Download or read book Malevolent Muse written by Oliver Hilmes and published by Northeastern University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the colorful figures on the twentieth-century European cultural scene, hardly anyone has provoked more polarity than Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879-1964), mistress to a long succession of brilliant men and wife of three of the best known: composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius and writer Franz Werfel. To her admirers Alma was a self-sacrificing socialite who inspired many great artists. Her detractors found her a self-aggrandizing social climber and an alcoholic, bigoted, vengeful harlot - as one contemporary put it, "a cross between a grande dame and a cesspool." So who was she really? When historian Oliver Hilmes discovered a treasure-trove of unpublished material, much of it in Alma's own words, he used it as the basis for his first biography, setting the record straight while evoking the atmosphere of intellectual life in Europe and then in migr communities on both coasts of the United States after the Nazi takeover of their home territories. First published in German in 2004, the book was hailed as a rare combination of meticulously researched scholarship and entertaining writing, making it a runaway bestseller and advancing Oliver Hilmes to his position as a household name in contemporary literature. Alma Mahler was one of the twentieth century's rare originals, worthy of her immortalization in song. Oliver Hilmes has provided us with an even-handed yet tantalizingly detailed account of her life, bringing Alma's singular story to a whole new audience.
Download or read book Passionate Spirit written by Cate Haste and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new biography of Alma Mahler (1879-1964), revealing a woman determined to wield power in a world that denied her agency History has long vilified Alma Mahler. Critics accused her of distracting Gustav Mahler from his work, and her passionate love affairs shocked her peers. Drawing on Alma's vivid, sensual, and overlooked diaries, biographer Cate Haste recounts the untold and far more sympathetic story of this ambitious and talented woman. Though she dreamed of being the first woman to compose a famous opera, Alma was stifled by traditional social values. Eventually, she put her own dreams aside and wielded power and influence the only way she could, by supporting the art of more famous men. She worked alongside them and gained credit as their muse, commanding their love and demanding their respect. Passionate Spirit restores vibrant humanity to a woman time turned into a caricature, providing an important correction to a history where systemic sexism has long erased women of talent.
Download or read book Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers Concert Music 1900DS1960 written by Laurel Parsons and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the second of four volumes in a multi-authored series of analytical essays on music by women composers from Hildegard of Bingen to the twenty-first century. Volume 2 presents detailed studies of compositions written between 1900 and 1960 by Alma Mahler-Werfel, Rebecca Clarke, Ethel Smyth, Ruth Crawford, Florence B. Price, Galina Ustvolskaya, J. M. Beyer, and Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Each chapter opens with a brief biographical sketch of the composer, followed by an in-depth analysis of a single representative composition, occasionally including other works where comparison strengthens the analytical argument. The repertoire explored by the authors includes art song, opera, choral, solo piano, chamber, and orchestral music. To enhance the volume's accessibility to readers who are not professional music theorists or musicologists, a glossary provides explanations of music-theoretical terms used in the book. The collection is designed to challenge and stimulate a wide range of readers. For academics, these thorough analytical studies can open new paths into unexplored research areas in music theory and musicology. Post-secondary instructors may be inspired by the insights offered here to include new works in graduate or upper-level undergraduate courses in early twentieth-century music or women and music. Finally, for performers, conductors, and music broadcasters, these thoughtful analyses can offer enriched understandings of this repertoire and suggest fresh, new programming possibilities to share with listeners-an endeavor of discovery for all those interested in twentieth-century music"--
Download or read book Can t Stop the Grrrls written by Lily E. Hirsch and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From stars like Britney Spears and Mariah Carey to classic icons like Yoko Ono, female musicians have long been the target of toxic labels in the media and popular culture: liar, crazy, snake, diva, and so on. This book takes a candid look at the full range of sexist labeling and inspires us to think about these remarkable women on their own terms"--
Download or read book Thematizations of the Goddess in South Asian Cinema written by Anway Mukhopadhyay and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents cross-disciplinary explorations of the tropes, themes and representational frameworks constellating around the figure of the Goddess in South Asian cinema. It critically approaches the Goddess theme in various genres of South Asian cinema, using analytical tools culled from gender studies, comparative cultural studies, and religious studies, as well as film semiotics. The films discussed here represent variegated thematizations of the Goddess across regions in South Asia, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and various geo-cultural locations in India. As the volume highlights the regional and politico-cultural differences and commonalities in representational schemes between South Asian films of different genres through the Goddess motif, it will appeal to scholars of film studies, South Asian studies and comparative religion, and will hold a special appeal for those interested in Goddess cultures and theology.
Download or read book Anneliese Landau s Life in Music Nazi Germany to migr California written by Lily E. Hirsch and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2019 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed and moving account of the life of Anneliese Landau, who, in Nazi Germany and later in émigré California, fought against prejudice to do notable work in music.
Download or read book The Bitch is Back written by Sarah Appleton Aguiar and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When she wrote The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood created a really villainous villain who happened to be a woman, partly in reaction to the fact that in Western literature the most meaty, wicked, and therefore interesting parts always seemed to go to male characters. Aguiar (English, Murray State U.) cites the beacon shone by Atwood in introducing her study, which discusses the dawning in contemporary literature of "the season of the bitch": a re-evaluation and reclaiming of female toughness, thorniness, and just plain badness in which women characters are also portrayed as more complete, possessed of motivations, and strongly individual. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Sorcerer s Serenade written by Vincent Netherward and published by JN Bazaar Enterprise. This book was released on 2023-09-13 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the dark, mystical heart of London, Valyrian Jacyn, a fourth-generation sorcerer, stumbles upon an ancient grimoire known as the Enchiridion Greco Daemons. This dusty tome, discovered in the cryptic basement of the Bloodfluke Manor, once belonging to his enigmatic Great Grandmother, the Witch Wilhelmina Bloodfluke, holds the key to a world of arcane secrets and forbidden rituals. As Valyrian delves deeper into the grimoire's pages, he unravels a tapestry of eerie and enchanting history surrounding the Bloodfluke Manor. The manor's legacy is steeped in darkness, rife with stories of malevolent spirits, hidden chambers, and a lineage of powerful witches and sorcerers. Among the grimoire's chilling incantations and ominous instructions, one particular ritual stands out—the capture of a muse. Valyrian, drawn by the allure of this forbidden act, decides to partake in the ritual, ensnaring the muse Euterpe in a web of magic and desire. With Euterpe as his captive muse, Valyrian's dreams of rock and roll stardom begin to take shape. His band, "Valyrian and the Misfits," rises to fame with the enchanting compositions Euterpe provides, compositions infused with otherworldly power that captivates audiences far and wide. Yet, beneath the surface, Euterpe's growing resentment simmers. Her once-enchanting music becomes tainted with a dark undertone as she yearns for her freedom. Amidst Valyrian's success, his inner struggle with newfound power and the consequences of his actions deepen. Paranoia creeps into his life, and a rival sorcerer, Geoffrey Fitzaidan, learns of Valyrian's secret, setting the stage for a dangerous confrontation. Euterpe, determined to turn the tables, hatches a plan to break free from her captor's grasp. Valyrian's life takes a sinister turn as the muse's powers begin to manifest in ways he never anticipated. Throughout this twisted tale, Valyrian maintains a conversant tone, sometimes breaking the fourth wall with dark humor. As he navigates the treacherous waters of fame, power, and magic, he grapples with his own demons while facing external threats from rival sorcerers and the captive muse herself. In a climactic showdown between Valyrian and Euterpe, the consequences of their actions unravel, and the true price of power becomes evident. Dark humor weaves through the narrative, providing a unique perspective on a tale of redemption and transformation. The story takes an unexpected turn in the epilogue when the mysterious narrator is unmasked as none other than Wilhelmina Bloodfluke, Valyrian's great-grandmother. Her enigmatic presence throughout the tale leaves room for interpretation, adding a cryptic twist to the narrative's conclusion. "Sorcerer's Serenade: A Muse’s Captive Descent" is a dark fantasy novel that explores the intricate interplay of music, magic, and the human psyche. With its conversational tone, dark humor, and enigmatic twists, it invites readers to ponder the depths of redemption and the enduring power of the arcane.
Download or read book Ferruccio Busoni As Architect of Sound written by Associate Professor of Music History Erinn E Knyt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book presents a broad view of Busoni's compositional activities as not only connected to musical traditions of the past, especially the music of J.S. Bach and W.A. Mozart, but also as closely aligned with contemporary interest in experimentalism. Developments during the twentieth century included new means of pitch organization, the spatialization of sound, and the expansion of formal structures. Busoni helped pioneer these trends by writing pieces in which sound radiates from different directions, by creating montage formal structures, and by freely using all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale without avoiding consonances. In the process, the book brings Busoni's music into discourse with recent multivalent accounts of modernism in music that move beyond notions of rupture with the past as well as beyond elitist esotericism. In addition, it reveals that many of Busoni's innovations were rooted in interdisciplinary thinking that reconciled the spatial and the temporal in unique manners. While his abstract metaphysical notions of music transcended physical boundaries, the realization of his ideas was informed by an understanding of tangible architectural spaces and styles fostered by the study of buildings and floor plans. In addition, he engaged in a rich exchange of ideas with contemporary architects and artists, such as Henry Van de Velde and members of the Weimar Bauhaus. The book concludes by documenting ways Busoni's spatialized architectural music left a lasting imprint on future generations of composers, artists, and early film pioneers, such as Hans Richter, Heinrich Neugeboren, Wladimir Vogel, Stefan Wolpe, and Edgard Varèse"--
Download or read book The Magician written by Colm Toibin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as a Notable Book, a Critics' Top Book, and a Top 10 Book of Historical Fiction by The New York Times, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post, Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal From one of today's most brilliant and beloved novelists, a dazzling, epic family saga set across a half-century spanning World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War. Colm Tóibín's magnificent new novel opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles. In a stunning marriage of research and imagination, Tóibín explores the heart and mind of a writer whose gift is unparalleled and whose life is driven by a need to belong and the anguish of illicit desire. The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife Katia, and the times in which they lived--the first world war, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile. This is a man and a family fiercely engaged by the world, profoundly flawed, and unforgettable. As People magazine said about The Master, "It's a delicate, mysterious process, this act of creation, fraught with psychological tension, and Tóibín captures it beautifully."
Download or read book The Companionship of Books and Other Papers written by Frederic Rowland Marvin and published by New York Putnam 1905.. This book was released on 1905 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The Companionship of Books and Other Papers makes this explanation with regard to the book he now presents to the reading public. The sentences and paragraphs and, in some instances, more lengthy articles which compose this work were written at various times, and many of them have been published in magazines and literary periodicals. To those already published have been added a number that here for the first time make their appearance in print. They sustain little or no relation to each other, and, therefore, admit of only a very general arrangement. The last page in the collection was finished two years ago, but the author did not feel that the work was completed, and could not bring himself to deliver the manuscript into the hands of his publisher. The generous reception, however, given to his Last Words of Distinguished Men and Women, and his Flowers of Song from Many Lands has encouraged him to place this book upon the list of his published works. Its preparation furnished to him many delightful hours in the library, and he now sends it forth with the hope that it may bring to others both pleasure and profit.
Download or read book Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature written by Justyna Sempruch and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Justyna Sempruch analyzes contemporary representations of the “witch” as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders. Sempruch revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current perceptions in feminist scholarship of exclusion and difference. She examines a selection of twentieth-century US American, Canadian, and European narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the archetype of the “witch” widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these metaphors, Sempruch develops a new concept of the witch, one that challenges traditional gender-biased theories linking it either to a malevolent “hag” on the margins of culture or to unrestrained “feminine” sexual desire. Sempruch turns, instead, to the causes for radical feminist critique of “feminine” sexuality as a fabrication of logocentric thinking and shows that the problematic conversion of the “hag” into a “superwoman” can be interpreted today as a therapeutic performance translating fixed identity into a site of continuous negotiation of the subject in process. Tracing the development of feminist constructs of the witch from 1970s radical texts to the present, Sempruch explores the early psychoanalytical writings of Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, and feminist reformulations of identity by Butler and Braidotti, with fictional texts from different political and cultural contexts.
Download or read book Music for Patriots Politicians and Presidents written by Vera Brodsky Lawrence and published by New York : Macmillan. This book was released on 1975 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a remarkable collection, with lyrics from pre-Revolution resistance to post-Civil War Reconstruction, covering nearly every important issue and event in the history of that period: the Constitution, presidential campaigns, battles, defeats, heroes, villains, slavery, abolition, and even women's rights. Accompanying each song--many of which are facsimiles of the original music pages--is Ms. Lawrence's informative and witty commentary. Contemporary documentary material gives enlightening historical background and explains the incidents and personalities that inspired the song text. The vitality of these songs is reflected in the splendid illustrations that appear on every page.
Download or read book You Ain t Heard Nothin Yet written by Andrew Sarris and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's most celebrated film critics, author of the seminal work "The American Cinema", offers this definitive statement on film in a masterwork that has been 25 years in the making. From Chaplin to Garbo to Welles, from gangster films to screwball comedies to musicals--this is the history movie buffs have been waiting for.
Download or read book Interactions with a Violent Past written by Sina Emde and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second and Third Indochina Wars are the subject of important ongoing scholarship, but there has been little research on the lasting impact of wartime violence on local societies and populations, in Vietnam as well as in Laos and Cambodia. Today's Lao, Vietnamese and Cambodian landscapes bear the imprint of competing violent ideologies and their perilous material manifestations. From battlefields and massively bombed terrain to reeducation camps and resettled villages, the past lingers on in the physical environment. The nine essays in this volume discuss post-conflict landscapes as contested spaces imbued with memory-work conveying differing interpretations of the recent past, expressed through material (even, monumental) objects, ritual performances, and oral narratives (or silences). While Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese landscapes are filled with tenacious traces of a violent past, creating an unsolicited and malevolent sense of place among their inhabitants, they can in turn be transformed by actions of resilient and resourceful local communities.
Download or read book Amazing Stories written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lyric Orientations written by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lyric Orientations, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge explores the power of lyric poetry to stir the social and emotional lives of human beings in the face of the ineffable nature of our mortality. She focuses on two German-speaking masters of lyric prose and poetry: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). While Hölderlin and Rilke are stylistically very different, each believes in the power of poetic language to orient us as social beings in contexts that otherwise can be alienating. They likewise share the conviction that such alienation cannot be overcome once and for all in any universal event. Both argue that to deny the uncertainty created by the absence of any such event (or to deny the alienation itself) is likewise to deny the particularly human condition of uncertainty and mortality. By drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell, who explores how language in all its formal aspects actually enables us to engage meaningfully with the world, Eldridge challenges poststructuralist scholarship, which stresses the limitations—even the failure—of language in the face of reality. Eldridge provides detailed readings of Hölderlin and Rilke and positions them in a broader narrative of modernity that helps make sense of their difficult and occasionally contradictory self-characterizations. Her account of the orienting and engaging capabilities of language reconciles the extraordinarily ambitious claims that Hölderlin and Rilke make for poetry—that it can create political communities, that it can change how humans relate to death, and that it can unite the sensual and intellectual components of human subjectivity—and the often difficult, fragmented, or hermetic nature of their individual poems.
