Download or read book Erik Satie Music Art and Literature written by Caroline Potter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erik Satie (1866-1925) was a quirky, innovative and enigmatic composer whose impact has spread far beyond the musical world. As an artist active in several spheres - from cabaret to religion, from calligraphy to poetry and playwriting - and collaborator with some of the leading avant-garde figures of the day, including Cocteau, Picasso, Diaghilev and René Clair, he was one of few genuinely cross-disciplinary composers. His artistic activity, during a tumultuous time in the Parisian art world, situates him in an especially exciting period, and his friendships with Debussy, Stravinsky and others place him at the centre of French musical life. He was a unique figure whose art is immediately recognisable, whatever the medium he employed. Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature explores many aspects of Satie's creativity to give a full picture of this most multifaceted of composers. The focus is on Satie's philosophy and psychology revealed through his music; Satie's interest in and participation in artistic media other than music, and Satie's collaborations with other artists. This book is therefore essential reading for anyone interested in the French musical and cultural scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Download or read book The Creation of Anne Boleyn written by Susan Bordo and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illuminating history examines the life and many legends of the 16th century Queen who was executed by her husband, King Henry VIII. Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne’s life and a revealing look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is her story so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? Was she the flaxen-haired martyr of Romantic paintings or the raven-haired seductress of twenty-first-century portrayals? (Answer: neither.) But the most provocative question of all concerns Anne’s death: How could Henry order the execution of a once beloved wife? Drawing on scholarship and critical analysis, Bordo probes the complexities of one of history’s most infamous relationships. She then demonstrates how generations of polemicists, biographers, novelists, and filmmakers have imagined and re-imagined Anne: whore, martyr, cautionary tale, proto “mean girl,” feminist icon, and everything in between. In The Creation of Anne Boleyn, Bordo steps off the well-trodden paths of Tudoriana to tease out the human being behind the competing mythologies, paintings, and on-screen portrayals.

Download or read book I Livia written by Mary Mudd and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2005-06-30 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical tradition of Roman origin represents Livia Drusilla, the third and much beloved wife of Caesar Augustus, as a conniving, Borgia-like criminal. This view of Livia maintains, that to promote the political career of her son by her former husband, Livia killed or incapacitated Augustus' descendants through his previous wife. Author Robert Graves, in his famous novel, I, Claudius, based his fictitious rendering of Livia upon this malevolent representation of her. The conceit is patently wrong, and essentially all modern scholars of Roman history reject it. But thanks to Graves' immensely entertaining book, and the British Broadcasting Corporation adaptation of it for television, the image of Livia as a devious dynastic murderess prevails in the popular mind. I, Livia: The Counterfeit Criminal aspires to correct the misconception, and present an accurate assessment of this much-maligned woman. The study's comfortably readable style is intended for general audiences. The first three chapters present a biographical sketch, which focuses on Livia's public life. Livia was accepted as an extraordinarily visible, dynamic and influential political personage, by a society and culture that maintained that women must confine their activities childrearing and other domestic pursuits. The following two chapters demonstrate the absurdity of Livia's criminal reputation, and offer explanation for its development. Three subsequent chapters seek Livia's private side - her habits, tastes, and interpersonal relationships. Livia (who suffered from colds and chronic arthritis) was an amiable soul, with a self-deprecating sense of humor. She was a loving, supportive forbearant wife and mother, an intellectual with profound political insights, an enthusiastic traveller, a connoisseur of art. Although generally patient and demure, she could also be impulsive, assertive, opinionated and, especially in later life, petulant. The final chapter examines how Livia became, and remained, a symbol of Roman imperial power. The brief epilogue describes the physical appearances of Livia and the members of her family. Also included are relevant appendices, a comprehensive bibliography, and color images of surviving wall paintings from her homes.

Download or read book Epic and Empire written by David Quint and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné's Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated. Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.

Download or read book Satie the Bohemian written by Steven Moore Whiting and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1999-02-18 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erik Satie (1866-1925) came of age in the bohemian subculture of Montmartre, with its artists' cabarets and cafés-concerts. Yet apologists have all too often downplayed this background as potentially harmful to the reputation of a composer whom they regarded as the progenitor of modern French music. Whiting argues, on the contrary, that Satie's two decades in and around Montmartre decisively shaped his aesthetic priorities and compositional strategies. He gives the fullest account to date of Satie's professional activities as a popular musician, and of how he transferred the parodic techniques and musical idioms of cabaret entertainment to works for concert hall. From the esoteric Gymnopédies to the bizarre suites of the 1910s and avant-garde ballets of the 1920s (not to mention music journalism and playwriting), Satie's output may be daunting in its sheer diversity and heterodoxy; but his radical transvaluation of received artistic values makes far better sense once placed in the fascinating context of bohemian Montmartre.

Download or read book Dictionary of Foreign Phrases and Classical Quotations written by Hugh Percy Comp Jones and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Download or read book Philostratus written by Philostratus (the Athenian) and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Queen of France written by Andre Castelot and published by Ishi Press. This book was released on 2009-11 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the biography of one of the most tragic women in History. It is the story of a frivolous young girl who threw wild parties and spent a lot of her husband's money and for that reason, and that reason alone, she had her head chopped off in public. The back cover photo here shows Marie Antoinette being given her last rights by a clergyman as she was waiting before the guillotine for the executioners to cut off her head, and while a crowd of thousands watched. Her last words were one of apology to one of her executioners, when she accidentally stepped on his foot. All of the events of the Life of Marie Antoinette are brilliantly explained in this biography by Andre Castelot. The most haunting and harrowing pages of the biography are Castelot's darkly etched picture of the Queen in the culminating moments of her life. Perhaps it is not in the least a paradox that one of the most arrantly self-indulgent women should, in her adversity, provide one of the most memorable images of mother love."

Download or read book A Mammal s Notebook written by Erik Satie and published by Atlas Press (GB). This book was released on 2014 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the largest selection, in any language, of the writings of Erik Satie. Although he was dismissed as an eccentric by many, Satie has come to be seen as a key influence on modern music. The appeal of his writings, however, go far beyond their musical value. He is revealed as one of the most beguiling of absurdists, in the mode of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, but with a strong streak of Dadaism (a movement with which he collaborated).

Download or read book Stefan Wolpe and the Avant Garde Diaspora written by Brigid Maureen Cohen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cohen traces a history of modernism in migration through the composer Stefan Wolpe, from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College.

Download or read book Disciplining Music written by Katherine Bergeron and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-06-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provocative and timely, Disciplining Music confronts a topic that has sparked considerable debate in recent years: how do musicians and music scholars "discipline" music in their efforts to confer order and meaning on it? This collection of essays addresses this issue by formulating questions about music's canons—rules that measure and order, negotiate cultural constraints, reconstruct the past, and shape the future. Written by scholars representing the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, many of the essays tug and push at the very boundaries of these traditional division within the study of music. "Fortunately, in a blaze of good-humored . . . scholarship, [this] book helps brains unaccustomed to thinking about the future without jeopardizing the past imagine the wonder classical-music life might become if it embraced all people and all musics."—Laurence Vittes, Los Angeles Reader "These essays will force us to rethink our position on many issues. . . [and] advance musicology into the twenty-first century."—Giulio Ongaro, American Music Teacher With essays by Katherine Bergeron, Philip V. Bohlman, Richard Cohn and Douglas Dempster, Philip Gossett, Robert P. Morgan, Bruno Nettl, Don Michael Randel, Ruth A. Solie, and Gary Tomlinson.

Download or read book The Wicked Queen written by Chantal Thomas and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chantal Thomas presents the history of the mythification of one of the most infamous queens in all history, whose execution still fascinates us today. In The Wicked Queen, Chantal Thomas presents the history of the mythification of one of the most infamous queens in all history, whose execution still fascinates us today. Almost as soon as Marie-Antoinette, archduchess of Austria, was brought to France as the bride of Louis XVI in 1771, she was smothered in images. In a monarchy increasingly under assault, the charm and horror of her feminine body and her political power as a foreign intruder turned Marie-Antoinette into an alien other. Marie-Antoinette's mythification, argues Thomas, must be interpreted as the misogynist demonization of women's power and authority in revolutionary France.In a series of pamphlets written from the 1770s until her death in 1793, Marie-Antoinette is portrayed as a spendthrift, a libertine, an orgiastic lesbian, and a poisoner and infant murderess. In her analyses of these pamphlets, seven of which appear here in translation for the first time, Thomas reconstructs how the mounting hallucinatory and libelous discourse culminated in the inevitable destruction of what had become the counterrevolutionary symbol par excellence. The Wicked Queen exposes the elaborate process by which the myth of Marie-Antoinette emerged as a crucial element in the successful staging of the French Revolution.

Download or read book Writing through Music written by Jann Pasler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-12 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a passion for music, a remarkably diverse interdisciplinary toolbox, and a gift for accessible language that speaks equally to scholars and the general public, Jann Pasler invites us to read as she writes "through" music, unveiling the forces that affect our sonic encounters. In an extraordinary collection of historical and critical essays, some appearing for the first time in English, Pasler deconstructs the social, moral, and political preoccupations lurking behind aesthetic taste. Arguing that learning from musical experience is vital to our understanding of past, present, and future, Pasler's work trenchantly reasserts the role of music as a crucial contributor to important public debates about who we can be as individuals, communities, and nations. The author's wide-ranging and perceptive approaches to musical biography and history challenge us to rethink our assumptions about important cultural and philosophical issues including national identity and postmodern musical hybridity, material culture, the economics of power, and the relationship between classical and popular music. Her work uncovers the self-fashioning of modernists such as Vincent d'Indy, Augusta Holm?s, Jean Cocteau, and John Cage, and addresses categories such as race, gender, and class in the early 20th century in ways that resonate with experiences today. She also explores how music uses time and constructs narrative. Pasler's innovative and influential methodological approaches, such as her notion of "question-spaces," open up the complex cultural and political networks in which music participates. This provides us with the reasons and tools to engage with music in fresh and exciting ways. In these thoughtful essays, music--whether beautiful or cacophonous, reassuring or seemingly incomprehensible--comes alive as a bearer of ideas and practices that offers deep insights into how we negotiate the world. Jann Pasler's Writing through Music brilliantly demonstrates how music can be a critical lens to focus the contemporary critical, cultural, historical, and social issues of our time.

Download or read book Satie the Composer written by Robert Orledge and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-10-26 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erik Satie remains one of the most bizarre figures in music history, yet everything he did has its own curious logic, once it can be perceived. In this important new study Dr Orledge reveals what made Satie 'tick' as a composer, dealing with every aspect of Satie's complex career and relating his achievement to the other arts and to the society in which he lived. Almost every figure in contemporary art was involved with Satie in some way or another, from Matisse and Picasso to Apollinaire, Cocteau and Brancusi. This, however, is no mere life-and-works study but rather an exploration of the technique behind Satie's art, which foreshadowed most of the 'advances' of twentieth-century music from serialism to minimalism, and even muzak. As the book progresses Satie appears as far more than just the composer of the popular Gymnopédies and Parade.

Download or read book Chopin Studies 2 written by John Rink and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A book that no serious student should be without... refreshingly sane.' Jeremy Siepmann, Classical Music 'An immensely valuable and well-researched book.' Stephen Haylett, BBC Music Magazine 'Intermittently engrossing...' Susan Bradshaw, Musical Times.

Download or read book Boileau s Lutrin written by Nicolas Boileau Despréaux and published by . This book was released on 1708 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Composer As Intellectual written by Jane F. Fulcher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Composer as Intellectual, musicologist Jane Fulcher reveals the extent to which leading French composers between the World Wars were not only aware of but also engaged intellectually and creatively with the central political and ideological issues of the period. Employing recent sociological and historical insights, she demonstrates the extent to which composers, particularly those in Paris since the Dreyfus Affair, considered themselves and were considered to be intellectuals, and interacted closely with intellectuals in other fields. Their consciousness raised by the First World War and the xenophobic nationalism of official culture, some joined parties or movements, allying themselves with and propagating different sets of cultural and political-social goals. Fulcher shows how these composers furthered their ideals through the specific language and means of their art, rejecting the dominant cultural exclusions or constraints of conservative postwar institutions and creatively translating their cultural values into terms of form and style. This was not only the case with Debussy in wartime, but with Ravel in the twenties, when he became a socialist and unequivocally refused to espouse a narrow, exclusionary nationalism. It was also the case with the group called "Les Six," who responded culturally in the twenties and then politically in the thirties, when most of them supported the programs of the Popular Front. Others could not be enthusiastic about the latter and, largely excluded from official culture, sought out more compatible movements or returned to the Catholic Church. Like many French Catholics, they faced the crisis of Catholicism in the thirties when the church not only supported Franco, but Mussolini's imperialistic aggression in Ethiopia. While Poulenc embraced traditional Catholicism, Messiaen turned to more progressive Catholic movements that embraced modern art and insisted that religion must cross national and racial boundaries. Fulcher demonstrates how closely music had become a field of clashing ideologies in this period. She shows also how certain French composers responded, and how their responses influenced specific aspects of their professional and stylistic development. She thus argues that, from this perspective, we can not only better understand specific aspects of the stylistic evolution of these composers, but also perceive the role that their art played in the ideological battles and in heightening cultural-political awareness of their time.