Download or read book Female Composers Conductors Performers Musiciennes of Interwar France 1919 1939 written by Laura Hamer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-20 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon extensive archival research, interview material, and musical analysis, Female Composers, Conductors, Performers: Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919–1939 presents an innovative study of women working as professional musicians in France between the two World Wars. Hamer positions the activities, achievements, and reception of women composers, conductors, and performers against a contemporary socio-political climate that was largely hostile to female professionalism. The musical styles and techniques of Marguerite Canal, Jeanne Leleu, Germaine Tailleferre, Yvonne Desportes, Elsa Barraine, and Claude Arrieu are discussed with reference to significant works dating from the interwar period. Hamer highlights the activities of Jane Evrard and her Orchestre féminin de Paris as well as the reception of the Orchestra of the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique, a contemporary pro-suffrage organisation that was dedicated to defending the collective interests of musiciennes and campaigning for their employment rights. Beyond women composers and conductors, Hamer also sheds light on female performers and their contribution to the interwar early music revival.
Download or read book Conductors and Composers of Popular Orchestral Music written by Naomi Musiker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World-wide in scope and focusing on the second half of the 20th century, this work provides biographies and discographies of some 500 composers and conductors of light and popular orchestral music, including film, show, theatre and mood music. The book is arranged in two sequences: 1) Biographies and select discographies, both arranged alphabetically, of the well-known and better-known conductors and composers. These entries also include a list of suggested reading for those wishing to further their studies; and 2) Select discographies of conductors about whom little or no biographical information is available. The bibliography at the end of the book covers discographical sources, popular music and film music. This is the first time that the lives and recordings of such artists as Kostelanetz, Faith, and Gould as well as the orchestral recordings of such great popular composers as Gershwin, Kern, Porter, Rodgers, Berlin and Coward have been documented and presented in an encyclopedic form.
Download or read book Music as Alchemy written by Tom Service and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are conductors' silent gestures magicked into sound by a group of more than a hundred brilliant but belligerent musicians? The mute choreography of great conductors has fascinated and frustrated musicians and music-lovers for centuries. Orchestras can be inspired to the heights of musical and expressive possibility by their maestros, or flabbergasted that someone who doesn't even make a sound should be elevated to demigod-like status by the public. This is the first book to go inside the rehearsal rooms of some of the most inspirational orchestral partnerships in the world - how Simon Rattle works at the Berlin Philharmonic, how Mariss Jansons deals with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, and how Claudio Abbado creates the world's most luxurious pick-up band every year with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. From London to Budapest, Bamberg to Vienna, great orchestral concerts are recreated as a collection of countless human and musical stories.
Download or read book Why Mahler written by Norman Lebrecht and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Gustav Mahler was a famous conductor in Vienna and New York, the music that he wrote was condemned during his lifetime and for many years after his death in 1911. “Pages of dreary emptiness,” sniffed a leading American conductor. Yet today, almost one hundred years later, Mahler has displaced Beethoven as a box-office draw and exerts a unique influence on both popular music and film scores. Mahler’s coming-of-age began with such 1960s phenomena as Leonard Bernstein’s boxed set of his symphonies and Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, which used Mahler’s music in its sound track. But that was just the first in a series of waves that established Mahler not just as a great composer but also as an oracle with a personal message for every listener. There are now almost two thousand recordings of his music, which has become an irresistible launchpad for young maestros such as Gustavo Dudamel. Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does? Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life. Pacing out his every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times. Mahler was—along with Picasso, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce—a maker of our modern world. “Mahler dealt with issues I could recognize,” writes Lebrecht, “with racism, workplace chaos, social conflict, relationship breakdown, alienation, depression, and the limitations of medical knowledge.” Why Mahler? is a book that shows how music can change our lives.
Download or read book Classical Music For Dummies written by David Pogue and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-06-25 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haydn, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms, oh, my! The beginner's guide to classical music Classical Music For Dummies is a friendly, funny, easy-to-understand guide to composers, instruments, orchestras, concerts, recordings, and more. Classical music is widely considered one of the pinnacles of human achievement, and this informative guide will shows you just how beautiful and rewarding it can be. You'll learn how Bach is different from Beethoven, how Mozart is different still, and why not all "classical" music is actually Classical if it's really Baroque or Romantic. You'll be introduced to the composers and their work, and discover the groundbreaking pieces that shake the world every time they're played. Begin building your classical music library with the essential recordings that define orchestral, choral, and operatic beauty as you get acquainted with the orchestras and musicians that bring the composers to life. Whether you want to play classical music or just learn more about it, Classical Music For Dummies will teach you everything you need to know to get the most out of this increasingly popular genre. Distinguish flute from piccolo, violin from viola, and trumpet from trombone Learn the difference between overtures, requiems, arias, and masses Explore the composers that shaped music as we know it Discover the recordings your music library cannot be without Classical music has begun sneaking into the mainstream — if your interest has been piqued, there's never been a better time to develop an appreciation for this incredibly rich, complex, and varied body of work. Classical Music For Dummies lays the groundwork, and demonstrates just how amazing classical music can be.
Download or read book The Silent Musician written by Mark Wigglesworth and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conductor—tuxedoed, imposingly poised above an orchestra, baton waving dramatically—is a familiar figure even for those who never set foot in an orchestral hall. As a veritable icon for classical music, the conductor has also been subjected to some ungenerous caricatures, presented variously as unhinged gesticulator, indulged megalomaniac, or even outright impostor. Consider, for example: Bugs Bunny as Leopold Stokowski, dramatically smashing his baton and then breaking into erratic poses with a forbidding intensity in his eyes, or Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, unwittingly conjuring dangerous magic with carefree gestures he doesn’t understand. As these clichés betray, there is an aura of mystery around what a conductor actually does, often coupled with disbelief that he or she really makes a difference to the performance we hear. The Silent Musician deepens our understanding of what conductors do and why they matter. Neither an instruction manual for conductors, nor a history of conducting, the book instead explores the role of the conductor in noiselessly shaping the music that we hear. Writing in a clever, insightful, and often evocative style, world-renowned conductor Mark Wigglesworth deftly explores the philosophical underpinnings of conducting—from the conductor’s relationship with musicians and the music, to the public and personal responsibilities conductors face—and examines the subtler components of their silent art, which include precision, charisma, diplomacy, and passion. Ultimately, Wigglesworth shows how conductors—by simultaneously keeping time and allowing time to expand—manage to shape ensemble music into an immersive, transformative experience, without ever making a sound.
Download or read book Conducting Music Today written by Bruce Hangen and published by Berklee Press. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Berklee Guide). Learn the essential practices of contemporary conducting. This book will teach you to use the motions, cues, patterns and practices used to lead ensembles, whether for orchestra, band, musical theater, opera, film orchestra, or other type of ensemble. You will learn techniques for keeping time, signaling musicians, and crafting your unique interpretation of the score, as well as how to command the stage presence necessary to lead a large ensemble whether for concert performances or synching live performers to other media, such as film, recordings, musical theater and dance. Video demonstrations and annotated scores of orchestral excerpts from Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and others illustrate and let you practice various conducting challenges, such as cadenzas, rubato and quickly changing time signatures. Also included are interviews with some of the most accomplished conductors of your time, such as John Wiliams, Lalo Schifrin, JoAnn Falletta, John Morris Russell and others, providing perspective from the concert hall podium to the Broadway pit to the Hollywood sound stage.
Download or read book The Beat Stops Here written by Mark Gibson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Beat Stops Here: Lessons on and off the Podium for Today's Conductor, master conductor Mark Gibson addresses the technique of conducting as an extension of intimate knowledge of the score to the hands and arms. He employs a variety of everyday activities and motions (brushing the dog, Tinkerbelle, the "door knob") to describe the physical aspects of the role. He advocates a comprehensive, detailed approach to score study, addressing major works bar-by-bar in terms of both musical analysis and conducting method. Finally, Gibson explores the various roles a conductor plays, as a teacher, a scholar and a member of the musical community. His writing is highly focused, with an occasionally tongue-in-cheek, discussing everything from motivic development in Brahms to how to hold a knife and fork in public. In short, The Beat Stops Here is a compendium of style and substance in the real world of today's conductor.
Download or read book The Listening Service written by Tom Service and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on his critically-acclaimed BBC Radio 3 programme The Listening Service, in which Tom Service takes an idea on an ear-opening and mind-expanding walk through the musical landscape every week, this book is a celebration of music's multi-dimensional power in our lives. With 101 short chapters based on the programmes and grouped thematically the book will open ears and imaginations to find answers to the questions we all have about why and how music - from Toots and the Maytals and J S Bach, Gustav Mahler and Miley Cyrus, to Anna Meredith and Mozart - works its magic over us. With direct links to the programmes using a QR code, the chapters draw on powerful and communicative anecdotes and analogies, as well as the latest scientific research, and above all, a spirit of discovery and connection across genres, cultures, and histories. At its heart is the conviction that music changes us.
Download or read book Mahler and Strauss written by Charles Youmans and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rare case among history's great music contemporaries, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed a close friendship until Mahler's death in 1911. Unlike similar musical pairs (Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Schoenberg and Stravinsky), these two composers may have disagreed on the matters of musical taste and social comportment, but deeply respected one another's artistic talents, freely exchanging advice from the earliest days of professional apprenticeship through the security and aggravations of artistic fame. Using a wealth of documentary material, this book reconstructs the 24-year relationship between Mahler and Strauss through collage—"a meaning that arises from fragments," to borrow Adorno's characterization of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Fourteen different topics, all of central importance to the life and work of the two composers, provide distinct vantage points from which to view both the professional and personal relationships. Some address musical concerns: Wagnerism, program music, intertextuality, and the craft of conducting. Others treat the connection of music to related disciplines (philosophy, literature), or to matters relevant to artists in general (autobiography, irony). And the most intimate dimensions of life—childhood, marriage, personal character—are the most extensively and colorfully documented, offering an abundance of comparative material. This integrated look at Mahler and Strauss discloses provocative revelations about the two greatest western composers at the turn of the 20th century.
Download or read book Beethoven A Life written by Jan Caeyers and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With unprecedented access to the archives at the Beethoven House in Bonn, ... Beethoven conductor and scholar Jan Caeyers ... weaves together a deeply human and complex image of Beethoven--his troubled youth, his unpredictable mood swings, his desires, relationships, and conflicts with family and friends, the mysteries surrounding his affair with the 'immortal beloved, ' and the dramatic tale of his deafness. Caeyers also offers new insights into Beethoven's music and its gradual transformation from the work of a skilled craftsman into that of a consummate artist"--Publisher marketing.
Download or read book Schumann written by John Alexander Fuller-Maitland and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Women Composers Conductors and Musicians of the Twentieth Century written by Jane Weiner LePage and published by Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lepage's latest volume comprises eighteen biographies.
Download or read book Conductors on Composers written by John L. Holmes and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1993-07-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively commentary by 123 important conductors of the past and present on the music they perform, this work discloses fascinating insights on much of our classical concert and recorded repertoire. It reveals different approaches of these interpreters of great music and also sometimes surprising prejudices and enthusiasms. The material comes from hundreds of sources, mainly conductors' autobiographies and their critical writings, interviews with conductors, and biographical works, all interwoven into a cohesive narrative for each of the 71 composers covered. A companion to the author's Composers on Composers, this volume is similarly organized alphabetically by composer. Brief biographies are given of the conductors, and their remarks on the music can be traced via indexing.
Download or read book The Virtuoso Conductors written by Raymond Holden and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expert's guide to the skills of the greatest conductors
Download or read book The Rest Is Noise written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Download or read book George Szell written by Michael Charry and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-01-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first full biography of George Szell, one of the greatest orchestra and opera conductors of the twentieth century. From child prodigy pianist and composer to world-renowned conductor, Szell's career spanned seven decades, and he led most of the great orchestras and opera companies of the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the NBC and Chicago Symphonies, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and Opera, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. A protégé of composer-conductor Richard Strauss at the Berlin State Opera, his crowning achievement was his twenty-four-year tenure as musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra, transforming it into one of the world's greatest ensembles, touring triumphantly in the United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, South Korea, and Japan. Michael Charry, a conductor who worked with Szell and interviewed him, his family, and his associates over several decades, draws on this first-hand material and correspondence, orchestra records, reviews, and other archival sources to construct a lively and balanced portrait of Szell's life and work from his birth in 1897 in Budapest to his death in 1970 in Cleveland. Readers will follow Szell from his career in Europe, Great Britain, and Australia to his guest conducting at the New York Philharmonic and his distinguished tenure at the Metropolitan Opera and Cleveland Orchestra. Charry details Szell's personal and musical qualities, his recordings and broadcast concerts, his approach to the great works of the orchestral repertoire, and his famous orchestrational changes and interpretation of the symphonies of Robert Schumann. The book also lists Szell's conducting repertoire and includes a comprehensive discography. In highlighting Szell's legacy as a teacher and mentor as well as his contributions to orchestral and opera history, this biography will be of lasting interest to concert-goers, music lovers, conductors, musicians inspired by Szell's many great performances, and new generations who will come to know those performances through Szell's recorded legacy.
