on what he saw as the alarming direction in which music was developing in the wake of Schoenberg and the twelve-tone system of composition. Professor Ronald Taylor has here, for the first time, translated and annotated a selection of FurtwAngler's writings covering the four decades from the First World War to the conductor's death in 1954, and prefaced them with an essay on FurtwAngler's controversial career and complicated personality. The result is a collection of stimulating pieces with a claim on our attention, made all the greater for reflecting the musical and philosophical ideals of one of the great conductors of the twentieth century.

Operatic Migrations - Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries (Paperback): Downing A. Thomas Operatic Migrations - Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries (Paperback)
Downing A. Thomas
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying a wide range of subjects associated with the creation, performance and reception of 'opera' in varying social and historical contexts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Each essay addresses migrations between genres, cultures, literary and musical works, modes of expression, media of presentation and aesthetics. Although the directions the contributions take are diverse, they converge in significant ways, particularly with the rebuttal of the notion of the singular nature of the operatic work. The volume strongly asserts that works are meaningfully transformed by the manifold circumstances of their creation and reception, and that these circumstances have an impact on the life of those works in their many transformations and on a given audience's experience of them. Topics covered include transformations of literary sources and their migration into the operatic genre; works that move across geographical and social boundaries into different cultural contexts; movements between media and/or genre as well as alterations through interpretation and performance of the composer's creation; the translation of spoken theatre to lyric theatre; the theoretical issues contingent on the rendering of 'speech' into 'song'; and the transforming effects of aesthetic considerations as they bear on opera. Crossing over disciplinary boundaries between music, literary studies, history, cultural studies and art history, the volume enriches our knowledge and understanding of the operatic experience and the works. The book will therefore appeal to those working in the field of music, literary and cultural studies, and to those with a particular interest in opera and musical theatre.

Johann Joseph Fux and the Music of the Austro-Italian Baroque (Paperback): Harry White Johann Joseph Fux and the Music of the Austro-Italian Baroque (Paperback)
Harry White
R1,547 Discovery Miles 15 470 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Johann Joseph Fux's reputation as a theorist and the long-term influence of his theoretical and pedagogical work have ensured that his name is widely known in music circles in the West. His pre-eminence as the foremost native-born composer of the Austrian Baroque has resulted in attention being focused on his work as an exemplum of virtually every genre, sacred or secular of Austro-Italian early eighteenth-century music. The publication of the Fux Gesamtausgabe has greatly enhanced the reputation of his music and the essays in this volume will develop our understanding of Fux, his music, and his place in musical history.

Mendelssohn Perspectives (Paperback): Angela Mace, Nicole Grimes Mendelssohn Perspectives (Paperback)
Angela Mace, Nicole Grimes
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

If the invective of Nietzsche and Shaw is to be taken as an endorsement of the lasting quality of an artist, then Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy takes pride of place beside Tennyson and Brahms in the canon of great nineteenth-century artists. Mendelssohn Perspectives presents valuable new insights into Mendelssohn's music, biography and reception. Critically engaging a wide range of source materials, the volume combines traditional musical-analytical studies with those that draw on other humanistic disciplines to shed new light on the composer's life, and on his contemporary and posthumous reputations. Together, these essays bring new historical and interpretive dimensions to Mendelssohn studies. The volume offers essays on Mendelssohn's Jewishness, his vast correspondence, his music for the stage, and his relationship with music of the past and future, as well as the compositional process and handling of form in the music of both Mendelssohn and his sister, the composer Fanny Hensel. German literature and aesthetics, gender and race, philosophy and science, and issues of historicism all come to bear on these new perspectives on Mendelssohn.

The Music of David Lumsdaine - Kelly Ground to Cambewarra (Paperback): Michael Hooper The Music of David Lumsdaine - Kelly Ground to Cambewarra (Paperback)
Michael Hooper
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Australian by birth but a longtime resident of Great Britain, David Lumsdaine (b.1931) is central to both Australian and British modernism. During the early 1970s Australian musical modernism was at its height. Lumsdaine and his Australian contemporaries were engaged with practices from multiple places, producing music that displays the attributes of their disparate influences; in so doing they formed a new conception of what it meant to be an Australian composer. The period is similarly important in Britain, for it saw the rise to prominence of composers such as Birtwistle, Davies, Goehr, Gilbert, Wood, Cardew and many others who were Lumsdaine's contemporaries, colleagues and friends. Hooper presents here a series of analyses of Lumsdaine's compositions, focusing on works written between 1966 and 1980. At the early end of this period is Kelly Ground, for solo piano. One of Lumsdaine's first acknowledged works, Kelly Ground connects explicitly with the music of high modernism, employing ideas about temporality as espoused by Ligeti, Stockhausen and Boulez, to form a new ritual for the (now mythical) Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Hooper places Lumsdaine's music in the context of Australian and British avant-gardes, and reveals its elegance, lyricism and technical virtuosity.

Olivier Messiaen: Music, Art and Literature - Music, Art and Literature (Paperback): Nigel Simeone Olivier Messiaen: Music, Art and Literature - Music, Art and Literature (Paperback)
Nigel Simeone
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

When Olivier Messiaen died in 1992, the prevailing image was of a man apart; a deeply religious man whose only sources of inspiration were God and Nature and a composer whose music progressed along an entirely individual path, artistically impervious to contemporaneous events and the whims both of his contemporaries and the critics. Whilst such a view contains a large element of truth, the past ten years has seen an explosion of interest in the composer, and the work of a diverse range of scholars has painted a much richer, more complex picture of Messiaen. This volume presents some of the fruits of this research for the first time, concentrating on three broad, interrelated areas: Messiaen's relationship with fellow artists; key developments in the composer's musical language and technique; and his influences, both sacred and secular. The volume assesses Messiaen's position as a creative artist of the twentieth century in the light of the latest research. In the process, it identifies some of the key myths, confusions and exaggerations surrounding the composer which often mask equally remarkable truths. In attempting to reveal some of those truths, the essays elucidate a little of the mystery surrounding Messiaen as a man, an artist, a believer and a musician. Specifically, the volume covers Messiaen's attitudes and associations to Cocteau, Stravinsky's Les Noces, Dutilleux and Toesca, as well as exploring his teaching techniques, the Traite de rythme, de couleur et d'ornithologie, Messiaen's harmony, performing and transcription techniques, composing for Ondes Martenot, his association with ballet, Saint FranAois d'Assise and the influence of his faith. Messiaen himself contributes directly in the form of a speech that he gave about the tapestry-maker Jean LurAat, and the collection also includes the first literary translation of L'Acme en bourgeon; the garland of poems written by Messiaen's mother, Cecile Sauvage, when she was expecting him. The composer described these poems as 'the only influence' in his life, making L'Acme en bourgeon a fascinating centrepiece to a rich and rewarding collection of essays.

The Life and Twelve-Note Music of Nikos Skalkottas (Paperback): Eva Mantzourani The Life and Twelve-Note Music of Nikos Skalkottas (Paperback)
Eva Mantzourani
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Nikos Skalkottas is perhaps the last great 'undiscovered' composer of the twentieth century. In the 1920s he was a promising young violinist and composer in Berlin, and a student of Schoenberg, who included him among his most gifted pupils. It was only after his return to Greece in 1933 that Skalkottas became an anonymous and obscure figure, working in complete isolation until his death in 1949. Most of his works remained unpublished and unperformed during his lifetime, and although he is largely known for his folkloristic tonal pieces, Skalkottas in fact concentrated predominantly on developing an idiosyncratic dodecaphonic musical language. Eva Mantzourani provides here a comprehensive study of this fascinating yet under-researched composer. The book, lavishly illustrated with musical examples, is divided into three parts. Part I comprises a critical biography that, by drawing extensively on his letters and other writings, reappraises the image of Skalkottas with which we are often presented. The main focus of the book, however, is on Skalkottas's twelve-note compositional processes, since these characterize the majority of his output, and are neither well-known nor fully understood. Part II presents the structural and technical features of his twelve-note technique, particularly the different types of sets and their manipulation, and his approach to musical forms. Part III consists of analytical case studies of several works, presented chronologically, which thus provide a diachronic framework within which Skalkottas's dodecaphonic compositional development can be more effectively viewed. This book underlines Nikos Skalkottas's importance as a composer with a distinctive artistic personality, whose work contributed to the development of twelve-note compositional practice, and who deserves a more significant position within the Western art music canon than that to which he is often assigned.

In Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood (Paperback): Dorothy De Val In Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood (Paperback)
Dorothy De Val
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Born into the famous family of piano makers, Lucy Broadwood (1858-1929) became one of the chief collectors and scholars of the first English folk music revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Privately educated and trained as a classical musician and singer, she was inspired by her uncle to collect local song from her native Sussex. The desire to rescue folk song from an aging population led to the foundation of the Folk Song Society, of which she was a founder member. Mentor to younger collectors such as Percy Grainger but often at loggerheads with fellow collector Cecil Sharp and the young Ralph Vaughan Williams, she eventually ventured into Ireland and Scotland, while remaining an eclectic contributor and editor of the Society's Journal, which became a flagship for scholarly publication of folksong. She also published arrangements of folk songs and her own compositions which attracted the attention of singers such as Harry Plunket Greene. Using an array of primary sources including the diaries Broadwood kept throughout her adult life, Dorothy de Val provides a lively biography which sheds new light on her early years and chronicles her later busy social, artistic and musical life while acknowledging the underlying vulnerability of single women at this time. Her account reveals an intelligent, generous though reserved woman who, with the help of her friends, emerged from the constraints of a Victorian upbringing to meet the challenges of the modern world.

The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music - Essays in Honour of Timothy J. McGee (Paperback): Brian E. Power The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music - Essays in Honour of Timothy J. McGee (Paperback)
Brian E. Power
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

The experience of music performance is always far more than the sum of its sounds, and evidence for playing and singing techniques is not only inscribed in music notation but can also be found in many other types of primary source materials. This volume of essays presents a cross-section of new research on performance issues in music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The subject is approached from a broad perspective, drawing on areas such as dance history, art history, music iconography and performance traditions from beyond Western Europe. In doing so, the volume continues some of the many lines of inquiry pursued by its dedicatee, Timothy J. McGee, over a lifetime of scholarship devoted to practical questions of playing and singing early music. Expanding the bases of inquiry to include various social, political, historical or aesthetic backgrounds both broadens our knowledge of the issues pertinent to early music performance and informs our understanding of other cultural activities within which music played an important role. The book is divided into two parts: 'Viewing the Evidence' in which visually based information is used to address particular questions of music performance; and 'Reconsidering Contexts' in which diplomatic, commercial and cultural connections to specific repertories or compositions are considered in detail. This book will be of value not only to specialists in early music but to all scholars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance whose interests intersect with the visual, aural and social aspects of music performance.

The Early Tudor Court and International Musical Relations (Paperback): Theodor Dumitrescu The Early Tudor Court and International Musical Relations (Paperback)
Theodor Dumitrescu
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Since the days in the early twentieth century when the study of pre-Reformation English music first became a serious endeavour, a conceptual gap has separated the scholarship on English and continental music of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The teaching which has informed generations of students in influential textbooks and articles characterizes the musical life of England at this period through a language of separation and conservatism, asserting that English musicians were largely unaware of, and unaffected by, foreign practices after the mid-fifteenth century. The available historical evidence, nevertheless, contradicts a facile isolationist exposition of musical practice in early Tudor England. The increasing appearance of typically continental stylistic traits in mid-sixteenth-century English music represents not an arbitrary and unexpected shift of compositional approach, but rather a development prefaced by decades of documentable historical interactions. Theodor Dumitrescu treats the matter of musical relations between England and continental Europe during the first decades of the Tudor reign (c.1485-1530), by exploring a variety of historical, social, biographical, repertorial and intellectual links. In the first major study devoted to this topic, a wealth of documentary references scattered in primary and secondary sources receives a long-awaited collation and investigation, revealing the central role of the first Tudor monarchs in internationalizing the royal musical establishment and setting an example of considerable import for more widespread English artistic developments. By bringing together the evidence concerning Anglo-continental musical relations for the first time, along with new documents and interpretations concerning musicians, music manuscripts and theory sources, the investigation paves the way for a new evaluation of English musical styles in the first half of the sixteenth century.

Johannes Brahms and Klaus Groth - The Biography of a Friendship (Paperback): Peter Russell Johannes Brahms and Klaus Groth - The Biography of a Friendship (Paperback)
Peter Russell
R1,532 Discovery Miles 15 320 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Over the past twenty years musicologists and theorists have been intensely preoccupied with Brahms's compositions. The same, however, could not be said for biographical issues. The relationship between the composer Johannes Brahms and the poet Klaus Groth, both important creative forces with strong roots in the Dithmarschen region of northern Germany, was a very special one that deserves greater recognition. In his lifetime Klaus Groth was a celebrated German poet because of his works in Plattdeutsch, a dialect with which Brahms was familiar. Unlike any of Brahms's other friends, Groth and his family had ties to the family of Brahms's father that extended back a number of generations. That he came from the same region as Brahms seems to have endeared the poet to the composer. Aside from Daumer, Brahms chose to set Groth's poems more frequently than those of any other writer. Both Groth and his wife Doris were greatly indebted for these settings, and they showered Brahms with praise. Peter Russell has made careful selections from the 89 letters that have been preserved, placing them in the context of the personalities, lives and works of both men. Alongside the letters, Russell provides a substantial commentary that includes analyses of Brahms's music and critical assessment of Groth's poems. The book includes two appendices: Brahms's settings of Groth's poems and a list of Groth's publications in Brahms's library.

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