Author: Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621969452
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 378
Book Description
Dead Composers, Living Audiences
Author: Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621969452
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 378
Book Description
Dead Composers, Living Audiences
Author: Gerald Lynn PhillipsPublisher:
ISBN: 9781624991509
Category : MUSIC
Languages : en
Pages : 377
Book Description
In this well-written work, the author argues that the present situation regarding the music of the classical tradition is fundamentally untenable. While change is, of course, inevitable, the author posits that teachers of the classical music tradition, nonetheless, have a moral responsibility to do as much as possible to advocate and work toward goals that will hasten and most positively influence the direction of change. The author believes that the present relationship between the music of the Western classical tradition and the culture of the present is an unhealthy one. The music of dead composers comprises the overwhelming preponderance of music heard today, especially in the larger venues such as symphony halls and opera houses. Specifically, the author argues that we must promote and provide for (at least) an equal place in our teaching, recordings, and performances for the music of composers who are living at the time we undertake these activities. He further advocates that this is not simply a matter of currency, it is a matter of cultural vibrancyeven survivaland it is an ethical and aesthetic concern toward which we must direct our most serious attention and effort. As both a singer and a teacher, the author delivers a resounding perspective in this book. He also brings the important insights of others from other fields such as literature, philosophy, and theater. The authors discussions revolve around the situation of classical music, a situation that in many ways exemplifies the gradual transformation of the rationalization of the world, into the radical commodification of the world. This outcome will be shown to be intimately linked to ethical and aesthetic issues, whichwill be developed by means of an extended consideration of the conflict between the rational and the a-rational as it plays itself out in contrasts between music, art, and literature, and science and philosophy. The book delves into the problem of teaching music, particularly the problems commonly dealt with in the teaching studio. Teachers of the Western music tradition have developed tried and true techniques for dealing with these problems as they occur in teaching, generally by helping students toward an understanding of historical, musical, technical and stylistic problems, among a host of others. These common problems of teaching are, however, symptomatic of very deep, complicated, and endemic philosophical issues that have, so far, been insufficiently discussed in a form that might be useful to teachers, performers, and lovers of the music of the Western classical music tradition. The most unique contribution of these discussions is the investigation into what is not discussed to any depth in pedagogy bookswhat lies behind or beneath these commonly experienced problems. This is a critical book for collections in music.
The Rest Is Noise
Author: Alex RossPublisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 640
Book Description
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Wagnerism
Author: Alex RossPublisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429944544
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 784
Book Description
Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.
German Song Onstage
Author: Natasha LogesPublisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304703X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Book Description
A singer in an evening dress, a grand piano. A modest-sized audience, mostly well-dressed and silver-haired, equipped with translation booklets. A program consisting entirely of songs by one or two composers. This is the way of the Lieder recital these days. While it might seem that this style of performance is a long-standing tradition, German Song Onstage demonstrates that it is not. For much of the 19th century, the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were heard in the home, salon, and, no less significantly, on the concert platform alongside orchestral and choral works. A dedicated program was rare, a dedicated audience even more so. The Lied was a genre with both more private and more public associations than is commonly recalled. The contributors to this volume explore a broad range of venues, singers, and audiences in distinct places and time periods—including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany—from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century. These historical case studies are set alongside reflections from a selection of today's leading musicians, offering insights on current Lied practices that will inform future generations of performers, scholars, and connoisseurs. Together these case studies unsettle narrow and elitist assumptions about what it meant and still means to present German song onstage by providing a transnational picture of historical Lieder performance, and opening up discussions about the relationship between history and performance today.
Rendezvous with the Sensuous
Author: John MurungiPublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443857874
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
In Rendezvous with the Sensuous readers are drawn to, and become situated within, the dynamic place of the aesthetic experience. While there, human sensuousness comes into relief as it combines with the sensuousness that derives from nature. In this complex place where artistic expression coalesces with the natural world, readers are extended an invitation to share in the journey of a richly diverse synesthetic experience and to gain a greater appreciation of the important place of the sensuous in illuminating the role of aesthetics in the world of ideas.
Listen to This
Author: Alex RossPublisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9781429977616
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.
Classical Music in Weimar Germany
Author: Brendan FayPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350114812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
From Hitler's notorious fondness for Wagner's operas to classical music's role in fuelling German chauvinism in the era of the world wars, many observers have pointed to a distinct relationship between German culture and reactionary politics. In Classical Music in Weimar Germany, Brendan Fay challenges this paradigm by reassessing the relationship between conservative musical culture and German politics. Drawing upon a range of archival sources, concert reviews and satirical cartoons, Fay maps the complex path of classical music culture from Weimar to Nazi Germany-a trajectory that was more crooked, uneven, or broken than straight. Through an examination of topics as varied as radio and race to nationalism, this book demonstrates the diversity of competing aesthetic, philosophical and political ideals held by German music critics that were a hallmark of Weimar Germany. Rather than seeing the cultural conservatism of this period as a natural prelude for the violence and destruction later unleashed by Nazism, this fascinating book sheds new light on traditional culture and its relationship to the rise of Nazism in 20th-century Germany.
A Performer's Guide to Transcribing, Editing, and Arranging Early Music
Author: Alon SchabPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197600654
Category : Arrangement (Music)
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
Provides instruction on three important tasks that early music performers often undertake in order to make their work more noticeable and appealing to their audiences. First, the book provides instruction on using early sources - manuscripts, prints, and treatises - in score, parts, or tablature. It then illuminates priorities behind basic editorial decisions - determining what constitutes a 'version' of a musical piece, how to choose a version, and how to choose the source for that version. Lastly, the book offers advice about arranging both early and new music for early instruments, including how to consider instruments' ranges and various registers, how to exploit the unique characteristics of period instruments, and how to produce convincing textures of accompaniment.
Environment-Space-Place, Volume 3 / Issue 1 (Spring 2011)
Author: Gary BackhausPublisher: Zeta Books
ISBN: 606826601X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description