Child Composers in the Old Conservatories

Child Composers in the Old Conservatories PDF Author: Robert O. Gjerdingen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190653612
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
In seventeenth century Italy, overcrowding, violent political uprising, and plague led an astonishing number of abandoned and orphaned children to overwhelm the cities. Out of the piety of private citizens and the apathy of local governments, the system of conservatori was created to house, nurture, and train these fanciulli vaganti (roaming children) to become hatters, shoemakers, tailors, goldsmiths, cabinet makers, and musicians - a range of practical trades that might sustain them and enable them to contribute to society. Conservatori were founded across Italy, from Venice and Florence to Parma and Naples, many specializing in a particular trade. Four music conservatori in Naples gained particular renown for their exceptional training of musicians, both performers and composers, all boys. By the eighteenth century, the graduates of the Naples conservatories began to spread across Europe, with some 600 boys formerly in residence beginning to dominate the European musical world. Other conservatories in the country - including the Paris Conservatory - began to imitate the principles of the Naples' conservatory's training, known as the partimento tradition. The daily lessons and exercises associated with this tradition were largely lost-until author Robert Gjerdingen discovered evidence of them in the archives of conservatories across Italy and the rest of Europe. Compellingly narrated and richly illustrated, Child Composers in the Old Conservatory follows the story of these boys as they undergo rigorous training with the conservatory's maestri and eventually become maestri themselves, then moves forward in time to see the influence of partimenti in the training of such composers as Claude Debussy and Colette Boyer. Advocating for the revival of partimenti in modern music education, the book explores the tremendous potential of this tradition to enable natural musical fluency for students of all ages learning the craft today.

Child Composers in the Old Conservatories

Child Composers in the Old Conservatories PDF Author: Robert O. Gjerdingen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190653612
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
In seventeenth century Italy, overcrowding, violent political uprising, and plague led an astonishing number of abandoned and orphaned children to overwhelm the cities. Out of the piety of private citizens and the apathy of local governments, the system of conservatori was created to house, nurture, and train these fanciulli vaganti (roaming children) to become hatters, shoemakers, tailors, goldsmiths, cabinet makers, and musicians - a range of practical trades that might sustain them and enable them to contribute to society. Conservatori were founded across Italy, from Venice and Florence to Parma and Naples, many specializing in a particular trade. Four music conservatori in Naples gained particular renown for their exceptional training of musicians, both performers and composers, all boys. By the eighteenth century, the graduates of the Naples conservatories began to spread across Europe, with some 600 boys formerly in residence beginning to dominate the European musical world. Other conservatories in the country - including the Paris Conservatory - began to imitate the principles of the Naples' conservatory's training, known as the partimento tradition. The daily lessons and exercises associated with this tradition were largely lost-until author Robert Gjerdingen discovered evidence of them in the archives of conservatories across Italy and the rest of Europe. Compellingly narrated and richly illustrated, Child Composers in the Old Conservatory follows the story of these boys as they undergo rigorous training with the conservatory's maestri and eventually become maestri themselves, then moves forward in time to see the influence of partimenti in the training of such composers as Claude Debussy and Colette Boyer. Advocating for the revival of partimenti in modern music education, the book explores the tremendous potential of this tradition to enable natural musical fluency for students of all ages learning the craft today.

Child Composers in the Old Conservatories

Child Composers in the Old Conservatories PDF Author: Robert O. Gjerdingen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190653590
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
In seventeenth century Italy, overcrowding, violent political uprising, and plague led an astonishing number of abandoned and orphaned children to overwhelm the cities. Out of the piety of private citizens and the apathy of local governments, the system of conservatori was created to house, nurture, and train these fanciulli vaganti (roaming children) to become hatters, shoemakers, tailors, goldsmiths, cabinet makers, and musicians - a range of practical trades that might sustain them and enable them to contribute to society. Conservatori were founded across Italy, from Venice and Florence to Parma and Naples, many specializing in a particular trade. Four music conservatori in Naples gained particular renown for their exceptional training of musicians, both performers and composers, all boys. By the eighteenth century, the graduates of the Naples conservatories began to spread across Europe, with some 600 boys formerly in residence beginning to dominate the European musical world. Other conservatories in the country - including the Paris Conservatory - began to imitate the principles of the Naples' conservatory's training, known as the partimento tradition. The daily lessons and exercises associated with this tradition were largely lost-until author Robert Gjerdingen discovered evidence of them in the archives of conservatories across Italy and the rest of Europe. Compellingly narrated and richly illustrated, Child Composers in the Old Conservatory follows the story of these boys as they undergo rigorous training with the conservatory's maestri and eventually become maestri themselves, then moves forward in time to see the influence of partimenti in the training of such composers as Claude Debussy and Colette Boyer. Advocating for the revival of partimenti in modern music education, the book explores the tremendous potential of this tradition to enable natural musical fluency for students of all ages learning the craft today.

Music in the Galant Style

Music in the Galant Style PDF Author: Robert Gjerdingen
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195313712
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
Music in the Galant Style is an authoritative and readily understandable study of the core compositional style of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of eighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists, formative of the "galant style."

Partimento and Continuo Playing in Theory and in Practice

Partimento and Continuo Playing in Theory and in Practice PDF Author: Thomas Street Christensen
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9058678288
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
This volume reflects a multidisciplinary approach, with the accent on the interplay between music performance and music theory. Thomas Christensen, in his contribution, shows how the development of tonal harmonic theory went hand in hand with the practice of thoroughbass. Both Robert Gjerdingen and Giorgio Sanguinetti focus on the Neapolitan tradition of partimento. Gjerdingen addresses the relation between the realization of partimenti and contrapuntal thinking, illustrated by examples of contrapuntal imitation and combination in partimenti, leading to the "partimentofugue." Sanguinetti elaborates on the history of this partimentofugue from the early eighteenth until the late nineteenth century. Rudolf Lutz, finally, presents his use of partimenti in educational practice, giving examples of how reviving this old practice can give new insights to composers, conductors, and musicians.

The Solfeggio Tradition

The Solfeggio Tradition PDF Author: Nicholas Baragwanath
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0197514081
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
In this first-ever book on the solfeggio tradition, one of the pillars of eighteenth-century music education, author Nicholas Baragwanath illuminates how performers and composers developed their exceptional skills in improvising and inventing melodies.

The Pianist's Guide to Historic Improvisation

The Pianist's Guide to Historic Improvisation PDF Author: John J. Mortensen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190920416
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Keyboard artists in the time of J.S. Bach were simultaneously performers, composers, and improvisers. By the twentieth century, however, the art of improvisation was all but lost. Today, vanishingly few classically-trained musicians can improvise with fluent, stylistic integrity. Many now question the system of training that leaves players dependent upon the printed page, and would welcome a new approach to musicianship that would enable modern performers to recapture the remarkable creative freedom of a bygone era. The Pianist's Guide to Historic Improvisation opens a pathway of musical discovery as the reader learns to improvise with confidence and joy. Useful as either a college-level textbook or a guide for independent study, the book is eminently practical. Author John Mortensen explains even the most complex ideas in a lucid, conversational tone, accompanied by hundreds of musical examples. Mortensen pairs every concept with hands-on exercises for step-by-step practice of each skill. Professional-level virtuosity is not required; players of moderate skill can manage the material. Suitable for professionals, conservatory students, and avid amateurs, The Pianist's Guide leads to mastery of improvisational techniques at the Baroque keyboard.

The Art of Partimento

The Art of Partimento PDF Author: Giorgio Sanguinetti
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195394208
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
At the height of the Enlightenment, four conservatories in Naples stood at the center of European composition. Maestros taught their students to compose with unprecedented swiftness and elegance using the partimento. In The Art of Partimento, performer and historian Giorgio Sanguinetti provides students and scholars of composition and music theory an historical chronicle as well as a practical guide, offering them the opportunity not only to understand the life of this fascinating tradition, but to participate in it as well.

First Nights

First Nights PDF Author: Thomas Forrest Kelly
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300091052
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This lively book takes us back to the first performances of five famous musical compositions: Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1607, Handel's Messiah in 1742, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1824, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique in 1830, and Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps in 1913. Thomas Forrest Kelly sets the scene for each of these premieres, describing the cities in which they took place, the concert halls, audiences, conductors, and musicians, the sound of the music when it was first performed (often with instruments now extinct), and the popular and critical responses. He explores how performance styles and conditions have changed over the centuries and what music can reveal about the societies that produce it. Kelly tells us, for example, that Handel recruited musicians he didn't know to perform Messiah in a newly built hall in Dublin; that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was performed with a mixture of professional and amateur musicians after only three rehearsals; and that Berlioz was still buying strings for the violas and mutes for the violins on the day his symphony was first played. Kelly's narrative, which is enhanced by extracts from contemporary letters, press reports, account books, and other sources, as well as by a rich selection of illustrations, gives us a fresh appreciation of these five masterworks, encouraging us to sort out our own late twentieth-century expectations from what is inherent in the music.

Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber PDF Author: Barbara B. Heyman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190863757
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 665

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Book Description
Samuel Barber (1910-1981) is one of the most admired and honored American composers of the twentieth century. An unabashed Romantic, largely independent of worldwide trends and the avant-garde, he infused his works with poetic lyricism and gave tonal language and forms new vitality. His rich legacy includes every genre, including the famous Adagio for Strings, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, three concertos, a plethora of songs, and two operas, the Pulitzer prize-winning Vanessa, and Antony and Cleopatra, the commissioned work that opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. Generously documented by letter, sketches, autograph manuscripts, and interviews with friends, colleagues, and performers with whom he worked, this ASCAP-Award winning book is still unquestionably the most authoritative biography on Barber, covering his entire career and interweaving the events of his life with his compositional process. This second edition benefits from many new discoveries, including a Violin Sonata recovered from an artist's estate, a diary Barber kept his seventeenth year, a trove of letters and manuscripts that were recovered from a suitcase found in a dumpster, documentation that dispels earlier myths about the composition of Barber's Violin Concerto, and research of scholars that was stimulated by Heyman's work. Barber's intimate relations are discussed when they bear on his creativity. A testament to the lasting significance of Romanticism, Samuel Barber stands as a model biography of an important musical figure.

Fantasies of Improvisation

Fantasies of Improvisation PDF Author: Dana Gooley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190633603
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The first history of keyboard improvisation in European music in the postclassical and romantic periods, Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music documents practices of improvisation on the piano and the organ, with a particular emphasis on free fantasies and other forms of free playing. Case studies of performers such as Abbé Vogler, J. N. Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Robert Schumann, Carl Loewe, and Franz Liszt describe in detail the motives, intentions, and musical styles of the nineteenth century's leading improvisers. Grounded in primary sources, the book further discusses the reception and valuation of improvisational performances by colleagues, audiences, and critics, which prompted many keyboardists to stop improvising. Author Dana Gooley argues that amidst the decline of improvisational practices in the first half of the nineteenth century there emerged a strong and influential "idea" of improvisation as an ideal or perfect performance. This idea, spawned and nourished by romanticism, preserved the aesthetic, social, and ethical values associated with improvisation, calling into question the supposed triumph of the "work."