Music-History & Criticism

Brings to light the life and work of one of France's most distinguished musicians in the most complete biography in any language of Charles-Marie Widor. Widor: A Life beyond the Toccata brings to light the life and work of one of France's most distinguished...

Over the past fifty years Roger Sessions has developed, in articles, lectures, and addresses, various themes that reflect the stages of his own musical and intellectual growth. These themes form the basis of the present collection of essays. Many of the essays deal with...

This book is a philosophical tour through the experience of beauty: what it is, and how the composer, performer, and listener all contribute. It explores -- with insight, patience, and humor -- profound issues at the essence of our experience. A student performance of...

Volume 3 of 3. This monumental three-volume work on the Italian madrigal from its beginnings about 1500 to its decline in the 17th century is based on the research of 40 years, and is a cultural history of the development of Italian music. Mr....

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) aimed to be more than just a composer. He set out to redefine opera as a "total work of art" combining the highest aspirations of drama, poetry, the symphony, the visual arts, even religion and philosophy. Equally celebrated and vilified in...

Wagner is one of the most controversial of composers, and much that has been written about him--including his autobiography--is misleading. Barry Millington draws on the best previous scholarship and his own original research to set the record straight. The first part of this book...

In this compulsively readable, fascinating, and provocative guide to classical music, Norman Lebrecht, one of the world's most widely read cultural commentators tells the story of the rise of the classical recording industry from Caruso's first notes to the heyday of Bernstein, Glenn Gould,...

"A summation of his beliefs about music as he looked into the final quarter of the 20th century...Bernstein's talks still seem surprisingly fresh. But words were nearly as much Bernstein's m騁ier as music." --New York Times The varied forms of Leonard Bernstein's musical creativity...

One of the true musical geniuses of the late 20th and early 21st century, Richard D. James has continued to be a pioneer in the electronic music landscape throughout his prolific, multi-faceted career. James, under his myriad of aliases, laid the foundation for ambient...

Greil Marcus has been one of the most distinctive voices in American music criticism for over forty years. His books, including Mystery Train and The Shape of Things to Come, traverse soundscapes of folk and blues, rock and punk, attuning readers to the surprising,...

On and Off the Bandstand is a study of American history, invention, and culture that focuses on the evolution of popular music. Efforts to keep the best of the bandstand alive in the twentieth century, as well as today, are enthusiastically celebrated. Before reliable...

Author: Diane HollowayISBN-10: 0595193315ISBN-13: 9780595193318Publisher: iUniverseLanguage: EnglishPublished: 08/01/2001Pages: 504Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.56lbsSize: 9.02h x 6.17w x 1.16d

This is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It highlights the interconnections between different genres and styles, enabling better understanding of their aesthetics, practice and key repertoire. It is designed for...

The song cycle was one of the most important musical genres of the nineteenth century. Famous examples by Schubert, Schumann and Mahler have received a great deal of attention. Yet many other cycles - by equally famous composers, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...

Presenting a fresh approach to French organ music, David Ponsford analyses the repertory from the reign of Louis XIV by genre. The colourful French organ was so consistent in design that the very titles of pieces that were constituent parts of organ masses, Magnificats...

This book is concerned not so much with the 'prima donna' as with prime donne: a group of working artists (sometimes famous but more often relatively unknown and now long forgotten) and the circumstances of their professional lives. It attempts to locate these singers...

On June 19, 2020, Bob Dylan's album Rough and Rowdy Ways was released, the first with songs newly written by the master in eight years! It was preceded by three songs on the Internet that caused a stir, especially the first, the seventeen-minute masterpiece...

This book offers new interpretations of many of Bach's late compositions which include complex musical techniques such as canon. These techniques held great significance for Bach and his contemporaries not only on account of the great skill they demanded but because of the meanings...

A fascinating history that examines how real estate, gentrification, community, and the highs and lows of New York City itself shaped the city's music scenes--from folk to house music--and how those scenes shaped the city.Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and...

This book explores the cultural and commercial life of Italian opera in late eighteenth-century London. Through primary sources, many analyzed for the first time, Ian Woodfield examines such issues as finances, recruitment policy, handling of singers and composers, links with Paris and Italy, and...

This Companion is an accessible introduction to Schumann: his time, his temperament, his style and his oeuvre. An international team of scholars explores the cultural context, musical and poetic fabric, sources of inspiration and interpretative reach of key works from the Schumann repertoire ranging...

Various modes of women's contemporary cultural, social and political leadership can be found in music. Informed by different histories and culturally bound social mores but also by a comparative perspective, the contributors of this volume ask what can be considered leadership in culture from...

This book combines three influential and much-quoted books Savannah Syncopators; Blacks, Whites and Blues and Recording the Blues, updated with additional new essays, which collectively confront the problem of how, when and from where the blues emerged and developed. It emphasizes the significance of...

Mozart's enduring popularity, among music lovers as a composer and among music historians as a subject for continued study, lies at the heart of The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. This reference book functions both as a starting point for information on specific works, people, places...

The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume III, has been acknowledged as a major work throughout human history, and we have taken precautions to assure its preservation by republishing this book in a modern manner for both present and future generations. This book has...

This introduction to the early horn provides a historical account of the instrument's development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as a practical guide to playing techniques and principles of interpretation. The book aims to help performers to play in a historically...

The Life of Johannes Brahms Volume 1, has been acknowledged as a major work throughout human history, and we have taken precautions to assure its preservation by republishing this book in a modern manner for both present and future generations. This book has been...

This volume offers an up-to-date overview of historical performance, surveying the various current issues (such as the influence of recording) and suggesting possible future developments. Its core comprises discussion of the period performer's myriad primary source materials and their interpretation, the various aspects of...

An exemplary "entry-level" introduction to Beethoven's life and music, this little book is still in print* almost a century after its first publication. Sullivan rarely assumes musical knowledge or expertise on the part of the reader but discusses Beethoven's major works in terms of...

The Rite of Spring is Stravinsky's most revolutionary work. This comprehensive guide tells in vivid detail the story of its inception and composition, of the stormy rehearsals that led to the scandalous premiere in 1913, and of Stravinsky's later betrayal of the ballet's first...

The motets of J. S. Bach are probably the most sophisticated works ever composed in the genre. Nevertheless, Daniel Melamed maintains, the view that they constitute a body of work quite separate from the German motet tradition is mistaken. He starts by considering the...

Despite the catastrophe caused by the 2005 failure of the New Orleans levee system, the biggest engineering failure in U.S. history, New Orleans was re-inhabited, rebuilt, and re-ignited with the spirit that makes it one of the world's greatest cultural gems.This book tells the...

This second volume of Greek Musical Writings contains important texts on harmonic and acoustic theory, illustrating the progress of these sciences from their beginnings in the sixth century BC over the subsequent thousand years. Writers represented include Philolaus, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Aristoxenus, Ptolemy, Aristides,...

Music in Central Java is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music...

This book demonstrates, in fascinating diversity, how musicians in the nineteenth century thought about and described music. The analysis of music took many forms (verbal, diagrammatic, tabular, notational, graphic), was pursued for many different purposes (educational, scholarly, theoretical, promotional) and embodied very different approaches....

Author: Peter StampfelISBN-10: 1737524503ISBN-13: 9781737524502Publisher: Don Giovanni RecordsLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/15/2023Pages: 144Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.35lbsSize: 8.48h x 5.58w x 0.39d

This anthology of Russian music criticism reveals the reactions of leading critics to new Russian music in the period 1880-1917. Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin were in their prime, and several new generations emerged: Rachmaninoff and Skryabin, Stravinsky and Prokoviev. Works reviewed range from In...

Bruce Springsteen is both a singer-songwriter and the leader of the last of the iconic groups of rock's golden age still operating at a peak level of passion and creativity. Like most of the great groups, the E Street Band was the product of...

This handbook provides an in-depth account of the origins, style, and performance history of Der fliegende Holl nder (The Flying Dutchman), universally acknowledged as Wagner's first truly significant, original work. Designed for scholars, performers and the opera-going public, the book examines the biographical impulses...

The world of Alban Berg is full of paradoxes, secrets and allusions, but he was able to handle emotional and moral issues at a distance and with profound sympathy. His unhurried, almost aristocratic attitude to life and his extreme self-criticism in professional matters resulted...

This book is the first anthology of writings about the emerging subject of artistic experimentation in music. This subject, as part of the cross-disciplinary field of artistic research, cuts across boundaries of the conventional categories of performance practice, music analysis, aesthetics, and music pedagogy....

Alban Berg's achievement is based on an extraordinarily small musical output, but it includes towering masterpieces such as the operas Wozzeck and Lulu, and his last work, the Violin Concerto. These and all Berg's other substantial works are discussed in this wide-ranging Companion, which...

Carnival, charivari, mumming plays, peasant festivals, and even early versions of the Santa Claus myth--all of these forms of entertainment influenced and shaped blackface minstrelsy in the first half of the nineteenth century. In his fascinating study Demons of Disorder, musicologist Dale Cockrell studies...

How and why do listeners come over time to 'feel the nation' through particular musical works? This book develops a comparative analysis of the relationship between western art music, nations and nationalism. It explores the influence of emergent nations and nationalism on the development...

The Rhapsody in Blue (1924) established Gershwin's reputation as a serious composer and has since become one of the most popular of all American concert works. In this richly informative guide David Schiff considers the piece as musical work, historical event and cultural document....

Hull House Songs, newly republished with a critical commentary, recovers the hidden emancipatory possibilities of the Hull-House women's legacy. Author: Graham Cassano, Rima Lunin Schultz, Jessica PayetteISBN-10: 1642590738ISBN-13: 9781642590739Publisher: Haymarket BooksLanguage: EnglishPublished: 02/25/2020Pages: 354Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.00lbsSize: 9.00h x 6.10w x 0.70d

This book endeavours to pinpoint the relations between musical, and especially instrumental, practice and the evolving conceptions of pitch systems. It traces the development of ancient melodic notation from reconstructed origins, through various adaptations necessitated by changing musical styles and newly invented instruments, to...

Charles Ives' massive Concord Sonata, his second sonata for piano, named after the town of Concord in Massachusetts, is central to his output and clearly reflects his aesthetic perspective. Geoffrey Block's wide-ranging account of the work thus provides an ideal introduction to this fascinating...

Explorations in Schenkerian Analysis is a collection of fifteen essays dedicated to the memory of Edward Laufer, an influential advocate of Schenker's method. The chapters are presented in chronological order by composer, opening with Charles Burkhart's contribution, which is presented as a letter to...

This volume explores the culture in which the composer Franz Schubert (1797SH1828) lived and worked, and provides a basic outline of his life examined in relation to the most persistent myths and legends. Schubert's music is then explored according to genre, a chapter on...