The Listener's Companion: The Great Composers and their Works

The Listener's Companion: The Great Composers and their Works PDF Author: Nicolas Slonimsky
Publisher: Schirmer Trade Books
ISBN: 0857127675
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
Renowned for his literary style as well as his musical scholarship, Nicolas Slonimsky wrote many program notes and articles for newspapers and other periodicals, in addition to his well-known books. These shorter writings, edited by Slonimsky’s daughter, Electra Yourke, are collected for the first time in this excellent introduction to the classical repertoire, from Bach to Shostakovich. Arranged chronologically by composer, the chapters begin with biographical sketches and go on to describe some of each composer’s most popular and important works.

The Listener's Companion: The Great Composers and their Works

The Listener's Companion: The Great Composers and their Works PDF Author: Nicolas Slonimsky
Publisher: Schirmer Trade Books
ISBN: 0857127675
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
Renowned for his literary style as well as his musical scholarship, Nicolas Slonimsky wrote many program notes and articles for newspapers and other periodicals, in addition to his well-known books. These shorter writings, edited by Slonimsky’s daughter, Electra Yourke, are collected for the first time in this excellent introduction to the classical repertoire, from Bach to Shostakovich. Arranged chronologically by composer, the chapters begin with biographical sketches and go on to describe some of each composer’s most popular and important works.

Experiencing Leonard Bernstein

Experiencing Leonard Bernstein PDF Author: Kenneth LaFave
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442235446
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
Leonard Bernstein is a household name. Most know him for his classic musical reworking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as Broadway’s West Side Story. But Bernstein accomplished so much more as a composer, and his body of work is both broad and varied. He composed ballets (Fancy Free, Facsimile, Dybbuk), operas (Trouble in Tahiti, Candide, A Quiet Place), musicals (On the Town, Wonderful Town), film scores (On the Waterfront), symphonies, choral works, chamber music pieces, art songs, and piano works. In Experiencing Leonard Bernstein: A Listener’s Companion, Kenneth LaFave guides readers past Bernstein’s famously tortured personal problems and into the clarity and balance of his Serenade after Plato’s Symposium for Violin and Orchestra, the intense drama of his music for On the Waterfront, the existential cosmography of his three symphonies, and his vibrant works for the musical stage. Perhaps the most famous American classical musician born in the twentieth century, Bernstein divided his time between c

Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers

Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers PDF Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190904569
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 977

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Book Description
Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers is the first edition of all known and available letters between Arnold Schoenberg and over seventy American composers written between 1915 and 1951, in English and English translation and with commentary. In six chronologically organized chapters, the correspondence first casts new light on Schoenberg's contacts with American composers before 1933, including correspondence with students and champions of his music (Israel Amter, James Francis Cooke, Henry Cowell, Edgar Varèse, and Adolph Weiss among others). The letters after 1933 show how Schoenberg gradually built a network of composer colleagues and friends, among them Mark Brunswick, Oscar Levant, Roger Sessions, Nicolas Slonimsky, Gerald Strang, with whom he discussed compositional ideas, specific musical works and writings, performances and the publication of his compositions. These letters also provide insight into his ideas about teaching in private settings, at the Malkin Conservatory and the University of California. The correspondence of his last years illuminates how the reception of Schoenberg's music in the United States was flourishing and how he attracted a growing number of disciples exploring twelve-tone composition. The book also qualifies the concept of and Schoenberg's association with the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers not only illuminates a varied and vivid epistolary style, but clearly demonstrates Schoenberg's far-reaching connections in the American music world.

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: 0300242727
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.

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg PDF Author: Mark Berry
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789140900
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The most radical and divisive composer of the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg remains a hero to many, and a villain to many others. In this refreshingly balanced biography, Mark Berry tells the story of Schoenberg’s remarkable life and work, situating his tale within the wider symphony of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. Born in the Jewish quarter of his beloved Vienna, Schoenberg left Austria for his early career in Berlin as a leading light of Weimar culture, before being forced to flee in the dead of night from Hitler’s Third Reich. He found himself in the United States, settling in Los Angeles, where he would inspire composers from George Gershwin to John Cage. Introducing all of Schoenberg’s major musical works, from his very first compositions, such as the String Quartet in D Major, to his invention of the twelve-tone method, Berry explores how Schoenberg’s revolutionary approach to musical composition incorporated Wagnerian late Romanticism and the brave new worlds of atonality and serialism. Essential reading for anyone interested in the music and history of the twentieth century, this book makes clear Schoenberg changed the history of music forever.

Experiencing Broadway Music

Experiencing Broadway Music PDF Author: Kat Sherrell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810889013
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Experiencing Broadway Music: A Listener’s Companion explores approximately the last century of American musical theater, beginning with the early–twentieth-century shift from European influenced operettas and bawdy variety shows to sophisticated works of seamlessly integrated song and dance that became uniquely American. It concludes with an examination of current musical trends and practices on Broadway. As a musician who works on Broadway and in developmental musical theater, Kat Sherrell draws on her knowledge both as a historian of Broadway musical form and as a professional Broadway musician to offer an insider’s perspective on the development and execution of the past and present Broadway scores. Despite its enormous breadth, and given the historical significance of the musical in modern popular culture, Experiencing Broadway Music provides listeners—whether they know musical theater well or not at all—with the tools and background necessary to gain an understanding of the highly variegated structure and character of the Broadway musical over the past century.

The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise PDF Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

What to Listen For in Music

What to Listen For in Music PDF Author: Aaron Copland
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101513144
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Now in trade paperback: “The definitive guide to musical enjoyment” (Forum). In this fascinating analysis of how to listen to both contemporary and classical music analytically, eminent American composer Aaron Copland offers provocative suggestions that will bring readers a deeper appreciation of the most viscerally rewarding of all art forms.

The Opera Companion

The Opera Companion PDF Author: George Whitney Martin
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781574671681
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 724

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Book Description
Provides synopses of forty-seven operas, a history of the opera, and a glossary of operatic terms.

The Indispensable Composers

The Indispensable Composers PDF Author: Anthony Tommasini
Publisher:
ISBN: 1594205930
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
The chief classical music critic of "The New York Times" explores the concept of greatness in relation to composers, considering elements of biography, influence, and shifting attitudes toward a composer's work over time.