Download or read book Contemporary Musical Virtuosities written by Louise Devenish and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary notions of musical virtuosity redevelop historic concepts and demonstrate that our present understanding of virtuosity in western art music has shifted from what seemed, for a time, to be a relatively clear and stable definition. In the field and the academy, lively debates around the definition and/or value of virtuosity have always elicited strong and varied ideas. In the twenty-first century, frictions have emerged between traditional definitions of virtuosity and contemporary practices that emphasise collaboration and blur roles between performers, composers, and improvisers. Contemporary Musical Virtuosities embraces the evolving processes, practitioners, and presentation models within twenty-first century art music. This edited collection explores recent insights into the experience and role of virtuosity in different contexts, via contributions from an intergenerational group of artists, academics, and artist-academics. Their writing highlights current themes in contemporary western art music and intersecting musical and performing arts genres such as dance, sound art, improvisation, jazz, trans-traditional collaborations, and Australian Indigenous music. It offers models for supporting and recognising a plurality of musical virtuosities typically excluded from traditional definitions and examines implications for musical practice today. Chapters take the form of academic essays, artist reflections, interviews, personal letters, and a manifesto, reflecting the range of approaches and contexts covered. The collection includes first writings on practices that have been present in the industry for some time not yet documented or examined in detail until now, and thus offers a vision for the future that prioritises inclusive and overlapping practices and processes in music.
Download or read book The Virtuoso as Subject written by Zarko Cvejić and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a novel interpretation of the sudden and steep decline of instrumental virtuosity in its critical reception between c. 1815 and c. 1850, documenting it with a large number of examples from Europe’s leading music periodicals at the time. The increasingly hostile critical reception of instrumental virtuosity during this period is interpreted from the perspective of contemporary aesthetics and philosophical conceptions of human subjectivity; the book’s main thesis is that virtuosity qua irreducibly bodily performance generated so much hostility because it was deemed incompatible with, and even threatening to, the new Romantic philosophical conception of music as a radically disembodied, abstract, autonomous art and, moreover, a symbol or model – if only a utopian one – of a similarly autonomous and free human subject, whose freedom and autonomy seemed increasingly untenable in the economic and political context of post-Napoleonic Europe. That is why music, newly reconceived as radically abstract and autonomous, plays such an important part in the philosophy of early German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, with their growing misgivings about the very possibility of human freedom, and not so much in the preceding generation of thinkers, such as Kant and Hegel, who still believed in the (transcendentally) free subject of the Enlightenment. For the early German Romantics, music becomes a model of human freedom, if freedom could exist. By contrast, virtuosity, irredeemably moored in the perishable human body, ephemeral, and beholden to such base motives as making money and gaining fame, is not only incompatible with music thus conceived, but also threatens to expose it as an illusion, in other words, as irreducibly corporeal, and, by extension, the human subject it was meant to symbolise as likewise an illusion. Only with that in mind, may we begin to understand the hostility of some early to mid-19th-century critics to instrumental virtuosity, which sometimes reached truly bizarre proportions. In order to accomplish this, the book looks at contemporary aesthetics and philosophy, the contemporary reception of virtuosity in performance and composition, and the impact of 19th-century gender ideology on the reception of some leading virtuosi, male and female alike.
Download or read book Virtuosity written by Jessica Martinez and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just before the most important violin competition of her career, seventeen-year-old prodigy Carmen faces critical decisions about her anti-anxiety drug addiction, her controlling mother, and a potential romance with her most talented rival.
Download or read book Schumann s Virtuosity written by Alexander Stefaniak and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A valuable resource for musicologists, theorists, pianists, and aestheticians interested in reading about Schumann’s views on virtuosity.” —Notes Considered one of the greatest composers—and music critics—of the Romantic era, Robert Schumann (1810–1856) played an important role in shaping nineteenth-century German ideas about virtuosity. Forging his career in the decades that saw abundant public fascination with the feats and creations of virtuosos (Liszt, Paganini, and Chopin among others), Schumann engaged with instrumental virtuosity through not only his compositions and performances but also his music reviews and writings about his contemporaries. Ultimately, the discourse of virtuosity influenced the culture of Western “art music” well beyond the nineteenth century and into the present day. By examining previously unexplored archival sources, Alexander Stefaniak looks at the diverse approaches to virtuosity Schumann developed over the course of his career, revealing several distinct currents in nineteenth-century German virtuosity and the enduring flexibility of virtuosity discourse.
Download or read book New Sounds New Stories written by Vincent Meelberg and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wanneer luisteraars over hun luisterervaringen praten, refereren ze vaak aan muziek alsof het een verhaal is. Maar kan muziek wel een verhaal vertellen? Kan muziek narratief zijn? Traditioneel wordt narrativiteit geassocieerd met verbale en visuele teksten en wordt er betwijfeld of een muzikale variant zelfs maar kan bestaan. In deze studie beargumenteert Vincent Meelberg dat muziek wel degelijk een verhaal kan vertellen, en dat de bestudering van muzikale narrativiteit zeer productief is. Meer specifiek stelt Meelberg voor om hedendaagse muzikale verhalen te beschouwen als metaverhalen, dus als verhalen die het verhaal van het proces van narrativizering vertellen.
Download or read book Computers and Creativity written by Jon McCormack and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary volume introduces new theories and ideas on creativity from the perspectives of science and art. Featuring contributions from leading researchers, theorists and artists working in artificial intelligence, generative art, creative computing, music composition, and cybernetics, the book examines the relationship between computation and creativity from both analytic and practical perspectives. Each contributor describes innovative new ways creativity can be understood through, and inspired by, computers. The book tackles critical philosophical questions and discusses the major issues raised by computational creativity, including: whether a computer can exhibit creativity independently of its creator; what kinds of creativity are possible in light of our knowledge from computational simulation, artificial intelligence, evolutionary theory and information theory; and whether we can begin to automate the evaluation of aesthetics and creativity in silico. These important, often controversial questions are contextualised by current thinking in computational creative arts practice. Leading artistic practitioners discuss their approaches to working creatively with computational systems in a diverse array of media, including music, sound art, visual art, and interactivity. The volume also includes a comprehensive review of computational aesthetic evaluation and judgement research, alongside discussion and insights from pioneering artists working with computation as a creative medium over the last fifty years. A distinguishing feature of this volume is that it explains and grounds new theoretical ideas on creativity through practical applications and creative practice. Computers and Creativity will appeal to theorists, researchers in artificial intelligence, generative and evolutionary computing, practicing artists and musicians, students and any reader generally interested in understanding how computers can impact upon creativity. It bridges concepts from computer science, psychology, neuroscience, visual art, music and philosophy in an accessible way, illustrating how computers are fundamentally changing what we can imagine and create, and how we might shape the creativity of the future. Computers and Creativity will appeal to theorists, researchers in artificial intelligence, generative and evolutionary computing, practicing artists and musicians, students and any reader generally interested in understanding how computers can impact upon creativity. It bridges concepts from computer science, psychology, neuroscience, visual art, music and philosophy in an accessible way, illustrating how computers are fundamentally changing what we can imagine and create, and how we might shape the creativity of the future.
Download or read book Vocal Virtuosity written by Sean M. Parr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction. Coloratura and Female Vocality -- The New Franco-Italian School of Singing -- Verdi and the End of Italian Coloratura -- Melismatic Madness and Technology -- Caroline Carvalho and Her World -- Carvalho, Gounod, and the Waltz -- Vestiges of Virtuosity : The French Coloratura Soprano -- Epilogue. Unending Coloratura.
Download or read book Sound Art and Music written by John Dack and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the mutually beneficial, but occasionally uneasy, relationship between sound art and music. It reveals how practices and theories associated with these art forms frequently result in corroboration, and contains chapters from both practitioners and theoreticians who work in areas where innovative synergies between sound art and music can be identified. Although practice and theory are inseparable, discourses surrounding practice are elusive but informative, and, as such, are given particular recognition and exploration in this volume. Taken as a whole, the book provides a snapshot of contemporary research across a range of sound art and music disciplines, showcasing the variety, scope and scale of this exciting, if bewildering, area of study.
Download or read book Composing under the Skin written by Paul Craenen and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing study of the physical presence of the musician in musical performance Fingers slipping over guitar strings, the tap of a bow against the body of a cello, a pianist humming along to the music: contemporary composers often work with parasitic, non-conventional sounds such as these. Are they to be perceived as musical elements or do they shift attention to the physical effort of music-making, contact between a body and an instrument? Composer Paul Craenen explores ways in which the musician’s body is revealed in musical performance. He leads us from Cage, Lachenmann, Kagel and their contemporaries to a discussion of how today's generation of young composers is writing a body paradigm into composition itself. Micro-temporal physical gestures and instrumental timbre provide the key to unveiling the physical presence of both a musician and a ‘composing body’. The author's concept of ‘intercorporeality’, along with the idea of an alternating linear and non-linear relationship of the composing body to time, casts new light on the relationship between musicians, composers, and music consumers.
Download or read book Liszt and Virtuosity written by Robert Doran and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and wide-ranging collection of essays by leading international scholars, exploring the concept and practices of virtuosity in Franz Liszt and his contemporaries.
Download or read book Dark Sound written by D Ferrett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark sound carries the dense cultural weight of darkness; it is the undertow of music that embodies melancholy, desire, grief, violence, rage, pain, loss and longing. Compelling and unnerving, dark sound immerses bodies in the darkest moments and delves into the depths of our hidden inner selves. There is a strangely perverse appeal about music that conjures intense affective states and about sound that can move its listeners to the very edge of the sayable. Through a series of case studies that include Moor Mother, Anna Calvi, Björk, Chelsea Wolfe and Diamanda Galás, D Ferrett argues that the extreme limits and transgressions of dark sound not only imply the limits of language, but are moreover tied to a cultural and historical association between darkness and the feminine within music and music discourse. Whilst the oppressive and violent associations between darkness and femininity are acknowledged, the author challenges their value to misogynistic, racist, capitalist and patriarchal power, showing how dark sound is charged with social, creative and political momentum.
Download or read book Developing Virtuosity Book 3 Violin written by Lynne Latham and published by Latham Music, Limited. This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instrumentation: Violin and Piano or CD The third volume moves students toward more advanced playing techniques and literature. This text continues to develop playing skills found in Book 2 and advances the student through more rigorous and lengthy literature. Instrument-specific selections promote performance, reinforcing shifting skills, more advanced bowing techniques, and complex and multiple-meter pieces. The book contains solo literature that: enables the student to use higher positions with suggested fingerings; features accidentals that challenge left-hand intonation; utilizes more complex time signatures, multiple-meters, and challenging rhythmic patterns; and develops the bow stroke to perform more expressive dynamics and musicianship. Digital audio available.
Download or read book Composers On Music written by Josiah Fisk and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1997-01-30 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a greatly expanded version of the classic 1956 anthology by Sam Morgenstern. The editor has added 30 composers to the roster, mostly in the pre-Baroque and contemporary eras, and has taken advantage of recent scholarship to prune and update the entries. The result is a glimpse into the writings of 103 major composers, from Marchetto of Paduo (14th century) on the definition of musician, to the contemporary British composer Oliver Knussen on much the same topic, and Bach's famous memorandum to the Town Council of Leipzig, as well as new discoveries, such as the elegant, cryptic prose of Toru Takemitsu.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Opera written by Mervyn Cooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-08 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion celebrates the extraordinary riches of the twentieth-century operatic repertoire in a collection of specially commissioned essays written by a distinguished team of academics, critics and practitioners. Beginning with a discussion of the century's vital inheritance from late-romantic operatic traditions in Germany and Italy, the text embraces fresh investigations into various aspects of the genre in the modern age, with a comprehensive coverage of the work of individual composers from Debussy and Schoenberg to John Adams and Harrison Birtwistle. Traditional stylistic categorizations (including symbolism, expressionism, neo-classicism and minimalism) are reassessed from new critical perspectives, and the distinctive operatic traditions of Continental and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and United States are subjected to fresh scrutiny. The volume includes essays devoted to avant-garde music theatre, operettas and musicals, filmed opera, and ends with a discussion of the position of the genre in today's cultural marketplace.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body written by Dr. Youn Kim and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The presence of the phenomenological body is central to music in all of its varieties and contradictions. With the explosion of scholarly works on the body in virtually every field in the humanities, the social as well as the biomedical sciences, the question of how such a complex understanding of the body is related to music, with its own complexity, has been investigated within specific disciplinary perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body brings together scholars from across these fields, providing a platform for the discussion of the multidimensional interfaces of music and the body. The book is organized into six sections, each discussing a topic that defines the field: the moving and performing body; the musical brain and psyche; embodied mind, embodied rhythm; the disabled and sexual body; music as medicine; and the multimodal body. Connecting a wide array of diverse perspectives and presenting a survey of research and practice, the Handbook provides an introduction into the rich world of music and the body.
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music written by Keith Potter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years the music of minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass has, increasingly, become the subject of important musicological reflection, research and debate. Scholars have also been turning their attention to the work of lesser-known contemporaries such as Phill Niblock and Eliane Radigue, or to second and third generation minimalists such as John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Michael Nyman and William Duckworth, whose range of styles may undermine any sense of shared aesthetic approach but whose output is still to a large extent informed by the innovative work of their minimalist predecessors. Attempts have also been made by a number of academics to contextualise the work of composers who have moved in parallel with these developments while remaining resolutely outside its immediate environment, including such diverse figures as Karel Goeyvaerts, Robert Ashley, Arvo Pärt and Brian Eno. Theory has reflected practice in many respects, with the multimedia works of Reich and Glass encouraging interdisciplinary approaches, associations and interconnections. Minimalism’s role in culture and society has also become the subject of recent interest and debate, complementing existing scholarship, which addressed the subject from the perspective of historiography, analysis, aesthetics and philosophy. The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music provides an authoritative overview of established research in this area, while also offering new and innovative approaches to the subject.
Download or read book Music in the Late Twentieth Century written by Richard Taruskin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-14 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of masterworks-the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to a significant period in the history of Western music. Music in the Late Twentieth Century is the final installment of the set, covering the years from the end of World War II to the present. In these pages, Taruskin illuminates the great compositions of recent times, offering insightful analyses of works by Aaron Copland, John Cage, Milton Babbitt, Benjamin Britten, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, among many others. He also looks at the impact of electronic music and computers, the rise of pop music and rock 'n' roll, the advent of postmodernism, and the contemporary music of Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, and John Adams. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse period.
