Rethinking Dvořák

Rethinking Dvořák PDF Author: David R. Beveridge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198164111
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The 24 essays offer penetrating insights into Dvorak's personality, his place in history, and the sheer beauty of his music. How this music was received and appreciated is a subject of special focus, offering explanations as to why, despite the composer's popularity, some of his greatest compositions have remained unknown.

Rethinking Dvořák

Rethinking Dvořák PDF Author: David R. Beveridge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198164111
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The 24 essays offer penetrating insights into Dvorak's personality, his place in history, and the sheer beauty of his music. How this music was received and appreciated is a subject of special focus, offering explanations as to why, despite the composer's popularity, some of his greatest compositions have remained unknown.

Dvorák: Cello Concerto

Dvorák: Cello Concerto PDF Author: Jan Smaczny
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521669030
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Dvorák's Cello Concerto, composed during his second stay in America, is one of the most popular works in the orchestral repertoire. This guide explores Dvorák's reasons for composing a concerto for an instrument which he at one time considered unsuitable for solo work, its relationship to his American period compositions and how it forms something of a bridge with his operatic interests. A particular focus is the concerto's unique qualities: why it stands apart in terms of form, melodic character and texture from the rest of Dvorák's orchestral music. The role of the dedicatee of the work, Hanus Wihan, in its creation is also considered, as are performing traditions as they have developed in the twentieth century. In addition the guide explores the extraordinary emotional background to the work which links it intimately to the woman who was probably Dvorák's first love.

The Symphonic Repertoire, Volume IV

The Symphonic Repertoire, Volume IV PDF Author: A. Peter Brown
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253072115
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1026

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Book Description
Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 18th century, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. Surprisingly, heretofore there has been no truly extensive, broad-based treatment of the genre, and the best of the existing studies are now several decades old. In this five-volume series, A. Peter Brown explores the symphony from its 18th-century beginnings to the end of the 20th century. Synthesizing the enormous scholarly literature, Brown presents up-to-date overviews of the status of research, discusses any important former or remaining problems of attribution, illuminates the style of specific works and their contexts, and samples early writings on their reception. The Symphonic Repertoire provides an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur. The series is being launched with two volumes on the Viennese symphony. Volume IV The Second Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorák, Mahler, and Selected Contemporaries Although during the mid-19th century the geographic center of the symphony in the Germanic territories moved west and north from Vienna to Leipzig, during the last third of the century it returned to the old Austrian lands with the works of Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorák, and Mahler. After nearly a half century in hibernation, the sleeping Viennese giant awoke to what some viewed as a reincarnation of Beethoven with the first hearing of Brahms's Symphony No. 1, which was premiered at Vienna in December 1876. Even though Bruckner had composed some gigantic symphonies prior to Brahms's first contribution, their full impact was not felt until the composer's complete texts became available after World War II. Although Dvorák was often viewed as a nationalist composer, in his symphonic writing his primary influences were Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms. For both Bruckner and Mahler, the symphony constituted the heart of their output; for Brahms and Dvorák, it occupied a less central place. Yet for all of them, the key figure of the past remained Beethoven. The symphonies of these four composers, together with the works of Goldmark, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Smetana, Fibich, Janácek, and others are treated in Volume IV, The Second Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony, covering the period from roughly 1860 to 1930.

Rethinking Brahms

Rethinking Brahms PDF Author: Nicole Grimes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197541739
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
As one of the most significant and widely performed composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms continues to command our attention. Rethinking Brahms counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions that position him as a conservative composer (whether musically or politically) with a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of his significance today. Drawing on German- and English-language scholarship, it deploys original approaches to his music and pursues innovative methodologies to interrogate the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of his creativity. Empowered by recent theoretical work on form and tonality, it offers fresh analytical insights into his music, including a number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present. The book brings into sharp focus the productive tension that exists between the perceived fixedness of musical texts and the ephemerality of performance by considering how historical and modern performers shape established understandings of Brahms and his music. Rethinking Brahms invites the reader to hear familiar pieces anew as they are refracted through historical, artistic, and philosophical prisms. Bringing us up to the present day, it also gives sustained attention to the resounding impact of Brahms's compositions on new music by exploring works by recent composers who have engaged deeply with his oeuvre. Combining awareness of overarching contexts with perceptive insights into Brahms's music, this book enlivens our understanding of Brahms, providing a dynamic, multifaceted, complex, and invigoratingly fresh portrait of the composer.

The Symphonic Repertoire, Volume IV

The Symphonic Repertoire, Volume IV PDF Author: A. Peter Brown
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253334886
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1050

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Book Description
This volume contains the symphonies of Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorák and Mahler, covering the period from roughly 1860 to 1930. Other contemporaries are discussed including Goldmark, Zemlinsky and Berg.

Reader's Guide to Music

Reader's Guide to Music PDF Author: Murray Steib
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135942625
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 928

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Book Description
The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).

Rusalka

Rusalka PDF Author: Timothy Cheek
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810883058
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book serves as an aid to anyone seeking to perform and gain a deeper understanding of this multi-layered opera, which so trenchantly asks what it means to be human, to love, and to be loved in return.

Defining Deutschtum

Defining Deutschtum PDF Author: David Lee Brodbeck
Publisher:
ISBN: 019936270X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna offers a nuanced look at the intersection of music, cultural identity, and political ideology in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Drawing on an extensive selection of writings in the city's political press, correspondence, archival documents, and a large body of recent scholarship in late Habsburg cultural and political history, author David Brodbeck argues that Vienna's music critics were important agents in the public sphere whose writings gave voice to distinct, sometimes competing ideological positions. These conflicting positions are exemplified especially well in their critical writings about the music of three notable composers of the day who were Austrian citizens but not ethnic Germans: Carl Goldmark, a Jew from German West Hungary, and the Czechs Bed'ich Smetana and Anton n Dvo? k. Often at stake in the critical discourse was the question of who and what could be deemed "German" in the multinational Austrian state. For critics such as Eduard Hanslick and Ludwig Speidel, traditional German liberals who came of age in the years around 1848, "Germanness" was an attribute that could be earned by any ambitious bourgeois-including Jews and those of non-German nationality-by embracing German cultural values. The more nationally inflected liberalism evident in the writings of Theodor Helm, with its particularist rhetoric of German national property in a time of Czech gains at German expense, was typical of those in the next generation, educated during the 1860s. The radical student politics of the 1880s, with its embrace of racialist antisemitism and irredentist German nationalism, just as surely shaped the discourse of certain young Wagnerian critics who emerged at the end of the century. This body of music-critical writing reveals a continuum of exclusivity, from a conception of Germanness rooted in social class and cultural elitism to one based in blood. Brodbeck neatly counters decades of musicological scholarship and offers a unique insight into the diverse ways in which educated German Austrians conceived of Germanness in music and understood their relationship to their non-German fellow citizens. Defining Deutschtum is sure to be an essential text for scholars of music history, cultural studies, and late 19th century Central European culture and society.

Musical Visitors to Britain

Musical Visitors to Britain PDF Author: Peter Gordon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135783594
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Britain has attracted many musical visitors to its shores. A varied and often eccentric collection of individuals, some were invited by royalty with musical tastes, some were refugees from religious or political oppression, some were spies, and others came to escape debt or even charges of murder. This book paints a broad picture of the changing nature of musical life in Britain over the centuries, through the eyes and ears of foreign musicians. After considering three of the eighteenth century’s greatest musical figures, the authors consider the rise of the celebrity composer in the nineteenth century, and go on to consider the influence of new forms of transport which allowed travel more freely from the Continent and the USA. Musical Visitors to Britain also charts the new opportunities presented by the opening of public halls, the growth of music festivals, and the regular influx of composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ending with the impact of new musical forms such as jazz. As much a social as a musical history of Britain, this book will be of interest to anyone studying or working in these fields, as well as to general readers who want to discover more about our musical heritage.

The Classical Music Lover's Companion to Orchestral Music

The Classical Music Lover's Companion to Orchestral Music PDF Author: Robert Philip
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300120699
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 969

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Book Description
An invaluable guide for lovers of classical music designed to enhance their enjoyment of the core orchestral repertoire from 1700 to 1950 Robert Philip, scholar, broadcaster, and musician, has compiled an essential handbook for lovers of classical music, designed to enhance their listening experience to the full. Covering four hundred works by sixty-eight composers from Corelli to Shostakovich, this engaging companion explores and unpacks the most frequently performed works, including symphonies, concertos, overtures, suites, and ballet scores. It offers intriguing details about each piece while avoiding technical terminology that might frustrate the non-specialist reader. Philip identifies key features in each work, as well as subtleties and surprises that await the attentive listener, and he includes enough background and biographical information to illuminate the composer's intentions. Organized alphabetically from Bach to Webern, this compendium will be indispensable for classical music enthusiasts, whether in the concert hall or enjoying recordings at home.