Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Mahler written by Jeremy Barham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-13 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years approaching the centenary of Mahler's death, this book provides both summation of, and starting point for, an assessment and reassessment of the composer's output and creative activity. Authored by a collection of leading specialists in Mahler scholarship, its opening chapters place the composer in socio-political and cultural contexts, and discuss his work in light of developments in the aesthetics of musical meaning. Part II examines from a variety of analytical, interpretative and critical standpoints the complete range of his output, from early student works and unfinished fragments to the sketches and performing versions of the Tenth Symphony. Part III evaluates Mahler's role as interpreter of his own and other composers' works during his lifelong career as operatic and orchestral conductor. Part IV addresses Mahler's fluctuating reception history from scholarly, journalistic, creative, public and commercial perspectives, with special attention being paid to his compositional legacy.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony written by Julian Horton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few genres of the last 250 years have proved so crucial to the course of music history, or so vital to public musical experience, as the symphony. This Companion offers an accessible guide to the historical, analytical and interpretative issues surrounding this major genre of Western music, discussing an extensive variety of works from the eighteenth century to the present day. The book complements a detailed review of the symphony's history with focused analytical essays from leading scholars on the symphonic music of both mainstream composers, including Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and lesser-known figures, including Carter, Berio and Maxwell Davies. With chapters on a comprehensive range of topics, from the symphony's origins to the politics of its reception in the twentieth century, this is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the history, analysis and performance of the symphonic repertoire.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner written by John Williamson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion provides an overview of the composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896). Sixteen chapters by leading scholars investigate aspects of his life and works and consider the manner in which critical appreciation has changed in the twentieth century. The first section deals with Bruckner's Austrian background, investigating the historical circumstances in which he worked, his upbringing in Upper Austria, and his career in Vienna. A number of misunderstandings are dealt with in the light of recent research. The remainder of the book covers Bruckner's career as church musician and symphonist, with a chapter on the neglected secular vocal music. Religious, aesthetic, formal, harmonic, and instrumental aspects are considered, while one chapter confronts the problem of the editions of the symphonies. Two concluding chapters discuss the symphonies in performance, and the history of Bruckner-reception with particular reference to German Nationalism, the Third Reich and the appropriation of Bruckner by the Nazis.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Lied written by James Parsons and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning several generations before Schubert, the Lied first appears as domestic entertainment. In the century that follows it becomes one of the primary modes of music-making. By the time German song comes to its presumed conclusion with Richard Strauss's 1948 Vier letzte Lieder, this rich repertoire has moved beyond the home and keyboard accompaniment to the symphony hall. This is a 2004 introductory chronicle of this fascinating genre. In essays by eminent scholars, this Companion places the Lied in its full context - at once musical, literary, and cultural - with chapters devoted to focal composers as well as important issues, such as the way in which the Lied influenced other musical genres, its use as a musical commodity, and issues of performance. The volume is framed by a detailed chronology of German music and poetry from the late 1730s to the present and also contains a comprehensive bibliography.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony written by Julian Horton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive guide to the historical, analytical and interpretative issues surrounding one of the major genres of Western music.
Download or read book Gustav Mahler s Symphonic Landscapes written by Thomas Peattie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study Thomas Peattie offers a new account of Mahler's symphonies by considering the composer's reinvention of the genre in light of his career as a conductor and more broadly in terms of his sustained engagement with the musical, theatrical, and aesthetic traditions of the Austrian fin de siècle. Drawing on the ideas of landscape, mobility, and theatricality, Peattie creates a richly interdisciplinary framework that reveals the uniqueness of Mahler's symphonic idiom and its radical attitude toward the presentation and ordering of musical events. The book goes on to identify a fundamental tension between the music's episodic nature and its often-noted narrative impulse and suggests that Mahler's symphonic dramaturgy can be understood as a form of abstract theatre.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra written by Colin James Lawson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-24 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide to the orchestra and orchestral life is unique in its breadth of coverage. It combinesorchestral history and repertory with a practical bias offering critical thought about the past, present and future of the orchestra. Including topics such as the art of orchestration, scorereading, conducting, international orchestras, recording, as well as consideration of what it means to be an orchestral musician, an educator, or an informed listener, it will be of interest to a wideranging readership of music historians and professional or amateur performers.
Download or read book Mahler in Context written by Charles Youmans and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mahler in Context explores the institutions, artists, thinkers, cultural movements, socio-political conditions, and personal relationships that shaped Mahler's creative output. Focusing on the contexts surrounding the artist, the collection provides a sense of the complex crosscurrents against which Mahler was reacting as conductor, composer, and human being. Topics explored include his youth and training, performing career, creative activity, spiritual and philosophical influences, and his reception after his death. Together, this collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide-ranging investigation of the ecology surrounding Mahler as a composer and a fuller appreciation of the topics that occupied his mind as he conceived his works. Readers will benefit from engagement with lesser known dimensions of Mahler's life. Through this broader contextual approach, this book will serve as a valuable and unique resource for students, scholars, and a general readership.
Download or read book Mahler s Voices written by Julian Johnson and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2009-04-17 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johnson considers how Mahler's body of music foregrounds the idea of artifice, construction and musical convention while also presenting itself as act of authentic expression and disclosure. This study of brings together a close reading of the renowned composer's music with wide-ranging cultural and historical interpretation.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Berg written by Anthony Pople and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-04-24 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of Alban Berg is full of paradoxes, secrets and allusions, but he was able to handle emotional and moral issues at a distance and with profound sympathy. His unhurried, almost aristocratic attitude to life and his extreme self-criticism in professional matters resulted in an extraordinarily small musical output, but it includes towering masterpieces such as the operas Wozzeck and Lulu, and his last work, the Violin Concerto. All of Berg's substantial works are discussed in this Companion which brings together a team of experts who write from a variety of historical and critical perspectives, outlining the place of the music in the cultural history of its time and recontextualising it against the broader twentieth-century interplay of fashions, aesthetics and ideas.
Download or read book Perspectives on Gustav Mahler written by Jeremy Barham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The diverse topics and methodologies of the essays brought together in this collection address particular gaps in the current scholarly understanding of Mahler and his work, and provide contexts for a continuing discourse receptive to differing musicological concerns.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg written by Jennifer Shaw and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-13 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arnold Schoenberg – composer, theorist, teacher, painter, and one of the most important and controversial figures in twentieth-century music. This Companion presents engaging essays by leading scholars on Schoenberg's central works, writings, and ideas over his long life in Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Challenging monolithic views of the composer as an isolated elitist, the volume demonstrates that what has kept Schoenberg and his music interesting and provocative was his profound engagement with the musical traditions he inherited and transformed, with the broad range of musical and artistic developments during his lifetime he critiqued and incorporated, and with the fundamental cultural, social, and political disruptions through which he lived. The book provides introductions to Schoenberg's most important works, and to his groundbreaking innovations including his twelve-tone compositions. Chapters also examine Schoenberg's lasting influence on other composers and writers over the last century.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet written by Robin Stowell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-13 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion offers a concise and authoritative survey of the string quartet by eleven chamber music specialists. Its fifteen carefully structured chapters provide coverage of a stimulating range of perspectives previously unavailable in one volume. It focuses on four main areas: the social and musical background to the quartet's development; the most celebrated ensembles; string quartet playing, including aspects of contemporary and historical performing practice; and the mainstream repertory, including significant 'mixed ensemble' compositions involving string quartet. Various musical and pictorial illustrations and informative appendixes, including a chronology of the most significant works, complete this indispensable guide. Written for all string quartet enthusiasts, this Companion will enrich readers' understanding of the history of the genre, the context and significance of quartets as cultural phenomena, and the musical, technical and interpretative problems of chamber music performance. It will also enhance their experience of listening to quartets in performance and on recordings.
Download or read book Mahler s Sixth Symphony written by Robert Samuels and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-11 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study uses semiotic theory in order to investigate different kinds of musical communication.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten written by Mervyn Cooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-06-28 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten is a comprehensive guide to the composer's work, aimed both at the non-specialist and music student. It sheds light on both the composer's stylistic and personal development, offering new interpretations of his operatic works and discussing his characteristic working methods. Topics treated here in detail for the first time include Britten's work in the cinema in the 1930s, his lifelong pacifism and his strong interest in the music of the Far East; other chapters include reassessments of his relationship with W. H. Auden and his attitude towards childhood, comprehensive analyses of major works and a concise history of the Aldeburgh Festival. A distinguished team of contributors include some who worked with the composer during his lifetime, as well as leading representatives of the younger generation of Britten scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.
Download or read book Recollections of Gustav Mahler written by Natalie Bauer-Lechner and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in English in 1980, this important early memoir of Gustav Mahler is by Natalie Bauer-Lechner (1858-1921), a viola player and close and devoted friend of Mahler until his marriage to Alma Schindler in 1902. She visited him in Hamburg and frequented his circle in Vienna, also accompanying him and his family on a number of the summer vacations during which the Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies came into being, together with many of the Wunderhorn songs. Compiled from Bauer-Lechner's private journal, these Recollections are a vital, invaluable record of Mahler's personal, professional and creative life during the last decade of the nineteenth century. A large part of the book recounts, at first hand, conversations with Mahler concerning his works and his ideas about performance (both in the opera-house and on the concert platform.)
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Debussy written by Simon Trezise and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-06-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often considered the father of twentieth-century music, Debussy was a visionary whose influence is still felt. This book offers a wide-ranging series of essays on Debussy the man, the musician and composer. It contains insights into his character, his relationship to his Parisian environment and his musical works across all genres, with challenging views on the roles of nature and eroticism in his life and music. His music is considered through the characteristic themes of sonority, rhythm, tonality and form, with closing chapters considering the performance and reception of his music in the first years of the new century and our view of Debussy today as a major force in Western culture. This comprehensive view of Debussy is written by a team of specialists for students and informed music lovers.
