Grand Opera

Grand Opera PDF Author: Charles Affron
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520958977
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
The Metropolitan has stood among the grandest of opera companies since its birth in 1883. Tracing the offstage/onstage workings of this famed New York institution, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron tell how the Met became and remains a powerful actor on the global cultural scene. In this first new history of the company in thirty years, each of the chronologically sequenced chapters surveys a composer or a slice of the repertoire and brings to life dominant personalities and memorable performances of the time. From the opening night Faust to the recent controversial production of Wagner’s "Ring," Grand Opera is a remarkable account of management and audience response to the push and pull of tradition and reinvention. Spanning the decades between the Gilded Age and the age of new media, this story of the Met concludes by tipping its hat to the hugely successful "Live in HD" simulcasts and other twenty-first-century innovations. Grand Opera’s appeal extends far beyond the large circle of opera enthusiasts. Drawing on unpublished documents from the Metropolitan Opera Archives, reviews, recordings, and much more, this richly detailed book looks at the Met in the broad context of national and international issues and events.

Grand Opera

Grand Opera PDF Author: Charles Affron
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520958977
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Metropolitan has stood among the grandest of opera companies since its birth in 1883. Tracing the offstage/onstage workings of this famed New York institution, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron tell how the Met became and remains a powerful actor on the global cultural scene. In this first new history of the company in thirty years, each of the chronologically sequenced chapters surveys a composer or a slice of the repertoire and brings to life dominant personalities and memorable performances of the time. From the opening night Faust to the recent controversial production of Wagner’s "Ring," Grand Opera is a remarkable account of management and audience response to the push and pull of tradition and reinvention. Spanning the decades between the Gilded Age and the age of new media, this story of the Met concludes by tipping its hat to the hugely successful "Live in HD" simulcasts and other twenty-first-century innovations. Grand Opera’s appeal extends far beyond the large circle of opera enthusiasts. Drawing on unpublished documents from the Metropolitan Opera Archives, reviews, recordings, and much more, this richly detailed book looks at the Met in the broad context of national and international issues and events.

Opera Companies and Houses of the United States

Opera Companies and Houses of the United States PDF Author: Karyl Lynn Zietz
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147661203X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This is a state-by-state guide to more than 90 opera houses and companies in the United States. Inaugural performances, a history of opera in the city, an ordinary season's repertory, and performers and directors are highlighted.

Music in World War II

Music in World War II PDF Author: Pamela M. Potter
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253052505
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A collection of essays examining the roles played by music in American and European society during the Second World War. Global conflicts of the twentieth century fundamentally transformed not only national boundaries, power relations, and global economies, but also the arts and culture of every nation involved. An important, unacknowledged aspect of these conflicts is that they have unique musical soundtracks. Music in World War II explores how music and sound took on radically different dimensions in the United States and Europe before, during, and after World War II. Additionally, the collection examines the impact of radio and film as the disseminators of the war’s musical soundtrack. Contributors contend that the European and American soundtrack of World War II was largely one of escapism rather than the lofty, solemn, heroic, and celebratory mode of “war music” in the past. Furthermore, they explore the variety of experiences of populations forced from their homes and interned in civilian and POW camps in Europe and the United States, examining how music in these environments played a crucial role in maintaining ties to an idealized “home” and constructing politicized notions of national and ethnic identity. This fascinating, well-constructed volume of essays builds understanding of the role and importance of music during periods of conflict and highlights the unique aspects of music during World War II. “A collection that offers deeply informed, interdisciplinary, and original views on a myriad of musical practices in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States during the period.” —Gayle Magee, co-editor of Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I

Wagner Outside the Ring

Wagner Outside the Ring PDF Author: John Louis DiGaetani
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786454504
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Designed as a companion volume to 2006's Inside the Ring, which focused on the four operas comprising Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, this new volume features more than a dozen original essays focusing on all of Wagner's non-Ring operas. Part One looks at the individual operas, including Der Fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, and Parsifal. Part Two reveals the connections between Wagnerian opera and other arts, including dance, filmmaking, and fiction. Finally, Part Three examines Wagner's operas in performance, featuring interviews with mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung and heldentenor Ben Heppner, both well-known for their Wagnerian performances. The book includes many photographs from current productions by the Metropolitan Opera and other opera companies, along with bibliographies and a discography of recommended performances.

Opera After the Zero Hour

Opera After the Zero Hour PDF Author: Emily Richmond Pollock
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190063734
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
'Opera After the Zero Hour' argues that newly composed opera in West Germany after World War II was a site for the renegotiation of musical traditions during an era in which tradition had become politically fraught.

Puccini

Puccini PDF Author: Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781555535308
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This masterful biography provides the most authentic and revealing portrait to date of this major operatic composer

Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria PDF Author: David T Evans
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429757689
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
First published in 1999, this original and entertaining sociological study takes a comprehensive and critical view of opera as unique cultural artefact as loss making ‘industry’, as institution with a ‘museum’ culture, and as consumed commodity of rare distinction and elaborate ritual. Specific chapters deal with opera within the contexts of musicological analysis, auratic art and fetishized taste: opera as business and as ‘museum’: singers’ opera: producers’ opera and audiences’ opera. There is also a chapter on ‘opera’: popular, commercialised fragments of opera outside the opera house, consumed by and through all manner of reproduced means: CD, video, Three Tenors concerts: film and TV soundtracks: advertising jingles etc. Despite the supposed popularisation and successful commercial exploitation of ‘opera’ during the past decade or so, this study concludes that opera remains an art-form, institution and ritual of relative inaccessibility and exclusiveness. The commercial interest in and profitability of ‘opera’ do not translate into new ‘popular’ audiences in the opera house. The increased dependency of opera companies on corporate funding in the face of retreating government subsidies may have brought a new ‘elite’ audience into the expensive seats, pandered to by the introduction of surtitles etc., but the traditional ‘elite’ has succeeded in closing down entry to opera in other select venues where opera continues to confirm and maintain their select identity and prestige of their life-style.

Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber PDF Author: Howard Pollack
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054059
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
A pivotal twentieth-century composer, Samuel Barber earned a long list of honors and accolades that included two Pulitzer Prizes for Music and the public support of conductors like Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein. Barber’s works have since become standard concert repertoire and continue to flourish across high art and popular culture. Acclaimed biographer Howard Pollack (Aaron Copland, George Gershwin) offers a multifaceted account of Barber’s life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu. Born into a musical family, Barber pursued his artistic ambitions from childhood. Pollack follows Barber’s path from his precocious youth through a career where, from the start, the composer consistently received prizes, fellowships, and other recognition. Stylistic analyses of works like the Adagio for Strings, the Violin Concerto, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra, the Piano Concerto, and the operas Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, stand alongside revealing accounts of the music’s commissioning, performance, reception, and legacy. Throughout, Pollack weaves in accounts of Barber’s encounters with colleagues like Aaron Copland and Francis Poulenc, performers from Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price to Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn, patrons, admirers, and a wide circle of eminent friends and acquaintances. He also provides an eloquent portrait of the composer’s decades-long relationship with the renowned opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Informed by new interviews and immense archival research, Samuel Barber is a long-awaited critical and personal biography of a monumental figure in twentieth-century American music.

Just Beyond Listening

Just Beyond Listening PDF Author: Michael C. Heller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520350782
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Just Beyond Listening asks how we might think about encounters with sound that complicate standard accounts of aurality. In a series of essays, Michael C. Heller considers how sound functions in dialogue with a range of sensory and affective modalities, including physical co-presence, textual interference, and spectral haunting. The text investigates sound that is experienced in other parts of the body, altered by cross-wirings of the senses, weaponized by the military, or mediated and changed by cultural practices and memory. Building on recent scholarship in sound studies and affect theory, Heller questions not only how sound propagates acoustically but how sonic presences temper our total experience of the world around us.

Contemporary World Musicians

Contemporary World Musicians PDF Author: Clifford Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135939616
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 3314

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Book Description
Music lovers, researchers, students, librarians, and teachers can trace the personal and artistic influences behind music makers from Elton John to Leontyne Price. Individual entries on over 400 of the world's most renowned and accomplished living performers, composers, conductors, and band leaders in musical genres from opera to hip-hop. Also includes an in-depth Index covering musicians of all eras, so that readers can learn which artists, alive or dead, influenced the work of today's most important figures in the music industry.