Download or read book The Mighty Kuchka written by John P. Roach Jr. and published by Author House. This book was released on 2009-05-13 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " THE MIGHTY KUCHKA " Teen prodigy NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV is brought by his piano teacher to the home of composer and music instructor MILI BALAKRIEV (antagonist) who recognizes the talent of the young man immediately. Mili's quest is to intentionally deprive his pupils of the musical knowledge of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Europeans in order that his circle of composers would write pure Russian Music without outside influence. After a tour with the Russian Navy to New York City, Rio de Janerio a few Mediterranean ports, Nikolai returns to St. Petersburg as a mature Naval Officer and rejoins Mili's circle of five composers which include MODEST MOUSSORGSKY, ALEXANDER BORODIN and CAESAR CUI. After awhile, Modest, Alexander and Nikolai realize they have been categorized as pupils by Mili and feel a certain coolness as they grow more independent. Nicolai has written his first two symphonies. Nikolai falls in love with NADEZHDA a talented pianist, they get married and travel to many romantic spots in Europe on their honeymoon. Nadezhda is a wonderful influence on Nikolai's music. PETER TCHAIKOVSKI becomes their friend and visits the couple occasionally when in St. Petersburg. One day Nadezhda sees Nikolai in tears claiming "Everything I have composed is wrong!" "I have wasted my life with Mili Balakriev." Nikolai realizes that he has been deprived of the knowledge of the European Masters. Nikolai feeling betrayed suffers a complete nervous breakdown. . .. Peter Tchaikovski credits Nadzhda with nursing Nikolai back to health. Now stronger than ever he completes more than 20 Operas. The Suites, Sheherazade,Easter Overture, Capriccio Espagnol are on repertoires around the world. Nikolai teaches his own group of pupils which include the younger ALEXANDER GLAZANOV andIGOR STRAVINSKY. See Other Books By This Author and when finished, Click here to return to www.JPRoach.org

Download or read book The Mighty Kuchka written by John P Roach Jr and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " THE MIGHTY KUCHKA " Teen prodigy NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV is brought by his piano teacher to the home of composer and music instructor MILI BALAKRIEV (antagonist) who recognizes the talent of the young man immediately. Mili's quest is to intentionally deprive his pupils of the musical knowledge of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Europeans in order that his circle of composers would write pure Russian Music without outside influence. After a tour with the Russian Navy to New York City, Rio de Janerio a few Mediterranean ports, Nikolai returns to St. Petersburg as a mature Naval Officer and rejoins Mili's circle of five composers which include MODEST MOUSSORGSKY, ALEXANDER BORODIN and CAESAR CUI. After awhile, Modest, Alexander and Nikolai realize they have been categorized as pupils by Mili and feel a certain coolness as they grow more independent. Nicolai has written his first two symphonies. Nikolai falls in love with NADEZHDA a talented pianist, they get married and travel to many romantic spots in Europe on their honeymoon. Nadezhda is a wonderful influence on Nikolai's music. PETER TCHAIKOVSKI becomes their friend and visits the couple occasionally when in St. Petersburg. One day Nadezhda sees Nikolai in tears claiming "Everything I have composed is wrong!" "I have wasted my life with Mili Balakriev." Nikolai realizes that he has been deprived of the knowledge of the European Masters. Nikolai feeling betrayed suffers a complete nervous breakdown. . .. Peter Tchaikovski credits Nadzhda with nursing Nikolai back to health. Now stronger than ever he completes more than 20 Operas. The Suites, Sheherazade, Easter Overture, Capriccio Espagnol are on repertoires around the world. Nikolai teaches his own group of pupils which include the younger ALEXANDER GLAZANOV and IGOR STRAVINSKY. See Other Books By This Author and when finished, Click here to return to www.JPRoach.org

Download or read book Musorgsky written by Richard Taruskin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It is [a] fully illuminated story that Richard Taruskin, in the path-breaking essays collected here, unfolds around Modest Musorgsky, Russia's greatest national composer. . . . [Taruskin's] tour de force comes with a frontal attack on all the Soviet-bred truisms that for a century have refashioned Musorgsky from what the evidence suggests he was—an aristocrat with an early clinical interest in true-to-life musical portraiture and a later penchant for drinking partners who were both folklore buffs and political reactionaries democrat."—from the foreword Incorporating both new and now-classic essays, this book for the first time sets the vocal works of Modest Musorgsky in a fully detailed cultural, political, and historical context. From this perspective, Richard Taruskin revises fundamentally the composer's historical and artistic image, in particular debunking the century-old dogmas of Vladimir Stasov, Musorgsky's first biographer. Here the author offers the most complete explanation of the revision of the opera Boris Godunov, compares it to contemporaneous operas by Chaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, advances a revisionary characterization of Khovanshchina as an aristocratic tragedy informed by a pessimistic view of history, discusses Musorgsky's use of folklore, and, focusing on Sorochintsi Fair, brings to a climax his refutation of Musorgsky as a protorevolutionary populist. The epilogue is a survey of revisionary productions of Musorgsky's works at home during the Gorbachev era.

Download or read book Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions Volume Two written by Richard Taruskin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 798 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music. Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity—Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces. Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism"—the professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk art—and how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music. Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed. Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.

Download or read book Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions Volume One written by Richard Taruskin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-04-27 with total page 992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music. Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturityÑPetrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces. Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism"Ñthe professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk artÑand how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music. Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed. Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.

Download or read book The Oxford History of Western Music Music in the Nineteenth Century written by Richard Taruskin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009-08-27 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the traditions of western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time, this book illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age.

Download or read book Oxford History of Western Music written by Richard Taruskin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-27 with total page 3856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of Western Music is a magisterial survey of the traditions of Western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time. This text illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Taking a critical perspective, this text sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. Written by an authoritative, opinionated, and controversial figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a critical aesthetic position with respect to individual works, a context in which each composition may be evaluated and remembered. Taruskin combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. It also describes how the c

Download or read book Essence of an Idealist written by John P. Roach Jr. and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2012-09-20 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ESSENCE of an IDEALIST ESSENCE, From the French word, esse, to be. To exist. If we exist we have essence. When we exist we have choices to make from the very moment we recognize our own existence. This book is about a person who chose to be an idealist, a person who set goals for himself at a very early age and achieved most of them without the need for money. Do not think it is easy to be an idealist? Certainly not in my case, those around you continually remind you to be more practical and advise you, that your goals are neither realistic nor pragmatic. Do idealists fail? Of course they do and some quit to blend in with everyone else. Others recognize their own failure, change direction and try again, and again until they succeed. This book is true account of the authors quest to find his purpose in life. A quest that contains so many failures and so many successes that one questions the trials of an idealist. We tend to categorize idealists as crazy Don Quixote types, charging at windmills to protect the chastity of his Dulcinea. When in fact, the true romantic recognizes, that both author, Cervantes and Don Quixote, appearing as an old chivalrous knight in rusty armor truly understood the power of love. The idealist in this true story seeks adventure at a very early age and even though he finds it, he never stops seeking more challenging adventures. The same is true for success. Success so often is measured in dollars as so aptly put in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. By mid-life this author has become a millionaire and questions the materialistic rewards of success. He concludes that the accumulation of dollars and materialism are not the answer to happiness, for that which you own, owns you. Should success then be re-defined.? Perhaps. Success could be defined as happiness and only the happiness, within you. If you are truly happy, you are successful. This quest contains both successes and failures to find a purpose in life. Im writing this while maturing in age and knowledge, and if my life ends tomorrow it shall be said by my friends that I sought adventure, success, happiness and love and you can judge for yourself whether or not I found it.

Download or read book On Russian Music written by Richard Taruskin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume gathers 36 essays by one of the leading scholars in the study of Russian music. An extensive introduction lays out the main issues and a justification of Taruskin's approach, seen both in the light of his intellectual development and in that of the changing intellectual environment.

Download or read book Musical Lives and Times Examined written by Richard Taruskin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A gathering chiefly of talks given either by invitation or at conferences throughout the world over the last quarter century. The topics range widely, but recurrent themes include the place of classical music in contemporary society and culture, the fraught relationship between aesthetics and ethics, and the responsibilities of scholarship in an age of spin"--

Download or read book Musorgsky and His Circle written by Stephen Walsh and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of Russian classical music in the nineteenth century in the wake of Mikhail Glinka comprises one of the most remarkable and fascinating stories in all musical history. The five men who came together in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg in the 1860s, all composers of talent, some of genius, would be—in spite of a virtual lack of technical training—responsible for some of the greatest and best-loved music ever written. How this happened is the subject of Stephen Walsh's brilliant composite portrait of the group known in the West as the Five, and in Russia as moguchaya kuchka—the Mighty Little Heap. Friends, competitors, and creative intellectuals whose ambitions and ideas reflect the ferment of their times, Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and—most important of all—Modest Musorgsky, come wonderfully to life in this extended account. The detail is engrossing. We see Borodin composing music while conducting research in chemistry (“he would jump up and run back to the laboratory to make sure nothing had burnt out or boiled over there, meanwhile filling the corridor with improbable sequences of ninths or sevenths”); Balakirev tutoring Musorgsky (“Balakirev could not remedy the defects in his pupil’s character, but he could confront him with works of genius”); Cui doggedly producing operas during breaks from his career as a military fortifications instructor. Musorgsky asserts his independence, moving from writing songs and the showpiece Night on Bald Mountain to the magnificent Boris Godunov, meanwhile struggling against poverty and depression. In the background such important figures as Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolay Chernïshevsky shape the cultural milieu, while the godfather of the kuchka, critic and scholar Vladimir Stasov, is seen offering sometimes combative support. As an experienced and widely skilled musical scholar and biographer (his two-volume life of Stravinsky has been called “one of the best books ever written about a musician”), Stephen Walsh is exceptionally wellplaced to tell this story. He does so with deep understanding and panache, making Musorgksy and His Circle both important and a delight to read.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture written by Nicholas Rzhevsky and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fully updated new edition of this overview of contemporary Russia and the influence of its Soviet past.

Download or read book Composing for the Red Screen written by Kevin Bartig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound film captivated Sergey Prokofiev during the final two decades of his life: he considered composing for nearly two dozen pictures, eventually undertaking eight of them, all Soviet productions. Hollywood luminaries such as Gloria Swanson tempted him with commissions, and arguably more people heard his film music than his efforts in all other genres combined. Films for which Prokofiev composed, in particular those of Sergey Eisenstein, are now classics of world cinema. Drawing on newly available sources, Composing for the Red Screen examines - for the first time - the full extent of this prodigious cinematic career. Author Kevin Bartig examines how Prokofiev's film music derived from a self-imposed challenge: to compose "serious" music for a broad audience. The picture that emerges is of a composer seeking an individual film-music voice, shunning Hollywood models and objecting to his Soviet colleagues' ideologically expedient film songs. Looking at Prokofiev's film music as a whole - with well-known blockbusters like Alexander Nevsky considered alongside more obscure or aborted projects - reveals that there were multiple solutions to the challenge, each with varying degrees of success. Prokofiev carefully balanced his own populist agenda, the perceived aesthetic demands of the films themselves, and, later on, Soviet bureaucratic demands for accessibility.

Download or read book Alexander Tcherepnin written by Li͡udmila Zinovʹevna Korabelʹnikova and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ludmila Korabelnikova recounts the life and times of Alexander Tcherepnin, a prolific and often emulated composer who produced four operas, 13 ballets, four symphonies, numerous orchestral and chamber works, and more than 200 piano pieces. He was born in Russia in 1899 to a family of musicians and artists. However, Aaron Copland referred to him as "an honorary American composer" and Toru Takemitsu called him "a father figure of Japanese music." Korabelnikova focuses not only on the biographical elements of Tcherepnin's story, but also on his music and its technical innovations. She includes extended quotations by the composer himself and selective analytical commentary, based on primary sources and contemporaneous accounts.

Download or read book Selected Articles on Russia written by and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Russian Music at Home and Abroad written by Richard Taruskin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new collection views Russian music through the Greek triad of “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” to investigate how the idea of "nation" embeds itself in the public discourse about music and other arts with results at times invigorating, at times corrupting. In our divided, post–Cold War, and now post–9/11 world, Russian music, formerly a quiet corner on the margins of musicology, has become a site of noisy contention. Richard Taruskin assesses the political and cultural stakes that attach to it in the era of Pussy Riot and renewed international tensions, before turning to individual cases from the nineteenth century to the present. Much of the volume is devoted to the resolutely cosmopolitan but inveterately Russian Igor Stravinsky, one of the major forces in the music of the twentieth century and subject of particular interest to composers and music theorists all over the world. Taruskin here revisits him for the first time since the 1990s, when everything changed for Russia and its cultural products. Other essays are devoted to the cultural and social policies of the Soviet Union and their effect on the music produced there as those policies swung away from Communist internationalism to traditional Russian nationalism; to the musicians of the Russian postrevolutionary diaspora; and to the tension between the compelling artistic quality of works such as Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps or Prokofieff’s Zdravitsa and the antihumanistic or totalitarian messages they convey. Russian Music at Home and Abroad addresses these concerns in a personal and critical way, characteristically demonstrating Taruskin’s authority and ability to bring living history out of the shadows.

Download or read book Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Louri written by Klára Móricz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié explores the varied aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of Russian composer Arthur Lourié. A St. Petersburg native allied with the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age decadence, Lourié was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and America, where his career foundered. Making his way by serving others, he became Stravinsky's right-hand man, Serge Koussevitsky's ghostwriter, and philosopher Jacques Maritain's muse. Lourié left his mark on the poems of Anna Akhmatova, on the neoclassical aesthetics of Stravinsky, on Eurasianism, and on Maritain's NeoThomist musings about music. Lourié serves as a flawless lens through which aspects of Silver Age Russia, early Bolshevik rule, and the cultural space of exile come into sharper focus. But this interdisciplinary collection of essays, edited by musicologists Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison, also looks at Lourié himself as an artist and intellectual in his own right. Much of the aesthetic and technical discussion concerns his grandly eulogistic opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, understood as both a belated Symbolist work and as a NeoThomist exercise. Despite the importance Lourié attached to the opera as his masterwork, Blackamoor has never been performed, its fate thus serving as an emblem of Lourié's own. Yet even if Lourié seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history, he looms large in studies of emigration and cultural memory. Here Lourié's life, like his last opera, is presented as a meditation on the circumstances and psychology of exile. Ultimately, these essays recover a lost realm of musical and aesthetic possibilities-a Russia that Lourié, and the world, saw disappear.