America's Musical Life PDF Download

Author: Richard Crawford
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393048100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1000

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Book Description
An illustrated history of America's musical heritage ranges from the earliest examples of Native American traditional song to the innovative sound of contemporary rock and jazz.

Author: Richard Crawford
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393327264
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"A superb, all-encompassing survey of music in America." —Kirkus Reviews When it comes to American music, America's Musical Life is "the best one-volume history yet on the subject for musicians and enthusiasts, professional or amateur" (Kirkus Reviews). "Well-researched and sensitively constructed" (Library Journal) and "a book that welcomes the reader, who is happy to keep returning for more" (Music Library Association Notes), America's Musical Life tells the story of American music making in rich detail. In chronicling American music's bountiful heritage, this "superb book presents the whole sweep of U.S. cultivated and traditional music—from 16th-century Native American music through late 20th-century hiphop culture." A substantial cultural achievement, "this definitive history of music in the U.S. is sure to delight music aficionados and history buffs alike, and is a must for anyone interested in what music has meant to America and what America has meant to music" (Publishers Weekly).

Author: Jack Viertel
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374711259
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
A New York Times Bestseller For almost a century, Americans have been losing their hearts and losing their minds in an insatiable love affair with the American musical. It often begins in childhood in a darkened theater, grows into something more serious for high school actors, and reaches its passionate zenith when it comes time for love, marriage, and children, who will start the cycle all over again. Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical? In The Secret Life of the American Musical, Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, marvels at their unflagging inventiveness, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he invites us to fall in love all over again by showing us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate audiences, and how one landmark show leads to the next—by design or by accident, by emulation or by rebellion—from Oklahoma! to Hamilton and onward. Structured like a musical, The Secret Life of the American Musical begins with an overture and concludes with a curtain call, with stops in between for “I Want” songs, “conditional” love songs, production numbers, star turns, and finales. The ultimate insider, Viertel has spent three decades on Broadway, working on dozens of shows old and new as a conceiver, producer, dramaturg, and general creative force; he has his own unique way of looking at the process and at the people who collaborate to make musicals a reality. He shows us patterns in the architecture of classic shows and charts the inevitable evolution that has taken place in musical theater as America itself has evolved socially and politically. The Secret Life of the American Musical makes you feel as though you’ve been there in the rehearsal room, in the front row of the theater, and in the working offices of theater owners and producers as they pursue their own love affair with that rare and elusive beast—the Broadway hit.

Author: David Nicholls
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521454292
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of American Music, first published in 1998, celebrates the richness of America's musical life. It was the first study of music in the United States to be written by a team of scholars. American music is an intricate tapestry of many cultures, and the History reveals this wide array of influences from Native, European, African, Asian, and other sources. The History begins with a survey of the music of Native Americans and then explores the social, historical, and cultural events of musical life in the period until 1900. Other contributors examine the growth and influence of popular musics, including film and stage music, jazz, rock, and immigrant, folk, and regional musics. The volume also includes valuable chapters on twentieth-century art music, including the experimental, serial, and tonal traditions.

Author: Michael Charry
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252093104
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
This book is the first full biography of George Szell, one of the greatest orchestra and opera conductors of the twentieth century. From child prodigy pianist and composer to world-renowned conductor, Szell's career spanned seven decades, and he led most of the great orchestras and opera companies of the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the NBC and Chicago Symphonies, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and Opera, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. A protégé of composer-conductor Richard Strauss at the Berlin State Opera, his crowning achievement was his twenty-four-year tenure as musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra, transforming it into one of the world's greatest ensembles, touring triumphantly in the United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, South Korea, and Japan. Michael Charry, a conductor who worked with Szell and interviewed him, his family, and his associates over several decades, draws on this first-hand material and correspondence, orchestra records, reviews, and other archival sources to construct a lively and balanced portrait of Szell's life and work from his birth in 1897 in Budapest to his death in 1970 in Cleveland. Readers will follow Szell from his career in Europe, Great Britain, and Australia to his guest conducting at the New York Philharmonic and his distinguished tenure at the Metropolitan Opera and Cleveland Orchestra. Charry details Szell's personal and musical qualities, his recordings and broadcast concerts, his approach to the great works of the orchestral repertoire, and his famous orchestrational changes and interpretation of the symphonies of Robert Schumann. The book also lists Szell's conducting repertoire and includes a comprehensive discography. In highlighting Szell's legacy as a teacher and mentor as well as his contributions to orchestral and opera history, this biography will be of lasting interest to concert-goers, music lovers, conductors, musicians inspired by Szell's many great performances, and new generations who will come to know those performances through Szell's recorded legacy.

Author: Steve Swayne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199792569
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 712

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Book Description
Winner of the ASCAP Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography The musical landscape of New York City and the United States of America would look quite different had it not been for William Schuman. Orpheus in Manhattan, a fully objective and comprehensive biography of Schuman, portrays a man who had a profound influence upon the artistic and political institutions of his day and beyond. Steve Swayne draws heavily upon Schuman's letters, writings, and manuscripts as well as unprecedented access to archival recordings and previously unknown correspondence. The winner of the first Pulitzer Prize in Music, Schuman composed music that is rhythmically febrile, harmonically pungent, melodically long-breathed, and timbrally brilliant, and Swayne offers an astute analysis of his work, including many unpublished music scores. Swayne also describes Schuman's role as president of the Juilliard School of Music and of Lincoln Center, tracing how he both expanded the boundaries of music education and championed the performing arts. Filled with new discoveries and revisions of the received historical narrative, Orpheus in Manhattan confirms Schuman as a major figure in America's musical life.

Author: John Bush Jones
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611682231
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Our Musicals, Ourselves is the first full-scale social history of the American musical theater from the imported Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas of the late nineteenth century to such recent musicals as The Producers and Urinetown. While many aficionados of the Broadway musical associate it with wonderful, diversionary shows like The Music Man or My Fair Lady, John Bush Jones instead selects musicals for their social relevance and the extent to which they engage, directly or metaphorically, contemporary politics and culture. Organized chronologically, with some liberties taken to keep together similarly themed musicals, Jones examines dozens of Broadway shows from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present that demonstrate numerous links between what played on Broadway and what played on newspapersÕ front pages across our nation. He reviews the productions, lyrics, staging, and casts from the lesser-known early musicals (the ÒgunboatÓ musicals of the Teddy Roosevelt era and the ÒCinderella showsÓ and Òleisure time musicalsÓ of the 1920s) and continues his analysis with better-known shows including Showboat, Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma, South Pacific, West Side Story, Cabaret, Hair, Company, A Chorus Line, and many others. While most examinations of the American musical focus on specific shows or emphasize the development of the musical as an art form, JonesÕs book uses musicals as a way of illuminating broader social and cultural themes of the times. With six appendixes detailing the long-running diversionary musicals and a foreword by Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof, JonesÕs comprehensive social history will appeal to both students and fans of Broadway.

Author: Tara Browner
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051157
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
In Rethinking American Music, Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis curate essays that offer an eclectic survey of current music scholarship. Ranging from Tin Pan Alley to Thelonious Monk to hip hop, the contributors go beyond repertory and biography to explore four critical yet overlooked areas: the impact of performance; patronage's role in creating music and finding a place to play it; personal identity; and the ways cultural and ethnographic circumstances determine the music that emerges from the creative process. Many of the articles also look at how a piece of music becomes initially popular and then exerts a lasting influence in the larger global culture. The result is an insightful state-of-the-field examination that doubles as an engaging short course on our complex, multifaceted musical heritage. Contributors: Karen Ahlquist, Amy C. Beal, Mark Clagu,. Esther R. Crookshank, Todd Decker, Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett, Joshua S. Duchan, Mark Katz, Jeffrey Magee, Sterling E. Murray, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., David Warren Steel, Jeffrey Taylor, and Mark Tucker

Author: Walter Aaron Clark
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195313704
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
The last of the Spanish Romantics, composer, conductor, and impresario Federico Moreno Torroba (1891-1982) left his mark on virtually every aspect of Spanish musical culture during a career which spanned six decades, and saw tremendous political and cultural upheavals. Federico Moreno Torroba: A Musical Life in Three Acts explores not only his life and work, but also the relationship of his music to the cultural milieu in which he moved.

Author: Bill Banfield
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0585464162
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
A sequel to the award-winning The Black Composer Speaks (Scarecrow Press, 1978), this exploration of the creative world of African American composers traces the lives and careers of 40 talented individuals and, in their own words, provides perspectives on a world that has been slow to recognize their remarkable contributions to classical music. The discussion places the music of these composers within the greater context of Western art music, but analyzes it through the lenses of sociology, Western concepts of art and taste, and vernacular musical forms, including spirituals, blues, jazz, and contemporary popular music. Each chapter is devoted to an individual composer, who discusses his or her musical training, compositional techniques and style, and the composer's personal philosophy as reflected in his or her music. A selected list of compositions for each composer is included, as well as a photo and sample of the composer's "hand." Banfield offers unprecedented insight into the history and influence of the African American composer with this documentary, which will appeal to everyone from the music scholar to the general reader.