Perspectives on American Music, 1900-1950

Perspectives on American Music, 1900-1950 PDF Author: Michael Saffle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136519726
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
The essays in this collection reflect the range and depth of musical life in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Contributions consider the rise and triumph of popular forms such as jazz, swing, and blues, as well as the contributions to art music of composers such as Ives, Cage, and Copland, among others. American contributions to music technology and dissemination, and the role of these forms in extending the audience for music, is also a focus.

Perspectives on American Music, 1900-1950

Perspectives on American Music, 1900-1950 PDF Author: Michael Saffle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136519726
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
The essays in this collection reflect the range and depth of musical life in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Contributions consider the rise and triumph of popular forms such as jazz, swing, and blues, as well as the contributions to art music of composers such as Ives, Cage, and Copland, among others. American contributions to music technology and dissemination, and the role of these forms in extending the audience for music, is also a focus.

This is Our Music

This is Our Music PDF Author: Iain Anderson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812239805
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
"Takes us back to that moment between the fifties and the sixties when a new music called free jazz took root in the coffeehouses and nightclubs of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles."--John Szwed, author of So What: The Life of Miles Davis

Begin Again

Begin Again PDF Author: Kenneth Silverman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810128306
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents—musician, inventor, composer, poet, and even amateur mycologist—John Cage became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. Silverman begins with Cage’s childhood in interwar Los Angeles and his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where immersion in the burgeoning new musical and artistic movements triggered an explosion of his creativity. Cage continued his studies in the United States with the seminal modern composer Arnold Schoenberg, and he soon began the experiments with sound and percussion instruments that would develop into his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. Cage’s unorthodox methods still influence artists in a wide range of genres and media. Silverman concurrently follows Cage’s rich personal life, from his early marriage to his lifelong personal and professional partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as his friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers. Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the enormous archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs, facsimiles of musical scores, and Web links to illustrative sections of his compositions, Silverman gives us a biography of major significance: a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century. !--?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /--

Through the Looking Glass

Through the Looking Glass PDF Author: Richard H. Brown
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190628073
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Through the Looking Glass examines John Cage's interactions and collaborations with avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, and in turn seeks out the implications of the audiovisual experience for the overall aesthetic surrounding Cage's career. As the commercially dominant media form in the twentieth century, cinema transformed the way listeners were introduced to and consumed music. Cage's quest to redefine music, intentionality, and expression reflect the similar transformation of music within the larger audiovisual experience of sound film. This volume examines key moments in Cage's career where cinema either informed or transformed his position on the nature of sound, music, expression, and the ontology of the musical artwork. The examples point to moments of rupture within Cage's own consideration of the musical artwork, pointing to newfound collision points that have a significant and heretofore unacknowledged role in Cage's notions of the audiovisual experience and the medium-specific ontology of a work of art.

Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?

Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? PDF Author: Barry Blesser
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026251317X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
How we experience space by listening: the concepts of aural architecture, with examples ranging from Gothic cathedrals to surround sound home theater. We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening. We can navigate a room in the dark, and "hear" the emptiness of a house without furniture. Our experience of music in a concert hall depends on whether we sit in the front row or under the balcony. The unique acoustics of religious spaces acquire symbolic meaning. Social relationships are strongly influenced by the way that space changes sound. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter examine auditory spatial awareness: experiencing space by attentive listening. Every environment has an aural architecture.The audible attributes of physical space have always contributed to the fabric of human culture, as demonstrated by prehistoric multimedia cave paintings, classical Greek open-air theaters, Gothic cathedrals, acoustic geography of French villages, modern music reproduction, and virtual spaces in home theaters. Auditory spatial awareness is a prism that reveals a culture's attitudes toward hearing and space. Some listeners can learn to "see" objects with their ears, but even without training, we can all hear spatial geometry such as an open door or low ceiling. Integrating contributions from a wide range of disciplines—including architecture, music, acoustics, evolution, anthropology, cognitive psychology, audio engineering, and many others—Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? establishes the concepts and language of aural architecture. These concepts provide an interdisciplinary guide for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of how space enhances our well-being. Aural architecture is not the exclusive domain of specialists. Accidentally or intentionally, we all function as aural architects.

A Blues Bibliography

A Blues Bibliography PDF Author: Robert Ford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135865078
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 2397

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Book Description
A Blues Bibliography, Second Edition is a revised and enlarged version of the definitive blues bibliography first published in 1999. Material previously omitted from the first edition has now been included, and the bibliography has been expanded to include works published since then. In addition to biographical references, this work includes entries on the history and background of the blues, instruments, record labels, reference sources, regional variations and lyric transcriptions and musical analysis. The Blues Bibliography is an invaluable guide to the enthusiastic market among libraries specializing in music and African-American culture and among individual blues scholars.

The Cambridge Companion to Percussion

The Cambridge Companion to Percussion PDF Author: Russell Hartenberger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316546217
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Percussion music is both the oldest and most recent of musical genres and exists in diverse forms throughout the world. This Companion explores percussion and rhythm from the perspectives of performers, composers, conductors, instrument builders, scholars, and cognitive scientists. Topics covered include percussion in symphony orchestras from the nineteenth century to today and the development of percussion instruments in chapters on the marimba revolution, the percussion industry, drum machines, and the effect of acoustics. Chapters also investigate drum set playing and the influences of world music on Western percussion, and outline the roles of percussionists as composers, conductors, soloists, chamber musicians, and theatrical performers. Developments in scientific research are explored in chapters on the perception of sound and the evolution of musical rhythm. This book will be a valuable resource for students, percussionists, and all those who want a deeper understanding of percussion music and rhythm.

Lou Harrison

Lou Harrison PDF Author: Bill Alves
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253026431
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 603

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Book Description
A biography on the legendary gay American composer of contemporary classical music. American composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) is perhaps best known for challenging the traditional musical establishment along with his contemporaries and close colleagues: composers John Cage, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Leonard Bernstein; Living Theater founder, Judith Malina; and choreographer, Merce Cunningham. Today, musicians from Bang on a Can to Björk are indebted to the cultural hybrids Harrison pioneered half a century ago. His explorations of new tonalities at a time when the rest of the avant-garde considered such interests heretical set the stage for minimalism and musical post-modernism. His propulsive rhythms and ground-breaking use of percussion have inspired choreographers from Merce Cunningham to Mark Morris, and he is considered the godfather of the so-called “world music” phenomenon that has invigorated Western music with global sounds over the past two decades. In this biography, authors Bill Alves and Brett Campbell trace Harrison’s life and career from the diverse streets of San Francisco, where he studied with music experimentalist Henry Cowell and Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, and where he discovered his love for all things non-traditional (Beat poetry, parties, and men); to the competitive performance industry in New York, where he subsequently launched his career as a composer, conducted Charles Ives’s Third Symphony at Carnegie Hall (winning the elder composer a Pulitzer Prize), and experienced a devastating mental breakdown; to the experimental arts institution of Black Mountain College where he was involved in the first “happenings” with Cage, Cunningham, and others; and finally, back to California, where he would become a strong voice in human rights and environmental campaigns and compose some of the most eclectic pieces of his career. “Lou Harrison’s avuncular personality and tuneful music coaxed affectionate regard from all who knew him, and that affection is evident on every page of Alves and Campbell’s new biography. Eminently readable, it puts Harrison at the center of American music: he knew everyone important and was in touch with everybody, from mentors like Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives and Harry Partch and Virgil Thomson to peers like John Cage to students like Janice Giteck and Paul Dresher. He was larger than life in person, and now he is larger than life in history as well.” —Kyle Gann, author of Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays After a Sonata

The Cambridge Companion to John Cage

The Cambridge Companion to John Cage PDF Author: David Nicholls
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521789684
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Publisher Description

“I’m not Perfect – I’m only Human” – How to Beat Perfectionism

“I’m not Perfect – I’m only Human” – How to Beat Perfectionism PDF Author: Darlene Lancer
Publisher: Carousel Books
ISBN:
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
Perfectionism can be a blessing or a curse. When it helps us, it lifts our mood, and we can achieve significant accomplishments. But perpetually seeking an illusion can have serious consequences. It can become a painful, inescapable trap. Its self-sabotaging side effects undermine our goals and creativity and spill over onto our co-workers and loved ones, damaging our relationships. At worse, it can be dehumanizing and compromise our ability to feel love and experience joy. Fortunately, it’s possible to beat perfectionism! Learn about types of perfectionists, both positive and negative, myths they hold, and how their relationships are affected. Other disorders are distinguished. Psychological, genetic, and environmental causes of perfectionism are explained with examples of symptoms, thoughts, and behaviors. Ten chapters provide steps and exercises to create change and find self-acceptance. Take a personality test and get parenting tips to avoid passing on perfectionism.