Author: Hector Berlioz
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393040623
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 479
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Book Description
Gathers letters the French composer wrote to friends, relatives, writers, and fellow composers and music critics about his life and music
Author: Berlioz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139433008
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 430
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Book Description
This is a book both by and about Berlioz, providing not only a translation but also an extensive commentary on his text, dealing with the instruments of Berlioz's time and comparing his instruction with his practice.
Author: Hector Berlioz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253311641
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
A Travers Chants is the collection of writings selected from his thirty-odd years of musical journalism. These essays cover a wide spectrum of intellectual inquiry: Beethoven's nine symphonies and his opera, Fidelio; Wagner and the partisans of the "Music of the Future"; Berlioz's idols - Gluck, Weber, and Mozart. There is an eloquent plea to stop the constant rise in concert pitch (an issue still discussed today), a serious piece on the place of music in church, and a humorous and imaginative account of musical customs in China.
Author: Wilfrid Mellers
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838637982
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
Wilfrid Mellers ranks among the most eminent of contemporary British writers and lecturers on music. The range of his interest is exceptionally wide, encompassing music from the renaissance to the present day, from Monteverdi to Minimalism, not excluding jazz and many different forms of popular music, as well as music from non-western cultures. That breadth of vision is nowhere more apparent than in his occasional writings. In these necessarily concentrated and closely focused pieces we find the essence of his thinking about music, its nature and its meaning. Written in the first instance for the general reader, they also offer insights that should be of importance to music students in schools, colleges, and universities.
Author: Malcolm Kingsley Macmillan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Historians
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Author: Stephanie Rocke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000300196
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
The mass is an extraordinary musical form. Whereas other Western art music genres from medieval times have fallen out of favour, the mass has not merely survived but flourished. A variety of historical forces within religious, secular, and musical arenas saw the mass expand well beyond its origins as a cycle of medieval chants, become concertised and ultimately bifurcate. Even as Western societies moved away from their Christian origins to become the religiously plural and politically secular societies of today, and the Church itself moved in favour of congregational singing, composers continued to compose masses. By the early twentieth century two forms of mass existed: the liturgical mass composed for church services, and the concert mass composed for secular venues. Spanning two millennia, The Origins and Ascendancy of the Concert Mass outlines the origins and meanings of the liturgical texts, defines the concert mass, explains how and why the split occurred, and provides examples that demonstrate composers’ gradual appropriation of the genre as a vehicle for personal expression on serious issues. By the end of the twentieth century the concert mass had become a repository for an eclectic range of theological and political ideas.
Author: Nicholas Tarling
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442234539
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
In Choral Masterpieces: Major and Minor, historian Nicholas Tarling surveys the landscape of choral works, some standard masterpieces that are commonly performed by choruses around the world, others deserving a second, closer look. As noted in the foreword by Uwe Grodd , music director of the Auckland Choral Society, this work “is a collection of essays about a number of outstanding works, including Beethoven’s Miss Solemnis and Britten’s War Requiem, but he also invites attention to lesser masterpieces. If the choral movement, which includes both singers and listeners, is to survive, new works must be created and repertory expanded. The book is an easy and captivating read even if you are not a chorister.” Choral Masterpieces: Major and Minor features short essays on over 28 works, from major masterpieces such as Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion to off-the-beaten path choral works such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha and Frederick Delius’ A Mass of Life. Throughout, Tarling offers assessments that sparkle with unique insights and at the same time ground listener’s in the historical contexts of the work’s production and performance. Each work is transformed in Tarling’s able hands from musical work into a window into the mind and milieu of the composer. Choral Masterpieces: Major and Minor mixes choral mainstays with works that demand revisiting. Choral singers and their audiences, as well as choral societies and their directions and promoters, will find ample food for thoughts in these meditations on the choral tradition.
Author: Harvey Sachs
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631495194
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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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: Nicole Grimes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317097394
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
If the invective of Nietzsche and Shaw is to be taken as an endorsement of the lasting quality of an artist, then Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy takes pride of place beside Tennyson and Brahms in the canon of great nineteenth-century artists. Mendelssohn Perspectives presents valuable new insights into Mendelssohn’s music, biography and reception. Critically engaging a wide range of source materials, the volume combines traditional musical-analytical studies with those that draw on other humanistic disciplines to shed new light on the composer’s life, and on his contemporary and posthumous reputations. Together, these essays bring new historical and interpretive dimensions to Mendelssohn studies. The volume offers essays on Mendelssohn's Jewishness, his vast correspondence, his music for the stage, and his relationship with music of the past and future, as well as the compositional process and handling of form in the music of both Mendelssohn and his sister, the composer Fanny Hensel. German literature and aesthetics, gender and race, philosophy and science, and issues of historicism all come to bear on these new perspectives on Mendelssohn.
Author: A. Peter Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Symphonies
Languages : en
Pages : 1186
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Book Description
"Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 18th century, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. Surprisingly, heretofore there has been no truly extensive, broad-based treatment of the genre, and the best of the existing studies are now several decades old. In this five-volume series, A. Peter Brown explores the symphony from its 18th-century beginnings to the end of the 20th century. Synthesizing the enormous scholarly literature, Brown presents up-to-date overviews of the status of research, discusses any important former or remaining problems of attribution, illuminates the style of specific works and their contexts, and samples early writings on their reception. The Symphonic Repertoire provides an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur. The series is being launched with two volumes on the Viennese symphony."--Publisher's website.
