Download or read book Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien R gime 1647 1785 written by Downing A. Thomas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study recognizes the broad impact of opera in early-modern French culture.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth Century Opera written by and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gr try s Operas and the French Public written by R.J. Arnold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, in the dying days of the Napoleonic Empire, did half of Paris turn out for the funeral of a composer? The death of André Ernest Modeste Grétry in 1813 was one of the sensations of the age, setting off months of tear-stained commemorations, reminiscences and revivals of his work. To understand this singular event, this interdisciplinary study looks back to Grétry’s earliest encounters with the French public during the 1760s and 1770s, seeking the roots of his reputation in the reactions of his listeners. The result is not simply an exploration of the relationship between a musician and his audiences, but of developments in musical thought and discursive culture, and of the formation of public opinion over a period of intense social and political change. The core of Grétry’s appeal was his mastery of song. Distinctive, direct and memorable, his melodies were exported out of the opera house into every corner of French life, serving as folkloristic tokens of celebration and solidarity, longing and regret. Grétry’s attention to the subjectivity of his audiences had a profound effect on operatic culture, forging a new sense of democratic collaboration between composer and listener. This study provides a reassessment of Grétry’s work and musical thought, positioning him as a major figure who linked the culture of feeling and the culture of reason - and who paved the way for Romantic notions of spectatorial absorption and the power of music.
Download or read book Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France written by Olivia Bloechl and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.
Download or read book Film Music A History written by James Wierzbicki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-21 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film Music: A History explains the development of film music by considering large-scale aesthetic trends and structural developments alongside socioeconomic, technological, cultural, and philosophical circumstances. The book’s four large parts are given over to Music and the "Silent" Film (1894--1927), Music and the Early Sound Film (1895--1933), Music in the "Classical-Style" Hollywood Film (1933--1960), and Film Music in the Post-Classic Period (1958--2008). Whereas most treatments of the subject are simply chronicles of "great film scores" and their composers, this book offers a genuine history of film music in terms of societal changes and technological and economic developments within the film industry. Instead of celebrating film-music masterpieces, it deals—logically and thoroughly—with the complex ‘machine’ whose smooth running allowed those occasional masterpieces to happen and whose periodic adjustments prompted the large-scale twists and turns in film music’s path.
Download or read book Listening Well written by Ora Frishberg Saloman and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelve essays in Listening Well illuminate aesthetic, educative, and evaluative strategies utilized by writers in Paris, Boston, and New York to guide listeners in confronting the challenges of musical modernity between 1764 and 1890. They interpret criticism from treatises, journals, and newspapers for its importance in cultural history and consider the reception of major works by Beethoven and by Berlioz. The essays explore contrasting responses to new operas and symphonies by composers, librettists, authors, critics, and conductors as well as by writers including Chabanon, Lacépède, Berlioz, Urhan, D'Ortigue, Dwight, Fuller, Watson, and Hassard. Readers interested in perceptions of Classicism and Romanticism in music as they relate to French, German, and American literature and criticism will discover how audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were encouraged to listen attentively to the new and controversial in music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Download or read book Musical Debate and Political Culture in France 1700 1830 written by Robert James Arnold and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length treatment of the operatic querelles in eighteenth-century France, placing individual querelles in historical context and tracing common themes of authority, national prestige and the power of music over popular sentiment.
Download or read book The Rival Sirens written by Suzanne Aspden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rival Sirens examines the vital and intertwined roles of singers, audiences and local cultural context in creating eighteenth-century opera.
Download or read book Music and the French Enlightenment written by Cynthia Verba and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Prompted by controversial views of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, the leading figures of the French Enlightenment engaged in a vigorous philosophical debate about the nature of music. Their dialogue was one of extraordinary depth and richness, and dealth with some of the most fundamental issues of the French Enlightenment. In the newly revised edition of 'Music and the French Enlightenment', Cynthia Verba updates this fascinating story with the prolific scholarship that has emerged since the book was first published." -- rear cover.
Download or read book Three Modes of Perception in Mozart written by Edmund J. Goehring and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2004 book is a full-length, scholarly study of what is widely regarded as Mozart's most enigmatic opera and Lorenzo Da Ponte's most erudite text. Against the long-standing judgement that the opera uses a misguided confidence in reason to traduce feeling, Goehring's study shows how Cosi affirms comedy's regenerative powers and its capacity to grant access to modes of sympathy and understanding that are otherwise inaccessible. In making this argument, the book surveys a rich literary, operatic and intellectual territory. It offers fresh perspective on the relationships between text and tone in the opera, on the tension between comedy and philosophy and its representation in stage works and on the pastoral mode which the opera uses in subtle ways. Throughout, Goehring's argument is sustained by close readings of primary sources, many of them little known, and is richly illustrated with musical examples.
Download or read book Translations of the Sublime written by Caroline A. van Eck and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-09-28 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume is a first attempt to chart the early modern translations of Peri hupsous, both in the literal sense of the history of its dissemination by means of editions, versions and translations in Latin and vernacular languages, but also in the figurative sense of its uses and transformations in the visual arts from 1500 to 1800.
Download or read book Operatic Migrations written by DowningA. Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying a wide range of subjects associated with the creation, performance and reception of 'opera' in varying social and historical contexts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Each essay addresses migrations between genres, cultures, literary and musical works, modes of expression, media of presentation and aesthetics. Although the directions the contributions take are diverse, they converge in significant ways, particularly with the rebuttal of the notion of the singular nature of the operatic work. The volume strongly asserts that works are meaningfully transformed by the manifold circumstances of their creation and reception, and that these circumstances have an impact on the life of those works in their many transformations and on a given audience's experience of them. Topics covered include transformations of literary sources and their migration into the operatic genre; works that move across geographical and social boundaries into different cultural contexts; movements between media and/or genre as well as alterations through interpretation and performance of the composer's creation; the translation of spoken theatre to lyric theatre; the theoretical issues contingent on the rendering of 'speech' into 'song'; and the transforming effects of aesthetic considerations as they bear on opera. Crossing over disciplinary boundaries between music, literary studies, history, cultural studies and art history, the volume enriches our knowledge and understanding of the operatic experience and the works. The book will therefore appeal to those working in the field of music, literary and cultural studies, and to those with a particular interest in opera and musical theatre.
Download or read book Peculiar Attunements written by Roger Mathew Grant and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for such theories, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability, beyond the rare thunderclap or birdcall. Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music, postulating that music’s physical materiality as sound vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.
Download or read book Empress Marie Therese and Music at the Viennese Court 1792 1807 written by John A. Rice and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-24 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the musical activities of Empress Marie Therese, one of the most important patrons in the Vienna of Haydn and Beethoven. Building on extensive archival research, including many documents published here for the first time, John A. Rice describes Marie Therese's activities as commissioner, collector and performer of music, and explores the rich and diverse musical culture that she fostered at court. This book, which will be of interest to musicologists, historians of artistic patronage and taste, and practitioners of women's studies, elucidates this remarkable woman's relations with a host of professional musicians, including Haydn, and argues that she played a significant and hitherto unsuspected role in the inception of one of the era's greatest masterpieces, Beethoven's Fidelio. Other composers discussed include Domenico Cimarosa, Joseph Eybler, Michael Haydn, Johann Simon Mayr, Ferdinando Paer, Antonio Salieri, Joseph Weigl and Paul Wranitzky.
Download or read book New Essays on Diderot written by James Fowler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great eighteenth-century French thinker Denis Diderot (1713–84) once compared himself to a weathervane, by which he meant that his mind was in constant motion. In an extraordinarily diverse career he produced novels, plays, art criticism, works of philosophy and poetics, and also reflected on music and opera. Perhaps most famously, he ensured the publication of the Encyclopédie, which has often been credited with hastening the onset of the French Revolution. Known as one of the three greatest philosophes of the Enlightenment, Diderot rejected the Christian ideas in which he had been raised. Instead, he became an atheist and a determinist. His radical questioning of received ideas and established religion led to a brief imprisonment, and for that reason, no doubt, some of his subsequent works were written for posterity. This collection of essays celebrates the life and work of this extraordinary figure as we approach the tercentenary of his birth.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to French Music written by Simon Trezise and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible Companion provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive introduction to French music from the early middle ages to the present.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque written by John D. Lyons and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 907 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few periods in history are so fundamentally contradictory as the Baroque, the culture flourishing from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries in Europe. When we hear the term âBaroque,â the first images that come to mind are symmetrically designed gardens in French chateaux, scenic fountains in Italian squares, and the vibrant rhythms of a harpsichord. Behind this commitment to rule, harmony, and rigid structure, however, the Baroque also embodies a deep fascination with wonder, excess, irrationality, and rebellion against order. The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque delves into this contradiction to provide a sweeping survey of the Baroque not only as a style but also as a historical, cultural, and intellectual concept. With its thirty-eight chapters edited by leading expert John D. Lyons, the Handbook explores different manifestations of Baroque culture, from theatricality in architecture and urbanism to opera and dance, from the role of water to innovations in fashion, from mechanistic philosophy and literature to the tension between religion and science. These discussions present the Baroque as a broad cultural phenomenon that arose in response to the enormous changes emerging from the sixteenth century: the division between Catholics and Protestants, the formation of nation-states and the growth of absolutist monarchies, the colonization of lands outside Europe and the mutual impact of European and non-European cultures. Technological developments such as the telescope and the microscope and even greater access to high-quality mirrors altered mankindâs view of the universe and of human identity itself. By exploring the Baroque in relation to these larger social upheavals, this Handbook reveals a fresh and surprisingly modern image of the Baroque as a powerful response to an epoch of crisis.
