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Book Music in the Service of the King  France in the Seventeenth Century

Download or read book Music in the Service of the King France in the Seventeenth Century written by Robert M. Isherwood and published by Ithaca [N.Y.] : Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The arts, particularly music, are viewed in this work as an integral part of evolving royal absolutism during the reign of Louis XIV. Drawing extensively on archival documents and musical scores, the author views the historical association of music and monarchy as a continuous development beginning with the Valois and climaxing in Louis XIV’s reign. The king is pictured as a rational, calculating man whose luxurious life style was politically motivated, and who undertook the centralization of the arts to assure French artistic preeminence. Elaborate, costly musical productions were also used to distract the nobility, to demonstrate French affluence to foreign powers, and to embellish the royal image.

Book Music in the Seventeenth Century

Download or read book Music in the Seventeenth Century written by Lorenzo Bianconi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987-11-26 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines musical life in the seventeenth century, a period of profound change in the history of music.

Book The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Music

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Music written by Tim Carter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-22 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2005, this title provides extensive knowledge on seventeenth-century music.

Book The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth Century Opera

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:

Book The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth Century Opera

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth Century Opera written by Jacqueline Waeber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-22 with total page 723 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through Europe and the Americas, the volume charts the changing landscape – on stage and beyond – which shaped the way opera was produced and received. With a range from opera's sixteenth-century antecedents to the threshold of the eighteenth century, this path breaking book is broad enough to function as a comprehensive introduction, yet sufficiently detailed to offer valuable insights into most of early opera's many facets; it guides the reader towards authoritative written and musical sources appropriate for further study. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students in universities and equivalent institutions, and amateur and professional musicians.

Book The Triumph of Music

    Book Details:
  • Author : Tim Blanning
  • Publisher : Penguin UK
  • Release : 2013-03-07
  • ISBN : 0141976454
  • Pages : 401 pages

Download or read book The Triumph of Music written by Tim Blanning and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once musicians such as Mozart were little more than court servants; now they are multimillionaire superstars wielding more power than politicians. How did this extraordinary change come about? Tim Blanning's brilliantly enjoyable book examines how everything from the cult of the romantic to technology and travel all fed the inexorable rise of music in the West, making it the most dominant and ubiquitous of the art forms. Encompassing balladeers, the great composers, jazz legends and rock gods, this is an enthralling story of power, patronage, creativity and genius.

Book Gods of Play

Download or read book Gods of Play written by Kristiaan Aercke and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1994-08-04 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the close connections between politics, culture, art, and philosophy in seventeenth-century Europe. As an emblem of this interrelationship, the author has chosen the phenomenon of the “splendid festive performance” of spectacular plays and operas given at absolutist courts in Rome, Madrid, Paris, Versailles, and Vienna between 1631 and 1668. Gods of Play fills voids in the scholarly literature on the seventeenth-century, on absolutism, on courtly theatricality, and on the philosophy of play. Aercke demonstrates that such splendid performances were not just frivolous entertainment for the courtly class but were serious activities with far-ranging political consequences.

Book Towards a Cultural Philology

Download or read book Towards a Cultural Philology written by Amy Wygant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Amy Wygant reads Racine's ""Phedre"" (1677) through an analysis of its 17th-century cultural contexts and a consideration of its subsequent reception history. She explores the construction of Racinian language as ""musical"", the poetics of the Racinian gaze, and Racine's labyrinthine eros of memory and forgetting. Reference is made to Lully's operas, the battle between the advocates of colour and the champions of drawing in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and Le Notre's centreless garden labyrinth at Versailles. These close textual and contextual studies relate the detail of the tragedy to the conceptual sweep of 17th-century absolutism. Wygant's interdisciplinary study draws on the music history, as well as on emblematics, the history of the formal garden and the arts of memory. Racine's great threnody, the ""recit de Theramene"", is shown as representative of expressions of loss which lie at the root of early modern literature."

Book The Guitar and Its Music

Download or read book The Guitar and Its Music written by James Tyler and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than twenty years ago James Tyler wrote a modest introduction to the history, repertory, and playing techniques of the four- and five-course guitar. Entitled The Early Guitar: A History and Handbook (OUP 1980), this work proved valuable and enlightening not only to performers and scholarsof Renaissance and Baroque guitar and lute music but also to classical guitarists. This new book, written in collaboration with Paul Sparks (their previous book for OUP, The Early Mandolin, appeared in 1989), presents new ideas and research on the history and development of the guitar and its musicfrom the Renaissance to the dawn of the Classical era.Tyler's systematic study of the two main guitar types found between about 1550 and 1750 focuses principally on what the sources of the music (published and manuscript) and the writings of contemporary theorists reveal about the nature of the instruments and their roles in the music making of theperiod. The annotated lists of primary sources, previously published in The Early Guitar but now revised and expanded, constitute the most comprehensive bibliography of Baroque guitar music to date. His appendices of performance practice information should also prove indispensable to performers andscholars alike.Paul Sparks also breaks new ground, offering an extensive study of a period in the guitar's history--notably c.1759-c.1800--which the standard histories usually dismiss in a few short paragraphs. Far from being a dormant instrument at this time, the guitar is shown to have been central tomusic-making in France, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and South America. Sparks provides a wealth of information about players, composers, instruments, and surviving compositions from this neglected but important period, and he examines how the five-course guitar gradually gave way to the six-stringinstrument, a process that occurred in very different ways (and at different times) in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Britain.

Book Backstage at the Revolution

    Book Details:
  • Author : Victoria Johnson
  • Publisher : University of Chicago Press
  • Release : 2008
  • ISBN : 0226401952
  • Pages : 307 pages

Download or read book Backstage at the Revolution written by Victoria Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On July 14, 1789, a crowd of angry French citizens en route to the Bastille broke into the Paris Opera and helped themselves to any sturdy weapon they could find. Yet despite its long association with the royal court, its special privileges, and the splendor of its performances, the Opera itself was spared, even protected, by Revolutionary officials. Victoria Johnson’s Backstage at the Revolution tells the story of how this legendary opera house, despite being a lightning rod for charges of tyranny and waste, weathered the most dramatic political upheaval in European history. Sifting through royal edicts, private letters, and Revolutionary records of all kinds, Johnson uncovers the roots of the Opera’s survival in its identity as a uniquely privileged icon of French culture—an identity established by the conditions of its founding one hundred years earlier under Louis XIV. Johnson’s rich cultural history moves between both epochs, taking readers backstage to see how a motley crew of singers, dancers, royal ministers, poet entrepreneurs, shady managers, and the king of France all played a part in the creation and preservation of one of the world’s most fabled cultural institutions.

Book Music and the Cultures of Print

Download or read book Music and the Cultures of Print written by Kate van Orden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the cultures that coalesced around printed music in previous centuries. It focuses on the unique modes through which print organized the presentation of musical texts, the conception of written compositions, and the ways in which music was disseminated and performed. In highlighting the tensions that exist between musical print and performance this volume raises not only the question of how older scores can be read today, but also how music expressed its meanings to listeners in the past.

Book Jean Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque

Download or read book Jean Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque written by James R. Anthony and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-02-09 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays on Jean-Baptiste Lully and his musical legacy honours the distinguished French baroque scholar James R. Anthony. Jean-Baptiste Lully, court composer to Louis XIV, served as the principal architect of what would become known as the French style of music in the baroque era. The style he created strongly influenced the great musical figures in England (Purcell and Handel) and Germany (Bach and Telemann), but Lully's music itself has received little attention. Recently, through the efforts of scholars and musicians concerned with the performance practices of Lully's time, Lully's own music has begun to come alive in performance and recording. These essays, all by important baroque specialists, cover significant aspects of Lully's life and works and the French tradition he influenced. They constitute the first post-war collection of studies centred on Lully and form a fitting tribute to Professor Anthony whose own French baroque music provided a stimulus for the work of an emerging generation of scholars.

Book In Praise of Commercial Culture

Download or read book In Praise of Commercial Culture written by Tyler COWEN and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does a market economy encourage or discourage music, literature, and the visual arts? Do economic forces of supply and demand help or harm the pursuit of creativity? This book seeks to redress the current intellectual and popular balance and to encourage a more favorable attitude toward the commercialization of culture that we associate with modernity. Economist Tyler Cowen argues that the capitalist market economy is a vital but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting a plurality of co-existing artistic visions, providing a steady stream of new and satisfying creations, supporting both high and low culture, helping consumers and artists refine their tastes, and paying homage to the past by capturing, reproducing, and disseminating it. Contemporary culture, Cowen argues, is flourishing in its various manifestations, including the visual arts, literature, music, architecture, and the cinema. Successful high culture usually comes out of a healthy and prosperous popular culture. Shakespeare and Mozart were highly popular in their own time. Beethoven's later, less accessible music was made possible in part by his early popularity. Today, consumer demand ensures that archival blues recordings, a wide array of past and current symphonies, and this week's Top 40 hit sit side by side in the music megastore. High and low culture indeed complement each other. Cowen's philosophy of cultural optimism stands in opposition to the many varieties of cultural pessimism found among conservatives, neo-conservatives, the Frankfurt School, and some versions of the political correctness and multiculturalist movements, as well as historical figures, including Rousseau and Plato. He shows that even when contemporary culture is thriving, it appears degenerate, as evidenced by the widespread acceptance of pessimism. He ends by considering the reasons why cultural pessimism has such a powerful hold on intellectuals and opinion-makers.

Book The Politics of Opera in Handel s Britain

Download or read book The Politics of Opera in Handel s Britain written by Thomas McGeary and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain examines the involvement of Italian opera in British partisan politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, which saw Sir Robert Walpole's rise to power and George Frideric Handel's greatest period of opera production. McGeary argues that the conventional way of applying Italian opera to contemporary political events and persons by means of allegory and allusion in individual operas is mistaken; nor did partisan politics intrude into the management of the Royal Academy of Music and the Opera of the Nobility. This book shows instead how Senesino, Faustina, Cuzzoni and events at the Haymarket Theatre were used in political allegories in satirical essays directed against the Walpole ministry. Since most operas were based on ancient historical events, the librettos - like traditional histories - could be sources of examples of vice, virtue, and political precepts and wisdom that could be applied to contemporary politics.

Book Coquettes  Wives  and Widows

    Book Details:
  • Author : Marcie Ray
  • Publisher : Eastman Studies in Music
  • Release : 2020
  • ISBN : 1580469884
  • Pages : 201 pages

Download or read book Coquettes Wives and Widows written by Marcie Ray and published by Eastman Studies in Music. This book was released on 2020 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory study of how composers and dramatists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France criticized and trivialized independent women in their portrayals of them in works of theater and opera.

Book The Cambridge Companion to French Music

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: France has a long and rich music history that has had a far-reaching impact upon music and cultures around the world. This accessible Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the music of France. With chapters on a range of music genres, internationally renowned authors survey music-making from the early middle ages to the present day. The first part provides a complete chronological history structured around key historical events. The second part considers opera and ballet and their institutions and works, and the third part explores traditional and popular music. In the final part, contributors analyse five themes and topics, including the early church and its institutions, manuscript sources, the musical aesthetics of the Siècle des Lumières, and music at the court during the ancien régime. Illustrated with photographs and music examples, this book will be essential reading for both students and music lovers.

Book Apollo s Angels

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jennifer Homans
  • Publisher : Random House
  • Release : 2010-11-02
  • ISBN : 0679603905
  • Pages : 640 pages

Download or read book Apollo s Angels written by Jennifer Homans and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY For more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s Angels—the first cultural history of ballet ever written—is a groundbreaking work. From ballet’s origins in the Renaissance and the codification of its basic steps and positions under France’s Louis XIV (himself an avid dancer), the art form wound its way through the courts of Europe, from Paris and Milan to Vienna and St. Petersburg. In the twentieth century, émigré dancers taught their art to a generation in the United States and in Western Europe, setting off a new and radical transformation of dance. Jennifer Homans, a historian, critic, and former professional ballerina, wields a knowledge of dance born of dedicated practice. Her admiration and love for the ballet, as Entertainment Weekly notes, brings “a dancer’s grace and sure-footed agility to the page.”