Download or read book Marc Blitzstein written by Howard Pollack and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-10-18 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning music historian Howard Pollack's new biography of Marc Blitzstein deftly captures the fascinating life and career of an American composer who was openly gay and Marxist at a time when neither was acceptable to the American public. The first biographer to deal with Blitzstein's music as well as his life, Pollack delves deeply into the Blitzstein's life, uncovering new details about his marriage to novelist Eva Goldbeck and his compositional process. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, this book is a must-have for any fan of Broadway or American music.
Download or read book The Cradle Will Rock written by Marc Blitzstein and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Marc Blitzstein written by Howard Pollack and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A composer and lyricist of enormous innovation and influence, Marc Blitzstein remains one of the most versatile and fascinating figures in the history of American music, his creative output running the gamut from films scores and Broadway operas to art songs and chamber pieces. A prominent leftist and social maverick, Blitzstein constantly pushed the boundaries of convention in mid-century America in both his work and his life. Award-winning music historian Howard Pollack's new biography covers Blitzstein's life in full, from his childhood in Philadelphia to his violent death in Martinique at age 58. The author describes how this student of contemporary luminaries Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg became swept up in the stormy political atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s and throughout his career walked the fine line between his formal training and his populist principles. Indeed, Blitzstein developed a unique sound that drew on everything contemporary, from the high modernism of Stravinsky and Hindemith to jazz and Broadway show tunes. Pollack captures the astonishing breadth of Blitzstein's work--from provocative operas like The Cradle Will Rock, No for an Answer, and Regina, to the wartime Airborne Symphony composed during his years in service, to lesser known ballets, film scores, and stage works. A courageous artist, Blitzstein translated Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera during the heyday of McCarthyism and the red scare, and turned it into an off-Broadway sensation, its "Mack the Knife" becoming one of the era's biggest hits. Beautifully written, drawing on new interviews with friends and family of the composer, and making extensive use of new archival and secondary sources, Marc Blitzstein presents the most complete biography of this important American artist.
Download or read book Mark the Music written by Eric A. Gordon and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Marc Blitzstein written by Leonard Lehrman and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2005-09-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marc Blitzstein was one of the 20th century's most important American composers, lyricists, and critics, often credited with having virtually invented opera in the American vernacular. Called the father of American opera in the vernacular by luminaries Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, Blitzstein was a masterful pianist, coach, and accompanist, though, ironically, he made more money on the lyrics to one song—Mack the Knife—than on everything else he ever did. Blitzstein's brilliant career was cut short in 1964 when he died at the age of 58. This book catalogs Blitzstein's own writings and writings about him, followed by detailed listings (chronological, alphabetical, and genre), analysis, a comprehensive performance history, and summaries of all known critiques of his 128 original musical works and 18 texts set to the music of others. Shown in detail are the ways in which Blitzstein took music from his earlier works and developed it in later works, a process that Lehrman utilized in completing (with Bernstein's and the Estate's approval) 20 Blitzstein works for performance, including The Cradle Will Rock, I've Got the Tune, No for an Answer, Idiots First, and Sacco and Vanzetti, which Blitzstein believed would be his magnum opus. The book provides a unique and full perspective on the works of one of America's greatest composers—one who deserves to be better known.
Download or read book An Exhibition of the Marc Blitzstein Papers Nov 1 6 1965 Union Theater written by University of Wisconsin. Wisconsin Center for Theatre Research and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Summertime George Gershwin s Life in Music written by Richard Crawford and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of a beloved American composer reflected through his music, writings, and letters. New York City native and gifted pianist George Gershwin blossomed as an accompanist before his talent as a songwriter opened the way to Broadway, where he fashioned his own brand of American music. He composed a long run of musical comedies, many with his brother Ira as lyricist, but his aspirations reached beyond commercial success. A lifetime learner, Gershwin was able to appeal to listeners on both sides of the purported popular-classical divide. In 1924—when he was just twenty-five—he bridged that gap with his first instrumental composition, Rhapsody in Blue, an instant classic premiered by Paul Whiteman’s jazz orchestra, as the anchor of a concert entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music.” From that time forward his work as a composer, pianist, and citizen of the Jazz Age made him in some circles a leader on America’s musical scene. The late1920s found him extending the range of the shows he scored to include the United Kingdom, and he published several articles to reveal his thinking about a range of musical matters. Moreover, having polished his skills as an orchestrator, he pushed boundaries again in 1935 with the groundbreaking folk opera, Porgy and Bess—his magnum opus. Gershwin’s talent and warmth made him a presence in New York’s musical and social circles (and linked him romantically with pianist-composer Kay Swift). In 1936 he and Ira moved west to write songs for Hollywood. Their work was cut short, however, when George developed a brain tumor and died at thirty-eight, a beloved American artist. Drawing extensively from letters and contemporaneous accounts, acclaimed music historian Richard Crawford traces the arc of Gershwin’s remarkable life, seamlessly blending colorful anecdotes with a discussion of Gershwin’s unforgettable oeuvre. His days on earth were limited to the summertime of life. But the spirit and inventive vitality of the music he left behind lives on.
Download or read book Social Criticism in the Original Theatre Librettos of Marc Blitzstein written by Paul Myers Talley and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cultural Front written by Michael Denning and published by Verso. This book was released on 1998 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As garment workers, longshoremen, autoworkers, sharecroppers and clerks took to the streets, striking and organizing unions in the midst of the Depression, artists, writers and filmmakers joined the insurgent social movement by creating a cultural front. Disney cartoonists walked picket lines, and Billie Holiday sand 'Strange Fruit' at the left-wing cabaret, Café Society. Duke Ellington produced a radical musical, Jump for Joy, New York garment workers staged the legendary Broadway revue Pins and Needles, and Orson Welles and his Mercury players took their labor operas and anti-fascist Shakespeare to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane. A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a vivid mural of this extraordinary upheaval which reshaped American culture in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Cradle Will Rock written by Tim Robbins and published by Newmarket Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Official tie-in to the major motion picture coming from Touchstone Pictures later this year, from the Academy Award-nominated writer-director of Dead Man Walking and Bob Roberts. An extraordinary film, written and directed by Robbins, supported by an amazing cast, about the events in 1936, surrounding the final days of the Federal Theatre Project, when Orson Welles and John Houseman staged a renegade production of Marc Blitzstein's proletariat musical The Cradle Will Rock, which became one of America's greatest moments in the history of American theater.
Download or read book The Marc Blitzstein Songbook written by Marc Blitzstein and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Queer Composition of America s Sound written by Nadine Hubbs and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-10-18 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this vibrant and pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a gifted group of Manhattan-based gay composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "American sound" and in the process served as architects of modern American identity. Focusing on a talented circle that included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, The Queer Composition of America's Sound homes in on the role of these artists' self-identification—especially with tonal music, French culture, and homosexuality—in the creation of a musical idiom that even today signifies "America" in commercials, movies, radio and television, and the concert hall.
Download or read book Communists in Closets written by Bettina Aptheker and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-09 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s explores the history of gay, lesbian, and non-heterosexual people in the Communist Party in the United States. The Communist Party banned lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people from membership beginning in 1938 when it cast them off as "degenerates." It persisted in this policy until 1991. During this 60-year ban, gays and lesbians who did join the Communist Party were deeply closeted within it, as well as in their public lives as both queer and Communist. By the late 1930s, the Communist Party had a membership approaching 100,000 and tens of thousands more people moved in its orbit through the Popular Front against fascism, anti-racist organizing, especially in the south, and its widely read cultural magazine, The New Masses. Based on a decade of archival research, correspondence, and interviews, Bettina Aptheker explores this history, also pulling from her own experience as a closeted lesbian in the Communist Party in the 1960s and ‘70s. Ironically, and in spite of this homophobia, individual Communists laid some of the political and theoretical foundations for lesbian and gay liberation and women’s liberation, and contributed significantly to peace, social justice, civil rights, and Black and Latinx liberation movements. This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and general readers in political history, gender studies, and the history of sexuality.
Download or read book Weill Blitzstein and Bernstein written by Rebecca Schmid and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study to explore the crucial influence of Kurt Weill on operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein. Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed that the model of Kurt Weill could not be repeated. Yet Weill's stage works set an inescapable precedent for composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Rebecca Schmid explores how Weill's formal innovations in particular laid the groundwork for operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein, although both composers resisted or downplayed his aesthetic contribution to American tradition. Comparative analysis based on Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence and other modes of intertextuality reveals that the principles of Weill's opera reform would catalyze an indigenous movement in sophisticated, socially engaged music theatre. Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein: A Study of Influence focuses on works that represent different phases of Weill's mission to renew the genre of opera, evolving from Die Dreigroschenoper to the musical play Lady in the Dark and the Broadway Opera Street Scene. Blitzstein and Bernstein in turn defied formal boundaries with The Cradle Will Rock, Regina, Trouble in Tahiti, Candide, and West Side Story - part of a short-lived movement in mid-twentieth century America that coincided with a renaissance for Weill's German-period works following the premiere of Blitzstein's translation, The Threepenny Opera, under Bernstein's baton. The unpublished A Pray by Blecht, for which Bernstein rejoined Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, his collaborators on West Side Story, deepens the connection of Bernstein's aesthetic to Weill.
Download or read book Aaron Copland written by Aaron Copland and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Enchanted Evenings written by Geoffrey Holden Block and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the great Broadway hits, how they were conceived, written and performed.
Download or read book Catalog of Copyright Entries written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by . This book was released on 1956 with total page 1066 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
