Download or read book A Soviet Credo Shostakovich s Fourth Symphony written by Pauline Fairclough and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Composed in 1935-36 and intended to be his artistic 'credo', Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony was not performed publicly until 1961. Here, Dr Pauline Fairclough tackles head-on one of the most significant and least understood of Shostakovich's major works. She argues that the Fourth Symphony was radically different from its Soviet contemporaries in terms of its structure, dramaturgy, tone and even language, and therefore challenged the norms of Soviet symphonism at a crucial stage of its development. With the backing of prominent musicologists such as Ivan Sollertinsky, the composer could realistically have expected the premiere to have taken place, and may even have intended the symphony to be a model for a new kind of 'democratic' Soviet symphonism. Fairclough meticulously examines the score to inform a discussion of tonal and thematic processes, allusion, paraphrase and reference to musical types, or intonations. Such analysis is set deeply in the context of Soviet musical culture during the period 1932-36, involving Shostakovich's contemporaries Shebalin, Myaskovsky, Kabalevsky and Popov. A new method of analysis is also advanced here, where a range of Soviet and Western analytical methods are informed by the theoretical work of Shostakovich's contemporaries Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin and Ivan Sollertinsky, together with Theodor Adorno's late study of Mahler. In this way, the book will significantly increase an understanding of the symphony and its context.
Download or read book A Soviet Credo Shostakovich s Fourth Symphony written by Pauline Fairclough and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Composed in 1935-36 and intended to be his artistic 'credo', Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony was not performed publicly until 1961. Here, Dr Pauline Fairclough tackles head-on one of the most significant and least understood of Shostakovich's major works. She argues that the Fourth Symphony was radically different from its Soviet contemporaries in terms of its structure, dramaturgy, tone and even language, and therefore challenged the norms of Soviet symphonism at a crucial stage of its development. With the backing of prominent musicologists such as Ivan Sollertinsky, the composer could realistically have expected the premiere to have taken place, and may even have intended the symphony to be a model for a new kind of 'democratic' Soviet symphonism. Fairclough meticulously examines the score to inform a discussion of tonal and thematic processes, allusion, paraphrase and reference to musical types, or intonations. Such analysis is set deeply in the context of Soviet musical culture during the period 1932-36, involving Shostakovich's contemporaries Shebalin, Myaskovsky, Kabalevsky and Popov. A new method of analysis is also advanced here, where a range of Soviet and Western analytical methods are informed by the theoretical work of Shostakovich's contemporaries Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin and Ivan Sollertinsky, together with Theodor Adorno's late study of Mahler. In this way, the book will significantly increase an understanding of the symphony and its context.
Download or read book Shostakovich Studies 2 written by Pauline Fairclough and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Shostakovich Studies was published in 1995, archival research in the ex-Soviet Union was only just beginning. Since that time, research carried out in the Shostakovich Family Archive, founded by the composer's widow Irina Antonovna Shostakovich in 1975, and the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture has significantly raised the level of international Shostakovich studies. At the same time, scholarly understanding of Soviet society and culture has developed significantly since 1991, and this has also led to a more nuanced appreciation of Shostakovich's public and professional identity. Shostakovich Studies 2 reflects these changes, focusing on documentary research, manuscript sources, film studies and musical analysis informed by literary criticism and performance. Contributions in this volume include chapters on Orango, Shostakovich's diary, behind-the-scenes events following Pravda's criticisms of Shostakovich in 1936 and a new memoir of Shostakovich by the Soviet poet Evgeniy Dolmatovsky, as well as analytical studies from a range of perspectives.
Download or read book Russian Symphony written by Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich written by Pauline Fairclough and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-30 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Soviet Union's foremost composer, Shostakovich's status in the West has always been problematic. Regarded by some as a collaborator, and by others as a symbol of moral resistance, both he and his music met with approval and condemnation in equal measure. The demise of the Communist state has, if anything, been accompanied by a bolstering of his reputation, but critical engagement with his multi-faceted achievements has been patchy. This Companion offers a starting point and a guide for readers who seek a fuller understanding of Shostakovich's place in the history of music. Bringing together an international team of scholars, the book brings research to bear on the full range of Shostakovich's musical output, addressing scholars, students and all those interested in this complex, iconic figure.
Download or read book Shostakovich in Dialogue written by Judith Kuhn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough examination of Shostakovich's string quartets is long overdue. Although they can justifiably lay claim to being the most significant and frequently performed twentieth-century oeuvre for that ensemble, there has been no systematic English-language study of the entire cycle. Judith Kuhn's book begins such a study, undertaken with the belief that, despite a growing awareness of the universality of Shostakovich's music, much remains to be learned from the historical context and an examination of the music's language. Much of the controversy about Shostakovich's music has been related to questions of meaning. The conflicting interpretations put forth by scholars during the musicological 'Shostakovich wars' have shown the impossibility of fixing a single meaning in the composer's music. Commentators have often heard the quartets as political in nature, although there have been contradictory views as to whether Shostakovich was a loyal communist or a dissident. The works are also often described as vivid narratives, perhaps a confessional autobiography or a chronicle of the composer's times. The cycle has also been heard to examine major philosophical issues posed by the composer's life and times, including war, death, love, the conflict of good and evil, the nature of subjectivity, the power of creativity and the place of the individual - and particularly the artist - in society. Soviet commentaries on the quartets typically describe the works through the lens of Socialist-Realist mythological master narratives. Recent Western commentaries see Shostakovich's quartets as expressions of broader twentieth-century subjectivity, filled with ruptures and uncertainty. What musical features enable these diverse interpretations? Kuhn examines each quartet in turn, looking first at its historical and biographical context, with special attention to the cultural questions being discussed at the time of its writing. She then surveys the work's reception history, and
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony written by Julian Horton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive guide to the historical, analytical and interpretative issues surrounding one of the major genres of Western music.
Download or read book Composing for the Red Screen written by Kevin Bartig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound film captivated Sergey Prokofiev during the final two decades of his life: he considered composing for nearly two dozen pictures, eventually undertaking eight of them, all Soviet productions. Hollywood luminaries such as Gloria Swanson tempted him with commissions, and arguably more people heard his film music than his efforts in all other genres combined. Films for which Prokofiev composed, in particular those of Sergey Eisenstein, are now classics of world cinema. Drawing on newly available sources, Composing for the Red Screen examines - for the first time - the full extent of this prodigious cinematic career. Author Kevin Bartig examines how Prokofiev's film music derived from a self-imposed challenge: to compose "serious" music for a broad audience. The picture that emerges is of a composer seeking an individual film-music voice, shunning Hollywood models and objecting to his Soviet colleagues' ideologically expedient film songs. Looking at Prokofiev's film music as a whole - with well-known blockbusters like Alexander Nevsky considered alongside more obscure or aborted projects - reveals that there were multiple solutions to the challenge, each with varying degrees of success. Prokofiev carefully balanced his own populist agenda, the perceived aesthetic demands of the films themselves, and, later on, Soviet bureaucratic demands for accessibility.
Download or read book The Shostakovich Wars written by and published by Ho and Feofanov. This book was released on with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich written by Joan Titus and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1920s, Dmitry Shostakovich emerged as one of the first Soviet film composers. With his first score for the silent film New Babylon (1928-29) and the many sound scores that followed, he was situated to observe and participate in the changing politics of the film industry and negotiate the role of the film composer. In The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich, author Joan Titus examines the relationship between musical narration, audience, filmmaker, and composer in six of Shostakovich's early film scores, from 1928 through 1936. Titus engages with the construct of Soviet intelligibility, the filmmaking and scoring processes, and the cultural politics of scoring Soviet film music, asking how listeners hear and see Shostakovich. The discussions of the scores are enriched by the composer's own writing on film music, along with archival materials and recently discovered musical manuscripts that illuminate the collaborative processes of the film teams, studios, and composer. The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich commingles film/media studies, musicology, and Russian studies , and is sure to be of interest to a wide audience including those in music studies, film/media scholars, and Slavicists.
Download or read book Shostakovich Symphonies written by Hugh Ottaway and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shostakovich Studies 2 written by Pauline Fairclough and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of authoritative and up-to-date scholarship on one of the twentieth century's most important and enigmatic composers.
Download or read book Twentieth Century Music and Politics written by Pauline Fairclough and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When considering the role music played in the major totalitarian regimes of the century it is music's usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. But as a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship both between art music and politicised mass culture, and between entertainment and propaganda. Nationality, self/other, power and ideology are the dominant themes of this book, whilst key topics include: music in totalitarian regimes; music as propaganda; music and national identity; émigré communities and composers; music's role in shaping identities of 'self' and 'other' and music as both resistance to and instrument of oppression. Taking the contributions together it becomes clear that shared experiences such as war, dictatorship, colonialism, exile and emigration produced different, yet clearly inter-related musical consequences.
Download or read book Symphony for the City of the Dead written by M.T. Anderson and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2015.
Download or read book Shostakovich s Symphony No 5 written by Marina Frolova-Walker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is devoted to Shostakovich's most controversial symphony, composed at the height of Stalin's Purges. It rescued Shostakovich from official disfavour and deeply moved audiences. The critics recognized it as a masterpiece, but they were perplexed by its ambiguities, especially at the end of the Symphony: some imagined it as the joyful final victory of socialism, while others heard the triumph instead of a sinister and oppressive force. The second interpretation was pushed into the background, but the controversy persisted, with the further complication of two very different tempo markings for the closing section, both of which seemed to be approved by the composer. The authors give an authoritative account of the tempo controversy and the effect of the different tempos on the reception of the work in the West. Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 delves into the history of the work's composition, the pressures Shostakovich experienced at the time, and the cultural environment from the time the composer began work on Symphony through to the settling of its official critical reception. At the center of this exploration is the musical score itself, which is full of secrets that have taken decades to uncover, the most colorful of which is the case for Shostakovich's extensive references to Bizet's Carmen, and the connection between these and Shostakovich's lover of the mid-30s, Lala Carmen (Elena Konstantinovskaya). The authors show how Shostakovich largely (but not entirely) set aside his influences from Mahler and German modernists, and in replacement absorbed Beethoven and Tchaikovsky with the same ingenuity as his previous influences. Shostakovich decided to make a virtue of a necessity, and created one of the richest of symphonic scores, allowing himself to retain his artistic pride while winning the official approval necessary for regaining his livelihood. These events all unfolded in the atmosphere of terror created by Stalin's "Great Purge". This book is the first to be devoted to this watershed symphony, and includes secrets of the score that took decades to uncover.
Download or read book Dimensions of Energy in Shostakovich s Symphonies written by Michael Rofe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shostakovich's music is often described as being dynamic, energetic. But what is meant by 'energy' in music? After setting out a broad conceptual framework for approaching this question, Michael Rofe proposes various potential sources of the perceived energy in Shostakovich's symphonies, describing also the historical significance of energeticist thought in Soviet Russia during the composer's formative years. The book is in two parts. In Part I, examples are drawn from across the symphonies in order to demonstrate energy streams within various musical dimensions. Three broad approaches are adopted: first, the theories of Boleslav Yavorsky are used to consider melodic-harmonic motion; second, Boris Asafiev's work, with its echoes of Ernst Kurth, is used to describe form as a dynamic process; and third, proportional analysis reveals numerous symmetries and golden sections within local and large-scale temporal structures. In Part II, the multi-dimensionality of musical energy is considered through case studies of individual movements from the symphonies. This in turn gives rise to broader contextualised perspectives on Shostakovich's work. The book ends with a detailed examination of why a piece of music might contain golden sections.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook to Music under German Occupation 1938 1945 written by David Fanning and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following their entry into Austria and the Sudetenland in the late 1930s, the Germans attempted to impose a policy of cultural imperialism on the countries they went on to occupy during World War II. Almost all music institutions in the occupied lands came under direct German control or were subject to severe scrutiny and censorship, the prime objective being to change the musical fabric of these nations and force them to submit to the strictures of Nazi ideology. This pioneering collection of essays is the first in the English language to look in more detail at the musical consequences of German occupation during a dark period in European history. It embraces a wide range of issues, presenting case studies involving musical activity in a number of occupied European cities, as well as in countries that were part of the Axis or had established close diplomatic relations with Germany. The wartime careers and creative outputs of individual musicians who were faced with the dilemma of either complying with or resisting the impositions of the occupiers are explored. In addition, there is some reflection on the post-war implications of German occupation for the musical environment in Europe. Music under German Occupation is written for all music-lovers, students, professionals and academics who have particular interests in 20th-century music and/or the vicissitudes of European cultural life during World War II.
