Download or read book Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist written by George Walker and published by . This book was released on 2009-07-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first black American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music (for his composition Lilacs), George Walker recounts the most significant events in his life and distinguished career as a composer and a musician.
Download or read book The Remarkable Mrs Beach American Composer written by Walter S. Jenkins and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of composer Amy Beach, covering her childhood, compositions, travels, and philanthropic activities. Includes b & w photos, a discography, and Beach's own analysis of her Gaelic Symphony, as well as indices of works cited and titles of works by opus number.
Download or read book Notes of a Pianist written by Louis Moreau Gottschalk and published by . This book was released on 1881 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recollections of the great American composer and pianist Louis Gottschalk shine with majesty and insight into the life of a touring virtuoso in the nineteenth century. Well-travelled and appreciated by audiences across Europe and the Americas, Gottschalk was a pianist of supreme talent, imbuing his performances with emotional and sensual depth seldom heard in the concert halls. The musician writes flowingly and expressively of the varied cities and sights he encounters; his hectic schedule did not dim his appreciation for the aesthetics and beauty of the many locales he toured. By all accounts a sensitive and kindly soul, the great musician was adored for his flamboyant nature as well as his formidable performing talents. Tragically Gottschalk's life was cut short by illness; a collapse from fever during a tour in Rio took him from the world at the age of only forty. This book consists of both a short, introductory biography of the author, and a lengthier autobiography adapted from the diaries and writings Gottschalk kept on his many travels. Also appended are personal profiles written by popular enthusiasts and the press of the time, which include appraisals of his distinctive stage presence and political leanings.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of American Classical Pianists written by Richard Masters and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential reference focuses on the lives, careers, and musical contributions of over 150 American pianists from early days of the nation until the present day. Richard Masters spotlights both modern and historical pianists—including women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ pianists who either never had the opportunity to win widespread acclaim but were top notch performers or who achieved important careers against heavy odds but were soon forgotten after their deaths, such as Augusta Cottlow, George Copeland, and Natalie Hinderas. This volume also gives attention to important collaborative pianists—none of whom have ever appeared in any volume on classical pianists—and influential pedagogues, some of whom never had significant performing careers but produced important students. Each entry explores an individual pianist’s life and career—from relevant biographical details to impact on American musical culture—and includes a selected list and brief discussion of existing and available recordings, if any. Additionally, an introduction situates these pianists into historical trends. Overseen by a blue-ribbon editorial board, Encyclopedia of American Classical Pianists: 1800s to the Present provides a comprehensive view of the depth and breadth of American pianistic achievement and serves as the most up-to-date work for students, piano departments, music libraries, researchers, and interested pianophiles.
Download or read book Samuel Barber written by Howard Pollack and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pivotal twentieth-century composer, Samuel Barber earned a long list of honors and accolades that included two Pulitzer Prizes for Music and the public support of conductors like Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein. Barber’s works have since become standard concert repertoire and continue to flourish across high art and popular culture. Acclaimed biographer Howard Pollack (Aaron Copland, George Gershwin) offers a multifaceted account of Barber’s life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu. Born into a musical family, Barber pursued his artistic ambitions from childhood. Pollack follows Barber’s path from his precocious youth through a career where, from the start, the composer consistently received prizes, fellowships, and other recognition. Stylistic analyses of works like the Adagio for Strings, the Violin Concerto, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra, the Piano Concerto, and the operas Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, stand alongside revealing accounts of the music’s commissioning, performance, reception, and legacy. Throughout, Pollack weaves in accounts of Barber’s encounters with colleagues like Aaron Copland and Francis Poulenc, performers from Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price to Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn, patrons, admirers, and a wide circle of eminent friends and acquaintances. He also provides an eloquent portrait of the composer’s decades-long relationship with the renowned opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Informed by new interviews and immense archival research, Samuel Barber is a long-awaited critical and personal biography of a monumental figure in twentieth-century American music.
Download or read book Music on My Mind written by Willie Smith and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An American Composer pianist with World wide Recognition written by and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Charles T Griffes written by Edward Maisel and published by Alfred A. Knopf. This book was released on 1984 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After his tragic death in 1920, at the age of thirty-five, Charles T. Griffes became the object of an almost fanatical devotion among many American music-lovers, and his reputation and stature have grown steadily ever since. His songs, piano compositions, string music, and symphonic works are now in the repertoire of leading musicians and symphonic organizations. Against a rich background of contemporary figures and of musical life in the early years of this century, Mr. Maisel here traces the story of Griffes' rise from obscure origins. Much light is thrown on the conditons and problems of American music in general; and there is a careful analysis of many of the central ideas of Griffes' music, especially his best-known pieces, The White Peacock and The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan. The result is an interesting chapter in the history of American culture, and a fascinating study of the creative temperament in our time.
Download or read book Duke Ellington written by Steven Brower and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beautifully illustrated and unparalleled in scope, this is an elegant visual celebration befitting the life and work of the "prince of the piano." Duke Ellington was the undisputed father of the American songbook. A prolific writer and consummate performer, Ellington was the author of such standards as "Solitude," "Prelude to a Kiss," and "It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)." With a career that spanned five decades, he is one of the defining composers of the Jazz Age. With unprecedented access to the Ellington family archives, this long overdue book illuminates the life and work of an icon of twentieth-century music from his humble beginnings to his long-lasting success. Every stage of Ellington’s career is brought to life, from sepia photographs of his early days in Washington, DC, to colorful playbills from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, his triumphant tours of Europe in the 1930s, and his pioneering explosion of form and genre in the 1940s and beyond. Alongside more than two hundred stunning images, contributions from peers such as Dave Brubeck, Cornel West, Quincy Jones, and Tony Bennett shed light on Ellington’s musical legacy, while the voice of his granddaughter Mercedes reveals the character behind the charisma, and the man behind the piano.
Download or read book Notes of a Pianist written by Louis Moreau Gottschalk and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-11 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notes of a Pianist chronicles the life of one of the most remarkable musical minds of the American experience, the great nineteenth-century New Orleans-born composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869). An important cultural and historical work, the book recounts Gottschalk's experiences as he traveled and performed throughout the last decade of his life. Born to an English-Jewish father and a Haitian mother, Gottschalk is remembered as one of the great New Orleans musicians and composers, his music a combination of the classical tradition in which he was trained, and the New Orleans tradition into which he was born. His art form took him far outside the boundaries of Louisiana, however. While still a child, he studied piano in Paris and gave a concert at the Salle Pleyel, after which Frédéric Chopin is said to have remarked: "Give me your hand, my child; I predict that you will become the king of pianists." Gottschalk returned to the United States in 1853, and later lived in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, and South America, during which time he kept-sometimes sporadically, sometimes daily--the notebooks that formed the basis of Notes of a Pianist. Published for the first time in 1881, the book continues to resonate with American cultural and musical life. Notes of a Pianist demonstrates Gottschalk's importance not only as a reporter of the musical life and tastes of Americans during the Civil War, but also as a forefather of Louisiana's rich musical culture.
Download or read book The Symphonic Repertoire Volume V written by Brian Hart and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 987 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 1700s, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. In his series The Symphonic Repertoire, the late A. Peter Brown explored the symphony in Europe from its origins into the 20th century. In Volume V, Brown's former students and colleagues continue his vision by turning to the symphony in the Western Hemisphere. It examines the work of numerous symphonists active from the early 1800s to the present day and the unique challenges they faced in contributing to the European symphonic tradition. The research adds to an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur. This much-anticipated fifth volume of The Symphonic Repertoire: The Symphony in the Americas offers a user-friendly, comprehensive history of the symphony genre in the United States and Latin America.
Download or read book The George Gershwin Reader written by Robert Wyatt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of articles, biographical reminiscences, reviews, musical analyses, and letters relating to the life and music of George Gershwin.
Download or read book Good Things Happen Slowly written by Fred Hersch and published by Crown Archetype. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jazz could not contain Fred Hersch. Hersch’s prodigious talent as a sideman—a pianist who played with the giants of the twentieth century in the autumn of their careers, including Art Farmer and Joe Henderson—blossomed further in the eighties and beyond into a compositional genius that defied the boundaries of bop, sweeping in elements of pop, classical, and folk to create a wholly new music. Good Things Happen Slowly is his memoir. It’s the story of the first openly gay, HIV-positive jazz player; a deep look into the cloistered jazz culture that made such a status both transgressive and groundbreaking; and a profound exploration of how Hersch’s two-month-long coma in 2007 led to his creating some of the finest, most direct, and most emotionally compelling music of his career. Remarkable, and at times lyrical, Good Things Happen Slowly is an evocation of the twilight of Post-Stonewall New York, and a powerfully brave narrative of illness, recovery, music, creativity, and the glorious reward of finally becoming oneself.
Download or read book Living with Liszt written by Carl Lachmund and published by Pendragon Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carl V. Lachmund (1857-1928) was an American pupil of Liszt; he studied with the Hungarian master in Weimar between the years 1882-1884. During that time he kept a diary which eventually ran to some 700 pages. This document gives one of the mo st exhaustive accounts of Liszt's keyboard instruction extant. Some time after World War I, and in response toa demand from a number of musicians with an interest in the matter, Lachmund decided to turn his diary into a book about his daily life with Liszt. In order to gather additional background material about a period now long past, he wrote to more than 200 musicians in America and Europe who had had some personal contact with the composer, and invited them to share their personal reminiscences. The book never appeared and his papers came to rest in the New York Public Library, with whose cooperation this book is now being published.The Liszt scholar Alan Walker has undertaken the task of introducing, editing, and annotating the Lachmund papers. He calls the diary an irreplaceable source of first-hand material which throws fresh light on the way Liszt taught the piano. Liszt also emerges from these pages as a great and noble human being. This book will interest all teachers, performers, and students of the period. It represents a major contribution to nineteenth-century studies.
Download or read book Contemporary American Composers written by Rupert Hughes and published by Boston : L.C. Page. This book was released on 1900 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Words and Music written by Peter Dickinson and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Articles, tributes and reminiscences of composer, pianist and author Peter Dickinson are here brought together for the first time.
Download or read book Speaking of Pianists written by Abram Chasins and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pianist, composer, music director of WOXR, contributor to the Saturday Review collects his reminiscences- and reactions stimulated by piano playing and piano music. So that his clavichord is well-tempered not only by his knowledge and feeling for its music, but also by his own association with many performers. He re-establishes Josef Hofmann as a great pianist and a greatly loved teacher; Rachmaninoff, the communicable and sumptuous melodist; Schnabel and Godowsky; the courtly Paderewski and the ebullient Rubinstein; Wanda Landowski and Backhaus, Gieseking and Serkin, Casadesus and Horowitz are all in this gallery of greats. He writes also of interpretation and teaching, of the ruthless stranglehold of concert management, of hi fidelity and its ""high fatality"" to the quality of recorded performances, and there is a substantial section of commentaries on particular works and composers- chiefly classical... Informed, but informally presented music appreciation which the general listener will enjoy- along with the contact with many concert pianists and the anecdotal asides (Kirkus Review)
