Download or read book Mozart in Motion written by Patrick Mackie and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In exhilarating, transformative prose, the poet Patrick Mackie reveals a musician in dialogue with culture at its most sweepingly progressive. Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand about his music, and what can it reveal to us about the great composer? Following Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death, from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments, from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer’s life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics, and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship. In Mozart in Motion, we are returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century and hear Mozart’s music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being.
Download or read book Mozart written by Jan Swafford and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.
Download or read book Mozart in the Jungle written by Blair Tindall and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The memoir that inspired the two-time Golden Globe Award–winning comedy series: “Funny . . . heartbreaking . . . [and] utterly absorbing” (Lee Smith, New York Times–bestselling author of Guests on Earth). Oboist Blair Tindall recounts her decades-long professional career as a classical musician—from the recitals and Broadway orchestra performances to the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth in the backbiting New York classical music scene, where musicians trade sexual favors for plum jobs and assignments in orchestras across the city. Tindall and her fellow journeymen musicians often play drunk, high, or hopelessly hungover, live in decrepit apartments, and perform in hazardous conditions—working-class musicians who schlep across the city between low-paying gigs, without health-care benefits or retirement plans, a stark contrast to the rarefied experiences of overpaid classical musician superstars. An incisive, no-holds-barred account, Mozart in the Jungle is the first true, behind-the-scenes look at what goes on backstage and in the orchestra pit. The book that inspired the Amazon Original series starring Gael García Bernal and Lola Kirke, this is “a fresh, highly readable and caustic perspective on an overglamorized world” (Publishers Weekly).
Download or read book Mozart s Grace written by Scott G. Burnham and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concentrating on music's effects, this book focuses on the most important elements of Mozart's music. Moving beyond conventional analysis and using the figurative powers of language with skill and imagination, this book engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings.
Download or read book Young Mozart written by William Augel and published by Humanoids, Inc.. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tender and playful glimpse at the childhood of the world's greatest musical genius.
Download or read book The Mozart Effect for Children written by Don Campbell and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-05-19 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his groundbreaking book, The Mozart Effect®, Don Campbell revealed the enormous healing powers of classical music. Now he shows you how to help the children in your life experience the same benefits. You don't have to be an expert on classical music to use this wise and compassionate book. Focusing each chapter on a particular age -- from prenatal through age ten -- Don Campbell explains how music is the perfect tool to improve children's language, movement, and social skills at home, school, and play. He presents dynamic, inventive ways to invigorate a child's imagination, and supplies simple exercises, musical menus, and entertaining games that will improve your child's memory. At once practical and profound, The Mozart Effect® for Children is an invaluable resource for all parents and educators who want to help their children imagine, achieve, and grow in every aspect of their lives.
Download or read book What to Listen for in Mozart written by Robert Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-06-07 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Simon & Schuster, What to Listen for in Mozart is Robert Harris' essential introduction to the world's most popular composer. An introduction to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart explores the essentials of his work, examining his place in the aristocratic society of the late eighteenth century, and discusses his life and death.
Download or read book A Natural History of the Piano written by Stuart Isacoff and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own. With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff—pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization—unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and individual style, and why it has so powerfully entertained generation upon generation of listeners. He illuminates the groundbreaking music of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, and Debussy. He analyzes the breathtaking techniques of Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Arthur Rubinstein, and Van Cliburn, and he gives musicians including Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Menahem Pressler, and Vladimir Horowitz the opportunity to discuss their approaches. Isacoff delineates how classical music and jazz influenced each other as the uniquely American art form progressed from ragtime, novelty, stride, boogie, bebop, and beyond, through Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, and Bill Charlap. A Natural History of the Piano distills a lifetime of research and passion into one brilliant narrative. We witness Mozart unveiling his monumental concertos in Vienna’s coffeehouses, using a special piano with one keyboard for the hands and another for the feet; European virtuoso Henri Herz entertaining rowdy miners during the California gold rush; Beethoven at his piano, conjuring healing angels to console a grieving mother who had lost her child; Liszt fainting in the arms of a page turner to spark an entire hall into hysterics. Here is the instrument in all its complexity and beauty. We learn of the incredible craftsmanship of a modern Steinway, the peculiarity of specialty pianos built for the Victorian household, the continuing innovation in keyboards including electronic ones. And most of all, we hear the music of the masters, from centuries ago and in our own age, brilliantly evoked and as marvelous as its most recent performance. With this wide-ranging volume, Isacoff gives us a must-have for music lovers, pianists, and the armchair musician.
Download or read book Reinventing Bach written by Paul Elie and published by Union Books. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 731 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johann Sebastian Bach – celebrated pipe organist, court composer and master of sacred music – was also a technical pioneer. Working in Germany in the early eighteenth century, he invented new instruments and carried out experiments in tuning, the effects of which are still with us today. Two hundred years later, a number of extraordinary musicians have utilised the music of Bach to thrilling effect through the art of recording, furthering their own virtuosity and reinventing the composer for our time. In Reinventing Bach, Paul Elie brilliantly blends the stories of modern musicians with a polyphonic account of our most celebrated composer’ s life to create a spellbinding narrative of the changing place of music in our lives. We see the sainted organist Albert Schweitzer playing to a mobile recording unit set up at London’ s Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach’ s organ works to the world beyond the churches, and Pablo Casals’ s Abbey Road recordings of Bach’ s cello suites transform the middle-class sitting room into a hotbed of existentialism; we watch Leopold Stokowski persuade Walt Disney to feature his own grand orchestrations of Bach in the animated classical-music movie Fantasia – which made Bach the sound of children’ s playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike – and we witness how Glenn Gould’ s Goldberg Variations made Bach the byword for postwar cool. Through the Beatles and Switched-on Bach and Gö del, Escher, Bach – through film, rock music, the Walkman, the CD and up to Yo-Yo Ma and the iPod – Elie shows us how dozens of gifted musicians searched, experimented and collaborated with one another in the service of a composer who emerged as the prototype of the spiritualised, technically savvy artist.
Download or read book Amadeus written by Ray Morton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MUSIC ON FILM: AMADEUS
Download or read book Debussy written by Stephen Walsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most revered composers of the twentieth century, Claude Debussy (1862–1918) achieved the unheard of: he reinvented the language of music without alienating the majority of music lovers. Debussy drove French music into entirely new regions of beauty and excitement at a time when old traditions threatened to stifle it. Yet despite his profound influence on French culture, Debussy’s own life was complicated and often troubled by struggles over money, women, and ill health. Here, Stephen Walsh, acclaimed author of Stravinsky, chronicles both the composer himself and the unique moment in European history that bore him. Walsh’s engagingly original approach is to enrich a lively biography with analyses of Debussy’s music: from his first daring breaks with the rules as a Conservatoire student to his achievements as the greatest French composer of his time.
Download or read book The Mozart of Basketball written by Todd Spehr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dražen Petrovic was born on October 22, 1964, in Šibenik, Croatia. Learning basketball at an early age from his older brother, Aleksandar, Dražen was a natural. He began his professional career at the age of fifteen, playing for the national team, where he began his rise through the European circuit. Known as a skilled shooter, it was not unusual for him to score 40, 50, even 60 points during a single game. While playing for Yugoslavia in the Olympics, Dražen and his team finished with the bronze medal in the 1984 Summer Olympic Games and the silver in the ’88 Games. He later won silver in the ’92 Olympics while playing for Croatia. In 1986, Dražen was drafted in the third round (60th overall) by the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers. Deciding to play a few more years in Europe, he did not come to the US until the beginning of the 1989–1990 season. Dražen, along with a handful of other players, were part of the first groups of Europeans to break into the NBA, paving the way for future stars. After struggling with playing time in Portland, Dražen was traded to the New Jersey Nets in 1991. He would become a premier player and was considered one of the finest shooters in the NBA, averaging over 20 points a game in his two full seasons with the Nets. He was both a hero in the US as well as at home in Croatia, where his success had become a beacon of hope for his beleaguered countrymen who were enduring war in what is now the former Yugoslavia. In the summer of 1993, after his best season in the NBA, Dražen traveled to Poland to help his country qualify for the upcoming FIBA European Basketball Championship. Deciding against flying with his team back to Croatia, he instead chose to drive there with his girlfriend. On June 7, 1993, only a few months before his twenty-ninth birthday, Dražen Petrovic died in a traffic collision in Denkendorf, Germany. Thousands attended the funeral in his hometown, and the New Jersey Nets retired his number 3. Even though his career was cut short, his passion, determination, and spirit continue to influence not only his home country, but international basketball as a whole. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Download or read book Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart written by Wye Jamison Allanbrook and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s widely influential Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart challenges the view that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music was a “pure play” of key and theme, more abstract than that of his predecessors. Allanbrook’s innovative work shows that Mozart used a vocabulary of symbolic gestures and musical rhythms to reveal the nature of his characters and their interrelations. The dance rhythms and meters that pervade his operas conveyed very specific meanings to the audiences of the day.
Download or read book Memoirs written by Lorenzo Da Ponte and published by NYRB Classics. This book was released on 2000-05-31 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The memoirs of the man who wrote the libretti for three of Mozart's best operas.
Download or read book Focal Impulse Theory written by John Paul Ito and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music is surrounded by movement, from the arching back of the guitarist to the violinist swaying with each bow stroke. To John Paul Ito, these actions are not just a visual display; rather, they reveal what it really means for musicians to move with the beat, organizing the flow of notes from beat to beat and shaping the sound produced. By developing "focal impulse theory," Ito shows how a performer's choices of how to move with the meter can transform the music's expressive contours. Change the dance of the performer's body, and you change the dance of the notes. As Focal Impulse Theory deftly illustrates, bodily movements carry musical meaning and, in a very real sense, are meaning.
Download or read book Getting Away With It written by Steven Soderbergh and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester are a generation apart, but theyshare a sense of humour and a passion for cinema. Soderbergh's freshman film, sex, lies and videotape, inaugurated a movementin US independent cinema. Lester's freewheeling work in the '60s and '70s (Help!, A Hard Day's Night, The Knack, How I Won the War, Petulia) helped create a 'new wave' of British film-making. Here, the two cineastes discuss their mutual passion for the medium in a frank,funny and free-ranging series of interviews. Also included is Soderbergh's diary of an extraordinary twelve months in which he ventured into 'guerilla film-making' with offbeatprojects Schizopolis and Gray's Anatomy, before returning to the Hollywood fray with the George Clooney hit Out of Sight.
Download or read book Cherubino s Leap written by Richard Kramer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Preliminaries -- 1. The Chromatic Moment in Enlightenment Thought -- Moments Musicaux -- 2. The Fugal Moment: On a Few Bars in Mozart's Quintet in C Major, K. 515 -- 3. Hearing the Silence: On a Much-Theorized Moment in a Sonata by Emanuel Bach -- The Klopstock Moment -- 4. Oden von Klopstock in Musik gesetzt ... -- 5. Composing Klopstock: Gluck contra Bach -- 6. Beethoven: In Search of Klopstock -- Dramma per Musica -- 7. Anagnorisis: Gluck and the Theater of Recognition -- 8. Cherubino's Leap -- 9. Konstanze's Tears -- Works Cited -- Index
