Download or read book Shostakovich Studies written by David Fanning and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These eleven essays lay a foundation for a proper understanding of Shostakovich's musical language and provide new insights into issues surrounding his composition.

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Survival written by George Rochberg and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revised paperback edition of composer George Rochberg's landmark essays "Rochberg presents the rare spectacle of a composer who has made his peace with tradition while maintaining a strikingly individual profile. . . . [H]e succeeds in transforming the sublime concepts of traditional music into contemporary language." ---Washington Post "An indispensable book for anyone who wishes to understand the sad and curious fate of music in the twentieth century." ---Atlantic Monthly "The writings of George Rochberg stand as a pinnacle from which our past and future can be viewed." ---Kansas City Star As a composer, George Rochberg has played a leading role in bringing about a transformation of contemporary music through a reassessment of its relation to tonality, melody, and harmony. In The Aesthetics of Survival, the author addresses the legacy of modernism in music and its related effect on the cultural milieu, particularly its overemphasis on the abstract, rationalist thinking embraced by contemporary science, technology, and philosophy. Rochberg argues for the renewal of holistic values in order to ensure the survival of music as a humanly expressive art. A renowned composer, thinker, and teacher, George Rochberg has been honored with innumerable awards, including, most recently, an Alfred I. du Pont Award for Outstanding Conductors and Composers, and an André and Clara Mertens Contemporary Composer Award. He lives in Pennsylvania.

Download or read book Music of the Twentieth Century written by Ton de Leeuw and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ton de Leeuw was a truly groundbreaking composer. As evidenced by his pioneering study of compositional methods that melded Eastern traditional music with Western musical theory, he had a profound understanding of the complex and often divisive history of twentieth-century music. Now his renowned chronicle Music of the Twentieth Century is offered here in a newly revised English-language edition. Music of the Twentieth Century goes beyond a historical survey with its lucid and impassioned discussion of the elements, structures, compositional principles, and terminologies of twentieth-century music. De Leeuw draws on his experience as a composer, teacher, and music scholar of non-European music traditions, including Indian, Indonesian, and Japanese music, to examine how musical innovations that developed during the twentieth century transformed musical theory, composition, and scholarly thought around the globe.

Download or read book How Mathematicians Think written by William Byers and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-12 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many outsiders, mathematicians appear to think like computers, grimly grinding away with a strict formal logic and moving methodically--even algorithmically--from one black-and-white deduction to another. Yet mathematicians often describe their most important breakthroughs as creative, intuitive responses to ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox. A unique examination of this less-familiar aspect of mathematics, How Mathematicians Think reveals that mathematics is a profoundly creative activity and not just a body of formalized rules and results. Nonlogical qualities, William Byers shows, play an essential role in mathematics. Ambiguities, contradictions, and paradoxes can arise when ideas developed in different contexts come into contact. Uncertainties and conflicts do not impede but rather spur the development of mathematics. Creativity often means bringing apparently incompatible perspectives together as complementary aspects of a new, more subtle theory. The secret of mathematics is not to be found only in its logical structure. The creative dimensions of mathematical work have great implications for our notions of mathematical and scientific truth, and How Mathematicians Think provides a novel approach to many fundamental questions. Is mathematics objectively true? Is it discovered or invented? And is there such a thing as a "final" scientific theory? Ultimately, How Mathematicians Think shows that the nature of mathematical thinking can teach us a great deal about the human condition itself.

Download or read book After Mahler written by Stephen Downes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.

Download or read book Music and Theology in Nineteenth Century Britain written by Martin Clarke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interrelationship of music and theology is a burgeoning area of scholarship in which conceptual issues have been explored by musicologists and theologians including Jeremy Begbie, Quentin Faulkner and Jon Michael Spencer. Their important work has opened up opportunities for focussed, critical studies of the ways in which music and theology can be seen to interact in specific repertoires, genres, and institutions as well as the work of particular composers, religious leaders and scholars. This collection of essays explores such areas in relation to the religious, musical and social history of nineteenth-century Britain. The book does not simply present a history of sacred music of the period, but examines the role of music in the diverse religious life of a century that encompassed the Oxford Movement, Catholic Emancipation, religious revivals involving many different denominations, the production of several landmark hymnals and greater legal recognition for religions other than Christianity. The book therefore provides a valuable guide to the music of this complex historical period.

Download or read book Nineteenth Century Music written by Carl Dahlhaus and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This magnificent survey of the most popular period in music history is an extended essay embracing music, aesthetics, social history, and politics, by one of the keenest minds writing on music in the world today. Dahlhaus organizes his book around "watershed" years--for example, 1830, the year of the July Revolution in France, and around which coalesce the "demise of the age of art" proclaimed by Heine, the musical consequences of the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, the simultaneous and dramatic appearance of Chopin and Liszt, Berlioz and Meyerbeer, and Schumann and Mendelssohn. But he keeps us constantly on guard against generalization and clich . Cherished concepts like Romanticism, tradition, nationalism vs. universality, the musical culture of the bourgeoisie, are put to pointed reevaluation. Always demonstrating the interest in socio-historical influences that is the hallmark of his work, Dahlhaus reminds us of the contradictions, interrelationships, psychological nuances, and riches of musical character and musical life. Nineteenth-Century Music contains 90 illustrations, the collected captions of which come close to providing a summary of the work and the author's methods. Technical language is kept to a minimum, but while remaining accessible, Dahlhaus challenges, braces, and excites. This is a landmark study that no one seriously interested in music and nineteenth-century European culture will be able to ignore.

Download or read book Rethinking Reich written by Sumanth Gopinath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Described by music critic Alex Ross as "the most original musical thinker of our time" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourteen tightly focused and multifarious essays on various aspects of Reich's work--ranging from analytical, aesthetic, and archival studies to sociocultural, philosophical, and ethnomusicological reflections--this edited volume reveals new insights, including those enabled by access to the growing Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation archive, the premier institution for primary research on twentieth-century and contemporary classical music. This volume takes on the timely task of challenging the hegemony of Reich's own articulate and convincing discourses on his music, as found in his Writings on Music (OUP, 2002), and breaks new ground in the broader field of minimalism studies.

Download or read book Proceedings American Philosophical Society vol 141 No 1 1997 written by and published by American Philosophical Society. This book was released on with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Postmodern Music Postmodern Listening written by Jonathan D. Kramer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-08-11 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kramer was one of the most visionary musical thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. In his The Time of Music, he approached the idea of the many different ways that time itself is articulated musically. This book has become influential among composers, theorists, and aestheticians. Now, in his almost completed text written before his untimely death in 2004, he examines the concept of postmodernism in music. Kramer created a series of markers by which we can identify postmodern works. He suggests that the postmodern project actually creates a radically different relationship between the composer and listener. Written with wit, precision, and at times playfully subverting traditional tropes to make a very serious point about this difference, Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening leads us to a strongly grounded intellectual basis for stylistic description and an intuitive sensibility of what postmodernism in music entails. Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening is an examination of how musical postmodernism is not just a style or movement, but a fundamental shift in the relationship between composer and listener. The result is a multifaceted and provocative look at a critical turning point in music history, one whose implications we are only just beginning to understand.

Download or read book Boh me written by Arthur Groos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-08-07 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide presents a unique collection of critical, analytical and documentary essays on Puccini's most popular opera. It includes new studies on the background to Parisian bohemianism, Puccini's musical language, and the opera's stage history as well as the genesis of the opera, the structure of the libretto, and aspects of the work's reception.

Download or read book Chromaticism written by Vladimir Barsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical practices in the 20th century pose new and complex problems in the study of the fundamental principles of pitch organization. The analysis of basic harmonic categories, one of which is chromaticism, acquires particular importance as a means of restoring time, which has gone out of joint and identifying the logical principles in the historical process of musical development. Vladimir Barsky, in his thoroughly researched and clearly written guide, traces the progress of the concept of chromaticism throughout Western musical history, and recreates an integrated logical and historical perspective in order to make a specific study of this key subject. He identifies the dynamics of the changing historical theories of chromaticism and relates these to musical practices, applying them to the analysis of current pitch systems. This book will be an invaluable tool for readers whose aim is to come nearer to comprehending the idioms of 20th century music.

Download or read book The Music of Hugh Wood written by Edward Venn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Music of Hugh Wood provides the first ever in-depth study of this well-known, yet only briefly documented composer. Over the years, Wood (b. 1932) has produced a sizeable oeuvre that explores the established genres of symphony, concerto, and quartet on the one hand, and songs and choruses on the other. Underpinned by an awareness of recent philosophical, theoretical and analytical concepts, Dr Edward Venn highlights both the technical basis of Wood's music and the expressive force of his work. In doing so, a picture emerges of Wood as an artist of considerable merit and power. The eclectic blend of national and international influences in the music of Hugh Wood combine to create an individual and distinctive musical language all his own. The book provides an overview of Wood's style, focussing on his engagement with modernism and the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic and formal characteristics of his musical language. From here a more detailed consideration of Wood's development as a composer is advanced, in which his technical development is illustrated alongside an exploration of various aspects of musical meaning embodied in his works. In the process, numerous analytical strategies ranging from formalist to narrative structures are utilized, demonstrating the fecundity and expressivity of Wood's music.

Download or read book Not Russian Enough written by Rutger Helmers and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2014 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers fresh perspectives on the function of nationalist thought in the cosmopolitan opera world, with particular emphasis on the idea of "Russianness" in four nineteenth-century operas by Glinka, Serov, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. In the nineteenth century, Russian composers and critics were encouraged to cultivate a national style to distinguish their music from the dominant Italian, French, and German traditions. Not Russian Enough? explores this aspiration for a nationalist musical tradition as it was carried out in the cosmopolitan world of opera. Rutger Helmers analyzes the cultural context, music, and reception of four important operas: Glinka's A Life for the Tsar (1836), Serov's Judith (1863), Tchaikovsky's The Maid of Orléans (1881), and Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride (1899). He discusses such issues as the influence of Italian and French opera, the use of foreign subjects, the application of local color, and the adherence to the classics, and considers how these related to a sense of "Russianness." Besides yielding new insights for each of these works, this study offers a fresh perspective on the function of nationalist thought in the nineteenth-century Russian opera world.. Rutger Helmers is Assistant Professor in Historical Musicology at the University of Amsterdam and lectures in literary and cultural studies at Radboud University Nijmegen.

Download or read book Critical Perspectives on Michael Finnissy written by Ian Pace and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-05-24 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The composer and pianist Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) is an unmistakeable presence in the British and international new music scene, both for his immeasurable generosity as prolific composer for many different types of musicians, major advocate for the works of others, and performer and conductor who has also been a driving force behind ensembles; he was also President of the International Society for Contemporary Music from 1990 to 1996. His vast and enormously varied output confounds those who seek easy categorisations: once associated strongly with the ‘new complexity’, Finnissy is equally known as composer regularly engaged with many different folk musics, for working with amateur and community musicians, for a long-term engagement with sacred music, or as an advocate of Anglo-American ‘experimental’ music. Twenty years ago, a large-scale volume entitled Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy gave the first major overview of the output of any ‘complex’ composer. This new volume brings a greater plurality of perspectives and critical sensibility to bear upon an output which is almost twice as large as it was when the earlier book was published. A range of leading contributors – musicologists, composers, performers and others – each grapple with particular questions relating to Finnissy’s music, often in ways which raise questions relating more widely to new music, and provide theoretical foundations for further of study both of Finnissy and other composers.

Download or read book Liszt s Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian gypsy Tradition written by Shay Loya and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transcultural modernism -- Verbunkos -- Identity, nationalism, and modernism -- Modernism and authenticity -- Listening to transcultural tonal practices -- The verbunkos idiom in the music of the future -- Idiomatic lateness

Download or read book Linguistics and Semiotics in Music written by Raymond Monelle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook for advanced students explains the various applications to music of methods derived from linguistics and semiotics. The book is aimed at musicians familiar with the ordinary range of aesthetic and theoretical ideas in music; no specialized knowledge of linguistic or semiotic terminology is necessary. In the two introductory chapters, semiotics is related to the tradition of music aesthetics and to well-known works like Deryck Cooke's The Language of Music, and the methods of linguistics are explained in language intelligible to musicians. There is no limitation to one school or tradition; linguistic applications not avowedly semiotic, and semiotic theories not connected with linguistics, are all included. The book gives clear and simple descriptions with ample diagrams and music examples of the 'neutral level', 'semiotic analysis', transformation and generation, structural semantics and narrative grammar, intonation theory, the ideas of C.S. Peirce, and applications in ethnomusicology.