The Biography of a String Quartet

The Biography of a String Quartet PDF Author: Alexa Vivien Wilks
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description

The Biography of a String Quartet

The Biography of a String Quartet PDF Author: Alexa Vivien Wilks
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet

The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet PDF Author: Robin Stowell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826549
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
This Companion offers a concise and authoritative survey of the string quartet by eleven chamber music specialists. Its fifteen carefully structured chapters provide coverage of a stimulating range of perspectives previously unavailable in one volume. It focuses on four main areas: the social and musical background to the quartet's development; the most celebrated ensembles; string quartet playing, including aspects of contemporary and historical performing practice; and the mainstream repertory, including significant 'mixed ensemble' compositions involving string quartet. Various musical and pictorial illustrations and informative appendixes, including a chronology of the most significant works, complete this indispensable guide. Written for all string quartet enthusiasts, this Companion will enrich readers' understanding of the history of the genre, the context and significance of quartets as cultural phenomena, and the musical, technical and interpretative problems of chamber music performance. It will also enhance their experience of listening to quartets in performance and on recordings.

Beethoven for a Later Age

Beethoven for a Later Age PDF Author: Edward Dusinberre
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571317154
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
'They are not for you but for a later age!' Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartets. Tackling the Beethoven quartets is a rite of passage that has shaped the Takács Quartet's work together for over forty years. Using the history of the composition and first performances of the quartets as the backbone to his story, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takács since 1993 - recounts the life of the Quartet from its inception in Hungary, through emigration to the US and its present-day life as one of the world's renowned string quartets. He also describes what it was like for him, as a young man fresh out of the Juilliard School, to join the Quartet as its first non-Hungarian member - an exhilarating challenge. Beethoven for a Later Age takes the reader inside the life of a quartet, vividly showing how four people enjoy making music together over a long period of time. The key, the author argues, is in balancing continuity with change and experimentation - a theme that also lies at the heart of Beethoven's remarkable compositions.

Indivisible by Four

Indivisible by Four PDF Author: Arnold Steinhardt
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374527006
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The author tells of his own development as a student, "of how he and his intrepid colleagues were converted to chamber music ... [and of how] four individualists master and then overcome the confining demands of ensemble playing."--Jacket.

The String Quartet

The String Quartet PDF Author: Paul Griffiths
Publisher: New York : Thames and Hudson
ISBN:
Category : String quartet
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book follows the quartet from its origins in the middle of the 18th century up to the present day. A large percentage of the book concerns the classic period of the quartets and with the works of Haydn, probable inventor of the genre, of Mozart, of Schubert, of Beethoven; on the Romantic period -- Mendelssohn, Brahms, Dvorak and Debussy -- finishing with the post-1914 era, Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. among others.

The String Quartets of Joseph Haydn

The String Quartets of Joseph Haydn PDF Author: Floyd Grave
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195346645
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Renowned music historians Floyd and Margaret Grave present a fresh perspective on a comprehensive survey of the works. This thorough and unique analysis offers new insights into the creation of the quartets, the wealth of musical customs and conventions on which they draw, the scope of their innovations, and their significance as reflections of Haydn's artistic personality. Each set of quartets is characterized in terms of its particular mix of structural conventions and novelties, stylistic allusions, and its special points of connection with other opus groups in the series. Throughout the book, the authors draw attention to the boundless supply of compositional strategies by which Haydn appears to be continually rethinking, reevaluating, and refining the quartet's potentials. They also lucidly describe Haydn's famous penchant for wit, humor, and compositional artifice, illuminating the unexpected connections he draws between seemingly unrelated ideas, his irony, and his lightning bolts of surprise and thwarted expectation. Approaching the quartets from a variety of vantage points, the authors correct many prevailing assumptions about convention, innovation, and developing compositional technique in the music of Haydn and his contemporaries.

Beethoven for a Later Age

Beethoven for a Later Age PDF Author: Edward Dusinberre
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022637436X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Using the history of both the Takács Quartet and the Beethoven quartets as a foundation, Dusinberre provides a backstage look at the daily life of a quartet, showing the necessary creative tension between individual and group and how four people can at the same time forge a lasting artistic connection and enjoy making music together over decades.

Composing the Modern Subject: Four String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich

Composing the Modern Subject: Four String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich PDF Author: Sarah Reichardt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351571362
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Since the publication of Solomon Volkov's disputed memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer and his music has been subject to heated debate concerning how the musical meaning of his works can be understood in relationship to the composer's life within the Soviet State. While much ink has been spilled, very little work has attempted to define how Shostakovich's music has remained so arresting not only to those within the Soviet culture, but also to Western audiences - even though such audiences are often largely ignorant of the compositional context or even the biography of the composer. This book offers a useful corrective: setting aside biographically grounded and traditional analytical modes of explication, Reichardt uncovers and explores the musical ambiguities of four of the composer‘s middle string quartets, especially those ambiguities located in moments of rupture within the musical structure. The music is constantly collapsing, reversing, inverting and denying its own structural imperatives. Reichardt argues that such confrontation of the musical language with itself, though perhaps interpretable as Shostakovich's own unique version of double-speak, also poignantly articulates the fractured state of a more general form of modern subjectivity. Reichardt employs the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis to offer a cogent explanation of this connection between disruptive musical process and modern subjectivity. The ruptures of Shostakovich's music become symptoms of the pathologies at the core of modern subjectivity. These symptoms, in turn, relate to the Lacanian concept of the real, which is the empty kernel around which the modern subject constructs reality. This framework proves invaluable in developing a powerful, original hermeneutic understanding of the music. Read through the lens of the real, the riddles written into the quartets reveal the arbitrary and contingent state of the musical subject's constructed reality, reflecting pathologies ende

Beethoven for a Later Age

Beethoven for a Later Age PDF Author: Edward Dusinberre
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571317141
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The essential read for fans of Beethoven and string quartet music.

Violin Dreams

Violin Dreams PDF Author: Arnold Steinhardt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780547086002
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
"A rapturous, witty, and passionate memoir ... Violin Dreams is not only the story of a man becoming an artist, it’s a history of twentieth-century music.” -- John Guare, Tony Award-winning playwright Arnold Steinhardt, for more than forty years an international soloist and the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, brings warmth, wit, and fascinating insider details to the story of his lifelong obsession with the violin, that most seductive and stunningly beautiful instrument. His story is rich with vivid scenes: the terror inflicted by his early violin teachers, the sensual pleasure involved in the pursuit of the perfect violin, the charged atmosphere of high-level competitions. Steinhardt describes Bach’s Chaconne as the holy grail for the solo violin, and he illuminates, from the perspective of an ardent owner of a great Storioni violin, the history and mysteries of the renowned Italian violinmakers. Violin Dreams includes a remarkable CD recording of Steinhardt performing Bach’s Partita in D Minor as a young violinist forty years ago and playing the same piece especially for this book. A conversation between the author and Alan Alda on the differences between the two performances is included in the liner notes.