Download or read book French Musical Thought 1600 1800 written by Georgia Cowart and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France were witness to dramatic changes in all aspects of social and cultural life. During this era, a new and modern spirit of critical inquiry arose, a change in ethos that had a major effect on all the arts. French Musical Thought, 1600-1800 is a diverse collection of essays offering new perspectives and insight on musical opinion during one of the most fascinating periods in French history. The essays in this volume, the authors of which include musicologists, historians and literary scholars, illuminate clearly the relationship of critical thought in music to contemporary developments in philosophy, art, literature and politics. In the final analysis, scholars contend that music aesthetics, criticism and theory can be understood only against the backdrop of a dynamic cultural milieu.Contributors: Claude V. Palisca, Jane R. Stevens, Louis E. Auld, Gloria Flaherty, Robert M. Isherwood, Albert Cohen, Barbara Russano Hanning, David Allen Duncan, Charles Dill, Georgia Cowart.
Download or read book Music and Theatre in France 1600 1680 written by John S. Powell and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the course of the 17th century, the dramatic arts reached a pinnacle of development in France; but despite the volumes devoted to the literature and theatre of the ancien régime, historians have largely neglected the importance of music and dance. This study defines the musical practices of comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy, and mythological and non-mythological pastoral drama, from the arrival of the first repertory companies in Paris until the establishment of the Comédie-Française.
Download or read book Music In European Capitals written by Daniel Heartz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2003-05-27 with total page 1128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glittering cultural tour of Europe's major capitals during a period of intense musical change. This volume continues the study of the eighteenth century begun in Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School 1740–1780 (1995) by focusing on the capital cities other than Vienna that were most important in the creation and diffusion of new music. It tells of events in Naples, where Vinci and Pergolesi went beyond their pre-1720 models to cultivate opera in a simpler, more direct manner, soon after christened the galant style. No less central was Venice, where Vivaldi perfected the concerto, on which were patterned the early symphonies and the newer kind of sonata. Dresden profited first from all these achievements and became, under Hasse's direction, the foremost center of Italian opera in Germany. Mannheim with its great orchestra did much to shape the modern symphony. A few years later, Paris became paramount, especially for its Opéra-Comique; during the 1770s the Opéra provided Gluck with a stage on which to cap his long international career. The book concludes with a description of Christian Bach in London, Paisiello in Saint Petersburg, and Boccherini in Madrid. This long-awaited book offers a view of eighteenth-century music that is broad and innovative while remaining sensitive to the values of those times and places. One comes away from it with an understanding of the European context behind the triumphs of Haydn and Mozart. Lavishly illustrated with music examples and reproductions, both in black-and-white and color, this master study will be of inestimable importance to scholars, cultural historians, performers, and all music lovers.
Download or read book Listening Well written by Ora Frishberg Saloman and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelve essays in Listening Well illuminate aesthetic, educative, and evaluative strategies utilized by writers in Paris, Boston, and New York to guide listeners in confronting the challenges of musical modernity between 1764 and 1890. They interpret criticism from treatises, journals, and newspapers for its importance in cultural history and consider the reception of major works by Beethoven and by Berlioz. The essays explore contrasting responses to new operas and symphonies by composers, librettists, authors, critics, and conductors as well as by writers including Chabanon, Lacépède, Berlioz, Urhan, D'Ortigue, Dwight, Fuller, Watson, and Hassard. Readers interested in perceptions of Classicism and Romanticism in music as they relate to French, German, and American literature and criticism will discover how audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were encouraged to listen attentively to the new and controversial in music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Download or read book Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press written by William Weber and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold application of the concept of canonical works to the development of French operatic and concert life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Download or read book Gr try s Operas and the French Public written by R.J. Arnold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, in the dying days of the Napoleonic Empire, did half of Paris turn out for the funeral of a composer? The death of André Ernest Modeste Grétry in 1813 was one of the sensations of the age, setting off months of tear-stained commemorations, reminiscences and revivals of his work. To understand this singular event, this interdisciplinary study looks back to Grétry’s earliest encounters with the French public during the 1760s and 1770s, seeking the roots of his reputation in the reactions of his listeners. The result is not simply an exploration of the relationship between a musician and his audiences, but of developments in musical thought and discursive culture, and of the formation of public opinion over a period of intense social and political change. The core of Grétry’s appeal was his mastery of song. Distinctive, direct and memorable, his melodies were exported out of the opera house into every corner of French life, serving as folkloristic tokens of celebration and solidarity, longing and regret. Grétry’s attention to the subjectivity of his audiences had a profound effect on operatic culture, forging a new sense of democratic collaboration between composer and listener. This study provides a reassessment of Grétry’s work and musical thought, positioning him as a major figure who linked the culture of feeling and the culture of reason - and who paved the way for Romantic notions of spectatorial absorption and the power of music.
Download or read book What Is Music written by Philip Alperson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to this volume are Philip Alperson, Francis Sparshott, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Edward T. Cone, Peter Kivy, Jenefer Robinson, Joseph Margolis, Arnold Berleant, Morris Grossman, Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Davies, Martin Donougho, Roger Scruton, and Rose Rosengard Subotnik.
Download or read book Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera written by Rebecca Harris-Warrick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the evolving practices in music, librettos, choreographed dance, and staging throughout the history of French Baroque opera.
Download or read book Monstrous Opera written by Charles Dill and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the foremost composers of the French Baroque operatic tradition, Rameau is often cited for his struggle to steer lyric tragedy away from its strict Lullian form, inspired by spoken tragedy, and toward a more expressive musical style. In this fresh exploration of Rameau's compositional aesthetic, Charles Dill depicts a much more complicated figure: one obsessed with tradition, music theory, his own creative instincts, and the public's expectations of his music. Dill examines the ways Rameau mediated among these often competing values and how he interacted with his critics and with the public. The result is a sophisticated rethinking of Rameau as a musical innovator. In his compositions, Rameau tried to highlight music's potential for dramatic meanings. But his listeners, who understood lyric tragedy to be a poetic rather than musical genre, were generally frustrated by these attempts. In fact, some described Rameau's music as monstrous--using an image of deformity to represent the failure of reason and communication. Dill shows how Rameau answered his critics with rational, theoretical arguments about the role of music in lyric tragedy. At the same time, however, the composer sought to placate his audiences by substantially revising his musical texts in later performances, sometimes abandoning his most creative ideas. Monstrous Opera illuminates the complexity of Rameau's vision, revealing not only the tensions within the music but also the conflicting desires that drove the man--himself caricatured by his contemporaries as a monster. Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Musical Voices of Early Modern Women written by Thomasin LaMay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship has offered a veritable landslide of studies about early modern women, illuminating them as writers, thinkers, midwives, mothers, in convents, at home, and as rulers. Musical Voices of Early Modern Women adds to the mix of early modern studies a volume that correlates women's musical endeavors to their lives, addressing early modern women's musical activities across a broad spectrum of cultural events and settings. The volume takes as its premise the notion that while women may have been squeezed to participate in music through narrower doors than their male peers, they nevertheless did so with enthusiasm, diligence, and success. They were there in many ways, but as women's lives were fundamentally different and more private than men's were, their strategies, tools, and appearances were sometimes also different and thus often unstudied in an historical discipline that primarily evaluated men's productivity. Given that, many of these stories will not necessarily embrace a standard musical repertoire, even as they seek to expand canonical borders. The contributors to this collection explore the possibility of a larger musical culture which included women as well as men, by examining early modern women in "many-headed ways" through the lens of musical production. They look at how women composed, assuming that compositional gender strategies may have been used differently when applied through her vision; how women were composed, or represented and interpreted through music in a larger cultural context, and how her presence in that dialog situated her in social space. Contributors also trace how women found music as a means for communicating, for establishing intellectual power, for generating musical tastes, and for enhancing the quality of their lives. Some women performed publicly, and thus some articles examine how this impacted on their lives and families. Other contributors inquire about the economics of music and women, and how in different situations some women may have been financially empowered or even in control of their own money-making. This collection offers a glimpse at women from home, stage, work, and convent, from many classes and from culturally diverse countries - including France, Spain, Italy, England, Austria, Russia, and Mexico - and imagines a musical history centered in the realities of those lives.
Download or read book A Natural History of the Piano written by Stuart Isacoff and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating celebration of the piano, including tales of its masters from Mozart and Beethoven to Oscar Peterson and Jerry Lee Lewis, told with the expertise of composer and author of Temperament, Stuart Isacoff. This history takes us back to the piano's humble genesis as a simple keyboard, and shows how everyone from Ferdinando de' Medici to Herbie Hancock affected its evolution of sound and influence in popular music. Presenting the instrument that has been at the core of musical development over the centuries in all its beauty and complexity, this explores the piano's capabilities and the range of emotional expression it conveys in different artists' hands. A Natural History of the Piano is fast-paced and intriguing, with beautiful illustrations and photos, a must-read for music lovers and pianists of every level.
Download or read book French Baroque Opera A Reader written by Caroline Wood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the outset, French opera generated an enormous diversity of literature, familiarity with which greatly enhances our understanding of this unique art form. Yet relatively little of that literature is available in English, despite an upsurge of interest in the Lully-Rameau period during the past two decades. This book presents a wide-ranging and informative picture of the organization and evolution of French Baroque opera, its aims and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on official documents, theoretical writings, letters, diaries, dictionary entries, contemporary reviews and commentaries, it provides an often entertaining insight into Lully’s once-proud Royal Academy of Music and the colourful characters who surrounded it. The translated passages are set in context, and readers are directed to further scholarly and critical writings in English. Readers will find this new, updated edition easier to use with its revised and expanded translations, supplementary explanatory content and new illustrations.
Download or read book Composing the Citizen written by Jann Pasler and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jann Pasler's remarkable Composing the Citizen reaches well beyond what any book concerned with music in society has ever attempted. Concentrating on France of the Third Republic, from the 1870s through the early 1900s, she demonstrates convincingly how music--whether new, old, popular, or élite, whether performed at institutions of state (such as the Opéra), the Folies Bergère, concert halls, or the zoo--helped to redefine what it meant to be French under evolving political circumstances. Equally adept in the languages of history, sociology, political science, reception history, and music analysis, Pasler establishes music's cultural significance and implicitly illuminates the role it can still play in countries like the United States."--Philip Gossett, The University of Chicago and University of Rome, La Sapienza "Composing the Citizen offers nothing less than a new paradigm for the study of musical cultures. Rather than forcing French music into the moulds developed for the Austro-German canon, Pasler simply studies the social uses of music in fin-de-siècle France. Her painstaking archival research allows her to present an astonishingly detailed account of musical practices, tastes, and activities; new names and genres come to the fore to engage in a variety of dynamic artistic scenes most of us never knew--or only thought we did by virtue of having read Proust. A masterwork of a scholar at the very peak of her career."--Susan McClary, MacArthur Fellow 1995 and author of Georges Bizet: Carmen and Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madgrigal "Utilité publique: a common-sense republican notion of sweeping consequence. In this greatly anticipated volume Jann Pasler uses it as touchstone, showing how and why musical life so mattered in Third-Republic France: layer after layer of it, in a journey that takes us past the Opéra and Conservatoire to the pops concerts, department stores, the zoo, the world's fairs, the overseas colonies. Companionable as a well-worn Baedeker, seductive as Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, this exquisitely styled and paced achievement is also a compelling read."--D. Kern Holoman, author of Berlioz and The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828-1967
Download or read book Opera Remade 1700 1750 written by Charles Dill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera in the first half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of the memorable composer and the memorable work. Recent research on this period has been especially fruitful, showing renewed interest in how opera operated within its local cultures, what audience members felt was at stake in opera performances, who the people-composers and performers-were who made opera possible. The essays for this volume capture the principal themes of current research: the "idea" of opera, opera criticism, the people of opera, and the emerging technologies of opera.
Download or read book Dreaming with Open Eyes written by Ayana O. Smith and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreaming with Open Eyes examines visual symbolism in late seventeenth-century Italian opera, contextualizing the genre amid the broad ocularcentric debates emerging at the crossroads of the early modern period and the Enlightenment. Ayana O. Smith reevaluates significant aspects of the Arcadian reform aesthetic and establishes a historically informed method of opera criticism for modern scholars and interpreters. Unfolding in a narrative fashion, the text explores facets of the philosophical and literary background and concludes with close readings of text and music, using visual symbolism to create readings of gender and character in two operas: Alessandro Scarlatti's La Statira (Rome, 1690), and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's La forza della virtù (Venice, 1693). Smith’s interdisciplinary approach enhances our modern perception of this rich and underexplored repertory, and will appeal to students and scholars not only of opera, but also of literature, philosophy, and visual and intellectual cultures.
Download or read book The Pathetick Musician written by Bruce Haynes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is rhetorical music? In The Pathetick Musician, Bruce Haynes and Geoffrey Burgess illustrate the vital place of rhetoric and eloquent expression in the creation and performance of Baroque music. Through engaging explorations of the cantatas of J.S. Bach, the authors explode the conventional notion of historical authenticity in music, proposing adventurous new directions to reinvigorate the performance of early music in the modern setting. Along the way, Haynes and Burgess investigate intersections between music and oratory, dance, gesture, poetry, painting and sculpture, and offer insights into figural elaboration, articulation, nuance and temporality. Aimed primarily at performers of Baroque music, the book situates the study of performance practice in a broader cultural context, and as much as an invaluable resource for advanced study, it contains a wealth of information that pertains directly to anyone working in the field of early music. Based on a draft sketched by celebrated Baroque oboist and early music scholar Bruce Haynes before his death in 2011, The Pathetick Musician is the fruit of the combined wisdom of two musicians renowned equally for their contributions as performers and scholars. Drawing on an impressive array of Classical treatises on oratory, musical autographs and performance accounts, it is an essential companion to Haynes' controversial The End of Early Music. Geoffrey Burgess has taken up the broader claims of Haynes' philosophy to create a practical, accessible text that will be stimulating for all musicians interested in the rediscovery of early music. With copious musical examples, contemporaneous works of art, and a companion website with supplementary audio recordings, The Pathetick Musician is an invaluable resource for all interested in exploring new expressive possibilities in the performance and study of Baroque music.
Download or read book A History of Western Philosophy of Music written by James O. Young and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive, accessible survey of Western philosophy of music from Pythagoras to the present. Its narrative traces themes and schools through history, in a sequence of five chapters that survey the ancient, medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary periods. Its wide-ranging coverage includes medieval Islamic thinkers, Continental and analytic thinkers, and neglected female thinkers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). All aspects of the philosophy of music are discussed, including music and the cosmos, music's value, music's relation to the other arts, the problem of opera, the origins of musical genius, music's emotional impact, the moral effects of music, the ontology of musical works, and the relevance of music's historical context. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars in philosophy and musicology, and all who are interested in the ways in which philosophers throughout history have thought about music.
