Download or read book Szymanowski Eroticism and the Voices of Mythology written by Stephen Downes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The desire to voice the artistic revelation of the truth of a precarious, multi-faceted, yet integrated self lies behind much of Szymanowski's work. This self is projected through the voices of deities who speak languages of love. The unifying figure is Eros, who may be embodied as Dionysus, Christ, Narcissus or Orpheus, and the gospel he proclaims tells of the resurrection and freedom of the desiring subject. This book examines Szymanowski's exploration of the relationship between the authorial voice, mythology and eroticism within the context of the crisis of the modern subject in Western culture. Stephen Downes analyses mythological and erotic aspects of selected songs from the composer's early career, moving to an interpretation of the voice of the homoerotic lover, embodied as a mad muezzin, in terms of heroic notions of Orphic elegy. Discussing the encounters of King Roger with the voices of Narcissus, the Siren and Dionysus, Downes shows how the composer uses the unifying Christ/Eros figure as a means of indicating that the King might be transformed from anguished despot to loving expressive subject. The book ends with an examination of Szymanowski's desire to fuse Slavonic and Middle-Eastern mythological inspirations in an attempt to fulfil a utopian vision of a pan-European culture bound together by the spirit of Eros.

Download or read book The Szymanowski Companion written by Stephen Downes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski is one of the most fascinating musical figures of the early twentieth century. His works included four symphonies, two violin concertos, the operas Hagith and King Roger, the ballet-pantomime Harnasie, the oratorio Stabat Mater, as well as numerous piano, violin, vocal and choral compositions. The profile and popularity of Szymanowski's music outside Poland has never been higher and continues to grow. The Szymanowski Companion constitutes the most significant and comprehensive reference source to the composer in English. Edited by two of the leading scholars in the field, Paul Cadrin and Stephen Downes, the collection consists of over 50 contributions from an international array of contributors, including recognized Polish experts. The Companion thus provides a systematic, authoritative and up-to-date compilation of information concerning the composer's life, thought and works.

Download or read book Music and Decadence in European Modernism written by Stephen Downes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-03 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Downes presents a detailed examination of the significance of decadence in Central and Eastern European modernist music.

Download or read book The Muse as Eros written by Stephen Downes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Muse has long been figured as a divine or erotically alluring consort to the virile male artist, who may inspire him or lead him to the edge of madness. This book explores the changing cultural expressions of the relationship between the male artist with a beloved, imagined or desired Muse, to offer new and penetrating perspectives on musical representations and transformations of creative masculine subjectivity, and important aspects of the shift from the styles and aesthetics of Romantic Idealism to Modernist Anxiety in music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of the chapters begins with explorations into male artists' relationships with their Muse, and moves to analysis and interpretation which uncovers cultural constructions of masculine artistic inspiration and production, and their association with creatively inspiring and erotically charged relationships with a Muse. New insights are offered into the musical meaning and cultural significance of selected works by Rossini, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Sibelius, Mahler, Bartók, Scriabin, Szymanowski, Debussy, Berg, Poulenc and Weill.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music written by Nicole V. Gagné and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-07-17 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary music scene thus embodies a uniquely broad spectrum of activity, which has grown and changed down to the present hour. With new talents emerging and different technologies developing as we move further into the 21st century, no one can predict what paths music will take next. All we can be certain of is that the inspiration and originality that make music live will continue to bring awe, delight, fascination, and beauty to the people who listen to it. This book cover modernist and postmodern concert music worldwide from the years 1888 to 2018. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on the most important composers, musicians, methods, styles, and media in modernist and postmodern classical music worldwide, from 1888 to 2018. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about modern and contemporary classical music.

Download or read book Gay Lives written by Robert Aldrich and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2023-05-16 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating portrait of LGBTQ+ figures throughout time whose lives have influenced society at large, as well as today’s varied LGBTQ+ culture. Gay Lives gives a voice to more than eighty people from all over the world and from all walks of life. It is a fascinating portrait of LGBTQ+ people throughout time, whose lives have influenced society at large, as well as today’s varied LGBTQ+ culture. It includes poets and philosophers, rulers and spies, activists and artists. Alongside such celebrated figures as Michelangelo, Frederick the Great, and Harvey Milk are lesser-known but no less surprising individuals: Dong Xian and the Chinese emperor Ai, whose passion flourished in the first century BCE; the unfortunate Robert De Péronne, burned at the stake for sodomy; Katharine Philips, writing protolesbian poetry in seventeenth-century England; and Aimee and Jaguar, whose love defied the death camps of wartime Germany. Often colorful, sometimes tragic, but all in some way extraordinary, these life stories reflect, and have helped shape, contemporary attitudes toward same-sex intimacy. Gay Lives will entertain, give pause for thought, and celebrate the diversity of human history.

Download or read book Gay Life Stories written by Robert Aldrich and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2023-03-02 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives a voice to more than eighty people from every major continent and from all walks of life. It includes poets and philosophers, rulers and spies, activists and artists. Alongside such celebrated figures as Michelangelo, Frederick the Great and Harvey Milk are lesser-known but no less surprising individuals: Dong Xian and the Chinese emperor Ai, whose passion flourished in the 1st century BC; the unfortunate Robert De Péronne, first to be burned at the stake for sodomy; Katharine Philips, writing proto-lesbian poetry in seventeenth-century England; and 'Aimee' and 'Jaguar', whose love defied the death camps of wartime Germany. With many striking illustrations, Gay Life Stories will entertain, give pause for thought, and ultimately celebrate the diversity of human history.

Download or read book Aesthetics of Music written by Stephen Downes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Approaches is an anthology of fourteen essays, each addressing a single key concept or pair of terms in the aesthetics of music, collectively serving as an authoritative work on musical aesthetics that remains as close to 'the music' as possible. Each essay includes musical examples from works in the 18th, 19th, and into the 20th century. Topics have been selected from amongst widely recognised central issues in musical aesthetics, as well as those that have been somewhat neglected, to create a collection that covers a distinctive range of ideas. All essays cover historical origins, sources, and developments of the chosen idea, survey important musicological approaches, and offer new critical angles or musical case studies in interpretation.

Download or read book Skryabin Philosophy and the Music of Desire written by Kenneth M. Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commentary on Skryabin has struggled to situate an understanding of the composer's music within his idiosyncratic philosophical world views. Early commentators' efforts to do so failed to establish a thorough or systematic approach. And later twentieth-century studies turned away from the composer's ideology, focusing instead on 'the music itself' with an analytic approach that scrutinized Skryabin's harmonic language in isolation from his philosophy. This groundbreaking study revisits the questions surrounding the composer's music within his own philosophy, but draws on new methodological tools, casting Skryabin's music in the light not only of his own philosophy of desire, but of more refined semiotic-psychoanalytical theory and modern techniques of music analysis. An interdisciplinary methodology corrects the narrow focus of Skryabin scholarship of the last century, offering insights from New Musicology and recent music theory that lead to hermeneutical, critically informed readings of selected works.

Download or read book Desire in Chromatic Harmony written by Kenneth M. Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does musical harmony engage listeners in relations of desire? Where does this desire come from? Author Kenneth Smith seeks to answer these questions by analyzing works from the turn of the twentieth- century that are both harmonically enriched and psychologically complex. Desire in Chromatic Harmony yields a new theory of how chromatic chord progressions direct the listener on intricate journeys through harmonic space, mirroring the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. Smith extends this mode of enquiry into sophisticated music theory, while exploring philosophically engaged European and American composers such as Richard Strauss, Alexander Skryabin, Josef Suk, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland. Focusing on harmony and chord progression, the book drills down into the diatonic undercurrent beneath densely chromatic and dissonant surfaces. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk's asrael Symphony to an exploration of "perversion" in Strauss's elektra; from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski's Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland's The Tender Land, Desire in Chromatic Harmony cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity, revealing the psychological make-up of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.

Download or read book Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage written by Peter Brown and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-09-02 with total page 1755 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera was invented at the end of the sixteenth century in imitation of the supposed style of delivery of ancient Greek tragedy, and, since then, operas based on Greek drama have been among the most important in the repertoire. This collection of essays by leading authorities in the fields of Classics, Musicology, Dance Studies, English Literature, Modern Languages, and Theatre Studies provides an exceptionally wide-ranging and detailed overview of the relationship between the two genres. Since tragedies have played a much larger part than comedies in this branch of operatic history, the volume mostly concentrates on the tragic repertoire, but a chapter on musical versions of Aristophanes' Lysistrata is included, as well as discussions of incidental music, a very important part of the musical reception of ancient drama, from Andrea Gabrieli in 1585 to Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Download or read book British Music and Modernism 1895 1960 written by Matthew Riley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imaginative analytical and critical work on British music of the early twentieth century has been hindered by perceptions of the repertory as insular in its references and backward in its style and syntax, escaping the modernity that surrounded its composers. Recent research has begun to break down these perceptions and has found intriguing links between British music and modernism. This book brings together contributions from scholars working in analysis, hermeneutics, reception history, critical theory and the history of ideas. Three overall themes emerge from its chapters: accounts of British reactions to Continental modernism and the forms they took; links between music and the visual arts; and analysis and interpretation of compositions in the light of recent theoretical work on form, tonality and pitch organization.

Download or read book British Music and Modernism 1895 960 written by Matthew Riley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imaginative analytical and critical work on British music of the early twentieth century has been hindered by perceptions of the repertory as insular in its references and backward in its style and syntax, escaping the modernity that surrounded its composers. Recent research has begun to break down these perceptions and has found intriguing links between British music and modernism. This book brings together contributions from scholars working in analysis, hermeneutics, reception history, critical theory and the history of ideas. Three overall themes emerge from its chapters: accounts of British reactions to Continental modernism and the forms they took; links between music and the visual arts; and analysis and interpretation of compositions in the light of recent theoretical work on form, tonality and pitch organization.

Download or read book Sacred Repertories in Paris under Louis XIII written by Peter Bennett and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of sacred music under Louis XIII (r.1610-43) has advanced little in the past hundred years. Despite some important recent contributions by the late Denise Launay and others, much of our current perception of the Latin sacred music of the period is still informed by the pioneering research undertaken by Henri Quittard in the early years of the twentieth century. Even with Quittard’s work, however, the almost complete absence of surviving sources has severely limited our understanding of this era. But by re-examining one of the seventeenth-century ’treasures’ of the Bibliothèque nationale (MS Vma rés. 571), Sacred Repertories in Paris under Louis XIII reveals that, far from being a transitional period in which little music of any interest was produced, the reign of Louis XIII witnessed a flowering of musical activity and the development of musical techniques normally associated with the reign of Louis XIV. Based on an exhaustive and innovative manuscript study, Sacred Repertories shows that Vma rés. 571 (a largely anonymous source of previously unknown provenance) was copied in Paris by the composer André Pechon, and that it preserves three previously unidentified repertories with connections to the court of Louis XIII. The repertoire of the musique de la chambre, until now considered a secular institution, shows it to have been an equal partner of the chapelle in the provision of sacred music at court. The repertoire of the royal parish church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, the only ’working’ liturgical repertory surviving from the century, illustrates musical practices at this important collegiate church. And the repertoire of the Royal Benedictine Abbey of Montmartre testifies to the richness of musical tradition in Parisian convents during a period when no other comparable music from France survives. Sacred Repertories thus transforms our understanding of the musical landscape of seventeenth-century France and provides a springboard fo

Download or read book MS Florence Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Magl XIX 164 67 written by AnthonyM. Cummings and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magliabechiana XIX, 164-167 (FlorBN Magl. 164-7) has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. The prevailing assumption had been that it was a Florentine source of the early sixteenth century. More recently, it has been argued that its provenance is not as easily determined as it first appears, and that there are Roman connections suggested by one of its codicological features. This monograph provides as full a bibliographical and codicological report on FlorBN Magl. 164-7 as is currently possible. Such evidence suggests that the earlier thesis is more likely to be correct: the manuscript was copied in Florence c.1520. After a review of the evidence for provenance and date, the repertory of the manuscript is placed in its historical and cultural context. Florence of the early sixteenth century is shown to have an organized cultural life that was characterized by the activities of such institutions as the Sacred Academy of the Medici, the famous group that met in the garden of the Rucellai, and others. FlorBN Magl. 164-7 is an exceedingly interesting and important source; an eclectic repository not only of compositionally advanced settings of Petrarchan verse by Rucellai-group intimate Bernardo Pisano but also of sharply contrasting works, popular in character. It is almost a manifesto of the sensibilities of preeminent Florentine cultural figures of the sort who frequented the garden of the Rucellai and as such is a revealing document of Florentine musical taste during those crucial years that witnessed the emergence of the new secular genre we know as the Italian madrigal.

Download or read book The Politics of Verdi s Cantica written by Roberta Montemorra Marvin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Verdi's Cantica treats a singular case study of the use of music to resist oppression, combat evil, and fight injustice. Cantica, better known as Inno delle nazioni / Hymn of the Nations, commissioned from Italy's foremost composer to represent the newly independent nation at the 1862 London International Exhibition, served as a national voice of pride and of protest for Italy across two centuries and in two very different political situations. The book unpacks, for the first time, the full history of Verdi's composition from its creation, performance, and publication in the 1860s through its appropriation as purposeful social and political commentary and its perception by American broadcast media as a 'weapon of art' in the mid twentieth century. Based on largely untapped primary archival and other documentary sources, journalistic writings, and radio and film scripts, the project discusses the changing meanings of the composition over time. It not only unravels the complex history of the work in the nineteenth century, of greater significance it offers the first fully documented study of the performances, radio broadcast, and filming of the work by the renowned Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini during World War II. In presenting new evidence about ways in which Verdi's music was appropriated by expatriate Italians and the US government for cross-cultural propaganda in America and Italy, it addresses the intertwining of Italian and American culture with regard to art, politics, and history; and investigates the ways in which the press and broadcast media helped construct a musical weapon that traversed ethnic, aesthetic, and temporal boundaries to make a strong political statement.

Download or read book The Genesis and Development of an English Organ Sonata written by Iain Quinn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume considers the influences and development of the English organ sonata tradition that began in the 1850s with compositions by W. T. Best and William Spark. With the expansion of the instrument’s capabilities came an opportunity for organist-composers to consider the repertoire anew with many factors reinforcing a desire to elevate the literature to new heights. This study begins by examining the legacy of the keyboard sonata in Britain and especially the pedagogical lineage that was to be seen through Mendelssohn and ultimately the early organ sonatas. The abiding influence of William Crotch’s lectures are studied to illuminate how a culture of conservatism emboldened the organist-composers towards compositions that were seen to represent the ideals of the Classical era but in a contemporary vein. The veneration of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven is then examined as composers wrote "portfolio" sonatas, each with a movement in a contrasting style to exhibit their compositional prowess while providing repertoire for the novice and connoisseur alike. Finally the volume considers how the British organist-composers who studied at the Leipzig Conservatorium had a direct bearing on the furtherance of an organ culture at home that in turn set the ground for the seminal work in the genre, Elgar’s Sonata of 1895.