Author: Fedor Lopukhov
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299182748
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Although little-known in the West, Fedor Lopukhov was a leading figure in Russia's dance world for more than sixty years and an influence on many who became major figures in Western dance, such as George Balanchine. As a choreographer, he staged the first post-revolutionary productions of traditional ballets like Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty as well as avant-garde and experimental works, including Dance Symphony, Bolt, and a highly controversial version of The Nutcracker. This first publication in English of Lopukhov's theoretical writings will give readers a clear understanding of his seminal importance in dance history and illuminate his role in the development of dance as a nonnarrative, musically based form. These writings present the rationale behind Lopukhov's attempt to develop a "symphonic" ballet that would integrate the formal and expressive elements of dance and music. They also show his finely detailed knowledge of the classical heritage and his creative efforts to transmit major works to future generations. This edition explains not only the making of his own controversial Dance Symphony but also the issues he saw at stake in productions of Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty, and other key works by Petipa and Fokine. Lopukhov's writings argue the details of choreographic devices with an unusual degree of precision, and his comments on composers and the musical repertoire used by his predecessors and contemporaries are equally revealing. Stephanie Jordan's introduction deftly situates these writings within the context of Lopukhov's life and career and in relation to the theories, aesthetics, and practices of dance in the twentieth century.
Author: Charles M. Joseph
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300118728
Category : Ballets
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"Joseph provides superb analyses of each of Stravinsky's ballet pieces, examining the composer's own drafts, notes and sketches to discover how he conceived of and developed each work."--Jacket.
Author: Wendy Hilton
Publisher: Pendragon Press
ISBN: 9780945193982
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 478
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Book Description
This collection of selected writings of Ms. Hilton includes a complete facsimile of her 1981 book Dance of Court & Theater (no longer available) as well as two significant articles, and a notated triple-meter danse � deux by LouisP�cour. Book One (the facsimile) provides in-depth analysis of primary sources on dance of the baroque period.The main body of the text is devoted to mastery of the Beauchamp-Feuillet notation system,which includes the relationships of steps to music in such dance types as the menuet,gavotte, bourr�e, sarabande, passacaille, loure, gigue, and entr�e grave. Instruction is also given on style, bows and courtesies, the use of the hat, and the ballroom menuet ordinaire as given by Pierre Rameau.Book Two adds theslow Seventeenth-Century French Courante; A survey of the 56 dances extant to music by J.B. Lully with their airs and some of the more virtuosic, theatrical step-units in notation; Louis P�cour's ballroom dance Aimable Vainqueur (1701 in six pages of dance notation with a five-part score of Andr� Campra's music from Hesione (1700)and an updated bibliography.
Author: John Haskell
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979793
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
A dark-hued, hybrid novel by a writer who “delivers our culture back to us, made entirely new” (A. M. Homes) In The Complete Ballet, John Haskell choreographs an intricate and irresistible pas de deux in which fiction and criticism come together to create a new kind of story. Fueled by the dramatic retelling of five romantic ballets, and interwoven with a contemporary story about a man whose daunting gambling debt pushes him to the edge of his own abyss, it is both a pulpy entertainment and a meditation on the physicality—and psychology—of dance. The unnamed narrator finds himself inexorably drawn back to the pre–cell phone world of Technicolor Los Angeles, to a time when the tragedies of his life were about to collide. Working as a part-time masseur in Hollywood, he attends an underground poker game with his friend Cosmo, a strip-club entrepreneur. What happens there hurtles the narrator down the road and into the room where the novel’s violent and surreal showdown leaves him a different person. As the narrator revisits his past, he simultaneously inhabits and reconstructs the mythic stories of ballet, assessing along the way the lives and obsessions of Nijinsky and Balanchine, Pavlova and Fonteyn, Joseph Cornell and the story’s presiding spirit, the film director John Cassavetes. This compulsively readable fiction is ultimately a profound and haunting consideration of the nature of art and identity.
Author: Misty Copeland
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399547649
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34
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Book Description
Instant New York Times bestselling series opener inspired by prima ballerina and author Misty Copeland's own early experiences in ballet. From prima ballerina and New York Times bestselling author Misty Copeland comes the story of a young Misty, who discovers her love of dance through the ballet Coppélia--a story about a toymaker who devises a villainous plan to bring a doll to life. Misty is so captivated by the tale and its heroine, Swanilda, she decides to audition for the role. But she's never danced ballet before; in fact, this is the very first day of her very first dance class! Though Misty is excited, she's also nervous. But as she learns from her fellow bunheads, she makes wonderful friends who encourage her to do her very best. Misty's nerves quickly fall away, and with a little teamwork, the bunheads put on a show to remember. Featuring the stunning artwork of newcomer Setor Fiadzigbey, Bunheads is an inspiring tale for anyone looking for the courage to try something new.
Author: Harriet Cavalli
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813018874
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 425
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Book Description
Harriet Cavalli, internationally recognized as one of the most talented and experienced specialists in the art of music for dancers and dance teachers, presents here the definitive book on accompaniment, as well as her personal - often humorous - look behind the scenes at the world of dance. The text is enhanced by diagrams and 83 complete musical examples, providing a wealth of repertoire choices.
Author: Matthew Naughtin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 081088660X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 471
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Book Description
Musicians who work professionally with ballet and dance companies sometimes wonder if they haven’t entered a foreign country—a place where the language and customs seem so utterly familiar and so bafflingly strange at the same. To someone without a dance background, phrases and terms--boy’s variation, pas d’action, apothéose—simply don’t fit their standard musical vocabulary. Even a familiar term like adagio means something quite different in the world of dance. Like any working professional, those conductors, composers, rehearsal pianists, instrumentalists and even music librarians working with professional ballet and dance companies must learn what dance professionals talk about when they talk about music. In Ballet Music: A Handbook Matthew Naughtin provides a practical guide for the professional musician who works with ballet companies, whether as a full-time staff member or as an independent contractor. In this comprehensive work, he addresses the daily routine of the modern ballet company, outlines the respective roles of the conductor, company pianist and music librarian and their necessary collaboration with choreographers and ballet masters, and examines the complete process of putting a dance performance on stage, from selection or existing music to commissioning original scores to staging the final production. Because ballet companies routinely revise the great ballets to fit the needs of their staff and stage, audience and orchestra, ballet repertoire is a tangled web for the uninitiated. At the core of Ballet Music: A Handbook lies an extensive listing of classic ballets in the standard repertoire, with information on their history, versions, revisions, instrumentation, score publishers and other sources for tracking down both the original music and subsequent musical additions and adaptations. Ballet Music: A Handbook is an invaluable resource for conductors, pianists and music librarians as well as any student, scholar or fan of the ballet interested in the complex machinery that works backstage before the curtain goes up.
Author: Hector Berlioz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253311641
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
A Travers Chants is the collection of writings selected from his thirty-odd years of musical journalism. These essays cover a wide spectrum of intellectual inquiry: Beethoven's nine symphonies and his opera, Fidelio; Wagner and the partisans of the "Music of the Future"; Berlioz's idols - Gluck, Weber, and Mozart. There is an eloquent plea to stop the constant rise in concert pitch (an issue still discussed today), a serious piece on the place of music in church, and a humorous and imaginative account of musical customs in China.
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).
Author: Virgil Thomson
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598534688
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1356
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Book Description
A Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic presents an unprecedented collection of the writings of the great composer-critic and father of American classical music, Virgil Thomson Following on the critically acclaimed edition of Virgil Thomson’s collected newspaper music criticism, The Library of America and Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomson’s other literary and critical works, a body of writing that constitutes America’s musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson’s name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald Tribune. This no-holds-barred polemic—here presented in its revised edition of 1962—discusses the commissions, jobs, and other opportunities available to the American composer, a worker in a world of performance and broadcast institutions that, today as much as in Thomson’s time, are dominated by tin-eared, non-musical patrons of the arts who are shocked by the new and suspicious of native talent. Thomson’s autobiography, Virgil Thomson (1966), is more than just the story of the struggle of one such American composer, it is an intellectual, aesthetic, and personal chronicle of the twentieth century, from World War I–era Kansas City to Harvard in the age of straw boaters, from Paris in the Twenties and Thirties to Manhattan in the Forties and after. A classic American memoir, it is marked by a buoyant wit, a true gift for verbal portrait-making, and a cast of characters including Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Paul Bowles, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. American Music Since 1910 (1971) is a series of incisive essays on the lives and works of Ives, Ruggles, Varèse, Copland, Cage, and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words (1989), Thomson’s final book, is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set English—especially American English—to music, in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a judicious selection of Thomson’s magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984—thirty-seven pieces, most of them previously uncollected, including many long-form review-essays written for The New York Review of Books. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
