Music Talks: the lives of classical musicians

Music Talks: the lives of classical musicians PDF Author: Helen Epstein
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
A collection of profiles of some of the world's most fascinating musicians, including the late Leonard Bernstein, Vladimir Horowitz, and Dorothy DeLay and the very lively James Galway and Yo-Yo Ma. Passed from hand to hand and read by music students as well as music lovers everywhere, Music Talks makes a wonderful gift book. “An illuminating introduction to the trials and triumphs of the classical musician.” — Michael E. Ross, New York Times Sunday Book Review “Informative, perceptive, lively and accurate.” — Gary Graffman, Curtis Institute “For twenty years, I've assigned these profiles to my students as a means of understanding themselves and their art. Epstein has a gift for making the sometimes remote world of classical music seem familiar without sacrificing its majesty and mystery.” — Jonathan Baldo, Eastman School of Music “I use her book as a model for my students in teaching them both the profile form and how to provoke subjects into revealing themselves on the page.” — Megan Marshall, Emerson College, Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing

Music Talks: the lives of classical musicians

Music Talks: the lives of classical musicians PDF Author: Helen Epstein
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection of profiles of some of the world's most fascinating musicians, including the late Leonard Bernstein, Vladimir Horowitz, and Dorothy DeLay and the very lively James Galway and Yo-Yo Ma. Passed from hand to hand and read by music students as well as music lovers everywhere, Music Talks makes a wonderful gift book. “An illuminating introduction to the trials and triumphs of the classical musician.” — Michael E. Ross, New York Times Sunday Book Review “Informative, perceptive, lively and accurate.” — Gary Graffman, Curtis Institute “For twenty years, I've assigned these profiles to my students as a means of understanding themselves and their art. Epstein has a gift for making the sometimes remote world of classical music seem familiar without sacrificing its majesty and mystery.” — Jonathan Baldo, Eastman School of Music “I use her book as a model for my students in teaching them both the profile form and how to provoke subjects into revealing themselves on the page.” — Megan Marshall, Emerson College, Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing

The Sound of Beauty

The Sound of Beauty PDF Author: Michael Kurek
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1642290939
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Music remains something of a mystery to many people—ephemeral sounds floating invisibly through the air—here, and then gone. This book begins with the basic question of what music actually is, scientifically, employing simple, clear explanations of wave theory and the acoustics of sound as part of God's natural creation. It presents accessible and fascinating explanations of some theories of the psychology of perception of music, how music speaks to the mind, emotions, and spirit. Some of these concepts have rarely been addressed outside the ivory tower and even more rarely been seen through the lens of Catholic theology. Moving from music and the individual to music in the culture and the Church, the author addresses numerous issues in the context of Catholic thought, including: immanence and transcendence in music the Real Presence and music Moral Theology, Natural Law and music ordered and disordered understandings of music as it relates to the emotions understanding the authentic meanings of "beauty" and "creativity" the real function of music in Catholic liturgy the role of music in evangelization This is a kind of "layman's handbook," a comprehensive theology of all things music, which anyone can understand, written by an internationally respected classical composer and music professor at a top secular university who is also a faithful Catholic. It sheds light on the mysteries of music and furthers the spiritual formation regarding music for Catholics of many ages and walks of life. It is groundbreaking in its comprehensive and holistic treatment of music from a Catholic perspective, and particularly timely in advocating for the renewal of the norms for music in liturgy found in the documents of Vatican II. It also presents one of the most penetrating critical examinations to be found of contemporary classical music, from an insider.

Secret Lives of Great Composers

Secret Lives of Great Composers PDF Author: Elizabeth Lunday
Publisher: Quirk Books
ISBN: 1594747466
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Discover little-known stories from music history—including murder, riots, and heartbreak—in this entertaining tour through the fascinating (and surprising) lives of classical music masters With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Gioachino Rossini (draft-dodging womanizer) to Johann Sebastian Bach (jailbird) to Richard Wagner (alleged cross-dresser), Secret Lives of Great Composers recounts the seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters of international music. Here, you’ll learn that Edward Elgar dabbled with explosives; that John Cage was obsessed with fungus; that Berlioz plotted murder; and that Giacomo Puccini stole his church’s organ pipes and sold them as scrap metal so he could buy cigarettes. This is one music history lesson you’ll never forget!

Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers

Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers PDF Author: Patrick Kavanaugh
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310208068
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This is a compelling and inspiring look at spiritual beliefs that influenced some of the world's greatest composers, now revised and expanded with eight additional composers.

The Art of Possibility

The Art of Possibility PDF Author: Rosamund Stone Zander
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 0875847706
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
In their playing you hear not only precision, color and balance, but thunder, lightning and the language of the heart. This is what the Boston Globe said about a performance by conductor Benjamin Zander with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, but it could apply equally to the Zanders' inspirational book, the product of a synthesis of the diverse worlds of the symphony orchestra and cutting-edge psychology. The Art of Possibility offers a set of breakthrough practices for creativity in all human enterprises. Infused with the energy of their dynamic partnership, the book joins together Ben's extraordinary talent as a mover and shaker, teacher, and communicator, with Rosamund Stone Zander's genius for creating innovative paradigms for personal and professional fulfillment. In lively counterpoint, the authors provide us with a deep sense of the powerful role that the notion of possibility can play in every aspect of our lives. The Zanders' deceptively simple practices are based on two premises: that life is composed as a story ("it's all invented") and that, with new definitions, much more is possible than people ordinarily think. The book shifts our perspective with uplifting stories, parables, and anecdotes from the authors' personal experiences as well as from famous and everyday heroes. From "Giving an A," to the mysterious "Rule Number 6," to "Leading from Any Chair"-the account of Ben's stunning realization that the conductor/leader's power is directly linked to how much greatness he is willing to grant to others-each practice offers an opportunity for personal and organizational transformation. The Art of Possibility provides a life-altering approach to fulfilling dreams large and small. The Zanders invite us all to become passionate communicators, leaders, and performers whose lives radiate possibility into the world. Rosamund Stone Zander is a family therapist and a landscape painter. Benjamin Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and a professor at the New England Conservatory of Music. Based on the principles developed through the authors' unique partnership, Mr. Zander gives presentations to managers and executives around the world and Ms. Zander conducts workshops for organizations on practicing the art of possibility.

The Question

The Question PDF Author: Henri Alleg
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
Henri Alleg’s candid account of how the French Army brutally tortured him in Algeria first appeared in 1958. Although quickly banned by the French government, it was widely read and remains a classic and powerful indictment of torture. “The lesson of this book... is that we are all on the edge of savagery and if we begin to slip over that edge, we fall fast and far.” — D. W. Brogan, The New York Times “Written with spare and simple candor, the book is much more than a scalding footnote to fever-hot headlines. The Question does not stop with the Algerian question but goes on to ask: What does it mean to be a human being? It tells of the shame and glory of man.” — Time “In his modest, unassuming and precise fashion, Alleg is describing a triumph of the human spirit... The importance of Alleg’s book extends far beyond Algeria and France. For this is what can happen anywhere; what does happen in many parts of the world and what could happen here. There is nothing ‘inhuman’ about it. It is too, too human. To hush it up, to deny it for any reason whatever is to be an accomplice of the torturers...” — Scotsman “[A] noble and in a sense ennobling book, the dominant impression it leaves is one of a progressive and finally an almost total degradation, a degradation both of persons — except for the tortured, the outlawed — and of social institutions. The Question is far more than an account of atrocities, however spectacular.” — The Nation

Shostakovich

Shostakovich PDF Author: Laurel E. Fay
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780195182514
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
For this biography the author has used many primary documents; Shostakovich's many letters, concert programmes, newspaper articles and diaries of his contemporaries. Showing his life as an example of the paradoxes of living as an artist in Russia.

Balzac

Balzac PDF Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Zweig devoted ten years of research and writing to Balzac, which he regarded as his crowning achievement. This late work reads like a picaresque novel, with Balzac’s quest for “a woman with a fortune” and recurrent episodes of the author chasing an elusive pot of gold driving the story. This biography of one classic author by another is filled with Zweig’s characteristic psychological insights. He portrays the energy and “exuberance of imagination” that produced some two thousand characters in La comédie humaine, as well as the daily details of the coffee-chugging writer’s life, his manic writing schedule, method of correcting proofs, dealing with publishers and reviewers, signing contracts, doing marketing and publicity. Balzac blends biography and literary history in a highly readable volume that will teach you French cultural history as you laugh out loud. “[Balzac] is sure to entertain, instruct and charm ... It is a work of art, ... alive with the teeming life of its model ... It is true both to facts and to the more elusive psychological and spiritual truth of a man who ... has remained one of the most mysterious of great creators.” – Henri Peyre, Sterling professor of French Literature, Yale University, The New York Times

The World of Yesterday

The World of Yesterday PDF Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.

Mary Stuart

Mary Stuart PDF Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, reigned over Scotland from 14 December 1542 to 24 July 1567. Mary, the only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland, was six days old when her father died and she acceded to the throne. She spent most of her childhood in France while Scotland was ruled by regents, and in 1558, she married the Dauphin of France, Francis. He ascended the French throne as King Francis II in 1559, and Mary briefly became queen consort of France, until his death in December 1560. Widowed, Mary returned to Scotland, arriving in Leith on 19 August 1561. Four years later, she married her first cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, but their union was unhappy. In February 1567, his residence was destroyed by an explosion, and Darnley was found murdered in the garden. James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, was generally believed to have orchestrated Darnley’s death, but he was acquitted of the charge in April 1567, and the following month he married Mary. Following an uprising against the couple, Mary was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle. On 24 July 1567, she was forced to abdicate in favour of James VI, her one-year-old son by Darnley. After an unsuccessful attempt to regain the throne, she fled southwards seeking the protection of her first cousin once removed, Queen Elizabeth I of England. Mary had previously claimed Elizabeth’s throne as her own and was considered the legitimate sovereign of England by many English Catholics, including participants in a rebellion known as the Rising of the North. Perceiving her as a threat, Elizabeth had her confined in various castles and manor houses in the interior of England. After eighteen and a half years in custody, Mary was found guilty of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth in 1586 and was beheaded the following year. “The story has all the emotional savor of a crime passionnel; it is adroitly worked up to a climax of violence and calamity, and it subsides as skillfully to an end of tragic pity... With his talent for simple exposition on a large scale, his sense of drama, his ready flow of emotion, his inventiveness in detail of the moments of his character’s life, his resources of metaphor, parallel and illustration, and his rich psychological adornment of human life, Herr Zweig has no difficulty in reducing his material into its essential drama... whatever Mary’s story, and we shall never know, Zweig’s book has every right to be set down as one of the most brilliant guesses at the truth, and it is an amazing piece of virtuosity to plunge her into the blackest of guilt, and then restore her to our sympathy and pity.” — Peter Munro Jack, The New York Times “Mr. Zweig... is not a historian but... a litterateur practising biography as a branch of letters. The distinction is not derogatory... It... is the clue to the strength and weakness of the book. The litterateur borrows from the craft and exercises some of the liberty of the novelist. He is interested in character and psychology and indulges in imaginative reconstruction more freely than the historian who is forever... haunted by the words, ‘We do not know.’... [Zweig] makes a real person of Mary, a convincing portrait, and there is sympathetic understanding even when he is presenting her as the accomplice of her lover, Bothwell, in the murder of Darnley. Needless to say the style is remarkably easy and readable... [C]riticism would be unjust to the brilliant qualities of Mr. Zweig’s book, and though I hope that all he says will not be taken for gospel truth, I am certain of the pleasure he will give to his readers. There are many descriptive passages to be scored and many sentences that one would give a great deal to have written. The whole book goes with the swing of a novel. The translation is beyond praise.” — J. E. Neale, The Saturday Review