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Book The Orpheus Myth and the Powers of Music

Download or read book The Orpheus Myth and the Powers of Music written by Vladimir L. Marchenkov and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the key turning points in the history of the Orpheus myth as factors that shaped, and continues to shape, our conceptions of music's powers. From its beginnings in archaic Antiquity to the latest major opera based on it, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice has been used by poets, philosophers, and musicians to express an increasingly complex set of ideas about what music can do. The study follows three threads in the myth's history: changes in form, cultural status, and the resulting visions of the powers of song. The most spectacular change in form is the role played by Eurydice who evolves from a generic, voiceless type into a rich music-philosophical symbol. Equally fascinating is the entangled issue of Orpheus's success and failure. In terms of cultural status, the story remains a genuine myth, ?even alongside its non-mythical forms, ?until the early modern period. Modernity problematizes the existence of myth but its mythophobia becomes a symptom of its own profound irrationality. Accordingly, the powers of music evolve from mythic omnipotence to screaming contradictions that demand, but fail to achieve, resolution. From Monteverdi and Striggio to Birtwistle and Zinovieff, composers and librettists turn to Orpheus and Eurydice to express their sense of music's place in human existence. The undulating tapestry of their strikingly diverse answers points to the need to rethink, once again, the fundamentals of our musical culture.

Book Orpheus

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ann Wroe
  • Publisher : Random House
  • Release : 2011-07-14
  • ISBN : 1446400905
  • Pages : 276 pages

Download or read book Orpheus written by Ann Wroe and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-07-14 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For at least two and a half millennia, the figure of Orpheus has haunted humanity. Half-man, half-god, musician, magician, theologian, poet and lover, his story never leaves us. He may be myth, but his lyre still sounds, entrancing everything that hears it: animals, trees, water, stones, and men. In this extraordinary work Ann Wroe goes in search of Orpheus, from the forests where he walked and the mountains where he worshipped to the artefacts, texts and philosophies built up round him. She traces the man, and the power he represents, through the myriad versions of a fantastical life: his birth in Thrace, his studies in Egypt, his voyage with the Argonauts to fetch the Golden Fleece, his love for Eurydice and journey to Hades, and his terrible death. We see him tantalising Cicero and Plato, and breathing new music into Gluck and Monteverdi; occupying the mind of Jung and the surreal dreams of Cocteau; scandalising the Fathers of the early Church, and filling Rilke with poems like a whirlwind. He emerges as not simply another mythical figure but the force of creation itself, singing the song of light out of darkness and life out of death.

Book Orfeo

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard Powers
  • Publisher : Harper Collins
  • Release : 2014-01-21
  • ISBN : 1443422924
  • Pages : 308 pages

Download or read book Orfeo written by Richard Powers and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Echo Maker, Richard Powers “may well be one of the smartest novelists now writing” (LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Seventy-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home DIY microbiology lab--the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to extract music from rich patterns beyond the ear’s ability to hear--has come to the attention of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid on his house, Els turns fugitive, waiting for the evidence to clear him and for the alarm surrounding his activities to blow over. His days in hiding provoke memories of a turbulent century of musical turf wars and cause Els to reflect on a life spent chasing after transcendent sounds to the bewilderment of an indifferent public. As the national hysteria for safety erupts again in the face of this latest threat, Els--the “Bioterrorist Bach”--feeling the noose around him tighten, embarks on a cross-country trip to visit the people in his past who have most shaped his failed musical journey. Through the help of these people--his ex-wife, his daughter and his long-time artistic collaborator-- Els comes up with a plan to turn this disastrous collision with the security state into one last, resonant artwork that might reach an audience beyond his wildest dreams. Inspired by Steve Kurtz, the bio-artist wrongly arrested for terrorism by the FBI, Orfeo probes the boundary between stifling safety and reckless, releasing danger. It explores the varieties of human hunger, in particular the desire to hear more and to make meaning where there is none. Finally, the book is a meditation on that most endangered and priceless of human resources: attention.

Book Enlightenment Orpheus

    Book Details:
  • Author : Vanessa Agnew
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2008-05-01
  • ISBN : 0198044356
  • Pages : 278 pages

Download or read book Enlightenment Orpheus written by Vanessa Agnew and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Agnew persuasively connects the English traveler and music scholar Charles Burney with the ancient myth of Orpheus. She uses Burney as a guide through wide-ranging discussions of eighteenth-century musical travel, views on music's curative powers, interest in non-European music, and concerns about cultural identity. Arguing that what people said about music was central to some of the great Enlightenment debates surrounding such issues as human agency, cultural difference, and national identity, Agnew adds a new dimension to postcolonial studies, which has typically emphasized the literary and visual at the expense of the aural. She also demonstrates that these discussions must be viewed in context at the era's broad and well-entrenched transnational network, and emphasizes the importance of travel literature in generating knowledge at the time. A new and radically interdisciplinary approach to the question of the power of music - its aesthetic and historical interpretations and political uses - Enlightenment Orpheus will appeal to students and scholars in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, German studies, eighteenth-century history, and comparative studies.

Book Orpheus Girl

    Book Details:
  • Author : Brynne Rebele-Henry
  • Publisher : Soho Press
  • Release : 2019-10-08
  • ISBN : 1641290757
  • Pages : 176 pages

Download or read book Orpheus Girl written by Brynne Rebele-Henry and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her debut novel, award-winning poet Brynne Rebele-Henry re-imagines the Orpheus myth as a love story between two teenage girls who are sent to conversion therapy after being caught together in an intimate moment. Abandoned by a single mother she never knew, 16-year-old Raya—obsessed with ancient myths—lives with her grandmother in a small conservative Texas town. For years Raya has fought to hide her feelings for her best friend and true love, Sarah. When the two are outed, they are sent to Friendly Saviors: a re-education camp meant to “fix” them and make them heterosexual. Upon arrival, Raya vows to assume the role of Orpheus, to return to the world of the living with her love—and after she, Sarah, and the other teen residents are subjected to abusive and brutal “treatments” by the staff, Raya only becomes more determined to escape. In a haunting voice reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and the contemporary lyricism of David Levithan, Brynne Rebele-Henry weaves a powerful inversion of the Orpheus myth informed by the disturbing real-world truths of conversion therapy. Orpheus Girl is a story of dysfunctional families, trauma, first love, heartbreak, and ultimately, the fierce adolescent resilience that has the power to triumph over darkness and ignorance. CW: There are scenes in this book that depict self-harm, homophobia, transphobia, and violence against LGBTQ characters.

Book All Our Pretty Songs

Download or read book All Our Pretty Songs written by Sarah McCarry and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a story about love, but not the kind of love you think. You'll see... In the lush and magical Pacific Northwest live two best friends who grew up like sisters: charismatic, mercurial, and beautiful Aurora, and the devoted, watchful narrator. Each of them is incomplete without the other. But their unbreakable bond is challenged when a mysterious and gifted musician named Jack comes between them. His music is like nothing I have ever heard. It is like the ocean surging, the wind that blows across the open water, the far call of gulls. Suddenly, each girl must decide what matters most: friendship, or love. What both girls don't know is that the stakes are even higher than either of them could have imagined. They're not the only ones who have noticed Jack's gift; his music has awakened an ancient evil—and a world both above and below which may not be mythical at all. We have paved over the ancient world but that does not mean we have erased it. The real and the mystical; the romantic and the heartbreaking all begin to swirl together in All Our Pretty Songs, Sarah McCarry's brilliant debut, carrying the two on journey that is both enthralling and terrifying. And it's up to the narrator to protect the people she loves—if she can.

Book Orpheus

    Book Details:
  • Author : Padraic Colum
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2013-10
  • ISBN : 9781258899738
  • Pages : 366 pages

Download or read book Orpheus written by Padraic Colum and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a new release of the original 1930 edition.

Book Orpheus

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Warden
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 1985
  • ISBN : 9780802065933
  • Pages : 238 pages

Download or read book Orpheus written by John Warden and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The myth of Orpheus, shaman and teacher, musician and lover, is the subject of this book. It brings together the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines to present a conspectus of the myth's career, to show how it grows and changes to meet changing demands -- always different, yet always the same. Early Greek evidence for the Orpheus myth and a speculative explanation of its origins are offered along with chapters on the treatments of the myth by Virgil and Ovid, on Orpheus and Christianity, and on the allegorizing treatment of Orpheus which characterizes the Middle Ages. Orpheus in the Renaissance is studied in the work of the philosopher Marsilio Ficino; in Italian art from 1400 to 1600; in operas by Peri and Monteverdi; in a religious allegorical play by Calderon; and in the writings of Spenser, Milton, and Bacon. The Orpheus myth has been crucial in the defining of a culture. Its history demonstrates effectively the persistence and plasticity of myth.

Book Music  Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Download or read book Music Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture written by Katherine Butler and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2019 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complex relationship between myths and music is here investigated.

Book The Last Song of Orpheus

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert Silverberg
  • Publisher : Phoenix Pick
  • Release : 2017-09-21
  • ISBN : 9781612423371
  • Pages : 152 pages

Download or read book The Last Song of Orpheus written by Robert Silverberg and published by Phoenix Pick. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I am Orpheus, the maker of songs. Great Apollo came to me often and instructed me in the art of melody so that what came from my lyre could touch the heart even of a stone, and when I went to my mother Calliope in her cave she taught me the secrets of making verses that would hold people entranced the way a magical spell might hold them. And so music has flowed from me all my life as though from an inextinguishable fountain, which is to say that there has been music in the world since the beginning of time and that music will endure to time's end, and beyond it to the moment of beginning again; and so it was that a shaggy-haired Thracian princeling entered into his role in the universe." Gifted with the golden lyre, Orpheus--rumored son of the god Apollo, and yet recognized as the heir of Oeagros, King of Thrace--tells us of the tale of his life as he writes songs throughout the known world. From his role as teacher and spiritual adviser to the Ciconian people, to the profound love and loss of his beloved Eurydice, to his quest with Jason and the Argonauts to claim the Golden Fleece, Orpheus' songs of his life experiences help him sculpt a world that, without his music, would be devoid of the passion and purpose only a muse of his power could provide. Aware of his own fate before he sets out, Orpheus nevertheless continues on the path pre-ordained for him, to discover if knowing your future prevents you from experiencing your present with a sense of wonder and immediacy that can allow Orpheus to connect with the lives around him in order to fulfill his destiny.

Book The Power of Music

    Book Details:
  • Author : Roger Kennedy
  • Publisher : Phoenix Publishing House
  • Release : 2020-07-31
  • ISBN : 1800130015
  • Pages : 190 pages

Download or read book The Power of Music written by Roger Kennedy and published by Phoenix Publishing House. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotion is an integral aspect of musical experience; music has the power to take us on an emotional and intellectual journey, transforming the listener along the way. The aim of this book is to examine the nature of this journey, using a variety of perspectives. No one discipline can do justice to music's complexity if one is to have a sense of the whole musical experience, even if one has to break up the whole experience into various elements for the purposes of clarification. The issues raised have some relationship to psychoanalytic understanding and listening, as after all psychoanalysis is a listening discipline; its bedrock is listening to the patient's communications. While of course there are significant differences between understanding of, and listening to, a musical performance and a patient in a consulting room, the book explores common ground. Evidence from neuroscience indicates that music acts on a number of different brain sites, and that the brain is likely to be hard-wired for musical perception and appreciation, and this offers some kind of neurological substrate for musical experiences, or a parallel mode of explanation for music's multiple effects on individuals and groups. After various excursions into early mother/baby experiences, evolutionary speculations, and neuroscientific findings, the book's main emphasis is that it is the intensity of the artistic vision which is responsible for music's power. That intense vision invites the viewer or the listener into the orbit of the work, engaging us to respond to the particular vision in an essentially intersubjective relationship between the work and the observer or listener. This is the area of what we might call the human soul. Music can be described as having soul when it hits the emotional core of the listener. And, of course, there is 'soul music', whose basic rhythms reach deep into the body to create a powerful feeling of aliveness. One can truly say that music of all the arts is most able to give shape to the elusive human subject or soul.

Book Enlightenment Orpheus

    Book Details:
  • Author : Vanessa Agnew
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2008-05
  • ISBN : 0195336666
  • Pages : 278 pages

Download or read book Enlightenment Orpheus written by Vanessa Agnew and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-05 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Agnew persuasively connects the English traveler and music scholar Charles Burney with the ancient myth of Orpheus. She uses Burney as a guide through wide-ranging discussions of eighteenth-century musical travel, views on music's curative powers, interest in non-European music, and concerns about cultural identity. Arguing that what people said about music was central to some of the great Enlightenment debates surrounding such issues as human agency, cultural difference, and national identity, Agnew adds a new dimension to postcolonial studies, which has typically emphasized the literary and visual at the expense of the aural. She also demonstrates that these discussions must be viewed in context at the era's broad and well-entrenched transnational network, and emphasizes the importance of travel literature in generating knowledge at the time.A new and radically interdisciplinary approach to the question of the power of music - its aesthetic and historical interpretations and political uses - Enlightenment Orpheus will appeal to students and scholars in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, German studies, eighteenth-century history, and comparative studies.

Book The Concept of Music in Robert Henryson s  Orpheus and Eurydice

Download or read book The Concept of Music in Robert Henryson s Orpheus and Eurydice written by Agnetha Hinz and published by . This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, Free University of Berlin (Institut fur Englische Philologie), course: Medieval English Literatures II, language: English, abstract: "Music, through the sweetness of its melody, brings pleasure and comfort to the soul." This citation by Nigel Wilkin in "Music in the Age of Chaucer" ascribes a special own form of power to music; the power to affect someone's soul. Also in the poem of Orpheus and Eurydice by the Scottish poet Robert Henryson, music plays a decisive role and implies a special power to the protagonist. The poem, which approximately was written in the late fifteenth century, leans on the Greek myth of Orpheus. King Orpheus, who is introduced as the grandson of Memoria and Jupiter, the son of the "michty god Phebuss" and the muse Caliope, "that madin mervalouss, / The ferd sistir, of all musik maistress," gains his bond to music through his mother's milk, quod vide "gart him souk of hir twa paupis quhyte/ The sueit lecour of all musik perfyte." Henryson describes Orpheus as "fair and wyse, / Gentill and gud, full of liberalitie." His "noble fame" was extensive, so that the queen of "Trace," called Eurydice, heard about him, too. They get married and live their life full of happiness, pleasure and enjoyment."

Book The Orpheus Myth in Milton s    L   Allegro        Il Penseroso     and    Lycidas

Download or read book The Orpheus Myth in Milton s L Allegro Il Penseroso and Lycidas written by Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of John Milton’s “L’Allegro”, “Il Penseroso”, and “Lycidas”, the perspective of an interpreting sign serves as the basis for analysis of the poems’ allusions to the Orpheus myth. The idea of an interpretant proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce and the semiotic relations theorized by Jorgen Dines Johansen work as a lens that enables the reader to see the extent to which Milton recreated the Orpheus myth and used its recreating powers in his poems. Since the three poems have different and opposing voices, the Orpheus myth is the trigger behind the change of voices, as well as the modeling frame that underlies the transitions from an innocent to an enlightened viewpoint. Furthermore, readers in general and critics of all persuasions will have the chance to appreciate the presence of the Orpheus myth in Milton’s work as the fragmented configuration of consciousness in the process of defining two orders of existence: the human and the divine.

Book The Orpheus Myth in Musical Thought of Antiquity  the Renaissance  and Modern Times

Download or read book The Orpheus Myth in Musical Thought of Antiquity the Renaissance and Modern Times written by Vladimir Leonidovi Marchenkov and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Concept of Music in Robert Henryson   s  Orpheus and Eurydice

Download or read book The Concept of Music in Robert Henryson s Orpheus and Eurydice written by Agnetha Hinz and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie), course: Medieval English Literatures II, language: English, abstract: “Music, through the sweetness of its melody, brings pleasure and comfort to the soul.” This citation by Nigel Wilkin in “Music in the Age of Chaucer” ascribes a special own form of power to music; the power to affect someone’s soul. Also in the poem of Orpheus and Eurydice by the Scottish poet Robert Henryson , music plays a decisive role and implies a special power to the protagonist. The poem, which approximately was written in the late fifteenth century, leans on the Greek myth of Orpheus. King Orpheus, who is introduced as the grandson of Memoria and Jupiter, the son of the “michty god Phebuss“ and the muse Caliope, “that madin mervalouss,/ The ferd sistir, of all musik maistress“, gains his bond to music through his mother’s milk, quod vide “gart him souk of hir twa paupis quhyte/ The sueit lecour of all musik perfyte“. Henryson describes Orpheus as “fair and wyse,/ Gentill and gud, full of liberalitie”. His “noble fame“ was extensive, so that the queen of “Trace”, called Eurydice, heard about him, too. They get married and live their life full of happiness, pleasure and enjoyment.