Ernst Krenek

Ernst Krenek PDF Author: John Lincoln Stewart
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520070141
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Biografie van de Amerikaanse componist van Oostenrijkse afkomst (geb. 1900)

Ernst Krenek

Ernst Krenek PDF Author: John Lincoln Stewart
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520070141
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Biografie van de Amerikaanse componist van Oostenrijkse afkomst (geb. 1900)

The Listening Composer

The Listening Composer PDF Author: George Perle
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520917835
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
George Perle takes us into the composer's workshop as he reevaluates what we call "twentieth-century music"—a term used to refer to new or modern or contemporary music that represents a radical break from the tonal tradition, or "common practice," of the preceding three centuries. He proposes that this music, in the course of breaking with the tonal tradition, presents coherent and definable elements of a new tradition. In spite of the disparity in their styles, idioms, and compositional methods, he argues, what unites Scriabin, Stravinsky, Bartók, and the Viennese circle (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) is more important than what separates them. If we are to understand the connections among these mainstream composers, we also have to understand their connections with the past. Through an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of a single piece by Varèse, Density 21.5 for unaccompanied flute, Perle shows how these composers refer not only to their contemporaries but also to Wagner, Debussy, and Beethoven. Perle isolates the years 1909-10 as the moment of revolutionary transformation in the foundational premises of our musical language. He asks: What are the implications of this revolution, not only for the composer, but also for the listener? What are the consequences for the theory and teaching of music today? In his highly original answers, Perle relates the role of intuition in the listening experience to its role in the compositional process. Perle asserts that the post-Schoenbergian serialists have preoccupied themselves with secondary and superficial aspects of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method that have led it to a dead end but he also exposes the speciousness of current alternatives such as chance music, minimalism, and the so-called return to tonality. He offers a new and more comprehensive definition of "twelve-tone music" and firmly rejects the notion that accessibility to the new music is reserved for a special class of elite listeners.

The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt

The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt PDF Author: Milton Babbitt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691155402
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 531

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Book Description
Like his compositions, Milton Babbitt's writings about music have exerted an extraordinary influence on postwar music and thinking about music. In essays and public addresses spanning fifty years, Babbitt has grappled profoundly with central questions in the composition and apprehension of music. These writings range from personal memoirs and critical reviews to closely reasoned metatheoretical speculations and technical exegesis. In the history of music theory, there has been only a small handful of figures who have produced work of comparable stature. Taken as a whole, Babbitt's writings are not only an invaluable testimony to his thinking--a priceless primary source for the intellectual and cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century--but also a remarkable achievement in their own right. Prior to this collection, Babbitt's writings were scattered through a wide variety of journals, books, and magazines--many hard to find and some unavailable--and often contained typographical errors and editorial corruptions of various kinds. This volume of almost fifty pieces gathers, corrects, and annotates virtually everything of significance that Babbitt has written. The result is complete, authoritative, and fully accessible--the definitive source of Babbitt's influential ideas.

Essays on Roberto Gerhard

Essays on Roberto Gerhard PDF Author: Monty Adkins
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443874817
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
For much of the mid-twentieth century, Roberto Gerhard found himself an outsider. He was airbrushed from much writing on contemporary music in Spain during the Franco regime, and was known in England more for his ‘commercial’ music for theatre, film and radio than his concert works. However, his significance as a musical innovator in developing serial technique and in the field of electro-acoustics is now being gradually recognised in both Spain and England, as well as further afield. The volume explores an extensive range of Gerhard’s work from the early Wind Quintet and the Spanish ballets Pandora and Don Quixote with their overt political overtones, through to the late period Metamorphoses and a newly discovered chance-based composition Claustophilia written in response to a request by John Cage for his book Notations. One of the key themes presented throughout the book is Gerhard’s innovative use of serialism. Gerhard’s development of Schoenberg’s technique led him to explore the serialization of both pitch and time. This volume suggests evidence for the first time that situates Gerhard’s idiosyncratic experiments alongside rather than after the total serialist works of his European counterparts Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The Last Opera

The Last Opera PDF Author: Chandler Carter
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041619
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
From the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 composer Igor Stravinsky and poet W. H. Auden collaborated on the opera The Rake's Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived that Stravinsky and Auden were confronting the central crisis of the Modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all opera. In The Last Opera, Chandler Carter weaves together three interlocking stories. The central and most detailed story explores the libretto and music of The Rake's Progress. The second positions the opera as a focal point in Stravinsky's artistic journey and those who helped him realize it—his librettists, Auden and Chester Kallman; his protégé Robert Craft; and his compatriot, fellow composer, and close friend Nicolas Nabokov. By exploring the ominous cultural landscape in which these fascinating individuals lived and worked, the book captures a pivotal twenty-five-year span (from approximately 1945 to 1970) during which modernists like Stravinsky and Auden confronted a tectonic disruption to their artistic worldview. Ultimately, Carter reveals how these stories fit into a larger third narrative, the 400-year history of opera. This richly and lovingly contextualized study of The Rake's Progress sheds new light on why, despite the hundreds of musical dramas and theater pieces that have been written since its premier in 1951, this work is still considered the "the last opera."

The Cambridge History of American Music

The Cambridge History of American Music PDF Author: David Nicholls
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521454292
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of American Music, first published in 1998, celebrates the richness of America's musical life. It was the first study of music in the United States to be written by a team of scholars. American music is an intricate tapestry of many cultures, and the History reveals this wide array of influences from Native, European, African, Asian, and other sources. The History begins with a survey of the music of Native Americans and then explores the social, historical, and cultural events of musical life in the period until 1900. Other contributors examine the growth and influence of popular musics, including film and stage music, jazz, rock, and immigrant, folk, and regional musics. The volume also includes valuable chapters on twentieth-century art music, including the experimental, serial, and tonal traditions.

The Musical Language of Berlioz

The Musical Language of Berlioz PDF Author: Julian Rushton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521242790
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This book is an analytical and critical study of Berlioz's unique musical style. It does not undertake to analyse all his works, but rather to separate characteristic elements and observe them in action. Berlioz's writings and those of his critics are called upon to help focus the discussion. Part I includes material on the sources of Berlioz's idiosyncrasy and a discussion of fundamental pitch elements. Part II pursues this discussion into textural, contrapuntal and orchestral features, and considers melody and rhythm. Part III deals with whole musical forms, vocal and instrumental. The book includes copious musical illustration, much of it analytical reduction, and the expressive purpose of the features analysed is fully considered. The conclusion is that Berlioz's musical language is inescapably peculiar, though not necessarily inept; features which seem inexplicable in the light of compositional theory nearly always contribute to the musical and expressive exactness of communication.

Frontier Figures

Frontier Figures PDF Author: Beth E. Levy
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520952022
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
Frontier Figures is a tour-de-force exploration of how the American West, both as physical space and inspiration, animated American music. Examining the work of such composers as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Farwell, Beth E. Levy addresses questions of regionalism, race, and representation as well as changing relationships to the natural world to highlight the intersections between classical music and the diverse worlds of Indians, pioneers, and cowboys. Levy draws from an array of genres to show how different brands of western Americana were absorbed into American culture by way of sheet music, radio, lecture recitals, the concert hall, and film. Frontier Figures is a comprehensive illumination of what the West meant and still means to composers living and writing long after the close of the frontier.

Serial Music and Serialism

Serial Music and Serialism PDF Author: John D. Vander Weg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135697345
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Serial or 12-tone music has proved to be an enduring 20th century style that has generated a wide range of writings. This much-needed work provides the only comprehensive, up-to-date guide to research on serial music, offering an annotated bibliography with nearly 500 citations from books and journals from 1950 to 1995.

Draw a Straight Line and Follow It

Draw a Straight Line and Follow It PDF Author: Jeremy Grimshaw
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199876525
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Recognized as the patriarch of the minimalist movement-Brian Eno once called him "the daddy of us all"--La Monte Young remains an enigma within the music world, one of the most important and yet most elusive composers of the late twentieth century. Early in his career Young almost completely eschewed the conventional musical institutions of publishers, record labels, and venues, in order to create compositions completely unfettered by commercial concerns. Yet at the same time he exercised profound influence on such varied figures as Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, David Lang, The Velvet Underground, and entire branches of electronica and drone music. For half a century, he and his partner and collaborator, Marian Zazeela, have worked in near-seclusion in their Tribeca loft, creating works that explore the furthest extremes of conceptual audacity, technical sophistication, acoustical complexity, and overt spirituality. Draw A Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young stands as the first narrative study to examine Young's life and work in detail. The book is a culmination of a decade of research, during which author Jeremy Grimshaw gained rare access to the composer and his archives. Loosely structured upon the chronology of the composer's career, the book takes a multi-disciplinary approach that combines biography, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music analysis, and illuminates such seemingly disparate aspects of Young's work as integral serialism and indeterminacy, Mormon esoterica and Vedic mysticism, and psychedelia and psychoacoustics. Draw A Straight Line and Follow It is a long-awaited, in-depth look at one of America's most fascinating musical figures.