Download or read book Understanding the Leitmotif written by Matthew Bribitzer-Stull and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through analysis, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull explores the legacy of the leitmotif, from Wagner's Ring cycle to present-day Hollywood film music.
Download or read book Understanding the Leitmotif written by Matthew Bribitzer-Stull and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The musical leitmotif, having reached a point of particular forcefulness in the music of Richard Wagner, has remained a popular compositional device up to the present day. In this book, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull explores the background and development of the leitmotif, from Wagner to the Hollywood adaptations of The Lord of The Rings and the Harry Potter series. Analyzing both concert music and film music, Bribitzer-Stull explains what the leitmotif is and establishes it as the union of two aspects: the thematic and the associative. He goes on to show that Wagner's Ring cycle provides a leitmotivic paradigm, a model from which we can learn to better understand the leitmotif across style periods. Arguing for a renewed interest in the artistic merit of the leitmotif, Bribitzer-Stull reveals how uniting meaning, memory, and emotion in music can lead to a richer listening experience and a better understanding of dramatic music's enduring appeal.
Download or read book Understanding the Leitmotif written by Matthew Bribitzer-Stull and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The musical leitmotif, having reached a point of particular forcefulness in the music of Richard Wagner, has remained a popular compositional device up to the present day. In this book, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull explores the background and development of the leitmotif, from Wagner to the Hollywood adaptations of The Lord of The Rings and the Harry Potter series. Analyzing both concert music and film music, Bribitzer-Stull explains what the leitmotif is and establishes it as the union of two aspects: the thematic and the associative. He goes on to show that Wagner's Ring cycle provides a leitmotivic paradigm, a model from which we can learn to better understand the leitmotif across style periods. Arguing for a renewed interest in the artistic merit of the leitmotif, Bribitzer-Stull reveals how uniting meaning, memory, and emotion in music can lead to a richer listening experience and a better understanding of dramatic music's enduring appeal.
Download or read book For the Love of Music written by John Mauceri and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a lifetime of experience, profound knowledge and understanding, and heartwarming appreciation, an internationally celebrated conductor and teacher answers the questions: Why should I listen to classical music? How can I get the most from the listening experience? A protégé of Leonard Bernstein--his colleague for eighteen years--and an eminent conductor who has toured and recorded all over the world, John Mauceri helps us to reap the joys and pleasures classical music has to offer. Briefly, we learn the way a musical tradition born in ancient Greece, embraced by the Roman Empire, and subsequently nurtured by influences from across the globe, gave shape to the classical music that came to be embraced by cultures from Japan to Bolivia. Then Mauceri examines the music itself, helping us understand what it is we hear when we listen to classical music: how, by a kind of sonic metaphor, it expresses the deepest recesses of human feeling and emotion; how each piece bears the traces of its history; how the concert experience--a unique one each and every time--allows us to discover music anew. Unpretentious, graceful, instructive, this is a book for the aficionado, the novice, and anyone looking to have the love of music fired within them.
Download or read book The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films written by Doug Adams and published by Alfred Publishing Company. This book was released on 2010 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the complete account of the making of the Lord of the Rings trilogy music score, and includes extensive music examples, original manuscript scores, and glimpses into the creative process from the composer.
Download or read book Musical Meaning and Expression written by Stephen Davies and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We talk not only of enjoying music, but of understanding it. Music is often taken to have expressive import--and in that sense to have meaning. But what does music mean, and how does it mean? Stephen Davies addresses these questions in this sophisticated and knowledgeable overview of current theories in the philosophy of music. Reviewing and criticizing the aesthetic positions of recent years, he offers a spirited explanation of his own position. Davies considers and rejects in turn the positions that music describes (like language), or depicts (like pictures), or symbolizes (in a distinctive fashion) emotions. Similarly, he resists the idea that music's expressiveness is to be explained solely as the composer's self-expression, or in terms of its power to evoke a response from the audience. Music's ability to describe emotions, he believes, is located within the music itself; it presents the aural appearance of what he calls emotion characteristics. The expressive power of music awakens emotions in the listener, and music is valued for this power although the responses are sometimes ones of sadness. Davies shows that appreciation and understanding may require more than recognition of and reaction to music's expressive character, but need not depend on formal musicological training.
Download or read book Waging Heavy Peace written by Neil Young and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The perfect gift for music lovers and Neil Young fans, telling the story behind Neil Young's legendary career and his iconic, beloved songs. “I think I will have to use my time wisely and keep my thoughts straight if I am to succeed and deliver the cargo I so carefully have carried thus far to the outer reaches.”—Neil Young, from Waging Heavy Peace Legendary singer and songwriter Neil Young’s storied career has spanned over forty years and yielded some of the modern era’s most enduring music. Now for the first time ever, Young reflects upon his life—from his Canadian childhood, to his part in the sixties rock explosion with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, through his later career with Crazy Horse and numerous private challenges. An instant classic, Waging Heavy Peace is as uncompromising and unforgettable as the man himself.
Download or read book A History of Film Music written by Mervyn Cooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive and lively introduction to the major trends in film scoring from the silent era to the present day, focussing not only on dominant Hollywood practices but also offering an international perspective by including case studies of the national cinemas of the UK, France, India, Italy, Japan and the early Soviet Union. The book balances wide-ranging overviews of film genres, modes of production and critical reception with detailed non-technical descriptions of the interaction between image track and soundtrack in representative individual films. In addition to the central focus on narrative cinema, separate sections are also devoted to music in documentary and animated films, film musicals and the uses of popular and classical music in the cinema. The author analyses the varying technological and aesthetic issues that have shaped the history of film music, and concludes with an account of the modern film composer's working practices.
Download or read book The Sense of Music written by Raymond Monelle and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-17 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fictional Dr. Strabismus sets out to write a new comprehensive theory of music. But music's tendency to deconstruct itself combined with the complexities of postmodernism doom him to failure. This is the parable that frames The Sense of Music, a novel treatment of music theory that reinterprets the modern history of Western music in the terms of semiotics. Based on the assumption that music cannot be described without reference to its meaning, Raymond Monelle proposes that works of the Western classical tradition be analyzed in terms of temporality, subjectivity, and topic theory. Critical of the abstract analysis of musical scores, Monelle argues that the score does not reveal music's sense. That sense--what a piece of music says and signifies--can be understood only with reference to history, culture, and the other arts. Thus, music is meaningful in that it signifies cultural temporalities and themes, from the traditional manly heroism of the hunt to military power to postmodern "polyvocality." This theoretical innovation allows Monelle to describe how the Classical style of the eighteenth century--which he reads as a balance of lyric and progressive time--gave way to the Romantic need for emotional realism. He argues that irony and ambiguity subsequently eroded the domination of personal emotion in Western music as well as literature, killing the composer's subjectivity with that of the author. This leaves Dr. Strabismus suffering from the postmodern condition, and Raymond Monelle with an exciting, controversial new approach to understanding music and its history.
Download or read book Richard Wagner for the New Millennium written by M. Bribitzer-Stull and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-09-17 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. A central concern of this study is the relationship between Wagner the artist and Wagner the social phenomenon. Many of the essays within explore the most difficult yet most crucial issue in Wagner studies: the impact of the composer's problematic world view and complex personal life on his musical/dramatic creations.
Download or read book Le Corbusier the Noble Savage written by Adolf Max Vogt and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vogt's investigation of LC's early life and education not only reveals important, previously unacknowledged influences on specific projects such as the League of Nations headquarters and the Villa Savoye, but also suggests why LC throughout his career preferred to lift buildings above the ground, to give them the appearance of "floating." This tendency had decisive consequences for buildings associated with the modern movement and continues to influence architecture today.
Download or read book Music of a Life written by Andreï Makine and published by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-10-28 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brief but extraordinarily powerful novel by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers and Requiem for a Lost Empire, Music of a Life is set in the period just before, and two decades after, World War II. Alexeï Berg’s father is a well-known dramatist, his mother a famous opera singer. But during Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1930s they, like millions of other Russians, come under attack for their presumed lack of political purity. Harassed and proscribed, they have nonetheless, on the eve of Hitler’s war, not yet been arrested. And young Alexeï himself, a budding classical pianist, has been allowed to continue his musical studies. His first solo concert is scheduled for May 24, 1941. Two days before the concert, on his way home from his final rehearsal, he sees his parents being arrested, taken from their Moscow apartment. Knowing his own arrest will not be far behind, Alexeï flees to the country house of his fiancée, where again betrayal awaits him. He flees, one step ahead of the dreaded secret police until, taking on the identity of a dead soldier, he enlists in the Soviet army. Thus begins his seemingly endless journey, through war and peace, until he lands, two decades later, in a snowbound train station in the Urals, where he relates his harrowing saga to the novel’s narrator. An international bestseller, Music of a Life is, in the words of Le Monde, “extremely powerful . . . a gem.”
Download or read book Richard Wagner written by Martin Geck and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-09-18 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[An] intriguing exploration of the composer’s life and thought as exemplified by his music. An excellent biography.” —Library Journal Best known for the four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner (1813–83) was a conductor, librettist, theater director, and essayist, in addition to being the composer of some of the most enduring operatic works in history. Though his influence on the development of European music is indisputable, Wagner was also quite outspoken on the politics and culture of his time. His ideas traveled beyond musical circles into philosophy, literature, theater staging, and the visual arts. To befit such a dynamic figure, acclaimed biographer Martin Geck offers here a Wagner biography unlike any other, one that strikes a unique balance between the technical musical aspects of Wagner’s compositions and his overarching understanding of aesthetics. A landmark study of one of music’s most important figures “People who would like to know more about Wagner, and people who have loved his music for years . . . will find a great deal in this book to enjoy and to admire.” —Tablet “Geck describes a Wagner who is grounded, focused and even cautious, a savvy realist and ironist rather than a flamboyant, flailing ideologue . . . Suffused with his readings of contemporary productions of the operas, Geck’s musical analyses are succinct and superb” —New York Times “As an editor of Wagner’s Complete Works, Geck brings a deep familiarity with the composer to his task.” —Weekly Standard “A thoroughly approachable yet consistently provocative study.” —Thomas S. Grey, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Wagner
Download or read book Wagnerism written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.
Download or read book Decoding Design written by Maggie Macnab and published by HOW Books. This book was released on 2008-02-04 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understand the Significance of Symbols in Your Design Work Our world is comprised of a handful of very simple patterns that have been a part of human design since the beginning of time and have eternal significance. Decoding Design reveals how common symbols and shapes - like circles, squares and triangles - resonate at a gut level and can lend greater meaning to a design. By deconstructing famous logos and other sample designs, you'll learn how to communicate complex information quickly and intuitively with universal and meaningful patterns. You'll also uncover how other disciplines, such as philosophy, math, and physics, influence great design and can help you present ideas in a holistic and compelling manner. Whether you're a designer, student, or marketing professional, Decoding Design will show you the deeper meaning behind the symbols you encounter everyday, and how to better use those symbols to create an impactful relationship with the viewer.
Download or read book The Form Within written by Karl H Pribram and published by Easton Studio Press, LLC. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE FORM WITHIN is the fascinating story of two hundred years of pioneering brain research, told from the unique perspective of the only brain scientist who has been, and still remains, an active participant in that story throughout the past seventy years: Karl H. Pribram. In THE FORM WITHIN, Dr. Pribram takes us on a compelling journey from the dawn of our collective “recorded perceptions” in cave paintings to our greatest achievements as a species. He explains the important task of mapping the brain; the discovery of our holographic processing of memory and perception; and the detailed research that has created our understanding of self-organizing biological systems. Along the way, Pribram shares the intimate interactions he has had with luminaries of twentieth-century science, including David Bohm, Francis Crick, John Eccles, Dennis Gabor, Hubel and Wiesel, Wolfgang Kohler, Karl Lashley, Aleksandr Romanovitch Luria, Ilya Prigogine, B. F. Skinner, Eugene Sokolov, and many others. But this riveting glimpse into our past is only a part of the story. Pribram also provides us with insightful breakthroughs into a science of the future, and points the way to where our understanding of the brain is headed.
Download or read book Transit written by Rachel Cusk and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller • A Finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize • A Finalist for the Goldsmiths Prize • Longlisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award • One of Time Magazine's Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Guardian, BOMB Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Commonweal, Southern Living, NOW Magazine, The Washington Independent Review of Books, Book Depository, The Globe and Mail, and The National Post (Canada) The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2015 In the wake of her family’s collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of this upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions—personal, moral, artistic, and practical—as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life. Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed novel Outline and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change. In this second book of a precise, short, yet epic cycle, Cusk describes the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one’s life, and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.
