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 Understanding the Women of Mozart s Operas written by Kristi Brown-Montesano and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni’s story the only one—or even the most interesting one—in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it’s Mozart’s men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist’s point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It’s time to give Mozart’s women—and Mozart’s multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character—their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart’s four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations. Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.
Download or read book Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart written by Wye Jamison Allanbrook and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wolfgang Amad Mozart written by Stanley Sadie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection based on the Royal Musical Association's Mozart Conference of 1991, the principal scholarly event in the English-speaking world in commemoration of the bicentenary. It includes essays placing Mozart in the context, in Salzburg and Vienna, in which he worked, explaining aspects of his life and work hitherto obscure; essays interpreting his instrumental music; and a substantial series of studies on different aspects of his operas, from Lucio Silla to La clemenza di Tito, with particular stress on the creative processes in the Da Ponte operas.
Download or read book On Mozart written by James M. Morris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-11-25 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays which explore Mozart from various perspectives, suggesting the complexity of his character and his achievement.
Download or read book Don Giovanni Captured written by Richard Will and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Don Giovanni” Captured considers the life of a single opera, engaging with the entire history of its recorded performance. Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni has long inspired myths about eros and masculinity. Over time, its performance history has revealed a growing trend toward critique—an increasing effort on the part of performers and directors to highlight the violence and predatoriness of the libertine central character, alongside the suffering and resilience of his female victims. In “Don Giovanni” Captured, Richard Will sets out to analyze more than a century’s worth of recorded performances of the opera, tracing the ways it has changed from one performance to another and from one generation to the next. Will consults audio recordings, starting with wax cylinders and 78s, as well as video recordings, including DVDs, films, and streaming videos. As Will argues, recordings and other media shape our experience of opera as much as live performance does. Seen as a historical record, opera recordings are also a potent reminder of the refusal of works such as Don Giovanni to sit still. By choosing a work with such a rich and complex tradition of interpretation, Will helps us see Don Giovanni as a standard-bearer for evolving ideas about desire and power, both on and off the stage.
Download or read book Defining Russia Musically written by Richard Taruskin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin devoted much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways. Defining Russia Musically represents one of his landmark achievements: here Taruskin uses music, together with history and politics, to illustrate the many ways in which Russian national identity has been constructed, both from within Russia and from the Western perspective. He contends that it is through music that the powerful myth of Russia's "national character" can best be understood. Russian art music, like Russia itself, Taruskin writes, has "always [been] tinged or tainted . . . with an air of alterity—sensed, exploited, bemoaned, reveled in, traded on, and defended against both from within and from without." The author's goal is to explore this assumption of otherness in an all-encompassing work that re-creates the cultural contexts of the folksong anthologies of the 1700s, the operas, symphonies, and ballets of the 1800s, the modernist masterpieces of the 1900s, and the hugely fraught but ambiguous products of the Soviet period. Taruskin begins by showing how enlightened aristocrats, reactionary romantics, and the theorists and victims of totalitarianism have variously fashioned their vision of Russian society in musical terms. He then examines how Russia as a whole shaped its identity in contrast to an "East" during the age of its imperialist expansion, and in contrast to two different musical "Wests," Germany and Italy, during the formative years of its national consciousness. The final section focuses on four individual composers, each characterized both as a self-consciously Russian creator and as a European, and each placed in perspective within a revealing hermeneutic scheme. In the culminating chapters—Chaikovsky and the Human, Scriabin and the Superhuman, Stravinsky and the Subhuman, and Shostakovich and the Inhuman—Taruskin offers especially thought-provoking insights, for example, on Chaikovsky's status as the "last great eighteenth-century composer" and on Stravinsky's espousal of formalism as a reactionary, literally counterrevolutionary move.
Download or read book The Secular Commedia written by Wye Jamison Allanbrook and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-06-07 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s The Secular Commedia is a stimulating and original rethinking of the music of the late eighteenth century. Hearing the symphonies and concertos of Haydn and Mozart with an ear tuned to operatic style, as their earliest listeners did, Allanbrook shows that this familiar music is built on a set of mimetic associations drawn from conventional modes of depicting character and emotion in opera buffa. Allanbrook mines a rich trove of writings by eighteenth-century philosophers and music theorists to show that vocal music was considered aesthetically superior to instrumental music and that listeners easily perceived the theatrical tropes that underpinned the style. Tracing Enlightenment notions of character and expression back to Greek and Latin writings about comedy and drama, she strips away preoccupations with symphonic form and teleology to reveal anew the kaleidoscopic variety and gestural vitality of the musical surface. In prose as graceful and nimble as the music she discusses, Allanbrook elucidates the idiom of this period for contemporary readers. With notes, musical examples, and a foreword by editors Mary Ann Smart and Richard Taruskin.
Download or read book Mozart written by Roye E. Wates and published by Amadeus Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Amadeus). Mozart: An Introduction to the Music, the Man, and the Myths explores in detail 20 of the composer's major works in the context of his tragically brief life and the turbulent times in which he lived. Addressed to non-musicians seeking to deepen their technical appreciation for his music while learning more about Mozart the man than the caricature portrayed in the 1986 movie Amadeus , this book offers extensive biographical and historical background debunking many well-established Mozart myths along with guided study of compositions representing every genre of 18th-century music: opera, concerto, symphony, church music, divertimento and serenade, sonata, and string quartet. Author Roye E. Wates, a Mozart specialist, has taught music history to thousands of non-musicians, both undergraduates and adults, as a Professor of Music at Boston University and from 2002-2004 as director of Boston University's Adult Music Seminar at Tanglewood, summer residence of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mozart: An Introduction to the Music, the Man, and the Myths provides a unique combination of biographical detail, up-to-date research, detailed musical analyses, and clear definitions of terms. Amateurs as well as more advanced musicians will gain a greater understanding of Mozart's encyclopedic mastery.
Download or read book Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics written by Stephen Rumph and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics, Stephen Rumph shifts the ground of interpretation for late eighteenth century European music by reinstating the semiotics and language theory of the period. In so doing, Rumph challenges and reappraises current orthodoxies. These challenges are extremely valuable, bravely offered, and intuitively right as well as convincingly argued." —Matthew Head, author of Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music "Stephen Rumph’s book is, to my knowledge, the first successful attempt to ground classical music in its contemporaneous intellectual context. In this respect, Rumph’s book is a great achievement. It is an imaginative tour-de-force bursting with dazzling insights, and with an apparently encyclopedic range of intellectual reference in several languages." —Michael Spitzer, author of Metaphor and Musical Thought “By keeping so many things in focus at the same time, Stephen Rumph has really written several books in one: an introduction to Enlightenment theories of the sign for scholars of music; a much-needed historical context for modern musical semiotics; a sensitive new exploration of the circulation of meanings in and through Mozart’s music; and an important contribution to the ongoing integration of musicology into cultural studies. I suspect that in the course of several readings, one would come away each time with a different set of equally valuable revelations.” —Elisabeth LeGuin, author of Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology
Download or read book Revolving Embrace written by Sevin H. Yaraman and published by Pendragon Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the 19th century the waltz brought men and women face-to-face, dancing tightly embraced and staring into each other's eyes, a position that provoked a great deal of anxiety in many circles: bishops of Austria signed decrees against waltzing, France banned it at court, and even Leo XII sought to suppress the waltz by papal decree. Nevertheless, composers wrote waltzes for the ballrooms, and the new bourgeoisie of Europe enjoyed the freedom and informality of the dance.The reception of the waltz as music was informed by 19th-century views on women. As a result, the waltz - both dance and music - acquired a distinctly gendered meaning. In Verdi's La Traviata, Puccini's La Bohème, and Berg's Wozzeck, the composers relied on the waltz's contradictory meanings of individual pleasure and social disapprobation to portray the women characters and their roles in the development of the plot.The popularity of the waltz persisted beyond the original era of the Viennese waltz. Twentieth-century composers wrote waltzes either to pay homage to the Viennese waltz and its creators or to evoke the spirit of that earlier period. In compositions such as La Valse and Wozzeck, Ravel and Berg make deliberate references to the Viennese waltz without yielding their own musical language to its convention.
Download or read book Music Sexuality and the Enlightenment in Mozart s Figaro Don Giovanni and Cos fan tutte written by Charles Ford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte 'sounds' the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms. Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales. Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers, especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and Così still maintain their vital immediacy for audiences today.
Download or read book Varieties of Musical Irony written by Michael Cherlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sophisticated and engaging, this volume explores and compares musical irony in the works of major composers, from Mozart to Mahler.
Download or read book Mozart s Music of Friends written by Edward Klorman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study analyzes chamber music from Mozart's time within its highly social salon-performance context.
Download or read book Orientalism Masquerade and Mozart s Turkish Music written by Matthew Head and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matthew Head explores the cultural meanings of Mozart's Turkish music in the composer's 18th-century context, in subsequent discourses of Mozart's significance for 'Western' culture, and in today's (not entirely) post-colonial world. Unpacking the ideological content of Mozart's numerous representations of Turkey and Turkish music, Head locates the composer's exoticisms in shifting power relations between the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, and in an emerging orientalist project. At the same time, Head complicates a presentist post-colonial critique by exploring commercial stimuli to Mozart's turquerie, and by embedding the composer's orientalism in practices of self-disguise epitomised by masquerade and carnival. In this context, Mozart's Turkish music offered fleeting liberation from official and proscribed identities of the bourgeois Enlightenment.
Download or read book Mozart s Viennese Instrumental Music written by Simon P. Keefe and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2007 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of stylistic re-invention, a practically - and empirically-based theory that explains how innovative, putatively inspired ideas take shape in Mozart's works and lead to stylistic re-formulation. From close examination of a variety of works, this work shows that stylistic re-invention is a consistent manifestation of stylistic development.
Download or read book Mozart s Piano Music written by William Kinderman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mozart's emergence as a mature artist coincides with the rise to prominence of the piano, an instrument that came alive under his fingers and served as medium for many of his finest compositions. In Mozart's Piano Music, William Kinderman reconsiders common assumptions about Mozart's life and art while offering comprehensive and incisive commentary on the solo music and concertos. After placing Mozart's pianistic legacy in its larger biographical and cultural context, Kinderman addresses the lively gestural and structural aspects of Mozart's musical language and explores the nature of his creative process. Incorporating the most recent research throughout this encompassing study, Kinderman expertly surveys each of the major genres of the keyboard music, including the four-hand and two-piano works. Beyond examining issues such as Mozart's earliest childhood compositions, his musical rhetoric and expression, the social context of his Viennese concertos, and affinities between his piano works and operas, Kinderman's main emphasis falls on detailed discussion of selected individual compositions.
