Curtain, Gong, Steam

Curtain, Gong, Steam PDF Author: Gundula Kreuzer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520966554
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
In this innovative book, Gundula Kreuzer argues for the foundational role of technologies in the conception, production, and study of nineteenth-century opera. She shows how composers increasingly incorporated novel audiovisual effects in their works and how the uses and meanings of the required apparatuses changed through the twentieth century, sometimes still resonating in stagings, performance art, and popular culture today. Focusing on devices (which she dubs “Wagnerian technologies”) intended to amalgamate opera’s various media while veiling their mechanics, Kreuzer offers a practical counternarrative to Wagner’s idealist theories of total illusionism. At the same time, Curtain, Gong, Steam’s multifaceted exploration of the three titular technologies repositions Wagner as catalyst more than inventor in the history of operatic production. With its broad chronological and geographical scope, this book deepens our understanding of the material and mechanical conditions of historical operatic practice as well as of individual works, both well known and obscure.

Curtain, Gong, Steam

Curtain, Gong, Steam PDF Author: Gundula Kreuzer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520966554
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this innovative book, Gundula Kreuzer argues for the foundational role of technologies in the conception, production, and study of nineteenth-century opera. She shows how composers increasingly incorporated novel audiovisual effects in their works and how the uses and meanings of the required apparatuses changed through the twentieth century, sometimes still resonating in stagings, performance art, and popular culture today. Focusing on devices (which she dubs “Wagnerian technologies”) intended to amalgamate opera’s various media while veiling their mechanics, Kreuzer offers a practical counternarrative to Wagner’s idealist theories of total illusionism. At the same time, Curtain, Gong, Steam’s multifaceted exploration of the three titular technologies repositions Wagner as catalyst more than inventor in the history of operatic production. With its broad chronological and geographical scope, this book deepens our understanding of the material and mechanical conditions of historical operatic practice as well as of individual works, both well known and obscure.

Foul Lady Fortune

Foul Lady Fortune PDF Author: Chloe Gong
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1665905603
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends comes the “equal parts intoxicating and dazzling” (Roshani Chokshi, New York Times bestselling author of The Gilded Wolves) first book in a captivating new duology following an ill-matched pair of spies posing as a married couple to investigate a series of brutal murders in 1930s Shanghai. It’s 1931 in Shanghai, and the stage is set for a new decade of intrigue. Four years ago, Rosalind Lang was brought back from the brink of death, but the strange experiment that saved her also stopped her from sleeping and aging—and allows her to heal from any wound. In short, Rosalind cannot die. Now, desperate for redemption for her traitorous past, she uses her abilities as an assassin for her country. Code name: Fortune. But when the Japanese Imperial Army begins its invasion march, Rosalind’s mission pivots. A series of murders is causing unrest in Shanghai, and the Japanese are under suspicion. Rosalind’s new orders are to infiltrate foreign society and identify the culprits behind the terror plot before more of her people are killed. To reduce suspicion, however, she must pose as the wife of another Nationalist spy, Orion Hong, and though Rosalind finds Orion’s cavalier attitude and playboy demeanor infuriating, she is willing to work with him for the greater good. But Orion has an agenda of his own, and Rosalind has secrets that she wants to keep buried. As they both attempt to unravel the conspiracy, the two spies soon find that there are deeper and more horrifying layers to this mystery than they ever imagined.

Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy

Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy PDF Author: Ellen Rosand
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520933279
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-century opera examines the composer's celebrated final works—Il ritorno d'Ulisse (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642)—from a new perspective. Ellen Rosand considers these works as not merely a pair but constituents of a trio, a Venetian trilogy that, Rosand argues, properly includes a third opera, Le nozze d'Enea (1641). Although its music has not survived, its chronological placement between the other two operas opens new prospects for better understanding all three, both in their specifically Venetian context and as the creations of an old master. A thorough review of manuscript and printed sources of Ritorno and Poppea, in conjunction with those of their erstwhile silent companion, offers new possibilities for resolving the questions of authenticity that have swirled around Monteverdi's last operas since their discovery in the late nineteenth century. Le nozze d'Enea also helps to explain the striking differences between the other two, casting new light on their contrasting moral ethos: the conflict between a world of emotional propriety and restraint and one of hedonistic abandon.

Boccherini’s Body

Boccherini’s Body PDF Author: Elisabeth Le Guin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520240170
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Annotation A study of how the physical processes of learning to play a piece of music can enrich and inform the mental process of studying and analyzing the music, using the cello music of Luigi Boccherini as a case study.

The Cambridge Companion to Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen

The Cambridge Companion to Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen PDF Author: Mark Berry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107108519
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
This Companion provides an overview and in-depth analysis of Wagner's Ring using traditional critical analysis alongside more recent approaches.

Echo's Chambers

Echo's Chambers PDF Author: Joseph L. Clarke
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988038
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
A room’s acoustic character seems at once the most technical and the most mystical of concerns. Since the early Enlightenment, European architects have systematically endeavored to represent and control the propagation of sound in large interior spaces. Their work has been informed by the science of sound but has also been entangled with debates on style, visualization techniques, performance practices, and the expansion of the listening public. Echo’s Chambers explores how architectural experimentation from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for concepts of acoustic space that are widely embraced in contemporary culture. It focuses on the role of echo and reverberation in the architecture of Pierre Patte, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Carl Ferdinand Langhans, and Le Corbusier, as well as the influential acoustic ideas of Athanasius Kircher, Richard Wagner, and Marshall McLuhan. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of media and auditory culture, Joseph L. Clarke reveals how architecture has impacted the ways we continue to listen to, talk about, and creatively manipulate sound in the physical environment.

Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, Second Edition

Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, Second Edition PDF Author: Simon Morrison
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520305469
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Acclaimed for treading new ground in operatic studies of the period, Simon Morrison’s influential and now-classic text explores music and the occult during the Russian Symbolist movement. Including previously unavailable archival materials about Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, this wholly revised edition is both up to date and revelatory. Topics range from decadence to pantheism, musical devilry to narcotic-infused evocations of heaven, the influence of Wagner, and the significance of contemporaneous Russian literature. Symbolism tested boundaries and reached for extremes so as to imagine art uniting people, facilitating communion with nature, and ultimately transcending reality. Within this framework, Morrison examines four lesser-known works by canonical composers—Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Scriabin, and Sergey Prokofiev—and in this new edition also considers Alexandre Gretchaninoff’s Sister Beatrice and Alexander Kastalsky’s Klara Milich, while also making the case for reviving Vladimir Rebikov’s The Christmas Tree.

Just Beyond Listening

Just Beyond Listening PDF Author: Michael C. Heller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520975863
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.

Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880

Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880 PDF Author: Sarah Hibberd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108486592
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The first English language collection on the musical sublime. Reveals music's place at the forefront of this interdisciplinary aesthetic category.

Opera as Art

Opera as Art PDF Author: Paul Thom
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 166691424X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
In Opera as Art: Philosophical Sketches, Paul Thom argues for opera as an art, standing alongside other artforms that employ visual and sonic media to embody the great themes of human life. Thom contends that in great operatic art, the narrative and expressive content collaborate with the work's aesthetic qualities towards achieving this aim. This argument can be extended to modern operatic productions. At their best, these stagings are works of art in themselves, whether they give faithful renditions of the operas they stage and whether their aims go beyond interpretation to commentary and critique. This book is a philosophical introduction to the key practices that comprise the world of opera: the making of the work; its interpretation by directors, critics, and spectators; and the making of an operatic production. Opera has always existed in a context of philosophical ideas, and this book is written for opera-lovers who would like to learn something about that philosophical context.