The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste

The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste PDF Author: Bálint András Varga
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580465935
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Bálint András Varga is perhaps the world's most respected interviewer of living composers. For The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste: Reflections on New Music, Varga has confronted thirty-three composers with quotations carefully chosen to elicit their thoughts about an issue that is crucial for any serious creative artist: How can one find courage to deal with the sometimes tyrannical expectations of the outside world? The result is an imaginary roundtable at which we encounter fresh, revealing, previously unpublished statements from such world-renowned composers as John Adams, Friedrich Cerha, George Crumb, Sofia Gubaïdulina, Georg Friedrich Haas, Giya Kancheli, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, Libby Larsen, Robert Morris, and Wolfgang Rihm. Also represented are composers who are becoming more prominent with the passing years -- Chaya Czernowin, Pascal Dusapin, and Rebecca Saunders -- as well as conductor-composer Michael Gielen, festival director Nicholas Kenyon, and music critics Paul Griffiths and Arnold Whittall. In The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste, composers and other insightful individuals comment on choices made, traps avoided, unforeseen consequences, proud accomplishments, occasional regrets: the whole range of experiences central to artistic creativity. Bálint András Varga isthe acclaimed author of György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages; Three Questions for 65 Composers; and From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir (all available from University of Rochester Press).

The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste

The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste PDF Author: Bálint András Varga
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580465935
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bálint András Varga is perhaps the world's most respected interviewer of living composers. For The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste: Reflections on New Music, Varga has confronted thirty-three composers with quotations carefully chosen to elicit their thoughts about an issue that is crucial for any serious creative artist: How can one find courage to deal with the sometimes tyrannical expectations of the outside world? The result is an imaginary roundtable at which we encounter fresh, revealing, previously unpublished statements from such world-renowned composers as John Adams, Friedrich Cerha, George Crumb, Sofia Gubaïdulina, Georg Friedrich Haas, Giya Kancheli, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, Libby Larsen, Robert Morris, and Wolfgang Rihm. Also represented are composers who are becoming more prominent with the passing years -- Chaya Czernowin, Pascal Dusapin, and Rebecca Saunders -- as well as conductor-composer Michael Gielen, festival director Nicholas Kenyon, and music critics Paul Griffiths and Arnold Whittall. In The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste, composers and other insightful individuals comment on choices made, traps avoided, unforeseen consequences, proud accomplishments, occasional regrets: the whole range of experiences central to artistic creativity. Bálint András Varga isthe acclaimed author of György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages; Three Questions for 65 Composers; and From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir (all available from University of Rochester Press).

Musical Lives and Times Examined

Musical Lives and Times Examined PDF Author: Richard Taruskin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520392019
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
"A gathering chiefly of talks given either by invitation or at conferences throughout the world over the last quarter century. The topics range widely, but recurrent themes include the place of classical music in contemporary society and culture, the fraught relationship between aesthetics and ethics, and the responsibilities of scholarship in an age of spin"--

The Cambridge Companion to Composition

The Cambridge Companion to Composition PDF Author: Toby Young
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108923739
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
There are as many ways of creating music as there are composers in the world, with a vast array of possible methods and practices. This book provides essential critical and practical tools for composers as they try to navigate this complex landscape, whilst also offering provocations for practitioners discovering their own voices and solidifying their place in their musical communities. Designed to be a companion in the truest sense, the book offers practical support throughout the creative process and thought-provoking insights on technical questions for a range of compositional approaches.

John Adams

John Adams PDF Author: Alexander Sanchez-Behar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351677934
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Winner of the 2022 Vincent H. Duckles Award, Music Library Association John Adams: A Research and Information Guide offers the first comprehensive guide to the musical works and literature of one of the leading American composers of our time. The research guide catalogs and summarizes materials relating to Adams’s work, providing detailed annotated bibliographic entries for both primary and secondary sources. Covering writings by and interviews with Adams, books, journal articles and book chapters, newspaper articles and reviews, dissertations, video recordings, and other sources, the guide also contains a chronology of Adams’s life, a discography, and a list of compositions. Robust indexes enable researchers to easily locate sources by author, composition, or subject. This volume is a major reference tool for all those interested in Adams and his music, and a valuable resource for students and researchers of minimalism, contemporary American music, and twentieth-century music more broadly.

A Century of Composition by Women

A Century of Composition by Women PDF Author: Linda Kouvaras
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030955575
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
This book presents accounts of creative processes and contextual issues of current-day and early-twentieth century women composers. This collection of essays balances narratives of struggle, artistic prowess, and of "breaking through" the obstacles in the profession. Part I: Creative Work – Then and Now illuminates historical and present-day women’s composition and various iterations and conceptions of the “feminine voice”; Part II: The State of the Industry in the Present Day provides solutions from the frontline to sector inequities; and Part III: Creating; Collaborating: Composer and Performer Reflections offers personal stories of current creation in music. A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds draws together topical issues in feminist musicology over the past century. This volume provides insight into the professional and compositional procedures of creative women in music and stands to be relevant for composers, performers, industry professionals, students, and feminist and musicological scholars for many years to come.

George Rochberg, American Composer

George Rochberg, American Composer PDF Author: Amy Lynn Wlodarski
Publisher: Eastman Studies in Music
ISBN: 1580469477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Based on private diaries, correspondence, and unpublished writings, George Rochberg, American Composer, reveals the impact of personal trauma on the creative and intellectual work of a leading postmodern composer.

Leonard Bernstein and Washington, DC

Leonard Bernstein and Washington, DC PDF Author: Daniel Abraham
Publisher: Eastman Studies in Music
ISBN: 1580469736
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Composer, conductor, activist, and icon of twentieth-century America, Leonard Bernstein (1918-90) had a rich association with Washington, DC. Although he never lived there, the U.S. capital was the site of some of the most important moments in his life and work, as he engaged with the nation's struggles and triumphs. By examining Bernstein through the lens of DC, this book offers new insights into his life and music from the 1940s through the 1980s, including his role in building DC's artistic landscape, his political-diplomatic aims, his works that received premieres and other early performances in DC, and his relationships with the nation's liberal and conservative political elites. The collection also contributes new perspectives on twentieth-century American history, government, and culture, helping to elucidate the political function of music in American democracy. The essays in Leonard Bernstein and Washington, DC, all newly written by leading authorities, situate this important American cultural figure in the seat of United States government. The result is a fresh new angle on Leonard Bernstein, American politics, and American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. Daniel Abraham is Professor of Music at American University, Alicia Kopfstein-Penk is Adjunct Professorial Lecturer at American University, and Andrew H. Weaver is Professor of Musicology at The Catholic University of America.

Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past

Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past PDF Author: Edmund Joseph Goehring
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580469302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
A bold, restorative vision of Mozart's works, and Western art music generally, as manifestations of an idealism rooted in the sociable nature of humans. For over a generation now, many leading performers, critics, and scholars of Mozart's music have taken a rejection of transcendence as axiomatic. This essentially modernist, antiromantic orientation attempts to neutralize the sorts of aesthetic experiences that presuppose an enchantment with Mozart's art, an engagement traditionally articulated by such terms as intention, mimesis, author, and genius. And what is true of much recent Mozart interpretation isoften manifest in the interpretation of Western art music more generally. Edmund Goehring's Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past explores what gets lost when the vocabulary of enchantment is abandoned. The bookthen proceeds to offer an alternative vision of Mozart's works and of the wider canon of Western art music. A modernized poetics, Goehring argues, reduces art to mechanism or process. It sees less because it excludes a necessaryand enlarging human presence: the generative, and receiving, "I." This fascinating new book-length essay is addressed to any reader interested in the performing arts, visual arts, and literature and their relationship to the broader culture. Goehring draws on seminal thinkers in art criticism and philosophy to propose that such works as Mozart's radiate an idealism that has human sociability both as its source and its object. Edmund J. Goehring is Professor of Music History at the University of Western Ontario.

Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys

Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys PDF Author: Nadia Boulanger
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 158046596X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Published for the first time: a rich epistolary dialogue revealing one master teacher's power to shape the cultural canon and one great composer's desire to embed himself within historical narratives.

Narrative and Robert Schumann's Songs

Narrative and Robert Schumann's Songs PDF Author: Andrew H. Weaver
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250890
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Featuring 28 music examples this book takes an innovative approach to analyzing and interpreting nineteenth-century German song, offering new perspectives on Robert Schumann's Lieder and song cycles. Robert Schumann's Lieder are among the richest and most complex songs in the repertoire and have long raised questions and stimulated discussion among scholars, performers, and listeners. Among the wide range of methodologies that have been used to understand and interpret his songs, one that has been conspicuously absent is an approach based on narratology (the theory and study of narrative texts). Proceeding from the premise that the performance of a Lied is a narrative act, in which the singer and pianist together function as a narrator, Andrew Weaver's groundbreaking study proposes a comprehensive theory of narratology for the German Romantic Lied and song cycle, using Schumann's complete song oeuvre as the test case. The theory, grounded in the work of narratologist Mieke Bal but also drawing upon recent work in literary theory and musicology, illuminates how music can open up new meanings for the poem, as well as how a narratological analysis of the poem can help us understand the music. Weaver's book offers new insights into Schumann's Lieder and the poetry he set while simultaneously proposing a methodology applicable to the analysis and interpretation of a wide range of works, including not only the rich treasury of German Lieder but also potentially any genre of accompanied song in any language from the Middle Ages to the present day.