Tuning the Antipodes: Battles for performing pitch in Melbourne

Tuning the Antipodes: Battles for performing pitch in Melbourne PDF Author: Simon Purtell
Publisher: Lyrebird Press Australia lyrebirdpress.music.unimelb.edu.au
ISBN: 0734037856
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Examining the many controversies associated with pitch standards in Melbourne over more than a hundred years, Simon Purtell discovers their impact on the tuning of the city’s orchestras and organs, as well as its defence, municipal and Salvation Army bands. This fascinating history involves famous local and touring singers, conductors and organists, including Nellie Melba, Malcolm Sargent and William McKie, revealing just how complex a problem it was to ensure that Melbourne’s music-makers remained in tune. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has nothing on the saga of ‘Pitch, pitch, that cursed pitch’: the seemingly endless and frequently caustic attempts to establish a uniform performing pitch for music in the Antipodes. It is a typically Melburnian drama of mixed deference to Britain and stubborn upholding of local interests that the author so eloquently and patiently chronicles, and it ranges from the almost theocratic intervention of Dame Nellie Melba at the beginning of the twentieth century to the Stanthorpe Apple and Grape Harvest Festival of 1972. At the same time, it will have been a battle taking place comparably in all the major cities of the British Empire and beyond, though each with its peculiar twists and turns. What Simon Purtell has done is show us, in immaculate detail, just how pervasive and intricate, not to mention costly, this tectonic realignment of a fundamental element of musical infrastructure must have been in all places over a very long period of time” (Emeritus Professor Stephen Banfield, Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth, University of Bristol).

Tuning the Antipodes: Battles for performing pitch in Melbourne

Tuning the Antipodes: Battles for performing pitch in Melbourne PDF Author: Simon Purtell
Publisher: Lyrebird Press Australia lyrebirdpress.music.unimelb.edu.au
ISBN: 0734037856
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examining the many controversies associated with pitch standards in Melbourne over more than a hundred years, Simon Purtell discovers their impact on the tuning of the city’s orchestras and organs, as well as its defence, municipal and Salvation Army bands. This fascinating history involves famous local and touring singers, conductors and organists, including Nellie Melba, Malcolm Sargent and William McKie, revealing just how complex a problem it was to ensure that Melbourne’s music-makers remained in tune. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has nothing on the saga of ‘Pitch, pitch, that cursed pitch’: the seemingly endless and frequently caustic attempts to establish a uniform performing pitch for music in the Antipodes. It is a typically Melburnian drama of mixed deference to Britain and stubborn upholding of local interests that the author so eloquently and patiently chronicles, and it ranges from the almost theocratic intervention of Dame Nellie Melba at the beginning of the twentieth century to the Stanthorpe Apple and Grape Harvest Festival of 1972. At the same time, it will have been a battle taking place comparably in all the major cities of the British Empire and beyond, though each with its peculiar twists and turns. What Simon Purtell has done is show us, in immaculate detail, just how pervasive and intricate, not to mention costly, this tectonic realignment of a fundamental element of musical infrastructure must have been in all places over a very long period of time” (Emeritus Professor Stephen Banfield, Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth, University of Bristol).

J.S. Bach in Australia: Studies in Reception and Performance

J.S. Bach in Australia: Studies in Reception and Performance PDF Author: Denis Collins
Publisher: Lyrebird Press lyrebirdpress.music.unimelb.edu.au
ISBN: 0734037910
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This book is the first to be dedicated to a study of the reception of a major European composer in Australia. Each of the eleven essays explores how J.S. Bach’s music has enriched Australian cultural life, from private performances in the early nineteenth century to historically informed realisations in recent years. The authors outline the challenges of mounting and sustaining this repertoire in the face of underdeveloped musical infrastructure and limited resources, and how these challenges have been overcome with determination and insight. Championed by imaginative individuals such as Ernest Wood and Leonard Fullard in Melbourne, E.H. Davies in Adelaide and W. Arundel Orchard in Sydney, Bach’s music has been a vehicle for the realisation of Australians’ cultural aspirations and a means of maintaining connections with traditions that continue to be cherished today.

Tuning the World

Tuning the World PDF Author: Fanny Gribenski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022682327X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Tuning the World tells the unknown story of how the musical pitch A 440 became the global norm. Now commonly accepted as the point of reference for musicians in the Western world, A 440 hertz only became the standard pitch during an international conference held in 1939. The adoption of this norm was the result of decades of negotiations between countries, involving a diverse group of performers, composers, diplomats, physicists, and sound engineers. Although there is widespread awareness of the variability of musical pitches over time, as attested by the use of lower frequencies to perform early music repertoires, no study has fully explained the invention of our current concert pitch. In this book, Fanny Gribenski draws on a rich variety of previously unexplored archival sources and a unique combination of musicological perspectives, transnational history, and science studies to tell the unknown story of how A 440 became the global norm. Tuning the World demonstrates the aesthetic, scientific, industrial, and political contingencies underlying the construction of one of the most “natural” objects of contemporary musical performance and shows how this century-old effort was ultimately determined by the influence of a few powerful nations.

Carmen Abroad

Carmen Abroad PDF Author: Richard Langham Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108638813
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
From the 'old world' to the 'new' and back again, this transnational history of the performance and reception of Bizet's Carmen – whose subject has become a modern myth and its heroine a symbol – provides new understanding of the opera's enduring yet ever-evolving and resituated presence and popularity. This book examines three stages of cultural transfer: the opera's establishment in the repertoire; its performance, translation, adaptation and appropriation in Europe, the Americas and Australia; its cultural 'work' in Soviet Russia, in Japan in the era of Westernisation, in southern, regionalist France and in Carmen's 'homeland', Spain. As the volume reveals the ways in which Bizet's opera swiftly travelled the globe from its Parisian premiere, readers will understand how the story, the music, the staging and the singers appealed to audiences in diverse geographical, artistic and political contexts.

The Reminiscences and Selected Criticism of Herbert Thompson

The Reminiscences and Selected Criticism of Herbert Thompson PDF Author: Michael Allis
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1835533442
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book is a critical edition of the autobiography and selected musical criticism of Herbert Thompson (1856–1945) who was chief music critic at The Yorkshire Post from 1886 until 1936, and Yorkshire correspondent for the Musical Times.

Tuning the Antipodes

Tuning the Antipodes PDF Author: Simon Andrew Purtell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780734037848
Category : Musical instruments
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Carmen Abroad

Carmen Abroad PDF Author: Richard Langham Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108481612
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
A transnational history of the performance, reception, translation, adaptation and appropriation of Bizet's Carmen from 1875 to 1945. This volume explores how Bizet's opera swiftly travelled the globe, and how the story, the music, the staging and the singers appealed to audiences in diverse contexts.

Australia visited and revisited. A narrative of recent travels and old experiences in Victoria and New South Wales

Australia visited and revisited. A narrative of recent travels and old experiences in Victoria and New South Wales PDF Author: Samuel MOSSMAN (and BANISTER (Thomas))
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description


The Mother Fault

The Mother Fault PDF Author: Kate Mildenhall
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0008430276
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
‘Thrilling...a triumph of a novel’ JANE HARPER ‘Beautiful writing, emotional depth, page-turning plot’ CHRIS HAMMER In a futuristic world, danger awaits... if you loved THE LAST and THE HANDMAID’S TALE you will love this!

Technopoly

Technopoly PDF Author: Neil Postman
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030779735X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transformation into a society that is shaped by technology—from the acclaimed author of Amusing Ourselves to Death. "A provocative book ... A tool for fighting back against the tools that run our lives." —Dallas Morning News The story of our society's transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it—with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.