Listening to Brahms

Listening to Brahms PDF Author: Rosemary Allen
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1780885210
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
December, 1989. While Margaret is visiting her sister and her husband at Blackheath Vicarage for a family Christmas, she finds the diary she kept during a school exchange visit to Germany in the summer of 1954. Painful memories from that time come flooding back when she hears a Brahms Rhapsody being played on the piano by Jonathan, a consultant at the local hospital. At the age of 17, she believed she had found the love of her life when a young pianist, Peter, kissed her and quoted poetry to her. But the traumatic events that followed changed her life forever. Now, 35 years later, emotional feelings she thought she had suppressed for ever are once again awoken as she begins to fall in love with Jonathan. As the family gathers to celebrate Christmas and the New Year, it appears that her sister’s marriage is beginning to crumble. While Margaret’s story is unfolding, the Soviet Union is collapsing. Ceausescu and his wife are executed in Romania, Havel becomes president of Czechoslovakia and the border dividing East and West Germany has come down, emphasising the pointlessness of the ever-changing divisions and alliances between peoples. Listening to Brahms is a gripping read that will appeal to fans of romance and historical fiction.

Listening to Brahms

Listening to Brahms PDF Author: Rosemary Allen
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1780885210
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
December, 1989. While Margaret is visiting her sister and her husband at Blackheath Vicarage for a family Christmas, she finds the diary she kept during a school exchange visit to Germany in the summer of 1954. Painful memories from that time come flooding back when she hears a Brahms Rhapsody being played on the piano by Jonathan, a consultant at the local hospital. At the age of 17, she believed she had found the love of her life when a young pianist, Peter, kissed her and quoted poetry to her. But the traumatic events that followed changed her life forever. Now, 35 years later, emotional feelings she thought she had suppressed for ever are once again awoken as she begins to fall in love with Jonathan. As the family gathers to celebrate Christmas and the New Year, it appears that her sister’s marriage is beginning to crumble. While Margaret’s story is unfolding, the Soviet Union is collapsing. Ceausescu and his wife are executed in Romania, Havel becomes president of Czechoslovakia and the border dividing East and West Germany has come down, emphasising the pointlessness of the ever-changing divisions and alliances between peoples. Listening to Brahms is a gripping read that will appeal to fans of romance and historical fiction.

The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise PDF Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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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.

Brahms' Symphonies

Brahms' Symphonies PDF Author: David Hurwitz
Publisher: Continuum
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
"Brahms was a famously complex character: an irascible curmudgeon, and a famously learned composer who took tremendous pride in composing tuneful, expressive melodies of great popular appeal. This accounts at least in part for the enduring esteem that his symphonies enjoy among musicians, scholars, and the listening public alike. This duality between the learned and the popular sides of Brahms' musical personality has made his music as difficult to analyze and discuss as was his singularly complex and mysterious personal life. This book attempts to aid the general listener in bridging the gap between these two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of Brahms' character, aspects that are particularly in evidence, and balanced with particular poise, in his four symphonies. First, author David Hurwitz examines Brahms' place in the German symphonic tradition, his obsessive preoccupation with his place in the grand line of classical composers stretching back to Bach, and proceeding through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann. Despite his ongoing struggle to master orchestral writing, Hurwitz argues that Brahms did achieve a unique symphonic style, one found nowhere else in his (or anyone else's) works in symphonic form. Finally, each symphony is described from two perspectives: in the most helpful musical context, and then also in movement by movement descriptions of Brahms' expressive argument. Finally, a list of recommended recordings concludes a discussion that shows today's music lovers that the riches contained in these perennially attractive works do not hide beneath the surface, but in fact lie liberally scattered in plain view, just waiting to be savored." --Back cover.

Listen to This

Listen to This PDF Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429977612
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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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.

How to Listen to Great Music

How to Listen to Great Music PDF Author: Robert Greenberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781101504550
Category : Music appreciation
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
From one of the most trusted names in continuing education-the knowledge you need to unlock "the most abstract and sublime of all the arts." Whether you're listening in a concert hall or on your iPod, concert music has the power to move you. The right knowledge can deepen the ability of this music to edify, enlighten, and stir the soul. In How to Listen to Great Music, Professor Robert Greenberg, a composer and music historian, presents a comprehensive, accessible guide to how music has mirrored Western history, that will transform the experience of listening for novice and long-time listeners alike. You will learn how to listen for key elements in different genres of music - from madrigals to minuets and from sonatas to symphonies-along with the enthralling history of great music from ancient Greece to the 20th century. You'll get answers to such questions as Why was Beethoven so important' How did the Enlightenment change music' And what's so great about opera anyway' How to Listen to Great Music will let you finally hear what you've been missing. Watch a Video.

For the Love of Music

For the Love of Music PDF Author: John Mauceri
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525520651
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
With a lifetime of experience, profound knowledge and understanding, and heartwarming appreciation, an internationally celebrated conductor and teacher answers the questions: Why should I listen to classical music? How can I get the most from the listening experience? A protégé of Leonard Bernstein--his colleague for eighteen years--and an eminent conductor who has toured and recorded all over the world, John Mauceri helps us to reap the joys and pleasures classical music has to offer. Briefly, we learn the way a musical tradition born in ancient Greece, embraced by the Roman Empire, and subsequently nurtured by influences from across the globe, gave shape to the classical music that came to be embraced by cultures from Japan to Bolivia. Then Mauceri examines the music itself, helping us understand what it is we hear when we listen to classical music: how, by a kind of sonic metaphor, it expresses the deepest recesses of human feeling and emotion; how each piece bears the traces of its history; how the concert experience--a unique one each and every time--allows us to discover music anew. Unpretentious, graceful, instructive, this is a book for the aficionado, the novice, and anyone looking to have the love of music fired within them.

Rethinking Brahms

Rethinking Brahms PDF Author: Nicole Grimes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197541739
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
As one of the most significant and widely performed composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms continues to command our attention. Rethinking Brahms counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions that position him as a conservative composer (whether musically or politically) with a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of his significance today. Drawing on German- and English-language scholarship, it deploys original approaches to his music and pursues innovative methodologies to interrogate the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of his creativity. Empowered by recent theoretical work on form and tonality, it offers fresh analytical insights into his music, including a number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present. The book brings into sharp focus the productive tension that exists between the perceived fixedness of musical texts and the ephemerality of performance by considering how historical and modern performers shape established understandings of Brahms and his music. Rethinking Brahms invites the reader to hear familiar pieces anew as they are refracted through historical, artistic, and philosophical prisms. Bringing us up to the present day, it also gives sustained attention to the resounding impact of Brahms's compositions on new music by exploring works by recent composers who have engaged deeply with his oeuvre. Combining awareness of overarching contexts with perceptive insights into Brahms's music, this book enlivens our understanding of Brahms, providing a dynamic, multifaceted, complex, and invigoratingly fresh portrait of the composer.

The Violin Conspiracy

The Violin Conspiracy PDF Author: Brendan Slocumb
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 059331543X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK! • Ray McMillian is a Black classical musician on the rise—undeterred by the pressure and prejudice of the classical music world—when a shocking theft sends him on a desperate quest to recover his great-great-grandfather’s heirloom violin on the eve of the most prestigious musical competition in the world. “I loved The Violin Conspiracy for exactly the same reasons I loved The Queen’s Gambit: a surprising, beautifully rendered underdog hero I cared about deeply and a fascinating, cutthroat world I knew nothing about—in this case, classical music.” —Chris Bohjalian, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant and Hour of the Witch Growing up Black in rural North Carolina, Ray McMillian’s life is already mapped out. But Ray has a gift and a dream—he’s determined to become a world-class professional violinist, and nothing will stand in his way. Not his mother, who wants him to stop making such a racket; not the fact that he can’t afford a violin suitable to his talents; not even the racism inherent in the world of classical music. When he discovers that his beat-up, family fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, all his dreams suddenly seem within reach, and together, Ray and his violin take the world by storm. But on the eve of the renowned and cutthroat Tchaikovsky Competition—the Olympics of classical music—the violin is stolen, a ransom note for five million dollars left in its place. Without it, Ray feels like he's lost a piece of himself. As the competition approaches, Ray must not only reclaim his precious violin, but prove to himself—and the world—that no matter the outcome, there has always been a truly great musician within him.

Brahms Among Friends

Brahms Among Friends PDF Author: Paul Berry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199982643
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Brahms Among Friends identifies patterns of listening, performance, and composition among close friends of Johannes Brahms and explores how those patterns informed the creation and reception of his music in the intimate genres of song, sonata, trio, and piano miniature. Among the tangled threads of counterpoint and circumstance that bound Brahms to his acquaintances was the technique of allusive musical borrowing, whereby a brief passage from a familiar work was drawn into the fabric of a new composition. For the specific listeners whose habits of mind and musicianship he knew best, allusive borrowings could become rhetorically charged gestures, persuasively revising the meanings his music conveyed and the interpretive strategies it invited. Primary documents, original manuscripts, music-analytic comparison, and kinesthetic parameters experienced in the act of performance all work in tandem to support ten case studies in the interplay between Brahms's small-scale works and the women and men who encountered them before publication. Central characters include violinist Joseph Joachim, singers Amalie Joachim, Julius Stockhausen, and Agathe von Siebold, composers Heinrich and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and pianists Emma Engelmann and Clara Schumann. For these musicians and for the composer himself, Brahms's allusive music served a broad variety of emotional needs and interpersonal ends. Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: to reconstruct the mutually dependent perspectives of historically situated agents and restore forgotten features of their communicative landscapes as bases for both musical and historical scrutiny.

Beyond Structural Listening?

Beyond Structural Listening? PDF Author: Andrew Dell'Antonio
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520237579
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Rose Subotnik criticized 'structural listening' as an attempt to situate musical meaning solely within the unfolding of the musical structure itself. The authors of this volume take up her challenge, writing on repertoires ranging from Beethoven to MTV.