Download or read book The Gesualdo Hex Music Myth and Memory written by Glenn Watkins and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting investigation of one of the most provocative musicians of the Renaissance, who continues to captivate composers, artists, and audiences today. In this vivid tale of adultery and intrigue, witchcraft and murder, Glenn Watkins explores the fascinating life of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo—a life suffused with scandal and bordering on the fantastical. An isolated prince, Gesualdo had a personal life that was no less eccentric and bewildering than the music he composed; his biography has often clouded our perception of his oeuvre, which music scholars have periodically dismissed as a late Renaissance deformation of little consequence. Today, however, Gesualdo’s music, once deemed so strange as to be unperformable, stands as one of the most vibrant legacies of the late Italian Renaissance with an undeniable impact on a host of twentieth-century musicians and artists. The incendiary details of Gesualdo’s life recede, and his grip on our musical imagination comes to the fore. Watkins challenges our preconceptions of what has become a nearly mythic persona, weaving together the cumulative experience of some of the most vibrant artists of the past century from Stravinsky and Schoenberg to Abbado and Herzog. Beyond questions of mere influence, however, The Gesualdo Hex offers a profound meditation on cultural memory and historical awareness: how composers attempt to shape the legacy they will bequeath to the world, and how music and history inevitably take on a new guise as they are revisited by subsequent generations and reinterpreted in light of contemporary experience. In examining Gesualdo’s life, music, myth, and memory intertwine with one another to reveal an uncanny affinity with our own time. With his elegant and engaging prose, Watkins asks us to grapple with our understanding not only of art and the artists who create it but also of history itself.
Download or read book Critical Music Historiography Probing Canons Ideologies and Institutions written by Vesa Kurkela and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past two decades, there has emerged a growing need to reconsider the objects, axioms and perspectives of writing music history. A certain suspicion towards Francois Lyotard’s grand narratives, as a sign of what he diagnosed as our ’postmodern condition’, has become more or less an established and unquestioned point of departure among historians. This suspicion, at its most extreme, has led to a radical conclusion of the ’end of history’ in the work of postmodern scholars such as Jean Baudrillard and Francis Fukuyama. The contributors to Critical Music Historiography take a step back and argue that the radical view of the ’impossibility of history’, as well as the unavoidable ideology of any history, are counter-productive points of departure for historical scholarship. It is argued that metanarratives in history are still possible and welcome, even if their limitations are acknowledged. Foucault, Lyotard and others should be taken into account but systematized viewpoints and methods for a more critical and multi-faceted re-evaluation of the past through research are needed. As to the metanarratives of music history, they must avoid the pitfalls of evolutionism, hagiography, and teleology, all hallmarks of traditional historiography. In this volume the contributors put these methods and principles into practice. The chapters tackle under-researched and non-conventional domains of music history as well as rethinking older historiographical concepts such as orientalism and nationalism, and consequently introduce new concepts such as occidentalism and transnationalism. The volume is a challenging collection of work that stakes out a unique territory for itself among the growing body of work on critical music history.
Download or read book Stories of Tonality in the Age of Fran ois Joseph F tis written by Thomas Christensen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-06-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. Thomas Christensen weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about “other” musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, or the medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis’s influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and why it has continued to resonate with uncanny prescience throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Download or read book Recomposing the Past Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen written by James Cook and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recomposing the Past is a book concerned with the complex but important ways in which we engage with the past in modern times. Contributors examine how media on stage and screen uses music, and in particular early music, to evoke and recompose a distant past. Culture, popular and otherwise, is awash with a stylise - sometimes contradictory - musical history. And yet for all its complexities, these representations of the past through music are integral to how our contemporary and collective imaginations understand history. More importantly, they offer a valuable insight into how we understand our musical present. Such representative strategies, the book argues, cross generic boundaries, and as such it brings together a range of multimedia discussion on the subjects of film (Lord of the Rings, Dangerous Liasions), television (Game of Thrones, The Borgias), videogame (Dragon Warrior, Gauntlet), and opera (Written on Skin, Taverner, English ‘dramatick opera’). This collection constitutes a significant, and interdisciplinary, contribution to a growing literature which is unpacking our ongoing creative dialogue with the past. Divided into three complementary sections, grouped not by genre or media but by theme, it considers: ‘Authenticity, Appropriateness, and Recomposing the Past’, ‘Music, Space, and Place: Geography as History’, and ‘Presentness and the Past: Dialogues between Old and New’. Like the musical collage that is our shared multimedia historical soundscape, it is hoped that this collection is, in its eclecticism, more than the sum of its parts.
Download or read book Wagner and Venice Fictionalized written by John W. Barker and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first account of how Wagner's last years and his death in Venice have been mythologized in novels and other works of the creative imagination. The vast literature about Richard Wagner and his works includes a surprising number of fictional works, including novels, plays, satires, and an opera. Many of these deal with his last years and his death in Venice in 1883 -- andeven a fabricated eleventh-hour romance. These fictional treatments -- many presented here in English for the first time -- reveal a striking evolution in the way that Wagner's character and reputation have been viewed over more than a century. They offer insights into changing contexts in Western intellectual and cultural history. And they make clear how much Wagner's associations with Venice have become part of the accumulated mythology of "thefloating city." John Barker's Wagner and Venice Fictionalized: Variations on a Theme will be of interest to all lovers of opera, Venice, and European culture generally. John W. Barker is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in medieval (including Venetian) history. He is also a passionate music lover and record collector, and an active music critic and journalist.
Download or read book Critical Perspectives on Michael Finnissy written by Ian Pace and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-24 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The composer and pianist Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) is an unmistakeable presence in the British and international new music scene, both for his immeasurable generosity as prolific composer for many different types of musicians, major advocate for the works of others, and performer and conductor who has also been a driving force behind ensembles; he was also President of the International Society for Contemporary Music from 1990 to 1996. His vast and enormously varied output confounds those who seek easy categorisations: once associated strongly with the ‘new complexity’, Finnissy is equally known as composer regularly engaged with many different folk musics, for working with amateur and community musicians, for a long-term engagement with sacred music, or as an advocate of Anglo-American ‘experimental’ music. Twenty years ago, a large-scale volume entitled Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy gave the first major overview of the output of any ‘complex’ composer. This new volume brings a greater plurality of perspectives and critical sensibility to bear upon an output which is almost twice as large as it was when the earlier book was published. A range of leading contributors – musicologists, composers, performers and others – each grapple with particular questions relating to Finnissy’s music, often in ways which raise questions relating more widely to new music, and provide theoretical foundations for further of study both of Finnissy and other composers.
Download or read book Musicians of the Renaissance written by Britannica Educational Publishing and published by Britannica Educational Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The score of Western music was writ large during the Renaissance. Secular music rivaled church music for prominence, harmonic lines intertwined and changed music forever with the emergence of polyphony, and, in general, musical composition was taken to new heights. The composers and musicians who provided the soundtrack to this remarkable period are the subject of this comprehensive volume, which also takes an in-depth look at instruments of the day.
Download or read book Twentieth and Twenty First Century Song Cycles written by Gordon Sly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways Toward Performance presents analyses of fourteen song cycles composed after the turn of the twentieth century, with a focus on offering ways into the musical and poetic structure of each cycle to performers, scholars, and students alike. Ranging from familiar works of twentieth-century music by composers such as Schoenberg, Britten, Poulenc, and Shostakovich to lesser-known works by Van Wyk, Sviridov, Wheeler, and Sánchez, this collection of essays captures the diversity of the song cycle repertoire in contemporary classical music. The contributors bring their own analytical perspectives and methods, considering musical structures, the composers' selection of texts, how poetic narratives are expressed, and historical context. Informed by music history, music theory, and performance, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles offers an essential guide into the contemporary art-music song cycle for performers, scholars, students, and anyone seeking to understand this unique genre.
Download or read book Louder Than Bombs written by Ed Vulliamy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part memoir, part reportage, Louder Than Bombs is a story of music from the front lines. Ed Vulliamy, a decorated war correspondent and journalist, offers a testimony of his lifelong passion for music. Vulliamy’s reporting has taken him around the world to cover the Bosnian war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Communism, the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003 onward, narco violence in Mexico, and more, places where he confronted stories of violence, suffering, and injustice. Through it all, Vulliamy has turned to music not only as a reprieve but also as a means to understand and express the complicated emotions that follow. Describing the artists, songs, and concerts that most influenced him, Vulliamy brings together the two largest threads of his life—music and war. Louder Than Bombs covers some of the most important musical milestones of the past fifty years, from Jimi Hendrix playing “Machine Gun” at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 to the Bataclan in Paris under siege in 2015. Vulliamy was present for many of these historic moments, and with him as our guide, we see them afresh, along the way meeting musicians like B. B. King, Graham Nash, Patti Smith, Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, and Bob Dylan. Vulliamy peppers the book with short vignettes—which he dubs 7" singles—recounting some of his happiest memories from a lifetime with music. Whether he’s working as an extra in the Vienna State Opera’s production of Aida, buying blues records in Chicago, or drinking coffee with Joan Baez, music is never far from his mind. As Vulliamy discovers, when horror is unspeakable, when words seem to fail us, we can turn to music for expression and comfort, or for rage and pain. Poignant and sensitively told, Louder Than Bombs is an unforgettable record of a life bursting with music.
Download or read book Sonic Overload written by Peter J. Schmelz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sonic Overload offers a new, music-centered cultural history of the late Soviet Union. It focuses on polystylism in music as a response to the information overload swamping listeners in the Soviet Union during its final decades. It traces the ways in which leading composers Alfred Schnittke and Valentin Silvestrov initially embraced popular sources before ultimately rejecting them. Polystylism first responded to the utopian impulses of Soviet ideology with utopian impulses to encompass all musical styles, from "high" to "low". But these initial all-embracing aspirations were soon followed by retreats to alternate utopias founded on carefully selecting satisfactory borrowings, as familiar hierarchies of culture, taste, and class reasserted themselves. Looking at polystylism in the late USSR tells us about past and present, near and far, as it probes the musical roots of the overloaded, distracted present. Based on archival research, oral historical interviews, and other overlooked primary materials, as well as close listening and thorough examination of scores and recordings, Sonic Overload presents a multilayered and comprehensive portrait of late-Soviet polystylism and cultural life, and of the music of Silvestrov and Schnittke. Sonic Overload is intended for musicologists and Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian specialists in history, the arts, film, and literature, as well as readers interested in twentieth- and twenty-first century music; modernism and postmodernism; quotation and collage; the intersections of "high" and "low" cultures; and politics and the arts.
Download or read book Experiencing Stravinsky written by Robin Maconie and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hear the name “Igor Stravinsky” and the first thing that comes to mind is a composer of ponderous, “serious” music. But did you know that Stravinsky lived much of his life in Hollywood? That he collaborated on musical projects with Pablo Picasso and George Balanchine? That his work subtly espoused deeply held political views and reflected key literary influences? That he was not only interested in the modern communication technologies of his time—sound recording, radio, television, even early computers—but wrote music that echoed their impact? In Experiencing Stravinsky, music historian Robin Maconie takes a fresh approach to understanding this great composer’s works, explaining what makes Stravinsky’s sound unique and what we, as listeners, need to know in order to appreciate the variety and brilliance of his compositions. Experiencing Stravinsky is more than just another work of music appreciation. In the author’s deft hands, Stravinsky’s long musical career is a guided tour through 20th-century history, from Czarist Russia and two world wars to the height of the Hollywood era and the birth of the information age. Maconie has provided nothing less than an operating manual to getting the most out of Stravinsky’s music.
Download or read book Sounds of War written by Annegret Fauser and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What role did music play in the United States during World War II? How did composers reconcile the demands of their country and their art as America mobilized both militarily and culturally for war? Annegret Fauser explores these and many other questions in the first in-depth study of American concert music during World War II. While Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrew Sisters entertained civilians at home and G.I.s abroad with swing and boogie-woogie, Fauser shows it was classical music that truly distinguished musical life in the wartime United States. Classical music in 1940s America had a ubiquitous cultural presence--whether as an instrument of propaganda or a means of entertainment, recuperation, and uplift--that is hard to imagine today, and Fauser suggests that no other war enlisted culture in general and music in particular so consciously and unequivocally as World War II. Indeed, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Group Theatre director Harold Clurman wrote to his cousin, Aaron Copland: "So you're back in N.Y. . . ready to defend your country in her hour of need with lectures, books, symphonies!" Copland was in fact involved in propaganda missions of the Office of War Information, as were Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, and Colin McPhee. It is the works of these musical greats--as well as many other American and exiled European composers who put their talents to patriotic purposes--that form the core of Fauser's enlightening account. Drawing on music history, aesthetics, reception history, and cultural history, Sounds of War recreates the remarkable sonic landscape of the World War II era and offers fresh insight to the role of music during wartime.
Download or read book Teaching Stravinsky written by Kimberly A. Francis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1929 Nadia Boulanger accepted Igor Stravinsky's younger son, Soulima, as her student. Within two years, Stravinsky and Boulanger merged their artistic spheres, each influencing and enhancing the cultural work of the other until the composer's death in 1971. Teaching Stravinsky tells Boulanger's story of the ever-changing nature of her fractious relationship with Stravinksy. Author Kimberly A. Francis explores how Boulanger's own professional activity during the turbulent twentieth-century intersected with her efforts on behalf of Stravinsky, and how this facilitated her own influential conversations with the composer about his works while also drawing her into close contact with his family. Through the theoretical lens of Bourdieu, and drawing upon over one thousand pages of letters and scores, many published here for the first time, Francis examines the extent to which Boulanger played a foundational role in defining, defending, and ultimately consecrating Stravinsky's canonical identity. She considers how the quotidian events in the lives of these two icons of modernism informed both their art and their professional decisions, and convincingly argues for a reevaluation of the influence of women on cultural production during the twentieth century. At once a story of one woman's vibrant friendship with an iconic modernist composer, and a case study in how gendered polemics informed professional negotiations of the artistic-political fields of the twentieth-century, Teaching Stravinsky sheds new light not only on how Boulanger taught Stravinsky, but also how, in doing so, she managed to influence the course of modernism itself.
Download or read book Understanding Stockhausen written by Robin Maconie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays addresses technical developments in telecommunications and sound recording that have guided the direction of musical aesthetics in the post-1950 era. Such information is readily available online but may appear counterintuitive to many who find its priorities difficult to grasp from a musical perspective. The author hopes to draw attention to the place of ideas of communication and flight in western tradition. This Element begins with Varèse and his 'noble noise', traverses the arrival of Information Theory and its influence, examples of early computer music, and ends with a defence of the sublime logic of Stockhausen's singing helicopters and tornados.
Download or read book The Artist as Murderer written by Norman E. Land and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-11-25 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 4th century BC Greek painter Parrhasius murdered his model--an old man who was his slave--to achieve, so the story goes, a more lifelike depiction of nature. The tale has inspired similar, more elaborate stories about both well known and obscure artists--including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rubens. Elements of the tale have appeared in theater, literature and film, as well as in comments by painters, historians, critics and anatomists. Challenging the archetype of the artist as a sympathetic lover of nature, this book examines the artist as cruel and murderous in service of art and ambition, and indirectly addresses a different understanding of the relationship between art and life.
Download or read book Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys written by Nadia Boulanger and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2018 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published for the first time: a rich epistolary dialogue revealing one master teacher's power to shape the cultural canon and one great composer's desire to embed himself within historical narratives.
Download or read book A Companion to Digital Art written by Christiane Paul and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-01-06 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting the dynamic creativity of its subject, this definitive guide spans the evolution, aesthetics, and practice of today’s digital art, combining fresh, emerging perspectives with the nuanced insights of leading theorists. Showcases the critical and theoretical approaches in this fast-moving discipline Explores the history and evolution of digital art; its aesthetics and politics; as well as its often turbulent relationships with established institutions Provides a platform for the most influential voices shaping the current discourse surrounding digital art, combining fresh, emerging perspectives with the nuanced insights of leading theorists Tackles digital art’s primary practical challenges – how to present, document, and preserve pieces that could be erased forever by rapidly accelerating technological obsolescence Up-to-date, forward-looking, and critically reflective, this authoritative new collection is informed throughout by a deep appreciation of the technical intricacies of digital art
