Download or read book The Breath of the Symphonist written by David J. Fanning and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1988 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1946 Schoenberg wrote of Sibelius and Shostakovich, 'I feel they have the breath of symphonists.' This book poses the question of what exactly that 'breath' means in the context of Shostakovich's 10th Symphony (1953). Written shortly after Stalin's death, the work marks a turning point in the composer's output and in the history of Russian music, heralding the possibility of a new creative direction for Soviet artists. David Fanning's close analysis of the 10th sheds light on issues associated with the genre of the twentieth-century epic symphony, issues of structure and expression, unity and contrast. The book reveals how the work displays some of Shostakovich's most effective strategies for confronting these issues.
Download or read book Edmund Rubbra Symphonist written by Leo Black and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leo Black, a pupil of Rubbra in the 1950s, presents a full-scale study of his symphonies (the first for twenty years). A biographical sketch throws light on legends about the BBC and Rubbra; there are full programme notes on eachsymphony, with accounts of important non-symphonic works. The music of Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986) has been unjustly neglected - arguably because its wide-ranging nature makes it difficult to categorise. He is perhaps best known as a symphonist; his eleven symphonies covered a period of musical and political upheaval [1934 - 1980], the first four reflecting the uneasy later 1930s, with a second global conflict no longer avoidable. The immediately-post-war ones document new emotional depths and his conversion, whilethe final symphonies show a man still in search of peace and reconciliation, overlooked by the world but certain he was on the right path. Leo Black, a pupil of Rubbra at Oxford in the 1950s, here presents a sympatheticfull-scale study of these works (the first for some twenty years). A succinct biographical sketch throws light on legends about the BBC and Rubbra; there are full programme notes on each symphony, with shorter accounts of important non-symphonic works, in particular a 'triptych' of concertos from the 1950s and major liturgical pieces composed around the time of the Second Vatican Council, after Rubbra's conversion to Catholicism. He also deals with the vexed question of Rubbra's mysticism. LEO BLACK is a former BBC chief producer for music and author of the highly-acclaimed Franz Schubert: Music and Belief [2003].
Download or read book Layers of Musical Meaning written by Finn Egeland Hansen and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a radical attempt to explain musical meaning as the complex fabric of tension and relaxation resulting from the courses of the individual musical elements: e.g. rhythm, where the musical tension manifests itself by the opposition between strong and weak beats - or harmony, where the chords of the tonal cadence generate courses of tension and relaxation. It is strongly emphasized that the total structure of contributors to the web of tension/relaxation, in short, the musical style, is constantly changing, and it is an error to believe that any musical way of articulation is eternal: new ways of expression arrive and others drop out gradually - precisely as with ordinary language. This consideration, however, implies that too many and radical changes over a short period of time are foredoomed to go over the head of the ordinary listener. The radical modernism of the 1950s illustrates how composers in their endeavour to wipe the slate clean in order to start from scratch largely failed. Attempts at semantic interpretations of music are rejected. Such interpretations belong to the private sphere and cannot be scholarly supported. No hermeneutic interpretation, however elaborate, can claim higher truth value than another.
Download or read book Shostakovich and His World written by Laurel E. Fay and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has a reputation as one of the leading composers of the twentieth century. But the story of his controversial role in history is still being told, and his full measure as a musician still being taken. This collection of essays goes far in expanding the traditional purview of Shostakovich's world, exploring the composer's creativity and art in terms of the expectations--historical, cultural, and political--that forged them. The collection contains documents that appear for the first time in English. Letters that young "Miti" wrote to his mother offer a glimpse into his dreams and ambitions at the outset of his career. Shostakovich's answers to a 1927 questionnaire reveal much about his formative tastes in the arts and the way he experienced the creative process. His previously unknown letters to Stalin shed new light on Shostakovich's position within the Soviet artistic elite. The essays delve into neglected aspects of Shostakovich's formidable legacy. Simon Morrison provides an in-depth examination of the choreography, costumes, décor, and music of his ballet The Bolt and Gerard McBurney of the musical references, parodies, and quotations in his operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki. David Fanning looks at Shostakovich's activities as a pedagogue and the mark they left on his students' and his own music. Peter J. Schmelz explores the composer's late-period adoption of twelve-tone writing in the context of the distinctively "Soviet" practice of serialism. Other contributors include Caryl Emerson, Christopher H. Gibbs, Levon Hakobian, Leonid Maximenkov, and Rosa Sadykhova. In a provocative concluding essay, Leon Botstein reflects on the different ways listeners approach the music of Shostakovich.
Download or read book The Concerto written by Michael Steinberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-26 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Steinberg's 1996 volume The Symphony: A Reader's Guide received glowing reviews across America. It was hailed as "wonderfully clear...recommended warmly to music lovers on all levels" (Washington Post), "informed and thoughtful" (Chicago Tribune), and "composed by a master stylist" (San Francisco Chronicle). Seiji Ozawa wrote that "his beautiful and effortless prose speaks from the heart." Michael Tilson Thomas called The Symphony "an essential book for any concertgoer." Now comes the companion volume--The Concerto: A Listener's Guide. In this marvelous book, Steinberg discusses over 120 works, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1720s to John Adams in 1994. Readers will find here the heart of the standard repertory, among them Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, eighteen of Mozart's piano concertos, all the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, and major works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Bruch, Dvora'k, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Elgar, Sibelius, Strauss, and Rachmaninoff. The book also provides luminous introductions to the achievement of twentieth-century masters such as Arnold Schoenberg, Be'la Barto'k, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron Copland, and Elliott Carter. Steinberg examines the work of these musical giants with unflagging enthusiasm and bright style. He is a master of capturing the expressive, dramatic, and emotional values of the music and of conveying the historical and personal context in which these wondrous works were composed. His writing blends impeccable scholarship, deeply felt love of music, and entertaining whimsy. Here then is a superb journey through one of music's richest and most diverse forms, with Michael Steinberg along as host, guide, and the best of companions.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich written by Pauline Fairclough and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-30 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Soviet Union's foremost composer, Shostakovich's status in the West has always been problematic. Regarded by some as a collaborator, and by others as a symbol of moral resistance, both he and his music met with approval and condemnation in equal measure. The demise of the Communist state has, if anything, been accompanied by a bolstering of his reputation, but critical engagement with his multi-faceted achievements has been patchy. This Companion offers a starting point and a guide for readers who seek a fuller understanding of Shostakovich's place in the history of music. Bringing together an international team of scholars, the book brings research to bear on the full range of Shostakovich's musical output, addressing scholars, students and all those interested in this complex, iconic figure.
Download or read book Shostakovich A Life Remembered written by Elizabeth Wilson and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shostakovich: A Life Remembered is a unique study of the great composer, drawn from the reminiscences and reflections of his contemporaries. Elizabeth Wilson sheds light on the composer's creative process and his working life in music, and examines the enormous and enduring influence that Shostakovich has had on Soviet musical life.'The one indispensable book about the composer.' New York Times
Download or read book Contemplating Shostakovich Life Music and Film written by Andrew Kirkman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemplating Shostakovich marks an important new stage in the understanding of Shostakovich and his working environment. Each chapter covers aspects of the composer's output in the context of his life and cultural milieu. The contributions uncover 'outside' stimuli behind Shostakovich's works, allowing the reader to perceive the motivations behind his artistic choices; at the same time, the nature of those choices offers insights into the workings of the larger world - cultural, social, political - that he inhabited. Thus his often ostensibly quirky choices are revealed as responses - by turns sentimental, moving, sardonic and angry - to the particular conditions, with all their absurdities and contradictions, that he had to negotiate. Here we see the composer emerging from the role of tortured loner of older narratives into that of the gregarious and engaged member of his society that, for better and worse, characterized the everyday reality of his life. This invaluable collection offers remarkable new insight, in both depth and range, into the nature of Shostakovich's working circumstances and of his response to them. The collection contains the seeds for a wide range of new directions in the study of Shostakovich's works and the larger contexts of their creation and reception.
Download or read book Dimensions of Energy in Shostakovich s Symphonies written by Dr Michael Rofe and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shostakovich's music is often described as being dynamic, energetic. But what is meant by 'energy' in music? After setting out a broad conceptual framework for approaching this question, Michael Rofe proposes various potential sources of the perceived energy in Shostakovich's symphonies, describing also the historical significance of energeticist thought in Soviet Russia during the composer's formative years. The book is in two parts. In Part I, examples are drawn from across the symphonies in order to demonstrate energy streams within various musical dimensions. Three broad approaches are adopted: first, the theories of Boleslav Yavorsky are used to consider melodic-harmonic motion; second, Boris Asafiev's work, with its echoes of Ernst Kurth, is used to describe form as a dynamic process; and third, proportional analysis reveals numerous symmetries and golden sections within local and large-scale temporal structures. In Part II, the multi-dimensionality of musical energy is considered through case studies of individual movements from the symphonies. This in turn gives rise to broader contextualised perspectives on Shostakovich's work. The book ends with a detailed examination of why a piece of music might contain golden sections.
Download or read book Shostakovich Studies written by David Fanning and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These eleven essays lay a foundation for a proper understanding of Shostakovich's musical language and provide new insights into issues surrounding his composition.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Music written by Nicholas Cook and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-05 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book The Musician s Breath written by James Mark Jordan and published by G I A Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this book, James Jordan examines why and how the breath is the "delivery system" for human and musical ideas in performance. "The breath," Dr. Jordan writes, " is the most magical and human thing we can engage as artists." The Musician's breath is divided into two sections: The first discusses the "why" of breathing, while the second provides the "how" with practical applications for singers, instrumentalists, and conductors"--Dust jacket.
Download or read book A History of Russian Music written by Francis Maes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-02-20 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces the general public to the scholarly debate that has revolutionized Russian music history over the past two decades. Summarizes the new view of Russian music and provides an overview of the relationships between artistic movements and political ideas.
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 The Musical Times written by and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 1348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Shostakovich Companion written by Michael Mishra and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adopting a two-books-in-one format. The Shostakovich Companion combines a full-length, single-author examination of the life and compositional evolution of the Soviet Union's most famous composer; and a symposium in which a variety of analytical techniques is applied to selected Shostakovich works and genres. This is the first comprehensive English-language book in twenty-five years in which the primary emphasis is on musical issues, and the secondary emphasis is on the biographical and much-debated political issues. The The Shostakovich Companion is divided into four parts. Part I considers the hermeneutic techniques that have been applied to Shostakovich's music, along with the various controversies surrounding his life and his relationship to Soviet politics. Part II comprises the book's central life-and-works discussion, uniting a comprehensive examination of Shostakovich's compositional evolution with a full account of his life. Coming from a variety of authors, the chapters in Part III demonstrate a cross-section of analytical techniques that may usefully be brought to bear upon Shostakovich's music. These range from literary and cinematically-based methods to the more traditional types of musical analysis. Part IV considers three independent but crucial aspects of Shostakovich's life: his contributions to the Soviet film industry, his career as a pianist, and his legacy and influence as a teacher.
Download or read book Defining Russia Musically written by Richard Taruskin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin devoted much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways. Defining Russia Musically represents one of his landmark achievements: here Taruskin uses music, together with history and politics, to illustrate the many ways in which Russian national identity has been constructed, both from within Russia and from the Western perspective. He contends that it is through music that the powerful myth of Russia's "national character" can best be understood. Russian art music, like Russia itself, Taruskin writes, has "always [been] tinged or tainted . . . with an air of alterity—sensed, exploited, bemoaned, reveled in, traded on, and defended against both from within and from without." The author's goal is to explore this assumption of otherness in an all-encompassing work that re-creates the cultural contexts of the folksong anthologies of the 1700s, the operas, symphonies, and ballets of the 1800s, the modernist masterpieces of the 1900s, and the hugely fraught but ambiguous products of the Soviet period. Taruskin begins by showing how enlightened aristocrats, reactionary romantics, and the theorists and victims of totalitarianism have variously fashioned their vision of Russian society in musical terms. He then examines how Russia as a whole shaped its identity in contrast to an "East" during the age of its imperialist expansion, and in contrast to two different musical "Wests," Germany and Italy, during the formative years of its national consciousness. The final section focuses on four individual composers, each characterized both as a self-consciously Russian creator and as a European, and each placed in perspective within a revealing hermeneutic scheme. In the culminating chapters—Chaikovsky and the Human, Scriabin and the Superhuman, Stravinsky and the Subhuman, and Shostakovich and the Inhuman—Taruskin offers especially thought-provoking insights, for example, on Chaikovsky's status as the "last great eighteenth-century composer" and on Stravinsky's espousal of formalism as a reactionary, literally counterrevolutionary move.
