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Author: Harvey Sachs Publisher: Liveright Publishing ISBN: 1631497588 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 287
Book Description
“[A]n immensely valuable source for anyone desiring an accessible overview of this endlessly controversial and chronically misunderstood giant of 20th-century music.” —John Adams, New York Times Book Review, cover review A New Yorker Best Book of the Year An astonishingly lyrical biography that rescues Schoenberg from notoriety, restoring him to his rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers. In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers and teachers. Sachs shows how Schoenberg, a thorny character who composed thorny works, raged against the “Procrustean bed” of tradition. Defying his critics—among them the Nazis, who described his music as “degenerate”—he constantly battled the anti-Semitism that eventually precipitated his flight from Europe to Los Angeles. Yet Schoenberg, synthesizing Wagnerian excess with Brahmsian restraint, created a shock wave that never quite subsided, and, as Sachs powerfully argues, his compositions must be confronted by anyone interested in the past, present, or future of Western music.
Author: Harvey Sachs Publisher: Liveright Publishing ISBN: 1631497588 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 287
Book Description
“[A]n immensely valuable source for anyone desiring an accessible overview of this endlessly controversial and chronically misunderstood giant of 20th-century music.” —John Adams, New York Times Book Review, cover review A New Yorker Best Book of the Year An astonishingly lyrical biography that rescues Schoenberg from notoriety, restoring him to his rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers. In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers and teachers. Sachs shows how Schoenberg, a thorny character who composed thorny works, raged against the “Procrustean bed” of tradition. Defying his critics—among them the Nazis, who described his music as “degenerate”—he constantly battled the anti-Semitism that eventually precipitated his flight from Europe to Los Angeles. Yet Schoenberg, synthesizing Wagnerian excess with Brahmsian restraint, created a shock wave that never quite subsided, and, as Sachs powerfully argues, his compositions must be confronted by anyone interested in the past, present, or future of Western music.
Author: Bojan Bujic Publisher: Phaidon Press ISBN: 9780714846149 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In this book, Bojan Bujic sets into an appropriate cultural context the immensely rich life of a composer who is, arguably, the key musical personality of the twentieth century. A major force in the development of modern music, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is famous for abandoning tonality and introducing the 12-tone 'serial' method of composition. There can be no agreement as to whether Schoenberg is the greatest composer of his time, especially as his innovative musical language did not appeal to all who came after him, but directly or indirectly, he affected so many musicians and listeners of his own and of subsequent generations that his centrality cannot be disputed. In addition to his work as a composer, Schoenberg was an important theorist of tonal music and an enormously influential teacher, with Anton Webern and Alban Berg among his most famous pupils. Brought up in the rich and cosmopolitan cultural life of Vienna, Schoenberg started to play the violin at the age of nine and began experimenting with composition almost immediately, but his education was cut short by the death of his father in 1889. Schoenberg had no formal training in music until he was in his late teens, and throughout his life he remained proud of the fact that so much of what he had absorbed as a youth about music and literature derived from his own tenacity and sense of purpose. Schoenberg first composed in the late Romantic tradition, and his earliest acknowledged works, including the string sextet "Verklarte Nacht", date from the turn of the century. Following a brief interlude in Berlin, where he worked as a cabaret musician and teacher and also wrote the symponic poem "Pelleas und Melisande", he returned to Vienna. Here, he began taking on pupils such as Webern and Berg, and further developed his musical style, in due course causing a sensation with the dissonance of his 'serial' technique and the greater harmonic strangeness and complexity of his material. Schoenberg only returned to something approaching his tonal style decades later, with his "Suite in G" for strings. In 1925, a couple of years after having turned down an offer to become director of the Bauhaus music school because he had been informed of antisemitic tendencies at the institution, Schoenberg moved back to Berlin to take up a post as director of a master class in composition at the Arts Academy, in spite of antisemitic protests appearing in the Zeitschrift fur Musik in reaction to his professorship. Later, when he situation of Jews in Germany became clear to him, Schoenberg increasingly spent time away from Berlin, and finally decided to move to the US in 1933, where he taught in Boston and New York at the Malkin Conservatory. In 1934, Schoenberg moved to Los Angeles, taking up a teaching post at USC and a professorship at UCLA. He lived in Los Angeles, where John Cage became one of his pupils and George Gershwin a good friend, until his death in 1951. There are those who contend that Schoenberg's uncompromising search for an individual voice led him to create music which is too difficult to follow, since many familiar features, which normally enable listeners to find their way through a piece of music, have been removed or radically re-shaped. This is often perceived as the main cause of the isolation of avant-garde music in the late twentieth century, but Bujic argues that these accusations are frequently made before Schoenberg's music has even had a chance to present itself - its difficulty and strangeness are uncritically evoked, often preventing the music from being appreciated in its own right. In this book, Bujic sets out to win more listeners to Schoenberg's music, by introducing his life, work and theories in an accessible, sympathetic manner.
Author: Arnold Schoenberg Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520052949 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 564
Book Description
One of the most influential collections of music ever published, Style and Idea includes Schoenberg’s writings about himself and his music as well as studies of many other composers and reflections on art and society.
Author: Harvey Sachs Publisher: National Geographic Books ISBN: 1631492713 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
On the 150th anniversary of his birth comes this monumental biography of Arturo Toscanini, whose dramatic life is unparalleled among twentieth-century musicians. It may be difficult to imagine today, but Arturo Toscanini—recognized widely as the most celebrated conductor of the twentieth century—was once one of the most famous people in the world. Like Einstein in science or Picasso in art, Toscanini (1867–1957) transcended his own field, becoming a figure of such renown that it was often impossible not to see some mention of the maestro in the daily headlines. Acclaimed music historian Harvey Sachs has long been fascinated with Toscanini’s extraordinary story. Drawn not only to his illustrious sixty-eight-year career but also to his countless expressions of political courage in an age of tyrants, and to a private existence torn between love of family and erotic restlessness, Sachs produced a biography of Toscanini in 1978. Yet as archives continued to open and Sachs was able to interview an ever-expanding list of relatives and associates, he came to realize that this remarkable life demanded a completely new work, and the result is Toscanini—an utterly absorbing story of a man who was incapable of separating his spectacular career from the call of his conscience. Famed for his fierce dedication but also for his explosive temper, Toscanini conducted the world premieres of many Italian operas, including Pagliacci, La Boheme, and Turandot, as well as the Italian premieres of works by Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Debussy. In time, as Sachs chronicles, he would dominate not only La Scala in his native Italy but also the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. He also collaborated with dozens of star singers, among them Enrico Caruso and Feodor Chaliapin, as well as the great sopranos Rosina Storchio, Geraldine Farrar, and Lotte Lehmann, with whom he had affairs. While this consuming passion constantly blurred the distinction between professional and personal, it did forge within him a steadfast opposition to totalitarianism and a personal bravery that would make him a model for artists of conscience. As early as 1922, Toscanini refused to allow his La Scala orchestra to play the Fascist anthem, "Giovinezza," even when threatened by Mussolini’s goons. And when tens of thousands of desperate Jewish refugees poured into Palestine in the late 1930s, he journeyed there at his own expense to establish an orchestra comprised of refugee musicians, and his travels were followed like that of a king. Thanks to unprecedented access to family archives, Toscanini becomes not only the definitive biography of the conductor, but a work that soars in its exploration of musical genius and moral conscience, taking its place among the great musical biographies of our time.
Author: Harvey Sachs Publisher: Liveright Publishing ISBN: 1631495194 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
Some pieces of music survive. Most fall into oblivion. What gives the ten masterpieces selected for this book their exceptional vitality? In this penetrating volume, Harvey Sachs, acclaimed biographer and historian of classical music, takes readers into the hearts of ten extraordinary works of classical music in ten different genres, showing both the curious novice and the seasoned listener how to recognize, appreciate, and engage with these masterpieces on a historical and compositional level. Far from what is often thought, classical music is neither dead nor dying. As a genre, it is constantly evolving, its pieces passing through countless permutations and combinations yet always retaining that essential élan vital, or life force. The works collected here, composed in the years between 1784 and 1966, are a testament to this fact. As Sachs skillfully demonstrates, they have endured not because they were exceptionally well-made or interesting but because they were created by composers—Mozart and Beethoven; Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Verdi, and Brahms; Sibelius, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky—who had a particular genius for drawing music out of their deepest wellsprings. “Through music,” Sachs writes, “they universalized the intimate.” In describing how music actually sounds, Ten Masterpieces of Music seems to do the impossible, animating the process of composing as well as the coming together of disparate scales and melodies, trills and harmonies. It tells us, too, how particular compositions came to be, often revealing that the pieces we now consider “classic” were never intended to be so. In poignant, exquisite prose, Sachs shows how Mozart, a former child prodigy under constant pressure to produce new music, hastily penned Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, one of his finest piano concertos, for a teenage student, and likewise demonstrates how Goethe’s Faust, Part One, became a springboard for the musical imagination of the French composer Berlioz. As Sachs explains, these pieces are not presented as candidates for a new “Top Ten.” They represent neither the most well-known nor the most often-performed works of each composer. Instead, they were chosen precisely because he had something profound to say about them, about their composers, about how each piece fits into its composer’s life, and about how each of these lives can be contextualized by time and place. In fact, Sachs encourages readers to form their own favorites, and teaches them how to discern special characteristics that will enhance their own listening experiences. With Ten Masterpieces of Music, it becomes evident that Sachs has lived with these pieces for a veritable lifetime. His often-soaring descriptions of the works and the dramatic lives of the men who composed them bring a heightened dimension to the musical perceptions of all listeners, communicating both the sheer improbability of a work becoming a classic and why certain pieces—these ten among them—survive the perilous test of time.
Author: Dika Newlin Publisher: Read Books Ltd ISBN: 1473387302 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
The idea of this book originally came to me during my years of study with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles. At that time I was first introduced to the most “radical” works of Schoenberg—works virtually unknown in this country so far as public performances are concerned. I felt the need of a historical background which would explain the origins of the new style.
Author: Allen Shawn Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 1466895500 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
A composer's study and celebration of a difficult but influential artist, his work, and his time Proposing that Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) has been more discussed than heard, more tolerated than loved, composer Allen Shawn puts aside ultimate judgments about Schoenberg's place in musical history to explore the composer's fascinating world in a series of "linked essays--soundings" that are more searching than analytical, more suggestive than definitive. In an approach that is unusual for a book of an avowedly introductory character, the text plunges into the details of some of Schoenberg works, while at the same time providing a broad overview of his involvement in music, painting and the history through which he lived. Emphasizing music as an expressive art of rhythms and tones, Shawn approaches Schoenberg primarily from the listener's point of view, uncovering both the seeds of his radicalism in his early music and the traditional bases of his later work. Although liberally sprinkled with musical examples, the text can be read without them. By turns witty, personal, opinionated and instructive, "Arnold Schoenberg's Journey" is above all an appreciation of a great musical and artistic imagination in a time unlike any other.
Author: Joy H. Calico Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520281861 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Joy H. Calico examines the cultural history of postwar Europe through the lens of the performance and reception of Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from WarsawÑa short but powerful work, she argues, capable of irritating every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. Schoenberg, a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been one of the NazisÕ prime exemplars of entartete (degenerate) music, immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, he wrote this twelve-tone piece about the Holocaust in three languages for an American audience.ÊThis book investigates the meanings attached to the work as it circulated through Europe during the early Cold War in a kind of symbolic musical remigration, focusing on six case studies: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Each case is unique, informed by individual geopolitical concerns, but this analysis also reveals common themes in anxieties about musical modernism, Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, anti-Semitism, dislocation, and the presence of occupying forces on both sides of the Cold War divide.
Author: Harvey Sachs Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks ISBN: 0812969073 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
The premier of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Vienna on May 7, 1824, was the most significant artistic event of the year—and the work remains one of the most precedent-shattering and influential compositions in the history of music. Described in vibrant detail by eminent musicologist Harvey Sachs, this symbol of freedom and joy was so unorthodox that it amazed and confused listeners at its unveiling—yet it became a standard for subsequent generations of creative artists, and its composer came to embody the Romantic cult of genius. In this unconventional, provocative book, Beethoven’s masterwork becomes a prism through which we may view the politics, aesthetics, and overall climate of the era. Part biography, part history, part memoir, The Ninth brilliantly explores the intricacies of Beethoven’s last symphony—how it brought forth the power of the individual while celebrating the collective spirit of humanity.
Author: Arthur Berger Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520928213 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
In this engrossing collection of essays, distinguished composer, theorist, journalist, and educator Arthur Berger invites us into the vibrant and ever-changing American music scene that has been his home for most of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and always entertaining, Berger describes the music scene in New York and Boston since the 1930s, discussing the heady days when he was a member of a tight-knit circle of avant-garde young composers mentored by Aaron Copland as well as his participation in a group at Harvard University dedicated to Stravinsky. As Virgil Thomson's associate on the New York Herald Tribune and founding editor of the prestigious Perspectives of New Music, Berger became one of the preeminent observers and critics of American music. His reflections on the role of music in contemporary life, his journalism career, and how changes in academia influence the composition and teaching of music offer a unique perspective informed by Berger's abundant intelligence and experience.
Author: Harvey Sachs
Author: Harvey Sachs
Author: Bojan Bujic
Author: Arnold Schoenberg
Author: Harvey Sachs
Author: Harvey Sachs
Author: Dika Newlin
Author: Allen Shawn
Author: Joy H. Calico
Author: Harvey Sachs
Author: Arthur Berger