Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline

Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline PDF Author: Constant Lambert
Publisher: Rare Treasure Editions
ISBN: 1774642700
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
A brilliant analysis of the music of the twenties and thirties, also discusses the music of composers like Stravinsky, Satie, Gershwin, and considers the contributions of jazz and other pop music of the time with classical music.

Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline

Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline PDF Author: Constant Lambert
Publisher: Rare Treasure Editions
ISBN: 1774642700
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
A brilliant analysis of the music of the twenties and thirties, also discusses the music of composers like Stravinsky, Satie, Gershwin, and considers the contributions of jazz and other pop music of the time with classical music.

Music for the People

Music for the People PDF Author: James J. Nott
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191554979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Popular music was a powerful and persistent influence in the daily life of millions in interwar Britain, yet these crucial years in the development of the popular music industry have rarely been the subject of detailed investigation. For the first time, here is a comprehensive survey of the British popular music industry and its audience. The book examines the changes to popular music and the industry and their impact on British society and culture from 1918 to 1939. It looks at the businesses involved in the supply of popular music, how the industry organised itself, and who controlled it. It attempts to establish the size of the audience for popular music and to determine who this audience was. Finally, it considers popular music itself - how the music changed, which music was the most popular, and how certain genres were made available to the public.

Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-Century British Music

Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-Century British Music PDF Author: Rhiannon Mathias
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317103009
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) were contemporaries at the Royal College of Music. The three composers' careers were launched with performances in the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts in the 1930s - a time when, in Britain, as Williams noted, a woman composer was considered 'very odd indeed'. Even so, by the early 1940s all three had made remarkable advances in their work: Lutyens had become the first British composer to use 12-note technique, in her Chamber Concerto No. 1 (1939-40); Maconchy had composed four string quartets of outstanding quality and was busy rethinking the genre; and Williams had won recognition as a composer with great flair for orchestral writing with her Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1940) and Sea Sketches (1944). In the following years, Lutyens, Maconchy and Williams went on to compose music of striking quality and to attain prominent positions within the British music scene. Their respective achievements broke through the 'sound ceiling', challenging many of the traditional assumptions which accompanied music by female composers. Rhiannon Mathias traces the development of these three important composers through analysis of selected works. The book draws upon previously unexplored material as well as radio and television interviews with the composers themselves and with their contemporaries. The musical analysis and contextual material lead to a re-evaluation of the composers' positions in the context of twentieth-century British music history.

Rethinking Prokofiev

Rethinking Prokofiev PDF Author: Rita McAllister
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190670789
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Among major 20th-century composers whose music is poorly understood, Sergei Prokofiev stands out conspicuously. The turbulent times in which Prokofiev lived and the chronology of his travels-he left Russia in the wake of Revolution, and returned at the height of the Stalinist purges-have caused unusually polarized appraisals of his music. While individual, distinctive, and instantly recognizable, Prokofiev's music was also idiosyncratically tonal in an age when tonality was largely passé. Prokofiev's output therefore has been largely elusive and difficult to assess against contemporary trends. More than sixty years after the composer's death, editors Rita McAllister and Christina Guillaumier offer Rethinking Prokofiev as an assessment that redresses this enigmatic composer's legacy. Often more political than artistic, these appraisals have depended not only upon the date of publication but also the geographical location of the writer. Commissioned from some of the most distinguished and rising scholars in the field, this collection highlights the background and context of Prokofiev's work. Contributors delve into the composer's relationship to nineteenth-century Russian traditions, Silver-Age and Symbolist composers and poets, the culture of Paris in the 1920s and '30s, and to his later Soviet colleagues and younger contemporaries. They also investigate his reception in the West, his return to Russia, and the effect of his music on contemporary popular culture. Still, the main focus of the book is on the music itself: his early, experimental piano and vocal works, as well as his piano concertos, operas, film scores, early ballets, and late symphonies. Through an empirical examination of his characteristic harmonies, melodies, cadences, and musical gestures-and through an analysis of the newly uncovered contents of his sketch-books-contributors reveal much of what makes Prokofiev an idiosyncratic genius and his music intriguing, often dramatic, and almost always beguiling.

The Great American Songbooks

The Great American Songbooks PDF Author: T. Austin Graham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199862117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American authors pioneered a mode of musical writing that quite literally resounded beyond the printed page. Novels gained soundtracks, poetry compelled its audiences to sing, and the ostensibly silent act of reading became anything but. The Great American Songbooks is the story of this literature, at once an overview of musical and authorial practice at the century's turn, an investigation into the sensory dimensions of reading, and a meditation on the effects that the popular arts have had on literary modernism. The writings of John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Walt Whitman are heard in a new key; the performers and tunesmiths who inspired them have their stories told; and the music of the past, long out of print and fashion, is recapitulated and made available in digital form. A work of criticism situated at the crossroads of literary analysis, musicology, and cultural history, The Great American Songbooks demonstrates the importance of studying fiction and poetry from interdisciplinary perspectives, and it suggests new avenues for research in the dawning age of the digital humanities.

Performing Music in the Age of Recording

Performing Music in the Age of Recording PDF Author: Robert Philip
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300102468
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
What is the relationship between performance and recording? What is the impact of recording on the lives of musicians? Comparison of the lives of musicians and audiences in the years before recordings with those of today. Survey of the changing attitudes toward freedom of expression, the globalization of performing styles and the rise of the period instrument movement.

Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England

Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England PDF Author: Philip Ross Bullock
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351550519
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Philip Ross Bullock looks at the life and works of Rosa Newmarch (1857-1940), the leading authority on Russian music and culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. Although Newmarch's work and influence are often acknowledged - most particularly by scholars of English poetry, and of the role of women in English music - the full range of her ideas and activities has yet to be studied. As an inveterate traveller, prolific author, and polyglot friend of some of Europe's leading musicians, such as Elgar, Sibelius and Jank, Newmarch deserves to be better appreciated. On the basis of both published and archival materials, the details of Newmarch's busy life are traced in an opening chapter, followed by an overview of English interest in Russian culture around the turn of the century, a period which saw a long-standing Russophobia (largely political and military) challenged by a more passionate and well-informed interest in the arts Three chapters then deal with the features that characterize Newmarch's engagement with Russian culture and society, and - more significantly perhaps - which she also championed in her native England; nationalism; the role of the intelligentsia; and feminism. In each case, Newmarch's interest in Russia was no mere instance of ethnographic curiosity; rather, her observations about and passion for Russia were translated into a commentary on the state of contemporary English cultural and social life. Her interest in nationalism was based on the conviction that each country deserved an art of its own. Her call for artists and intellectuals to play a vital role in the cultural and social life of the country illustrated how her Russian experiences could map onto the liberal values of Victorian England. And her feminism was linked to the idea that women could exercise roles of authority and influence in society through participation in the arts. A final chapter considers how her late interest in the music of Czechoslovakia pi

Jean Sibelius

Jean Sibelius PDF Author: Glenda Dawn Goss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135541175
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
First Published in 1998. This book is a comprehensive annotated bibliography of writings about the life, times, and music of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). Over 1,000 sources in 11 different languages are represented, from the earliest writings, which appeared in the 1890s, to studies published through 1994. Historical information and background are supplied together with an indication of the reliability of each source. Translations of studies into English, German, and French are noted, particularly important in a field where so many items are in Finnish and Swedish. Introductory essays to each section discuss Sibelius in different contexts: for example, vis--vis his contemporaries in Scandinavia, in relation to folk music, in reception history, and in the scholarly literature. Individual musical compositions have their own sections with bibliography. Comprehensive indexes cover the musical works, authors, and people and subjects mentioned.

"British Music and Modernism, 1895?960 "

Author: Matthew Riley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351573004
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 573

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Book Description
Imaginative analytical and critical work on British music of the early twentieth century has been hindered by perceptions of the repertory as insular in its references and backward in its style and syntax, escaping the modernity that surrounded its composers. Recent research has begun to break down these perceptions and has found intriguing links between British music and modernism. This book brings together contributions from scholars working in analysis, hermeneutics, reception history, critical theory and the history of ideas. Three overall themes emerge from its chapters: accounts of British reactions to Continental modernism and the forms they took; links between music and the visual arts; and analysis and interpretation of compositions in the light of recent theoretical work on form, tonality and pitch organization.

Music and Politics in Thirties Britain

Music and Politics in Thirties Britain PDF Author: John Morris
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135027125X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Radical domestic politics, musical experimentation, advancing technology and the influence of migration from Europe and Britain's enrichment from it, all had their affects on a remarkable year in musical cultural life in the mid-30s. This book looks at the little-known aspect of music and politics in domestic Britain in 1934, a pivotal year in terms of political and cultural developments. Music and Politics in Thirties Britain focuses on the production, reception and interpretation of classical music in relation to the changes of the 1930s. John Morris treads new ground by examining the relationship between music, musicians and fascism – an area overlooked by existing scholarship. The book expertly traces the complexities and contradictions of British music history in the 1930s as musicians like others in the Arts attempted to engage with the political turmoil of the period. John Morris exemplifies the “cultural turn” in studies of British fascism, and also shows the overlap between ideas of the BUF and more progressive musicians. The result is a stimulating addition to existing scholarship which will be of interest to scholars and students alike.