Download or read book Weill Blitzstein and Bernstein written by Rebecca Schmid and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study to explore the crucial influence of Kurt Weill on operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein. Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed that the model of Kurt Weill could not be repeated. Yet Weill's stage works set an inescapable precedent for composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Rebecca Schmid explores how Weill's formal innovations in particular laid the groundwork for operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein, although both composers resisted or downplayed his aesthetic contribution to American tradition. Comparative analysis based on Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence and other modes of intertextuality reveals that the principles of Weill's opera reform would catalyze an indigenous movement in sophisticated, socially engaged music theatre. Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein: A Study of Influence focuses on works that represent different phases of Weill's mission to renew the genre of opera, evolving from Die Dreigroschenoper to the musical play Lady in the Dark and the Broadway Opera Street Scene. Blitzstein and Bernstein in turn defied formal boundaries with The Cradle Will Rock, Regina, Trouble in Tahiti, Candide, and West Side Story - part of a short-lived movement in mid-twentieth century America that coincided with a renaissance for Weill's German-period works following the premiere of Blitzstein's translation, The Threepenny Opera, under Bernstein's baton. The unpublished A Pray by Blecht, for which Bernstein rejoined Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, his collaborators on West Side Story, deepens the connection of Bernstein's aesthetic to Weill.
Download or read book The Cradle Will Rock written by Marc Blitzstein and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Mark the Music written by Eric A. Gordon and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2000 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recently released Tim Robbins film Cradle Will Rock reawakened worldwide audiences to composer Marc Blitzstein's runaway Broadway hit of 1937, and to the exciting times he lived in. Blitzstein went on to write Regina (based on Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes"), the definitive translation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera, and an enormous amount of other music based squarely in American and Broadway traditions. Mark the Music is an engaging biography of this larger-than-life composer that reads like a novel. Practically every page features an illuminating and revealing pen portrait of the most important creative personalities in American culture—Orson Welles, John Houseman, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Robeson, Sean O'Casey, Agnes de Mille, Lotte Lenya, Melvyn Douglas, Shirley Both, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Earl Robinson, Rudolf Bing, and many more. A vibrant journey through mid-20th century America comes to life through the eyes and experience of Marc Blitzstein. The issues that marked Blitzstein's day—censorship, repression, war—are all with us today. This is a story of passion, defiance, glory and tragedy, and ultimately of faith in democratic American values expressed through the arts.
Download or read book Marc Blitzstein written by Howard Pollack and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A composer and lyricist of enormous innovation and influence, Marc Blitzstein remains one of the most versatile and fascinating figures in the history of American music, his creative output running the gamut from films scores and Broadway operas to art songs and chamber pieces. A prominent leftist and social maverick, Blitzstein constantly pushed the boundaries of convention in mid-century America in both his work and his life. Award-winning music historian Howard Pollack's new biography covers Blitzstein's life in full, from his childhood in Philadelphia to his violent death in Martinique at age 58. The author describes how this student of contemporary luminaries Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg became swept up in the stormy political atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s and throughout his career walked the fine line between his formal training and his populist principles. Indeed, Blitzstein developed a unique sound that drew on everything contemporary, from the high modernism of Stravinsky and Hindemith to jazz and Broadway show tunes. Pollack captures the astonishing breadth of Blitzstein's work--from provocative operas like The Cradle Will Rock, No for an Answer, and Regina, to the wartime Airborne Symphony composed during his years in service, to lesser known ballets, film scores, and stage works. A courageous artist, Blitzstein translated Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera during the heyday of McCarthyism and the red scare, and turned it into an off-Broadway sensation, its "Mack the Knife" becoming one of the era's biggest hits. Beautifully written, drawing on new interviews with friends and family of the composer, and making extensive use of new archival and secondary sources, Marc Blitzstein presents the most complete biography of this important American artist.
Download or read book Marc Blitzstein written by Howard Pollack and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-18 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning music historian Howard Pollack's new biography of Marc Blitzstein deftly captures the fascinating life and career of an American composer who was openly gay and Marxist at a time when neither was acceptable to the American public. The first biographer to deal with Blitzstein's music as well as his life, Pollack delves deeply into the Blitzstein's life, uncovering new details about his marriage to novelist Eva Goldbeck and his compositional process. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, this book is a must-have for any fan of Broadway or American music.
Download or read book Leonard Bernstein in Context written by Elizabeth A. Wells and published by . This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging introduction to one of the twentieth century's most famous cultural icons: pianist, conductor, composer and educator Leonard Bernstein.
Download or read book Writing to Louis Andriessen written by Rose Dodd and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis Andriessen is the Netherlands? foremost composer of contemporary music. 'Writing to Louis Andriessen: Commentaries on life in music' surveys significant works from Andriessen?s career. The book will be substantial in its commentary on the span of his work, with contributors from the UK, the Netherlands and the US contextualising his music from a European critical perspective, linking outwards to American minimalism, so too surveying his international importance. It will be in the English language.0Louis Andriessen has exerted influence not only as a teacher at the Koninklijk Conservatorium, Den Haag but also internationally in the expanse of works presented. Celebrating his eightieth birthday in 2019, former students, now also significant voices internationally, and contemporaries join together to write to Louis Andriessen in a book of critical reflection and celebration. Amongst those writing will be Donnacha Dennehy, Rose Dodd, David Dramm, Anthony Fiumara, Ron Ford, Christopher Fox, Liz Haddon, Yannis Kyriakides, Jan Nieuwenhuis, Ian Pace, Martijn Padding, Johanneke van Slooten and Julia Wolfe.0Designed by Joost Grootens, the visual presentation within the book will comprise letters from Andriessen?s personal correspondence with the iconic American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, music materials and programme booklets, musical score excerpts and archive photos, all in lush presentation.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Leonard Bernstein written by Paul R. Laird and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical Dictionary of Leonard Bernstein contains a chronology, an introduction, an appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries encompassing people whom he befriended or worked with, institutions, orchestras, performance venues, cities, compositional methods, and compositions.
Download or read book A Practical Guide to Choral Conducting written by Harold Rosenbaum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rooted in the experience of a professional choral conductor, this book provides a guide to practical issues facing conductors of choral ensembles at all levels, from youth choruses to university ensembles, church and community choirs, and professional vocal groups. Paired with the discussion of practical challenges is a discussion of over fifty key works from the choral literature, with performance suggestions to aid the choral conductor in directing each piece. Dealing with often-overlooked yet vital considerations such as how to work with composers, recording, concert halls, and choral tours, A Practical Guide to Choral Conducting offers a valuable resource for both emerging choral conductors and students of choral conducting at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Download or read book Dinner with Lenny written by Jonathan Cott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features a complete account of the author's twelve-hour interview with Bernstein one year before the classical music personality's death in 1990.
Download or read book Leonard Bernstein written by Barry Seldes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his dazzling conducting debut in 1943 until his death in 1990, Leonard Bernstein's star blazed brilliantly. In this fresh and revealing biography of Bernstein's political life, Barry Seldes examines Bernstein's career against the backdrop of cold war America—blacklisting by the State Department in 1950, voluntary exile from the New York Philharmonic in 1951 for fear that he might be blacklisted, signing a humiliating affidavit to regain his passport—and the factors that by the mid-1950s allowed his triumphant return to the New York Philharmonic. Seldes for the first time links Bernstein's great concert-hall and musical-theatrical achievements and his real and perceived artistic setbacks to his involvement with progressive political causes. Making extensive use of previously untapped FBI files as well as overlooked materials in the Library of Congress's Bernstein archive, Seldes illuminates the ways in which Bernstein's career intersected with the twentieth century's most momentous events. This broadly accessible and impressively documented account of the celebrity-maestro's life deepens our understanding of an entire era as it reveals important and often ignored intersections of American culture and political power.
Download or read book Famous Father Girl written by Jamie Bernstein and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The oldest daughter of revered composer Leonard Bernstein offers a rare look at her father on the centenary of his birth—illuminating a man, a city, and an era that defined modern culture—in a deeply intimate and broadly evocative memoir reminiscent of Alexandra Styron’s Reading My Father and Richard Ford’s Between Them. The composer of On the Town and West Side Story, chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, television star, humanitarian, friend of the powerful and influential, and inveterate partygoer Leonard Bernstein was a massive celebrity during one of the headiest periods of American cultural life, and perhaps the most talented musician in American history. To his eldest daughter, Jamie, he was all that and more; he was the man in the scratchy brown bathrobe that smelled of cigarettes, who sat late at night at the piano when he couldn’t sleep (he could never sleep). An incredible jokester, an incessant teacher, he taught her to love the world in all its beauty and complexity. In public and private, Lenny was larger than life. In Famous Father Girl, Bernstein mines the emotional depths of her childhood and invites us into her family’s private world. A fantastic set of characters populate the Bernsteins’ lives, including: the Kennedys, Mike Nichols, John Lennon, Richard Avedon, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins, and Betty (Lauren) Bacall. An intoxicating tale, Famous Father Girl is an intimate meditation on a deeply complex and sometimes troubled man and the beautiful music that was the soundtrack to his life. Deeply moving and often hilarious, Bernstein’s beautifully written memoir is great American story about one of the greatest Americans of the modern age.
Download or read book On the Road and Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein written by Charlie Harmon and published by Charlesbridge Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrating Leonard Bernstein's centenary with an intimate and detailed look at the public and private life of the Maestro written by his former assistant. Foreword by Broadway legend Harold Prince. "An affectionate portrait of an eminent musician who was driven by demons." —Kirkus Reviews "Harmon’s personable and warm account of what it was like to work for one of the twentieth century’s musical giants casts new light on Bernstein and his world." —Booklist "This multifaceted perspective gives readers plenty of salacious gossip paired with insight into Leonard Bernstein’s remarkable artistic achievements later in life." —Library Journal On the Road is a colorfully written, unforgettably entertaining and unputdownable book, and is available just in time for LB’s 100th birthday. Unreservedly recommended. —Fanfare Magazine Leonard Bernstein reeked of cheap cologne and obviously hadn't showered, shaved, or slept in a while. Was he drunk to boot? He greeted his new assistant with "What are you drinking?" Yes, he was drunk. Charlie Harmon was hired to manage the day-to-day parts of Bernstein's life. There was one additional responsibility: make sure Bernstein met the deadline for an opera commission. But things kept getting in the way: the centenary of Igor Stravinsky, intestinal parasites picked up in Mexico, teaching all summer in Los Angeles, a baker's dozen of young men, plus depression, exhaustion, insomnia, and cut-throat games of anagrams. Did the opera get written? For four years, Charlie saw Bernstein every day, as his social director, gatekeeper, valet, music copyist, and itinerant orchestra librarian. He packed (and unpacked) Bernstein's umpteen pieces of luggage, got the Maestro to his concerts, kept him occupied changing planes in Zurich, Anchorage, Tokyo, or Madrid, and learned how to make small talk with mayors, ambassadors, a chancellor, a queen, and a Hollywood legend or two. How could anyone absorb all those people and places? Because there was music: late-night piano duets, or the Maestro's command to accompany an audition, or, by the way, the greatest orchestras in the world. Charlie did it, and this is what it was like, told for the first time.
Download or read book Bernstein Meets Broadway written by Carol J. Oja and published by Broadway Legacies. This book was released on 2014 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A super-star of 20th-century music, Leonard Bernstein is famous for his multi-faceted artistic brilliance. Best-known on Broadway for "West Side Story," a tale of immigrant struggles and urban gang warfare, Bernstein thrived within the theater's collaborative artistic environments, and he forged a life-long commitment to advancing social justice. In 'Bernstein meets Broadway: collaborative art in a time of war', award-winning author Carol J. Oja explores a youthful Bernstein-a twenty-something composer who was emerging in New York City during World War II. Devising an innovative framework, Oja constructs a wide-ranging cultural history that illuminates how Bernstein and his friends violated artistic and political boundaries to produce imaginative artistic results. At the core of her story are the Broadway musical On the Town, the ballet Fancy Free, and a nightclub act called The Revuers. A brilliant group of collaborators joins Bernstein at center-stage, including the choreographer Jerome Robbins and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green. With the zeal of youth, they infused their art with progressive political ideals. On the Town focused on sailors enjoying a day of shore leave, and it featured a mixed-race cast, contributing an important chapter to the desegregation of American performance. It projected an equitable inter-racial vision in an era when racial segregation was being enforced contentiously in the U.S. military.
Download or read book Dvorak s Prophecy And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music written by Joseph Horowitz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”
Download or read book The Marc Blitzstein Songbook written by Marc Blitzstein and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Leonard Bernstein West Side Story written by Nigel Simeone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the Broadway musicals that can genuinely claim to have transformed the genre, West Side Story has been featured in many books on Broadway, but it has yet to be the focus of a scholarly monograph. Nigel Simeone begins by exploring the long process of creating West Side Story, including a discussion of Bernstein's sketches, early drafts of the score and script, as well as cut songs. The core of the book is a commentary on the music itself. West Side Story is one of the very few Broadway musicals for which there is a complete published orchestral score, as well as two different editions of the piano-vocal score. The survival of the original copied orchestral score, and the reminiscences of Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, reveal details of the orchestration process, and the extent to which Bernstein was involved in this. Simeone's commentary considers: musical characteristics and compositional techniques used to mirror the drama (for example, the various uses of the tritone), motivic development, the use and reinvention of Broadway and other conventions, the creation of dramatic continuity in the score through the use of motifs and other devices, the unusual degree of dissonance and rhythmic complexity (at least for the time), and the integration of Latin-American dance forms (Mambo, Huapango and so on). Simeone also considers the reception of West Side Story in the contemporary press. The stir the show caused included the response that it was the angular, edgy score that made it a remarkable achievement. Not all reviews were uncritical. Finally, the book looks in detail at the making of the original Broadway cast recording, made in just one day, included on the accompanying downloadable resources.
