|
Showing 1 - 18 of
18 matches in All Departments
Pierre Boulez was appointed to the College de France in 1976, with
the chair devoted to 'Invention, technique and language in Music',
and he held his position until 1995. The publication of his
extraordinary College de France lectures, his most significant
writings from the 1970s to the 1990s, will make a major
contribution to the discussion in English about Boulez's aesthetic
legacy. His goal in Lecons de musique is to express his conception
of musical language, laid out over the course of nearly twenty
years of lecturing. He is thinking about the possible paths musical
thought could take, as well as the musical legacy of the past In
addition to composers, music historians, theorists, and music
students, this book will be invaluable to those interested in the
history and aesthetics of 20th century music, musical
manifestations of artistic modernism, the history of ideas, and
French intellectual and cultural history. Faber have been Pierre
Boulez's publisher since 1986 - previous books include
Orientations, Boulez on Music Today and Boulez on Conducting.
'Boulez's achievements in changing every part of the fabric of
classical musical culture all over the world are indelible.' Tom
Service, Guardian
A selection of Arnold Whittall's masterly writings on Wagner
dealing with all major works in the context of 150 years' of
critical reception - with copious music examples. The book
celebrates Arnold Whittall's 80th birthday with a collection of his
key writings on Richard Wagner. The first ten chapters deal with
the three Romantic operas, the four parts of The Ring and the three
remaining music dramas. Their aim is to illuminate those aspects of
Wagner's style that are both personal and important for his
successors. Whittall sets close readings of key passages in the
context of a critical debate that has itself ragedfor over a
century, and his comprehensive range of reference makes this volume
essential reading for all those who want to enter the debate. The
final chapter deals with Jonathan Harvey's Wagner Dream (2007), a
modern operatic treatment of Wagner the man and his unrealised
Buddhist project, Die Sieger. Whittall's style is focussed and
discriminating, yet also relaxed and accessible, and his text is
rich in music examples. ARNOLD WHITTALL is Professor Emeritus at
King's College London. His previous books include Exploring
Twentieth-Century Music and Serialism.
A selection of Arnold Whittall's masterly writings on Wagner
dealing with all major works in the context of 150 years' of
critical reception - with copious music examples. The book
celebrates Arnold Whittall's 80th birthday with a collection of his
key writings on Richard Wagner. The first ten chapters deal with
the three Romantic operas, the four parts of The Ring and the three
remaining music dramas. Their aim is to illuminate those aspects of
Wagner's style that are both personal and important for his
successors. Whittall sets close readings of key passages in the
context of a critical debate that has itself ragedfor over a
century, and his comprehensive range of reference makes this volume
essential reading for all those who want to enter the debate. The
final chapter deals with Jonathan Harvey's Wagner Dream (2007), a
modern operatic treatment of Wagner the man and his unrealised
Buddhist project, Die Sieger. Whittall's style is focussed and
discriminating, yet also relaxed and accessible, and his text is
rich in music examples. ARNOLD WHITTALL is Professor Emeritus at
King's College London. His previous books include Exploring
Twentieth-Century Music and Serialism.
Historical, theoretical and analytical studies of principally
19-20c topics, reflecting current musical research. This collection
of nineteen essays, all by leaders in the field of music theory,
reflects the rich diversity of topics and approaches currently
being explored. The contributions fall within three principal areas
of study that haveremained at the heart of the discipline. One is
historical research, which includes efforts to trace the
development of theoretical ideas and their philosophical bases.
Representing this broad category are essays dealing with issues
like Scriabin's mysticism, neoclassicism, modern aesthetics, and
the development of the concept of pitch collection in
twentieth-century theoretical writings. The second area embraces
the theory and analysis of common-practicetonality and its
associated repertoire (including chromatic and 'transitional'
music). Within this category are several studies related directly
to or derived from Schenkerian theory, covering repertoire from
Bach through Schubert and Chopin to Gershwin. Complementing these
articles are a study of a chromatic work by Liszt and an essay on
Schoenberg's concept of tonality. The third broad category includes
the large body of work associated with the theoryand analysis of
post-tonal music. Representing this extensive area of inquiry are
essays dealing with voice leading in atonal music and extending
Allen Forte's theory of the set complex, and analytical studies
dealing with works by Schoenberg and Webern. Adding to these
contributions are articles that deal with works by composers less
frequently discussed in the analytical literature, Milhaud and
Peter Maxwell Davies, and an empirical study of aural cognition of
atonal and tonal music. These essays, all by colleagues, friends,
and students of Allen Forte are intended as a celebrationof his
enormous contribution to the discipline of music theory. James
Baker is Professor of Music at Brown University; David Beach is
Dean of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto; Jonathan
Bernard is Professor of Music at the University of Washington.
Showcases the energy and diversity of the young field of music
semiology, appealing to readers who want to explore the meaning of
music in our lives. The Dawn of Music Semiology showcases the work
of nine leading musicologists, inspired by the work of Jean-Jacques
Nattiez, the founding father of music semiology. Now entering its
fifth decade as Nattiez enters his eighth,music semiology, or music
semiotics, is still a young, vibrant field, and this book reflects
its energy and diversity. It appeals to readers wanting to explore
the meaning of music in our lives and to understand the ways of
appreciating the complexities that lie behind its simple beauty and
direct impact on us. Following a preface by Pierre Boulez and an
introduction by the editors, nine chapters discuss the latest
thinking about general considerations such as music and gesture,
the psychology of music, and the role of ethnotheory. The volume
offers new research on topics as diverse as modeling folk
polyphony, spatialization in the Darmstadt repertoire, Schenker's
theory of musical content, compositional modernism from Wagner to
Boulez, current music theory terminology, and Maderna's use of folk
music in serial composition. CONTRIBUTORS: Kofi Agawu, Simha Arom,
Rossana Dalmonte, Irene Deliege, Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman,
Nicolas Meeus, Jean Molino, Arnold Whittall Jonathan Dunsby is
Professor of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music,
University of Rochester. Jonathan Goldman is Professor of
Musicology at the University of Montreal.
By common consent the leading British composer of the
twentieth-century's middle decades, Britten continues to create
significant contexts for the work of those who survived and
succeeded him. This collection of revised reprints of essays,
reviews and analyses first published between 1995 and 2018 surveys
a cross-section of contemporary classical composition in the UK.
The governing perspective is the impact of the life and work of
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) on British composers who, with the
exception of Michael Tippett and Robert Simpson, were born between
the 1930s and the 1980s. Despite obvious and considerable
differences in character and style, British composers like Harrison
Birtwistle and Thomas Ades, Robin Holloway and James Dillon, have
continued, like Britten himself, to seek personal perspectives on
the still prominent procedures and personalities of more distant
baroque, classical and romantic eras. Most if not all of these
composers would deny being influenced by Britten, and many have
reservations about his music. Yet, in light of the fact that
British musical life and the institutions that support it have not
changed radically since Britten's own time - the pace of
technological change notwithstanding - to speak of 'British music
after Britten' inevitably involves something more than mere
chronology. As by common consent the leading British composer of
the twentieth-century's middle decades, Britten continues to create
significant contexts for the work of those who survived and
succeeded him.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) is often portrayed as a composer
who began as a heart-on-sleeve late Romantic only to evolve during
the First World War into an austere, mathematically-obsessed
deviser of musical puzzles. Yet to claim that in his music he
replaced tonality with its absolute opposite, atonality, as the
twelve-tone method swept away all trace of traditional harmonic and
thematic processes, is as misleading as to argue that romantic
warmth and humanity morphed into the purest and most austerely
modernistic spirituality. This handbook refocuses the wealth of
recent research into two of Schoenberg's major compositions; the
expressive character of those relatively early works which centre
on nocturnal images of darkness and despair is at its most original
and powerful in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung, where the dramatic
interplay between stabilising continuities and disorientating
fragmentations reveals the elements of a modernist aesthetics that
remained fundamental to Schoenberg's musical thought.
This comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective on
the stories that art music has told since the start of the 20th
century. Contributors challenge the broadly held opinion that the
loss of tonality in some music after 1900 also meant the loss of
narrative in that music. To the contrary, the editors and essayists
in this book demonstrate how experiments in approaching narrative
in other media, such as fiction and cinema, suggested fresh
possibilities for musical narrative, which composers were quick to
exploit. The new conceptions of time, narrative voice, plot, and
character that accompanied these experiments also had a significant
impact on contemporary music. The repertoire explored in the
collection ranges across a wide variety of genres and includes
composers from Charles Ives and the Pet Shop Boys to Thomas Ades
and Dmitri Shostakovich."
Looks at how Romanticism differs from Classicism, and discusses the
works of Paganini, Donizetti, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner,
Verdi, Grieg, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Puccini, and Rakhmaninov.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) is often portrayed as a composer
who began as a heart-on-sleeve late Romantic only to evolve during
the First World War into an austere, mathematically-obsessed
deviser of musical puzzles. Yet to claim that in his music he
replaced tonality with its absolute opposite, atonality, as the
twelve-tone method swept away all trace of traditional harmonic and
thematic processes, is as misleading as to argue that romantic
warmth and humanity morphed into the purest and most austerely
modernistic spirituality. This handbook refocuses the wealth of
recent research into two of Schoenberg's major compositions; the
expressive character of those relatively early works which centre
on nocturnal images of darkness and despair is at its most original
and powerful in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung, where the dramatic
interplay between stabilising continuities and disorientating
fragmentations reveals the elements of a modernist aesthetics that
remained fundamental to Schoenberg's musical thought.
Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century builds on the foundations of Music since the First World War (first published 1977, revised edition 1988). It updates and reshapes the original text and places it in the wider context of twentieth-century serious music before 1918 and after 1975, surveying the immense variety of technical developments in twentieth-century serious music. Sections of detailed analysis, with particular emphasis on such major figures as Stravinsky, Bartók, Messiaen, Tippett, and Ligeti, are framed by more concise sketches of a range of significant composers from Fauré, to Wolfgang Rihm. Extensive music examples reinforce this technical focus.
From the earliest years of the 20th century composers sought ways
in which to break from earlier musical traditions. Serialism is one
of the most prominent innovations resulting from this. From
Schoenberg to Stockhausen, Berg to Boulez, this introduction tells
the story of how serialism emerged, and provides a basic outline of
serial compositional techniques. * Introduces serialism - a
traditionally complex but key area of music studies - in a thorough
and straightforward way * Clearly and concisely describes the
technical aspects of serialism, using illustrative music examples *
Contains a glossary to aid readers unfamiliar with specialised
vocabulary.
From the earliest years of the 20th century composers sought ways
in which to break from earlier musical traditions. Serialism is one
of the most prominent innovations resulting from this. From
Schoenberg to Stockhausen, Berg to Boulez, this introduction tells
the story of how serialism emerged, and provides a basic outline of
serial compositional techniques. * Introduces serialism - a
traditionally complex but key area of music studies - in a thorough
and straightforward way * Clearly and concisely describes the
technical aspects of serialism, using illustrative music examples *
Contains a glossary to aid readers unfamiliar with specialised
vocabulary.
Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century builds on the foundations of Music since the First World War (first published 1977, revised edition 1988). It updates and reshapes the original text and places it in the wider context of twentieth-century serious music before 1918 and after 1975, surveying the immense variety of technical developments in twentieth-century serious music. Sections of detailed analysis, with particular emphasis on such major figures as Stravinsky, Bartók, Messiaen, Tippett, and Ligeti, are framed by more concise sketches of a range of significant composers from Fauré, to Wolfgang Rihm. Extensive music examples reinforce this technical focus.
In this classic study of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett,
Arnold Whittall builds up a unique double portrait of the two
leading composers of their generation. For this second, revised
edition Whittall includes a new chapter on Tippett's major works of
the 1980s: the Piano Sonata No. 4, the large-scale choral
composition The Mask of Time and the most recent opera, New Year.
In addition, new information on the Britten repertoire and an
updated bibliography are also presented.
This study of the music of a group of important composers of the twentieth century includes Debussy, Webern, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Janácek, Britten, Carter, Birtwistle, Andriessen and Adams. Arnold Whittall explores the cultural contexts and critical perspectives which shed light on certain works by these composers. In particular, he reveals the continuum between the progressive and the conservative underlying the great variety of styles and musical genres in twentieth-century composition.
This survey of the most significant modern composers and their techniques has become a standard work on the constantly shifting musical developments during the greater part of the twentieth century. In a concise and accessible narrative, Whittall examines the continued but declining commitment to tonality, twelve-note serialism, and the gradual emergence of new aesthetic attitudes and concepts of musical form.
This study of the music of a group of important composers of the twentieth century includes Debussy, Webern, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Janácek, Britten, Carter, Birtwistle, Andriessen and Adams. Arnold Whittall explores the cultural contexts and critical perspectives which shed light on certain works by these composers. In particular, he reveals the continuum between the progressive and the conservative underlying the great variety of styles and musical genres in twentieth-century composition.
|
|