Download or read book Handel and the Pastoral Tradition written by Ellen T. Harris and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1980 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book G F Handel written by Mary Ann Parker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baroque composer George Frideric Handel easily ranks among the world's greatest composers. The first edition of this research guide on Handel appeared in 1988; since that time a great deal of scholarly work has been published on Handel and related areas, including the discovery of a hitherto unknown work. New general resources such as the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), electronic resources such as the RISM libretto catalogue online, and the study of Handel's continuing popularity as evidenced by the new Handel House Museum in London and Handel practice around the world (e.g., Messiah and millennium celebrations in Tonga, singalong Messiahs etc.) are incorporated into this revised edition of the Handel guide.
Download or read book A Poetics of Handel s Operas written by Nathan Link and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Poetics of Handel's Operas investigates the rich representational fabric of Handel's stories, drawing upon musicology, narratology, drama, and film in offering a study with appeal to scholars, producers and performers, opera afficionados, and anyone fascinated by storytelling. In most storytelling genres, we often distinguish between the story, on the one hand, and the way that story is represented, on the other, without a second thought. We know that a character in a film hears neither her own voice-over nor the ambient music that accompanies it, and that she does not really build a house from the ground up in the three minutes spanned by the cinematic montage that depict its construction. In opera, however, many commentators to this day characterize the medium as "unrealistic," since we know, for example, that people in the real world do not sing to each other, nor does orchestral music accompany their utterances. This said, the vocal and orchestral music, while not literally present in the world of the story surely have a great deal to tell us about the opera's story and its characters, and if we distinguish the performance we see and hear on the stage and in the orchestra pit from the story represented, we enable ourselves to construct stories that are no less coherent than those conveyed by other media. By avoiding conflation of the story and its representation, we enable ourselves to engage more meaningfully with the significance of these and many other unique aspects of operatic storytelling"--
Download or read book Dance Spectacle and the Body Politick 1250 1750 written by Jennifer Nevile and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-25 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mid-13th to the mid-18th century the ability to dance was an important social skill for both men and women. Dance performances were an integral part of court ceremonies and festivals and, in the 17th and 18th centuries, of commercial theatrical productions. Whether at court or in the public theater danced spectacles were multimedia events that required close collaboration among artists, musicians, designers, engineers, and architects as well as choreographers. In order to fully understand these practices, it is necessary to move beyond a consideration of dance alone, and to examine it in its social context. This original collection brings together the work of 12 scholars from the disciplines of dance and music history. Their work presents a picture of dance in society from the late medieval period to the middle of the 18th century and demonstrates how dance practices during this period participated in the intellectual, artistic, and political cultures of their day.
Download or read book Handel s Oratorios and Eighteenth Century Thought written by Ruth Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-05-04 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-r anging and challenging book, Ruth Smith claims that the words to Handel's oratorios reflect the events and ideas of their time and have far greater meaning than has hitherto been realised. She explores eighteenth-century literature, music, aesthetics, politics and religion to reveal Handel's texts as conduits for the thought and sensibility of their time. The book thus enriches our understanding of Handel, his times, and the close relationship between music and its intellectual contexts.
Download or read book Beethoven The Pastoral Symphony written by David Wyn Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-11-23 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear piece of musical criticism analysing the formal aspects of Beethoven's 6th symphony. Reviewed as very readable.
Download or read book Dance in Handel s London Operas written by Sarah Yuill McCleave and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the pivotal role of dance in the Italian operas of Handel, perhaps the greatest opera composer between Monteverdi and Mozart. George Frideric Handel set himself apart from his contemporaries by employing choreographed instrumental music to complement and reinforce the emotional impact of his operas. Of his fifty-three operas, no fewer than fourteen -- including ten written for the London stage -- feature dances. Dance in Handel's London Operas explores the relationship between music, drama, and dance in these London works, dispelling the notion that dance was a largely peripheral element in Italian-language operas prior to those of Gluck. Taking a chronological approach, Sarah McCleave examines operas written throughout various periods in Handel's life, beginning with his early London operas, including his time at the Royal Music Academy and the "Sallé" operas of the 1730s, and concluding with his unstaged dramatic opera Alceste (1750). In considering the various influences on Handel (particularly the London stage), McCleave blends analysis of information from eighteenth-century treatises with that found in more modern studies, offering an informed and imaginative understanding of the role dance played in the work of this major figure --one who remained responsive throughout his career to the vital and innovative theatrical environment in which he worked. Sarah McCleave is a lecturer at The School of Creative Arts at Queen's University Belfast.
Download or read book Reader s Guide to Music written by Murray Steib and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-02 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).
Download or read book Ancient Rome in Early Opera written by Robert Ketterer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major historians of ancient Rome wrote their works in the firm belief that the exalted history of the Roman Empire provided plentiful lessons about individual behavior, inspiration for great souls, and warnings against evil ambitions, not to mention opportunities for rich comedy. The examples of Rome have often been resurrected for the opera stage to display the exceptional grandeur, glory, and tragedy of Roman figures. In this volume, Robert C. Ketterer tracks the changes as operas’ Roman subjects crossed generations and national boundaries. Following opera from its origins in seventeenth-century Venice to Napoleon’s invasion of Italy, Ketterer shows how Roman history provided composers with all the necessary courage and intrigue, love and honor, and triumph and defeat so vital for the stirring music that makes great opera.
Download or read book Poetic Form and British Romanticism written by Stuart Curran and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990-02-22 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, the Romantic age coincided with a large-scale revival of lost literatures and the first attempts to create a coherent history of Western literature. Calling into question that history, Stuart Curran demonstrates that the Romantic poets, far from being indifferent or hostile to popular forms of literature were actually obsessed with them as repositories of literary conventions and conveyors of implicit ideological value. Whether in their proccupation with fixed forms, which resulted in the incomparable artistry of Romantic odes, or in their rethinking of major genres like the pastoral, the epic, and the romance, the Romantic poets transformed every element they touched to suit their own democratic, secular and skeptical ethos--a world view recognizably modern in its dimensions.
Download or read book Music and Theatre written by Nigel Fortune and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of eleven essays, compiled as a tribute to Winton Dean on his seventieth birthday, focuses on that area which has absorbed Winton Dean's interest throughout his distinguished career: opera and other theatre music. The first half of the book covers the period from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth. The second half of the book ranges over later opera: operacomique; Mendelssohn's operas; the influence of Wagner; the finales of Janácek's operas; and Britten's first two major operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia.
Download or read book Choral Masterpieces written by Nicholas Tarling and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-05-16 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Choral Masterpieces: Major and Minor, historian Nicholas Tarling surveys the landscape of choral works, some standard masterpieces that are commonly performed by choruses around the world, others deserving a second, closer look. As noted in the foreword by Uwe Grodd , music director of the Auckland Choral Society, this work “is a collection of essays about a number of outstanding works, including Beethoven’s Miss Solemnis and Britten’s War Requiem, but he also invites attention to lesser masterpieces. If the choral movement, which includes both singers and listeners, is to survive, new works must be created and repertory expanded. The book is an easy and captivating read even if you are not a chorister.” Choral Masterpieces: Major and Minor features short essays on over 28 works, from major masterpieces such as Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion to off-the-beaten path choral works such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha and Frederick Delius’ A Mass of Life. Throughout, Tarling offers assessments that sparkle with unique insights and at the same time ground listener’s in the historical contexts of the work’s production and performance. Each work is transformed in Tarling’s able hands from musical work into a window into the mind and milieu of the composer. Choral Masterpieces: Major and Minor mixes choral mainstays with works that demand revisiting. Choral singers and their audiences, as well as choral societies and their directions and promoters, will find ample food for thoughts in these meditations on the choral tradition.
Download or read book A Sociable Moment written by Colleen Reardon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After their military defeat by the Florentines in the mid-sixteenth century, the citizens of Siena turned from politics to celebratory, social occasions to express their civic identity and show their capacity for collective action. In the first major work of its kind, Colleen Reardon opens a window on the ways in which the Sienese absorbed the new genre of opera into their own festive apparatus and challenges the prevailing view that operatic productions in the city were merely an extension of Medici power to the provinces. It was, rather, members of the expatriate Chigi family who exploited the festive impulse of their countrymen, coordinating operatic performances with their triumphant visits home by activating ties of friendship and family as well as connections to Sienese institutions, most notably the Assicurate, possibly the first all-female academy in Italy. If the Chigi proved successful at inserting opera into larger patterns of sociability that conveyed the very essence of what it meant to be Sienese (senesità), their successor, the flamboyant playwright and librettist Girolamo Gigli, struggled in his attempts to transform operatic performances into professional enterprises. Fluidly written and richly embellished with anecdotes from historical chronicles, A Sociable Moment offers insight into the Sienese experience with opera during the genre's rapid expansion throughout the Italian peninsula during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Download or read book Opera and Vivaldi written by Michael Collins and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-09-05 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times review of the Dallas Opera's performance of Orlando furioso and the international symposium on Baroque opera: ". . . it was a serious, thoughtful, consistent and imaginative realization of a beautiful, long-neglected work, one that fully deserved all the loving attention it received. As such, the production and its attendant symposium made a positive contribution to the cause of Baroque opera . . . . " Baroque opera experienced a revival in the late twentieth century. Its popularity, however, has given rise to a number of perplexing and exciting questions regarding literary sources, librettos, theater design, set design, stage movement, and costumes—even the editing of the operas. In 1980, the Dallas Opera produced the American premier of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso, which met with much acclaim. Concurrently an international symposium on the subject of Baroque opera was held at Southern Methodist University. Authorities from around the world met to discuss the operatic works of Vivaldi, Handel, and other Baroque composers as well as the characteristics of the genre. Michael Collins and Elise Kirk, deputy chair and chair of the symposium, edited the papers to produce this groundbreaking study, which will be of great interest to music scholars and opera lovers throughout the world. Contributors to Opera and Vivaldi include Shirley Wynne, John Walter Hill, Andrew Porter, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Howard Mayer Brown, William Holmes, Ellen Rosand, and the editors.
Download or read book Textual Vision written by Timothy Erwin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-03-06 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stylish critique of literary attitudes towards painting, TextualVision explores the simultaneous rhetorical formation and empirical fragmentation of visual reading in enlightenment Britain. Beginning with an engaging treatment of Pope's Rape of the Lock, Timothy Erwin takes the reader on a guided tour of the pointed allusion, apt illustration, or the subtle appeal to the mind's eye within a wide array of genres and texts, before bringing his linked case studies to a surprising close with the fiction of Jane Austen. At once carefully researched, theoretically informed and highly imaginative, Textual Vision situates textual vision at the cultural crossroads of ancient pictura-poesis doctrine and modernist aesthetics. It provides reliable interpretive poles for reading enlightenment imagery, offers vivid new readings of familiar works, and promises to invigorate the study of Restoration and eighteenth-century visual culture.
Download or read book Handel as Orpheus written by Ellen T. Harris and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-30 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handel wrote over 100 cantatas, compositions for voice and instruments decsribing the joy and pain of love. In the first comprehensive study of the cantatas, Harris investigates their place in Handel's life as well as their extraordinary beauty.
Download or read book A Short History of Opera written by Donald J. Grout and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-18 with total page 1047 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When first published in 1947, A Short History of Opera immediately achieved international status as a classic in the field. Now, more than five decades later, this thoroughly revised and expanded fourth edition informs and entertains opera lovers just as its predecessors have. The fourth edition incorporates new scholarship that traces the most important developments in the evolution of musical drama. After surveying anticipations of the operatic form in the lyric theater of the Greeks, medieval dramatic music, and other forerunners, the book reveals the genre's beginnings in the seventeenth century and follows its progress to the present day. A Short History of Opera examines not only the standard performance repertoire, but also works considered important for the genre's development. Its expanded scope investigates opera from Eastern European countries and Finland. The section on twentieth-century opera has been reorganized around national operatic traditions including a chapter devoted solely to opera in the United States, which incorporates material on the American musical and ties between classical opera and popular musical theater. A separate section on Chinese opera is also included. With an extensive multilanguage bibliography, more than one hundred musical examples, and stage illustrations, this authoritative one-volume survey will be invaluable to students and serious opera buffs. New fans will also find it highly accessible and informative. Extremely thorough in its coverage, A Short History of Opera is now more than ever the book to turn to for anyone who wants to know about the history of this art form.
