Black Opera

Black Opera PDF Author: Naomi Andre
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050614
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemmings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.

Black Opera

Black Opera PDF Author: Naomi Andre
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050614
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemmings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.

Opera

Opera PDF Author: Piero Weiss
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195116380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In Opera: A History in Documents, Piero Weiss presents a wide-ranging, vivid, and carefully researched tour of operatic history. A unique anthology of primary source material, this survey includes 115 chronologically organized selections--passages from private letters, public decrees, descriptions of first performances, portions of libretti, literary criticism and satire, newspaper reviews and articles, and poetry and fiction--from opera's late Renaissance infancy through modern times. This first-hand testimony allows students to experience the history of opera as eyewitnesses, offering an immediacy and validity unmatched by standard histories. Readers are transported to a Medici wedding in sixteenth-century Florence, to the Haymarket Theatre for a performance of Handel's Rinaldo, to Mozart at work on Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and to Bertolt Brecht's writing desk, among many other landmarks in opera's history. Weiss expertly guides students, providing highly accessible headnotes to each selection that both contextualize the excerpts and position them within the broader historical narrative. In addition, he offers original translations of more than half of the selections in the book, many of which appear here in English for the first time. Stage settings, costumes, portraits, contemporary playbills, and other illustrations enliven the text and help to recreate the feel of the era under discussion. Opera: A History in Documents is an intrinsically lively text that will enrich college courses on opera and delight any music-loving reader.

Fifty-five Years in Five Acts

Fifty-five Years in Five Acts PDF Author: Astrid Varnay
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781555534554
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
One of the world's greatest Wagnerian sopranos talks about an illustrious career that flourished for over five decades.

Living Opera

Living Opera PDF Author: Joshua Jampol
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195381386
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Living Opera offers revealing interviews with two dozen top opera professionals working on and behind the international stage today. Singers, conductors, stage directors and opera-house directors reflect on why opera is important to them, why they have dedicated their lives to it and why it continues to fascinate audiences around the world.

Sing for Your Life

Sing for Your Life PDF Author: Daniel Bergner
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316300659
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The New York Times bestseller about a young black man's journey from violence and despair to the threshold of stardom: "A beautiful tribute to the power of good teachers" (Terry Gross, Fresh Air). "One of the most inspiring stories I've come across in a long time."-Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review Ryan Speedo Green had a tough upbringing in southeastern Virginia: his family lived in a trailer park and later a bullet-riddled house across the street from drug dealers. His father was absent; his mother was volatile and abusive. At the age of twelve, Ryan was sent to Virginia's juvenile facility of last resort. He was placed in solitary confinement. He was uncontrollable, uncontainable, with little hope for the future. In 2011, at the age of twenty-four, Ryan won a nationwide competition hosted by New York's Metropolitan Opera, beating out 1,200 other talented singers. Today, he is a rising star performing major roles at the Met and Europe's most prestigious opera houses. Sing for Your Life chronicles Ryan's suspenseful, racially charged and artistically intricate journey from solitary confinement to stardom. Daniel Bergner takes readers on Ryan's path toward redemption, introducing us to a cast of memorable characters -- including the two teachers from his childhood who redirect his rage into music, and his long-lost father who finally reappears to hear Ryan sing. Bergner illuminates all that it takes -- technically, creatively -- to find and foster the beauty of the human voice. And Sing for Your Life sheds unique light on the enduring and complex realities of race in America.

Opera on the Couch

Opera on the Couch PDF Author: Steven H. Goldberg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000591557
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
In this widely ranging collection of essays, a group of contemporary psychoanalyst/authors turn their finely-honed listening skills and clinical experience to plumb the depths and illuminate themes of character, drama, myth, culture, and psychobiography in some of the world’s most beloved operas. The richly diverse chapters are unified by a psychoanalytic approach to the nuances of unconscious mental life and emotional experience as they unfold synergistically in opera’s music, words, and drama. Opera creates a unique bridge between thought and feeling, mind and body, and conscious and unconscious that offers fertile ground for psychological exploration of profound human truths. Each piece is written in a colorful and non-technical manner that will appeal to mental health professionals, musicians, academics, and general readers wishing to better understand and appreciate opera as an art form.

Opera 101

Opera 101 PDF Author: Fred Plotkin
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 1401306004
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Opera is the fastest growing of all the performing arts, attracting audiences of all ages who are enthralled by the gorgeous music, vivid drama, and magnificent production values. If you've decided that the time has finally come to learn about opera and discover for yourself what it is about opera that sends your normally reserved friends into states of ecstatic abandon, this is the book for you. Opera 101 is recognized as the standard text in English for anyone who wants to become an opera lover--a clear, friendly, and truly complete handbook to learning how to listen to opera, whether on the radio, on recordings, or live at the opera house. Fred Plotkin, an internationally respected writer and teacher about opera who for many years was performance manager of the Metropolitan Opera, introduces the reader (whatever his or her level of musical knowledge) to all the elements that make up opera, including: A brief, entertaining history of opera; An explanation of key operatic concepts, from vocal types to musical conventions; Hints on the best way to approach the first opera you attend and how to best understand what is happening both offstage and on; Lists of recommended books and recordings, and the most complete traveler's guide to opera houses around the world. The major part of Opera 101 is devoted to an almost minute-by-minute analysis of eleven key operas, ranging from Verdi's thunderous masterpiece Rigoletto and Puccini's electrifying Tosca through works by Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, Offenbach, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner, to the psychological complexities of Richard Strauss's Elektra. Once you have completed Opera 101, you will be prepared to see and hear any opera you encounter, thanks to this book's unprecedentedly detailed and enjoyable method of revealing the riches of opera.

Avidly Reads Opera

Avidly Reads Opera PDF Author: Alison Kinney
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479811769
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
“Opera is community, comfort, art, voice, breath, life. It’s hope.” All art exists to make life more bearable. For Alison Kinney, it was the wild, fantastical world of opera that transformed her listening and her life. Whether we’re listening for the first time or revisiting the arias that first stole our hearts, Avidly Reads Opera welcomes readers and listeners to a community full of friendship, passion, critique—and, always, beautiful music. In times of delirious, madcap fun and political turmoil, opera fans have expressed their passion by dispatching records into the cosmos, building fairy-tale castles, and singing together through the arduous work of social activism. Avidly Reads Opera is a love letter to the music and those who love it, complete with playlists, a crowdsourced tip sheet from ultra-fans to newbies, and stories of the turbulent, genre-busting, and often hilarious history of opera and its audiences. Across five acts—and the requisite intermission—Alison Kinney takes us everywhere opera’s rich melodies are heard, from the cozy bedrooms of listeners at home, to exclusive music festivals, to protests, and even prisons. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Opera is an homage to the marvelous, sensational world of opera for the casual viewer.

American Opera

American Opera PDF Author: Elise Kuhl Kirk
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252026232
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
A treasure trove of information, "American Opera" sketches musical traits and provides plot summaries, descriptions of sets and stagings, and biographical details on performers, composers, and librettists for more than 100 American operas. 86 photos.

Opera Lives

Opera Lives PDF Author: Linda Kitchen
Publisher: Spiramus Press Ltd
ISBN: 1910151564
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
What makes an opera singer? And where in the making of a performance is the identity of the singer themselves? Linda Kitchen goes behind the scenes with prominent voices who have valuable insight about the world of opera, discussing what it means to be a performer, how they got into the profession and how who they are affects how they perform. Illustrated with photos of the artists in places that lend meaning to their lives by renowned photographer Nobby Clark. Contents Biographies - La favorite, Donizetti Prologue - Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs, Nyman Act One ‘Shoving us from the jetty’ Scene One - Family background The Captain’s Daughter, Cui Scene Two - School days The Wandering Scholar, Holst Scene Three - Defining moment Sonntag aus Licht, Stockhausen Scene Four - Singing study Les arts florissants, Charpentier Scene Five - Preparing Bang!, Rutter Act Two ‘Carry on – it’s going very well’ Scene One - The unfolding The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky Scene Two - Learning the score La Conquista, Ferrero Scene Three - Warming up La Sonnambula, Bellini Scene Four - The feeling of singing La Rondine, Puccini Act Three ‘No good playing Mime as if you’re Brad Pitt’ Scene One - Character, text, drama The Jewels of the Madonna, Wolf-Ferrari Scene Two - Body work The Nose, Shostakovich Scene Three - The essence The Lighthouse, Maxwell Davies Scene Four - Problems Trouble in Tahiti, Bernstein Scene Five - Humour Comedy on the Bridge, Martinů Intermission - by Thomas Allen Paradise Lost, Penderecki Act Four ‘Goodies and Baddies’ Scene One - People around you The Dangerous Liaisons, Susa Scene Two - Composers From Morning to Midnight, Sawer Scene Three - Conductors Der Corregidor, Wolf Scene Four - Directors Der Schauspieldirektor, Mozart Scene Five - Designers Powder her Face, Adès Scene Six - Agents Les Pêcheurs de Perles, Bizet Scene Seven - Reviewing reviewers War and Peace, Prokofiev Act Five ‘Bowls of sushi on a conveyor belt’ Scene One - Changing paths The New Moon, Romberg Scene Two - Legacy Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Monteverdi Scene Three - Family The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Nyman Scene Four - Life beyond the job Il rè pastore, Mozart Scene Five - The future The Medium, Menotti Scene Six - Advice Le donne curiose, Wolf-Ferrari Epilogue - Hänsel und Gretel, Humperdinck