Download or read book Beethoven s Symphonies written by John Bell Young and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2008 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ludwig Van Beethoven's nine symphonies stand as towering masterworks at the core of the classical canon. In Beethoven's hands, the symphony expanded dramatically in scope and power in a way that would revolutionise both the form itself and music in general. The impact of Beethoven's nine was such that composers long after him would write their own symphonies in his shadow. In this book, acclaimed Pianist and critic John Bell Young explores each of the nine symphonies, always looking beneath the surface for what makes the music so compelling. He places them in their historical and cultural context, and he describes how the Russian concept of intonatsiia, a way of perceiving relationships "between the notes," can help deepen our appreciation of these pieces. The accompanying CD contains selections from all of the symphonies, each performance conducted by the legendary Wilhelm Furtwangler.
Download or read book Beethoven Eroica Symphony written by Thomas Sipe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Eroica Symphony is perhaps Beethoven's most provocative work. Its unprecedented design and its powerful emotional impact forever redefined the potential of musical expression. The work was conceived as a homage to Napoleon Bonaparte, but understood for over a century as a passionate rejection of the tyranny he came to represent. This book traces the compositional process and puts the Eroica in precise historical and aesthetic perspective: the political situations that brought about both the dedication to Napoleon and its withdrawal show that Beethoven followed diplomatic developments astutely. Early interpretations by Beethoven's contemporaries show that they understood the work's import clearly. This study focuses on Beethoven's unique ability to imbue traditional symphonic forms with the idealism of his philosophical mentor, Friedrich Schiller.
Download or read book Beethoven s Eroica written by James Hamilton-Paterson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ode to Beethoven's revolutionary masterpiece, his Third Symphony In 1805, the world of music was startled by an avant-garde and explosive new work. Intellectually and emotionally, Beethoven's Third Symphony, the "Eroica," rudely broke the mold of the Viennese Classical symphony and revealed a powerful new expressiveness, both personal and societal. Even the whiff of actual political revolution was woven into the work-it was originally inscribed to Napoleon Bonaparte, a dangerous hero for a composer dependent on conservative royal patronage. With the first two stunning chords of the "Eroica," classical music was transformed. In Beethoven's Eroica, James Hamilton-Paterson reconstructs this great moment in Western culture, the shock of the music and the symphony's long afterlife.
Download or read book Beethoven written by William Kinderman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-10 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman's Beethoven is both a richly drawn portrait of the man and a guide to his music. Kinderman traces the composer's intellectual and musical development from the early works written in Bonn to the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, looking at compositions from different and original perspectives that show Beethoven's art as a union of sensuous and rational, of expression and structure. In analyses of individual pieces, Kinderman shows that the deepening of Beethoven's musical thought was a continuous process over decades of his life. In this new updated edition, Kinderman gives more attention to the composer's early chamber music, his songs, his opera Fidelio, and to a number of often-neglected works of the composer's later years and fascinating projects left incomplete. A revised view emerges from this of Beethoven's aesthetics and the musical meaning of his works. Rather than the conventional image of a heroic and tormented figure, Kinderman provides a more complex, more fully rounded account of the composer. Although Beethoven's deafness and his other personal crises are addressed, together with this ever-increasing commitment to his art, so too are the lighter aspects of his personality: his humor, his love of puns, his great delight in juxtaposing the exalted and the commonplace.
Download or read book All Music Guide to Classical Music written by Chris Woodstra and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2005 with total page 1620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering comprehensive coverage of classical music, this guide surveys more than eleven thousand albums and presents biographies of five hundred composers and eight hundred performers, as well as twenty-three essays on forms, eras, and genres of classical music. Original.
Download or read book Beethoven s Symphonies An Artistic Vision written by Lewis Lockwood and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-10-26 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Beethoven’s] music never grows old— and, enjoyed alongside Mr. Lockwood’s expert commentary, it sparkles with fresh magic.”—Wall Street Journal More than any other composer, Beethoven left to posterity a vast body of material that documents the early stages of almost everything he wrote. From this trove of sketchbooks, Lewis Lockwood draws us into the composer’s mind, unveiling a creative process of astonishing scope and originality. For musicians and nonmusicians alike, Beethoven’s symphonies stand at the summit of artistic achievement, loved today as they were two hundred years ago for their emotional cogency, variety, and unprecedented individuality. Beethoven labored to complete nine of them over his lifetime—a quarter of Mozart’s output and a tenth of Haydn’s—yet no musical works are more iconic, more indelibly stamped on the memory of anyone who has heard them. They are the products of an imagination that drove the composer to build out of the highest musical traditions of the past something startlingly new. Lockwood brings to bear a long career of studying the surviving sources that yield insight into Beethoven’s creative work, including concept sketches for symphonies that were never finished. From these, Lockwood offers fascinating revelations into the historical and biographical circumstances in which the symphonies were composed. In this compelling story of Beethoven’s singular ambition, Lockwood introduces readers to the symphonies as individual artworks, broadly tracing their genesis against the backdrop of political upheavals, concert life, and their relationship to his major works in other genres. From the first symphonies, written during his emerging deafness, to the monumental Ninth, Lockwood brings to life Beethoven’s lifelong passion to compose works of unsurpassed beauty.
Download or read book Beethoven The Relentless Revolutionary written by John Clubbe and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating and in-depth exploration of how the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon shaped Beethoven’s political ideals and inspired his groundbreaking compositions. Beethoven imbibed Enlightenment and revolutionary ideas in his hometown of Bonn, where they were fervently discussed in cafés and at the university. Moving to Vienna at the age of twenty-one to study with Haydn, he gained renown as a brilliant pianist and innovative composer. In that conservative city, capital of the Hapsburg empire, authorities were ever watchful to curtail and punish overt displays of radical political views. Nevertheless, Beethoven avidly followed the meteoric rise of Napoleon. As Napoleon had made strides to liberate Europe from aristocratic oppression, so Beethoven desired to liberate humankind through music. He went beyond the musical forms of Haydn and Mozart, notably in the Eroica Symphony and his opera Fidelio, both inspired by the French Revolution and Napoleon. John Clubbe illuminates Beethoven as a lifelong revolutionary through his compositions, portraits, and writings, and by setting him alongside major cultural figures of the time—among them Schiller, Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand, and Goya.
Download or read book Ludwig van Beethoven written by and published by PediaPress. This book was released on with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ludwig Van Beethoven written by Carl Dahlhaus and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many books have been written about Beethoven. But it is rare to find one that seeks an alternative between the fragmentation found in most specialized studies and the superficial overview typical of popular biography. In this volume, Carl Dahlhaus, one of the century's leading musicologists, combines interpretations of individual works that focus on issues of composition and musical history, with excursions into the musical aesthetics of the period around 1800; an age that was not only a "classical" period in the history of the arts but also one in that aesthetics carved itself a place in the center of philosophical attention. The theme of the book is the reconstruction of Beethoven's "musical thinking" from the evidence in the works themselves and their context in the history of ideas.
Download or read book The New Beethoven written by Jeremy Yudkin and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marking the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, this volume presents twenty-one completely new essays on aspects of Beethoven's personal life, his composing process, his manuscripts, and his greatest works.
Download or read book The Symphonic Repertoire Volume II written by A. Peter Brown and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-29 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 18th century, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. Surprisingly, heretofore there has been no truly extensive, broad-based treatment of the genre, and the best of the existing studies are now several decades old. In this five-volume series, A. Peter Brown explores the symphony from its 18th-century beginnings to the end of the 20th century. Synthesizing the enormous scholarly literature, Brown presents up-to-date overviews of the status of research, discusses any important former or remaining problems of attribution, illuminates the style of specific works and their contexts, and samples early writings on their reception. The Symphonic Repertoire provides an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur. The series is being launched with two volumes on the Viennese symphony. Volume II The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert Volume II considers some of the best-known and most universally admired symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, who created what A. Peter Brown designates as the first golden age of the Viennese symphony during the late 18th and first three decades of the 19th century. The last two dozen symphonies by Haydn, half dozen by Mozart, and three by Schubert, together with Beethoven's nine symphonies became established in the repertoire and provided a standard against which every other symphony would be measured. Most significantly, they imparted a prestige to the genre that was only occasionally rivaled by other cyclic compositions. More than 170 symphonies from this repertoire are described and analyzed in The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony, the first volume of the series to appear.
Download or read book Out of Time written by Julian Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does music have to say about modernity? How can this apparently unworldly art tell us anything about modern life? In Out of Time, author Julian Johnson begins from the idea that it can, arguing that music renders an account of modernity from the inside, a history not of events but of sensibility, an archaeology of experience. If music is better understood from this broad perspective, our idea of modernity itself is also enriched by the specific insights of music. The result is a rehearing of modernity and a rethinking of music - an account that challenges ideas of linear progress and reconsiders the common concerns of music, old and new. If all music since 1600 is modern music, the similarities between Monteverdi and Schoenberg, Bach and Stravinsky, or Beethoven and Boulez, become far more significant than their obvious differences. Johnson elaborates this idea in relation to three related areas of experience - temporality, history and memory; space, place and technology; language, the body, and sound. Criss-crossing four centuries of Western culture, he moves between close readings of diverse musical examples (from the madrigal to electronic music) and drawing on the history of science and technology, literature, art, philosophy, and geography. Against the grain of chronology and the usual divisions of music history, Johnson proposes profound connections between musical works from quite different times and places. The multiple lines of the resulting map, similar to those of the London Underground, produce a bewildering network of plural connections, joining Stockhausen to Galileo, music printing to sound recording, the industrial revolution to motivic development, steam trains to waltzes. A significant and groundbreaking work, Out of Time is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of music and modernity.
Download or read book Beethoven written by Michael Broyles and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1987 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Multiple Masks written by Maureen A. Carr and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Multiple Masks, Maureen A. Carr studies Igor Stravinsky's creative process for Oedipus Rex, Apollo, Persäphone, and Orpheus through his musical sketches and other documents?scenarios, librettos, correspondence, reviews, and philosophical commentaries, as well as previously uncited sources for Stravinsky's book Poetics of Music. A clear explanation of Stravinsky's compositional techniques within a broad cultural context emerges for each of these four significant works. Carr concludes that Stravinsky used Greek myths as filters for certain poetic ideas and musical techniques that he developed in his earlier works. At the same time the mythological story lines provided him with the objective stance that he was seeking in these neoclassical works.
Download or read book Beethoven written by Maynard Solomon and published by Schirmer Trade Books. This book was released on 2012-03-08 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as a masterpiece for its original interpretations of Beethoven's life and music. This edition takes into account the latest information and literature. Includes a 30-page bibliographical essay, numerous illustrations, and a full-color pictorial biography of the composer.
Download or read book Beethoven s Ninth written by Esteban Buch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who hasn't been stirred by the strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? That's a good question, claims Esteban Buch. German nationalists and French republicans, communists and Catholics have all, in the course of history, embraced the piece. It was performed under the direction of Leonard Bernstein at a concert to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet it also serves as a ghastly and ironic leitmotif in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Hitler celebrated his birthdays with it, and the government of Rhodesia made it their anthem. And played in German concentration camps by the imprisoned, it also figured prominently at Mitterand's 1981 investiture. In his remarkable history of one of the most popular symphonic works of the modern period, Buch traces such complex and contradictory uses—and abuses—of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony since its premier in 1824. Buch shows that Beethoven consciously drew on the tradition of European political music, with its mix of sacred and profane, military and religious themes, when he composed his symphony. But while Beethoven obviously had his own political aspirations for the piece—he wanted it to make a statement about ideal power—he could not have had any idea of the antithetical political uses, nationalist and universalist, to which the Ninth Symphony has been put since its creation. Buch shows us how the symphony has been "deployed" throughout nearly two centuries, and in the course of this exploration offers what was described by one French reviewer as "a fundamental examination of the moral value of art." Sensitive and fascinating, this account of the tangled political existence of a symphony is a rare book that shows the life of an artwork through time, shifted and realigned with the currents of history.
Download or read book Beethoven s Symphonies written by Martin Geck and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years spanning from 1800 to 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven completed nine symphonies, now considered among the greatest masterpieces of Western music. Yet despite the fact that this time period, located in the wake of the Enlightenment and at the peak of romanticism, was one of rich intellectual exploration and social change, the influence of such threads of thought on Beethoven’s work has until now remained hidden beneath the surface of the notes. Beethoven’s Symphonies presents a fresh look at the great composer’s approach and the ideas that moved him, offering a lively account of the major themes unifying his radically diverse output. Martin Geck opens the book with an enthralling series of cultural, political, and musical motifs that run throughout the symphonies. A leading theme is Beethoven’s intense intellectual and emotional engagement with the figure of Napoleon, an engagement that survived even Beethoven’s disappointment with Napoleon’s decision to be crowned emperor in 1804. Geck also delves into the unique ways in which Beethoven approached beginnings and finales in his symphonies, as well as his innovative use of particular instruments. He then turns to the individual symphonies, tracing elements—a pitch, a chord, a musical theme—that offer a new way of thinking about each work and will make even the most devoted fans of Beethoven admire the symphonies anew. Offering refreshingly inventive readings of the work of one of history’s greatest composers, this book shapes a fascinating picture of the symphonies as a cohesive oeuvre and of Beethoven as a master symphonist.
