Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Serialism written by Martin Iddon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-16 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is serialism? Defended by enthusiastic champions and decried by horrified detractors, serialism was central to twentieth-century art music, but riven, too, by inherent contradictions. The term can be a synonym for dodecaphony, Arnold Schoenberg's 'method of composing with twelve tones which are related only to one another'. It can be more expansive, describing ways of composing systematically with parameters beyond pitch - duration, dynamic, and more - and can even stand as a sort of antonym to dodecaphony: 'Schoenberg is Dead', as Pierre Boulez once insisted. Stretched to its limits, it can describe approaches where sound can be divided into discrete parameters and later recombined to generate the new, the unexpected, beginning to blur into a further antonym, post-serialism. This Companion introduces and embraces serialism in all its dimensions and contradictions, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Babbitt, and explores its variants and legacies in Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Download or read book Electronic Inspirations written by Jennifer Iverson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Jennifer Iverson's Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. In the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for reconstruction was great, West Germany began to rebuild its cultural prestige via aesthetic and technical advances. The studio's composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, and magnetic tape. Together, they applied core tenets from information theory and phonetics, reclaiming military communication technologies as well as fascist propaganda broadcasting spaces. The electronic studio nurtured a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics. Its esoteric sounds transformed mid-century music and continue to reverberate today. Electronic music--echoing both cultural anxiety and promise--is a quintessential Cold War innovation.

Download or read book Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship written by Pierre Boulez and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1991 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pierre Boulez (born 1925) is a major figure in French musical life, being not only the leading French composer of his generation, but also an outstanding conductor. He is also a prolific writer on music, and this is a translation of his first collection of essays, published in France in 1966. In these essays Boulez worked out many of his most significant ideas about music, and he sets forth his views with characteristic intellectual vigour and acuity. The essays are divided into four parts, the first three concerned with a common preoccupation (aesthetic, technical, polemical), thelast a collection of entries intended for a music encyclopaedia. Boulez writes mainly on the giants of twentieth-century music - Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Debussy, Messiaen, Ravel - and he offers penetrating and at times provocative analyses of some of their music and musical styles,such as neo-classicism and serialism. His illuminating comments arise from intimate knowledge of the music, and the resulting collection is an essential document of post-war modern music.

Download or read book G rard Grisey and Spectral Music written by Liam Cagney and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in-depth historical overview of spectral music, which is widely regarded, alongside minimalism, as one of the two most influential compositional movements of the last fifty years. Charting spectral music's development in France from 1972 to 1982, this ground-breaking study establishes how spectral music's innovations combined existing techniques from post-war music with the use of information technology. The first section focuses on Gérard Grisey, showing how he creatively developed techniques from Messiaen, Xenakis, Ligeti, Stockhausen and Boulez towards a distinctive style of music based on groups of sounds mutating in time. The second section shows how a wider generation of young composers centred on the Parisian collective L'Itinéraire developed a common vision of music embracing seismic developments in in psychoacoustics and computer sound synthesis. Framed against institutional and political developments in France, spectral music is shown as at once an inventive artistic response to the information age and a continuation of the French colouristic tradition.

Download or read book Alban Berg written by Bryan R. Simms and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alban Berg: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer. The second edition will include research published since the publication of the first edition and provide electronic resources.

Download or read book Music Lessons written by Pierre Boulez and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eminent French composer’s groundbreaking lectures, available for the first time in English: “a major event” (Alex Ross). Music Lessons collects the yearly lectures of French composer Pierre Boulez, prepared for the Collège de France between 1976 and 1995. These lectures offer a sustained intellectual engagement with themes of creativity in music by a widely influential cultural figure, who has long been central to the conversation around contemporary music. In his essays Boulez explores the process through which a musical idea is realized in a full-fledged composition; the complementary roles of craft and inspiration; the degree to which the memory of other musical works can influence and change the act of creation; and other deeply fascinating topics. Boulez also gives a penetrating account of problems in classical music that are still present today, such as the crippling conservatism of many musical institutions. Woven into the discussion are stories of Boulez’s own compositions and those of fellow composers whose work he championed, as both a critic and conductor: from Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Varèse, from Bartók to Berg, Debussy to Mahler and Wagner, and all the way back to Bach. This edition includes a foreword by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and a preface by Jonathan Goldman.

Download or read book Anton Webern written by Darin Hoskisson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anton Webern: A Research and Information Guide offers carefully selected and annotated sources regarding Webern from 1975 to present day, including sources on Webern’s life, his music, and the interpretation and reception of his music. Along with this comprehensive annotated listing of print and online sources, the book discusses the history of research on Webern and includes a brief chronology of his life. It is a major reference tool for those interested in Webern and his music and valuable for researchers of 20th century music and the Second Viennese School.

Download or read book Arabesque without End written by Anne Leonard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring multidisciplinary research by an international team of leading scholars, this volume addresses the contested aspects of arabesque while exploring its penchant for crossing artistic and cultural boundaries to create new forms. Enthusiastically imported from its Near Eastern sources by European artists, the freely flowing line known as arabesque is a recognizable motif across the arts of painting, music, dance, and literature. From the German Romantics to the Art Nouveau artists, and from Debussy’s compositions to the serpentine choreographies of Loïe Fuller, the chapters in this volume bring together cross-disciplinary perspectives to understand the arabesque across both art historical and musicological discourses.

Download or read book Orchestration written by Paul Mathews and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-11-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orchestration: An Anthology of Writings is designed to be a primary or ancillary text for college-level music majors. Although there are several 'how to' textbooks aimed at this market, there is little available that traces the history of orchestration through the writings of composers themselves. By collecting writings from the ninenteenth century to today, Mathews illuminates how orchestration has grown and developed, as well as presenting a wide variety of theories that have been embraced by the leading practitioners in the field. The collection then traces the history of orchestration, beginning with Beethoven's Orchestra (with writings by Berlioz, Wagner, Gounod, Mahler, and others), the 19th century (Mahler, Gevaert, Strauss) the fin de siecle (on the edge of musical modernism; writings by Berlioz, Jadassohn, Delius, and Rimsky Korsakov), early modern (Busoni, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Grainger, and others), and high modern (Carter, Feldman, Reich, Brant). Many of these pieces have never been translated into English before; some only appeared in small journals or the popular press and have never appeared in a book; and none have ever been collected in one place. The study of orchestration is a key part of all students of music theory and composition. Orchestration provides a much needed resource for these students, filling a gap in the literature.

Download or read book Stravinsky the Music maker written by Hans Keller and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2010 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hans Keller's text and Milein Cosman's vibrant illustrations combine to produce a unique and enlightening book on Stravinsky. Stravinsky the Music-Maker is the third incarnation of a book that has been greeted with superlatives on each previous appearance. Hans Keller and Milein Cosman collaborated down the decades of their married life, Keller'spen analysing music, Cosman's catching its makers at work. Stravinsky was a source of fascination for them both, and their Stravinsky at Rehearsal appeared in 1962, to be expanded, two decades later, as Stravinsky Seen and Heard. Stravinsky the Music-Maker offers the most generous compilation of their work yet: it includes Keller's complete articles on Stravinsky, written between 1954 and 1980, and augments Cosman's celebrated prints and drawings with a number not previously published. The introduction, by the composer Hugh Wood, sites the Keller-Cosman partnership in the framework of the British musical life they enriched. HANS KELLER (1919-85) fled Austria in1938 and became a commanding critical voice in British music journalism and on the BBC from the end of the war until his death. He is the author of numerous books, many illustrated by his wife Milein Cosman, including Criticism (Faber), The Great Haydn String Quartets (Dent), Essays on Music (CUP), Jerusalem Diary, Film Music and Beyond and Music and Psychology (all Plumbago). A critic of insight and integrity throughout his life, he remains a powerful influence to this day.

Download or read book When Music Mattered written by James Wierzbicki and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-04-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the American Sixties, and how that period’s socio-political essence was reflected and refracted in certain forms of the period’s music. Its five main chapters bear the names of familiar musical categories: ’Folk,’ ‘Rock,’ ‘Jazz,’ ‘Avant-Garde,’ ‘Classical.’ But the book’s real subject matter—treated at length in the Prologue and the Epilogue but spread throughout all that comes between—is the Sixties’ tangled mess of hopes and frustrations, of hungers as much for self-identity as for self-indulgence, of crises of conscience that bothered Americans of almost all ages and regardless of political persuasion.

Download or read book The Battle of Chronos and Orpheus written by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of previously unpublished essays Jean-Jacques Nattiez applies his theoretical foundations of musical semiotics to theorists such as Lévi-Strauss, Hanslick, and Brailoiu; novelists such as Proust; and poets such as Baudelaire. The author treats problems which musicologists and music lovers alike need to address: the artistic product in music of oral tradition, the nature of musical facts, and questions of fidelity and authenticity in performance practice. Nattiez tackles these perennial issues with an originality born out of his focus on the status of time in the works considered. This approach allows him to take sides, sometimes in a provocative manner, in the ongoing debates which pit adherents of modernity against apologists of postmodernism.

Download or read book Karlheinz Stockhausen Zeitma written by Jerome Kohl and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zeitmaße is one of a group of four acknowledged masterpieces composed between 1955 and 1957 that together established Karlheinz Stockhausen as the leading figure in the European avant-garde. Of the four works, it is the only one that has not been thoroughly analysed from the composer's sketches and, for this reason, remains the least-well understood. In this volume, Jerome Kohl provides a much-needed analysis of Zeitmaße, considering its standing in the group and in the wider context of Stockhausen's output. Using recently published correspondence and other documentation from the period, together with surviving sketch material, Kohl investigates the compositional procedures employed in Zeitmaße and their evolution. He discusses the wide range of influences discernible in the work, from that of both past generations of composers and contemporaries, to the impact of Stockhausen's studies in acoustics, phonetics and information theory on his music. The book closes with an examination of the reception of Zeitmaße and its associated concepts in the years following its composition, and shows how the key concepts utilized in the work are themselves a reflection of the properties seen in the very Zeitgeist that produced them.

Download or read book After the Rite written by Maureen A. Carr and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Rite: Stravinsky's Path to Neoclassicism (1914-1925) traces the evolution of Stravinsky's compositional style as he searched for his own voice in the explosive musical world of the early 20th century as he responded to harsh criticisms of his work.

Download or read book The Work of Literary Translation written by Clive Scott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an original reconceptualization of literary translation, Clive Scott argues against traditional approaches to the theory and practice of translation. Instead he suggests that translation should attend more to the phenomenology of reading, triggering creative textual thinking in the responsive reader rather than testing the hermeneutic skills of the professional translator. In this new guise, translation enlists the reader as an active participant in the constant re-fashioning of the text's structural, associative, intertextual and intersensory possibilities, so that our larger understanding of ecology, anthropology, comparative literature and aesthetics is fundamentally transformed and our sense of the expressive resources of language radically extended. Literary translation thus assumes an existential value which takes us beyond the text itself to how it situates us in the world, and what part it plays in the geography of human relationships.

Download or read book Debussy in Context written by Simon Trezise and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-23 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the many dimensions of Debussy's historical significance, this volume provides new perspectives on the life and work of a much-loved composer and considers how social and political contexts shape the way we approach and perform his works today. In short, focused chapters building on recent research, contributors chart the influences, relationships and performances that shaped Debussy's creativity, and the ways he negotiated the complex social and professional networks of music, literature, art, and performance (on and off the stage) in Belle Époque Paris. It probes Debussy's relationship with some of the most influential '-isms' of his time, including his fascination with early music and with the 'exotic', and assesses his status as a pioneer of musical modernism and his continuing popularity with performers and listeners alike.

Download or read book Stravinsky written by Stephen Walsh and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-03-03 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely regarded the greatest composer of the 20th century, Igor Stravinsky was central to the development of modernism in art. In this revealing volume, the first of two, Walsh follows Stravinsky from his birth in 1882 to 1934.