Download or read book Max Reger and Historicist Modernisms written by Antonius Bittmann and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive English-language account of Reger's oeuvre, Antonius Bittmann emphatically revises misconceptions about Reger's music which has often been stigmatized because of its indebtedness to earlier composers, especially Brahms. As Bittmann argues, Reger does not turn to historical models in order to preserve or reconstitute antiquated musical languages; rather, viewing himself as a horseman "riding steadfastly to the left," Reger appropriates the musical past for the most modern ends. Reflecting upon conflicting notions of musical progress, the Phantasie und Fuge über den Namen B-A-C-H, Op. 46, relies on revered traditions to restore cultural health, whereas his Fourth Violin Sonata, Op. 72, adulterates its compositional models with epithets. Reger's desire to escape the shadow of his great predecessors is evident in works that manifest an aesthetic and intellectual current that probe the psychological underpinnings of creation and reception of art, leading him to eschew history altogether. Taking a strong interest in reception history, Bittmann reassesses Reger's work by drawing on a wide array of interdisciplinary sources in literary criticism, philosophy, and cultural history.
Download or read book German Modernism written by Walter Frisch and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-07-25 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pioneering, erudite study of a pivotal era in the arts, Walter Frisch examines music and its relationship to early modernism in the Austro-German sphere. Seeking to explore the period on its own terms, Frisch questions the common assumption that works created from the later 1870s through World War I were transitional between late romanticism and high modernism. Drawing on a wide range of examples across different media, he establishes a cultural and intellectual context for late Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as their less familiar contemporaries Eugen d'Albert, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Max von Schillings, and Franz Schreker. Frisch explores "ambivalent" modernism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as reflected in the attitudes of, and relationship between, Nietzsche and Wagner. He goes on to examine how naturalism, the first self-conscious movement of German modernism, intersected with musical values and practices of the day. He proposes convergences between music and the visual arts in the works of Brahms, Max Klinger, Schoenberg, and Kandinsky. Frisch also explains how, near the turn of the century, composers drew inspiration and techniques from music of the past—the Renaissance, Bach, Mozart, and Wagner. Finally, he demonstrates how irony became a key strategy in the novels and novellas of Thomas Mann, the symphonies of Mahler, and the operas of Strauss and Hofmannsthal.
Download or read book Max Reger and Karl Straube written by Christopher Anderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Reger (1873-1916) is perhaps best-known for his organ music. This quickly assumed a prominent place in the repertory of German organists due in large measure to the efforts of Reger?s contemporary Karl Straube (1873-1950). The personal and collegial relationship between the composer and performer began in 1898 and developed until Reger?s death. By that time, Straube had established himself as an important artist and teacher in Leipzig and the central authority for the interpretation of Reger?s organ music. The Reger-Straube relationship functioned on a number of levels with decisive consequences both for the composition of the music and its interpretation over a period fraught with upheaval on sociopolitical, religious and aesthetic fronts. This book evaluates the significance of the relationship between the composer and organist using primary source materials such as autograph performing manuscripts, reviews, programmes, letters and archival sources from contemporary organ building. The result is a much enhanced understanding of Reger in terms of performance practice and reception history, and a re-examination of Straube and, more broadly, of Leipzig as a musical centre during this period.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music written by John Michael Cooper and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music provides detailed and authoritative articles for the most important composers, concepts, genres, music educators, performers, theorists, writings, and works of cultivated music in Europe and the Americas during the period 1789-1914. The roster of biographical entries includes not only canonical composers such as Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Chopin, Fauré, Grieg, Liszt, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, Rossini, Schubert, Robert Schumann, Sibelius, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Wagner, and Wolf, but also less-well-known distinguished contemporaries of those composers (among them George Whitefield Chadwick, Cécile Chaminade, Ernesto Elorduy, Chiquinha Gonzaga, Fanny Hensel, C. H. Parry, and Clara Schumann, to name but a few). Significant literary and cultural topics such as Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s theoretical writings of the 1850s, as well as entries on other cultural luminaries who significantly influenced music’s Romanticisms – among them J. S. Bach, Goethe, Haydn, Handel, Heine, Mozart, Schiller, and Shakespeare – are also included. Entries on important institutions (conservatory, orphéon, Männerchor), concepts (biographical fallacy, copyright, exoticism, feminism, nationalism, performance practice), and political caesurae and movements (First and Second French Empire, First, Second, and Third French Republic, Franco-Prussian War, Revolutions of 1848, Risorgimento) round out the dictionary section. Like other volumes in this series, this book's more than 500 entries are preceded by an introductory essay that explains the essential concepts necessary for understanding and exploring further the vast and complex musical landscape of Romanticism, plus a detailed Chronology. Concluding the volume is an extensive bibliography that lists the most important source-critical series of editions of Romantic music, important general writings on the period and its music, and composer-by-composer bibliographies.
Download or read book Five Lives in Music written by Cecelia Hopkins Porter and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing a historical cross-section of performance and training in Western music since the seventeenth century, Five Lives in Music brings to light the private and performance lives of five remarkable women musicians and composers. Elegantly guiding readers through the Thirty Years War in central Europe, elite courts in Germany, urban salons in Paris, Nazi control of Germany and Austria, and American musical life today, as well as personal experiences of marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, Cecelia Hopkins Porter provides valuable insights into the culture in which each woman was active. Porter begins with the Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lueneberg, a harpsichordist who also presided over seventeenth-century North German court music as an impresario. At the forefront of French Baroque composition, composer Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre bridged a widening cultural gap between the Versailles nobility and the urban bourgeoisie of Paris. A century later, Josephine Lang, a prodigiously talented pianist and dedicated composer, participated at various times in the German Romantic world of lieder through her important arts salon. Lastly, the twentieth century brought forth two exceptional women: Baroness Maria Bach, a composer and pianist of twentieth-century Vienna's upper bourgeoisie and its brilliant musical milieu in the era of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Erich Korngold; and Ann Schein, a brilliant and dauntless American piano prodigy whose career, ongoing today though only partially recognized, led her to study with the legendary virtuosos Arthur Rubinstein and Myra Hess. Mining musical autographs, unpublished letters and press reviews, interviews, and music archives in the United States and Europe, Porter probes each musician's social and economic status, her education and musical training, the cultural expectations within the traditions and restrictions of each woman's society, and other factors. Throughout the lively and focused portraits of these five women, Porter finds common threads, both personal and contextual, that extend to a larger discussion of the lives and careers of female composers and performers throughout centuries of music history.
Download or read book German Modernism written by Walter Frisch and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-07-25 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pioneering, erudite study of a pivotal era in the arts, Walter Frisch examines music and its relationship to early modernism in the Austro-German sphere. Seeking to explore the period on its own terms, Frisch questions the common assumption that works created from the later 1870s through World War I were transitional between late romanticism and high modernism. Drawing on a wide range of examples across different media, he establishes a cultural and intellectual context for late Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as their less familiar contemporaries Eugen d'Albert, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Max von Schillings, and Franz Schreker. Frisch explores "ambivalent" modernism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as reflected in the attitudes of, and relationship between, Nietzsche and Wagner. He goes on to examine how naturalism, the first self-conscious movement of German modernism, intersected with musical values and practices of the day. He proposes convergences between music and the visual arts in the works of Brahms, Max Klinger, Schoenberg, and Kandinsky. Frisch also explains how, near the turn of the century, composers drew inspiration and techniques from music of the past—the Renaissance, Bach, Mozart, and Wagner. Finally, he demonstrates how irony became a key strategy in the novels and novellas of Thomas Mann, the symphonies of Mahler, and the operas of Strauss and Hofmannsthal.
Download or read book Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bart k written by Lynn M. Hooker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the most popular works of nineteenth-century music were labeled either "Hungarian" or "Gypsy" in style, including many of the best-known and least-respected of Liszt's compositions. In the early twentieth century, Béla Bartók and his colleagues questioned not only the Hungarianness but also the good taste of that style. Bartók argued that it should be discarded in favor of a national style based in the "genuine" folk music of the rural peasantry. Between the heyday of the nineteenth-century Hungarian-Gypsy style and its replacement by a new paradigm of "authentic" national style was a vigorous decades-long debate-one little known inside or outside Hungary-over what it meant to be Hungarian, European, and modern. Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók traces the historical process that defined the conventions of Hungarian-Gypsy style. Author Lynn M. Hooker frames her study around the 1911 celebration of Liszt's centennial. In so doing, she analyzes Liszt's problematic role as a Hungarian-born composer and leader of Hungarian art music who spent most of his life outside of Hungary and questioned whether Hungary's national music was more the creation of Hungarians or Roma (Gypsies). The themes of race and nation that emerge in the discussion of Liszt are further developed in an analysis of discourse on Hungarian national music throughout the Hungarian press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Showing how the "discovery" of "genuine" folk music by Bartók and Kodály, often depicted as a purely "scientific" matter, responds directly to concerns raised by earlier writers about the "problem of Hungarian music," Hooker argues that the innovations of Bartók and Kodály and their circle are not so much in correcting a flawed concept of the national as in using the idea of national authenticity to open up freedom for composers to explore more stylistic options, including the exploration of modernist musical language. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók is essential reading for musicologists, musicians, and concertgoers alike.
Download or read book The Organ Music of Johannes Brahms written by Barbara Owen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Influenced by Robert and Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim, Johannes Brahms not only learned to play the organ at the beginning of his career, but also wrote significant compositions for the instrument as a result of his early counterpoint study. He composed for the organ only sporadically or as part of larger choral and instrumental works in his subsequent career. During the final year of his life, however, he returned to pure organ composition with a set of chorale preludes--though many of these are thought to have been revisions of earlier works. Today, the organ works of Johannes Brahms are recognized as beautifully-crafted compositions by church and concert organists across the world and have become a much-cherished component of the repertoire. Until now, however, most scholarly accounts of Brahms's life and work treat his works for the organ as a minor footnote in his development as a composer. Precisely because the collection of organ works is not extensive, the pieces--composed at different times during Brahms's lifetime--help to map his path as a composer, pinpointing various stages in his artistic development. In this volume, Barbara Owen offers the first in-depth study of this corpus, considering Brahms's organ works in relation to his background, methods, and overall artistic development, his contacts with organs and organists, the influence of his predecessors and contemporaries, and analyses of each specific work and its place in Brahms's career. Her expert history and analysis of Brahms's individual organ works and their interpretation also investigates contemporary practices relative to the performance of these pieces. The book's three valuable appendices present a guide to editions of Brahms's organ works, a discussion of the organ in Brahms's world that highlights some organs the composer would have heard, and a listing of the organ transcriptions of Brahms's work. Blending unique insights into composition and performance practice, this book will be read eagerly by performers, students, and scholars of the organ, Brahms, and the music of the Nineteenth Century.
Download or read book Socialist Laments written by Martha Sprigge and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antifascist and socialist monuments pervaded the landscape of the former German Democratic Republic (1949-89), presenting a distorted vision of the national past. Official commemorative culture in East Germany celebrated a selective set of political heroes, seeming to leave no public space for mourning those who were excluded from the country's founding myths. Socialist Laments: Musical Mourning in the German Democratic Republic examines the role of music in this nation's memorial culture, demonstrating how music facilitated the expressions of loss within spaces of commemoration for East German citizens. Music performed during state-sponsored memorial rituals no doubt bolstered official narratives of the German past. But it simultaneously provided an outlet for mourning in highly politicized environment. The book presents both a history and theory of musical mourning in East Germany. Using a site-specific approach to analysis, author Martha Sprigge demonstrates how the multiple semantic networks opened up by these musical works facilitated many memorial associations without necessitating the overt articulation of a mourned subject. Throughout the country's forty-year existence, music offered East German citizens an audible outlet for working through traumatic losses-both collective and individual-that was distinct from other artistic expressive possibilities. The book reveals the ways that East Germany's extensive commemorative repertoire helped composers, performers, and audiences navigate between the inevitable need to mourn on the one hand, and the seeming impossibilities of mourning on the other.
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 Notes for Violists written by David M. Bynog and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-12 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Notes for Violists: A Guide to the Repertoire provides historical and analytical information about thirty-five pieces of classical music written for the viola. Arranged alphabetically by composer, the book covers some of the best-known examples of string music repertoire prominently involving the viola. A single chapter is devoted to each of the thirty-five works. The selected string repertoire includes concertos, chamber music, and works for solo viola composed between the early part of the eighteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Each chapter includes biographical information about the composer and historical information about the work. A detailed musical analysis of each work is also included. Numerous charts and musical examples provide further references for the reader"--
Download or read book The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss written by Wayne Heisler and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly interdisciplinary study of Strauss's contributions to ballet, his collaboration with prominent dance artists of his time, and his explorations of musical modernism.
Download or read book Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic written by Kyle Frackman and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaches the topic of classical music in the GDR from an interdisciplinary perspective, questioning the assumption that classical music functioned purely as an ideological support for the state.
Download or read book Selected Writings of Max Reger written by Christopher Anderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Reger (1873-1916) was a celebrated German composer, performer on piano and organ, and conductor. Well known for his compositions for keyboards and orchestra, Reger worked during the crucial decades when Western music transformed itself from the misty veil of Romanticism and Impressionism to the more hard-edged modernism that would prevail in the 20th century. Less well known are his writings about music and the composer's craft. Although he wrote a major book on music theory published in 1903 (and translated into English a year later), his extended essays on composition, his fellow composers, and analysis have never appeared before in English. Christopher Anderson, a noted Reger scholar, has gone back to original manuscripts as well as the published versions of these writings to produce definitive new texts. Additionally, Anderson has written an opening essay placing Reger's writings and music in the context of his time. This volume will appeal strongly to those interested in the Late Romantic era, musical composition and aesthetics, and of course those interested in the music and life of Reger
Download or read book Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism written by Daniel M. Grimley and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beryl Foster's authoritative study can claim to be the most thorough investigation of this repertoire yet to have appeared in English, and is likely to remain the standard work on the subject for many years to come. TLS --
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music written by Nicole V. Gagné and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decade of the 19th century, modernist sensibilities reached a critical mass and emerged more frequently in music as composers began employing dissonance, polyrhythm, atonality, and densities. Conversely, many 20th-century composers eschewed modernist devices and wrote accessible works in a tonal idiom, which drew chiefly on classical, romantic, and folk models. Then the postmodern sensibility followed, with its enthusiasm for the unprecedented availability of virtually every type of music, andit engendered numerous sub-groups, including multiculturalism, minimalism, multimedia, and free improvisation. Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music focuses on modernist and postmodern classical music worldwide from 1890to the present. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries, with more than 60 entries explaining the methods, styles, and acoustic and electronic media peculiar tonew music, and over 350 entries giving essential information on the lives and work of the people who have composed and performed that music. Those entries also include pop, jazz, and rock composer/musicians whose work either overlaps the realm of classical music or else is so radical within its own field that it merits discussion in this context. This book is a must for anyone, musician or non-musician, student or professional, who seeks to research and learn more about any significant aspect of modern and contemporary classical music worldwide.
Download or read book Selected Writings of Max Reger written by Christopher Anderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Reger (1873-1916) was a celebrated German composer, performer on piano and organ, and conductor. Well known for his compositions for keyboards and orchestra, Reger worked during the crucial decades when Western music transformed itself from the misty veil of Romanticism and Impressionism to the more hard-edged modernism that would prevail in the 20th century. Less well known are his writings about music and the composer's craft. Although he wrote a major book on music theory published in 1903 (and translated into English a year later), his extended essays on composition, his fellow composers, and analysis have never appeared before in English. Christopher Anderson, a noted Reger scholar, has gone back to original manuscripts as well as the published versions of these writings to produce definitive new texts. Additionally, Anderson has written an opening essay placing Reger's writings and music in the context of his time. This volume will appeal strongly to those interested in the Late Romantic era, musical composition and aesthetics, and of course those interested in the music and life of Reger
