The Nightingale's Sonata

The Nightingale's Sonata PDF Author: Thomas Wolf
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643131621
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
*Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal* A moving and uplifting history set to music that reveals the rich life of one of the first internationally renowned female violinists. Spanning generations, from the shores of the Black Sea to the glittering concert halls of New York, The Nightingale's Sonata is a richly woven tapestry centered around violin virtuoso Lea Luboshutz. Like many poor Jews, music offered an escape from the predjudices that dominated society in the last years of the Russian Empire. But Lea’s dramatic rise as an artist was further accentuated by her scandalous relationship with the revolutionary Onissim Goldovsky. As the world around them descends in to chaos, between revolution and war, we follow Lea and her family from Russia to Europe and eventually, America. We cross paths with Pablo Casals, Isadora Duncan, Emile Zola and even Leo Tolstoy. The little girl from Odessa will eventually end up as one of the founding faculty of the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, but along the way she will lose her true love, her father, and watch a son die young. The Iron Curtain would rise, but through it all, she plays on. Woven throughout this luminous odyssey is the story is Cesar Franck’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano.” As Lea was one of the first-ever internationally recognized female violinists, it is fitting that this pioneer was one of the strongest advocates for this young boundary-pushing composer and his masterwork.

The Nightingale's Sonata

The Nightingale's Sonata PDF Author: Thomas Wolf
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643131621
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Get Book Here

Book Description
*Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal* A moving and uplifting history set to music that reveals the rich life of one of the first internationally renowned female violinists. Spanning generations, from the shores of the Black Sea to the glittering concert halls of New York, The Nightingale's Sonata is a richly woven tapestry centered around violin virtuoso Lea Luboshutz. Like many poor Jews, music offered an escape from the predjudices that dominated society in the last years of the Russian Empire. But Lea’s dramatic rise as an artist was further accentuated by her scandalous relationship with the revolutionary Onissim Goldovsky. As the world around them descends in to chaos, between revolution and war, we follow Lea and her family from Russia to Europe and eventually, America. We cross paths with Pablo Casals, Isadora Duncan, Emile Zola and even Leo Tolstoy. The little girl from Odessa will eventually end up as one of the founding faculty of the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, but along the way she will lose her true love, her father, and watch a son die young. The Iron Curtain would rise, but through it all, she plays on. Woven throughout this luminous odyssey is the story is Cesar Franck’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano.” As Lea was one of the first-ever internationally recognized female violinists, it is fitting that this pioneer was one of the strongest advocates for this young boundary-pushing composer and his masterwork.

A House Not Meant to Stand: A Gothic Comedy

A House Not Meant to Stand: A Gothic Comedy PDF Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811226352
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
The spellbinding last full-length play produced during the author's lifetime is now published for the first time. Christmas 1982: Cornelius and Bella McCorkle of Pascagoula, Mississippi, return home one midnight in a thunderstorm from the Memphis funeral of their older son to a house and a life literally falling apart--daughter Joanie is in an insane asylum and their younger son Charlie is upstairs having sex with his pregnant, holy-roller girlfriend as the McCorkles enter. Cornelius, who has political ambitions and a litany of health problems, is trying to find a large amount of moonshine money his gentle wife Bella has hidden somewhere in their collapsing house, but his noisy efforts are disrupted by a stream of remarkable characters, both living and dead. While Williams often used drama to convey hope and desperation in human hearts, it was through this dark, expressionistic comedy, which he called a "Southern gothic spook sonata," that he was best able to chronicle his vision of the fragile state of our world.

A Fine Romance

A Fine Romance PDF Author: David Lehman
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0805242716
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In A Fine Romance, David Lehman looks at the formation of the American songbook—the timeless numbers that became jazz standards, iconic love songs, and sound tracks to famous movies—and explores the extraordinary fact that this songbook was written almost exclusively by Jews. An acclaimed poet, editor, and cultural critic, David Lehman hears America singing—with a Yiddish accent. He guides us through America in the golden age of song, when “Embraceable You,” “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “My Romance,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Stormy Weather,” and countless others became nothing less than the American sound track. The stories behind these songs, the shows from which many of them came, and the shows from which many of them came, and the composers and lyricists who wrote them give voice to a specifically American saga of love, longing, assimilation, and transformation. Lehman’s analytical skills, wit, and exuberance infuse this book with an energy and a tone like no other: at once sharply observant, personally searching, and attuned to the songs that all of us love. He helps us understand how natural it should be that Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen was the son of a cantor who incorporated “Over the Rainbow” into his Sabbath liturgy, and why Cole Porter—the rare non-Jew in this pantheon of musicians who wrote these classic songs shaped America even as America was shaping them. (Part of the Jewish Encounter series)

Music for the End of Time

Music for the End of Time PDF Author: Jennifer Bryant
Publisher: Eerdmans Publishing Company
ISBN: 0802852297
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
Presents the story of how French composer Olivier Messiaen was able to overcome the desolation of a World War II prison camp through the power of music.

The Oxford Handbook of Timbre

The Oxford Handbook of Timbre PDF Author: Emily I. Dolan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190637250
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 740

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Book Description
Despite its importance as a central feature of musical sounds, timbre has rarely stood in the limelight. First defined in the eighteenth century, denigrated during the nineteenth, the concept of timbre came into its own during the twentieth century and its fascination with synthesizers and electronic music-or so the story goes. But in fact, timbre cuts across all the boundaries that make up musical thought-combining scientific and artistic approaches to music, material and philosophical aspects, and historical and theoretical perspectives. Timbre challenges us to fundamentally reorganize the way we think about music. The twenty-five essays that make up this collection offer a variety of engagements with music from the perspective of timbre. The boundaries are set as broad as possible: from ancient Homeric sounds to contemporary sound installations, from birdsong to cochlear implants, from Tuvan overtone singing to the tv show The Voice, from violin mutes to Moog synthesizers. What unifies the essays across this vast diversity is the material starting point of the sounding object. This focus on the listening experience is radical departure from the musical work that has traditionally dominated musical discourse since its academic inception in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Timbre remains a slippery concept that has continuously demanded more, be it more precise vocabulary, a more systematic theory, or more rigorous analysis. Rooted in the psychology of listening, timbre consistently resists pinning complete down. This collection of essays provides an invitation for further engagement with the range of fascinating questions that timbre opens up.

Between the Acts

Between the Acts PDF Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: Laurus - Lexecon Kft.
ISBN: 6155643474
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
In Woolf's last novel, the action takes place on one summer's day at a country house in the heart of England, where the villagers are presenting their annual pageant. A lyrical, moving valedictory.

Paris, 7 A.M.

Paris, 7 A.M. PDF Author: Liza Wieland
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501197223
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
“A marvel of lost innocence” (O, The Oprah Magazine) that reimagines three life-changing weeks poet Elizabeth Bishop spent in Paris amidst the imminent threat of World War II. June 1937. Elizabeth Bishop, still only a young woman and not yet one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, arrives in France with her college roommates. They are in search of an escape, and inspiration, far from the protective world of Vassar College where they were expected to find an impressive husband and a quiet life. But the world is changing, and as they explore the City of Lights, the larger threats of fascism and occupation are looming. There, they meet a community of upper-crust expatriates who not only bring them along on a life-changing adventure, but also into an underground world of rebellion that will quietly alter the course of Elizabeth’s life forever. Sweeping and stirring, Paris, 7 A.M. imagines 1937—the only year Elizabeth, a meticulous keeper of journals—didn’t fully chronicle—in vivid detail and brings us from Paris to Normandy where Elizabeth becomes involved with a group rescuing Jewish “orphans” and delivering them to convents where they will be baptized as Catholics and saved from the impending horror their parents will face. Both poignant and captivating, Paris, 7 A.M. is an “achingly introspective marvel of lost innocence” (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a beautifully rendered take on the formative years of one of America’s most celebrated female poets.

The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett

The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett PDF Author: Kenneth Gloag
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107021979
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This Companion provides a wide ranging and accessible study of one of the most individual composers of the twentieth century. A team of international scholars shed new light on Tippett's major works and draw attention to those that have not yet received the attention they deserve.

Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera

Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera PDF Author: Sarah Kay
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150176389X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Focusing on songs by the troubadours and trouvères from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera contends that song is not best analyzed as "words plus music" but rather as a distinctive way of sounding words. Rather than situating them in their immediate period, Sarah Kay fruitfully listens for and traces crosscurrents between medieval French and Occitan songs and both earlier poetry and much later opera. Reflecting on a song's songlike quality—as, for example, the sound of light in the dawn sky, as breathed by beasts, as sirenlike in its perils—Kay reimagines the diversity of songs from this period, which include inset lyrics in medieval French narratives and the works of Guillaume de Machaut, as works that are as much desired and imagined as they are actually sung and heard. Kay understands song in terms of breath, the constellations, the animal soul, and life itself. Her method also draws inspiration from opera, especially those that inventively recreate medieval song, arguing for a perspective on the manuscripts that transmit medieval song as instances of multimedia, quasi-operatic performances. Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera features a companion website (cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song) hosting twenty-four audio or video recordings, realized by professional musicians specializing in early music, of pieces discussed in the book, together with performance scores, performance reflections, and translations of all recorded texts. These audiovisual materials represent an extension in practice of the research aims of the book—to better understand the sung dimension of medieval song.

The Song Cycle

The Song Cycle PDF Author: Laura Tunbridge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521896444
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Investigates how other types of music have influenced the scope of the song cycle, from operas and symphonies to popular song --