Download or read book Vanishing Sensibilities written by Kristina Muxfeldt and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vanishing Sensibilities examines once passionate cultural concerns that shaped music of Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann, and works of their contemporaries in drama or poetry. Music, especially music with text, was a powerful force in lively ongoing conversations about the nature of liberty, which included such topics as the role of consent in marriage, same-sex relationships, freedom of the press, and the freedom to worship (or not). Among the most common vehicles for stimulating debate about pressing social concerns were the genres of historical drama, and legend or myth, whose stories became inflected in fascinating ways during the Age of Metternich. Interior and imagined worlds, memories and fantasies, were called up in purely instrumental music, and music was privately celebrated for its ability to circumvent the restrictions that were choking the verbal arts.Author Kristina Muxfeldt invites us to listen in on these cultural conversations, dating from a time when the climate of censorship made the tone of what was said every bit as important as its literal content. At this critical moment in European history such things as a performer's delivery, spontaneous improvisation, or the demeanor of the music could carry forbidden messages of hope and political resistance--flying under the censor's radar like a carrier pigeon. Rather than trying to decode or fix meanings, Muxfeldt concerns herself with the very mechanisms of their communication, and she confronts distortions to meaning that form over time as the cultural or political pressures shaping the original expression fade and are eventually forgotten. In these pages are accounts of works successful in their own time alongside others that failed to achieve more than a liminal presence, among them Schubert's Alfonso und Estrella and his last opera project Der Graf von Gleichen, whose libretto was banned even before Schubert set to work composing it. Enlivening the narrative are generous music examples, reproductions of artwork, and facsimiles of autograph material.
Download or read book Rhapsody on a Film by Kurosawa written by Leonard Ginsberg and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Akira Kurosawa's most popular films, Yojimbo (1961) tells the story of a vagrant samurai who outsmarts two gangs warring to control a small town in mid-19th century Japan. This plot a lone hero who challenges both potent rivals struggling to control a place has proved remarkably adaptable. Recent film settings include the American southwest, New York, the coast of Ireland, Viking Iceland, and outer space. The rivals include drug dealers, police, witches, and seals, the hero a hit-man, a psychopath, a senior, an orphan. These films track the basic plot or veer off in unexpected directions. They provide an evening's delight or arouse enduring intellectual engagement with a wide variety of disciplines. Rhapsody on a Film by Kurosawa explores this cultural complex. Films discussed include American Beauty (1999), Donnie Darko (2001), The King of Masks (1996), Memento (2000), Ponette (1996), Requiem for a Dream (2000), Se7en (1995), and The Witches (1990). Other sections discuss possible origins of the plot in the work of Dashiell Hammett and Shakespeare, a Yojimbo hero who emerged in the final days of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the relation of Yojimbo to Kurosawa's cinematic career. Rhapsody on a Film by Kurosawa is the author's first book.
Download or read book A History of Canadian Fiction written by David Staines and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first one-volume history of Canadian fiction covering its growth and development from earliest times to the present day. Recounting the struggles and the glories of this burgeoning area of investigation, it explains Canada's literary growth alongside its remarkable history.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Essay written by Tracy Chevalier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 1032 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies
Download or read book The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt written by and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dramaturgical Leaves: Essays about Musical Works for the Stage and Queries about the Stage, Its Composers and Performers, the third volume in Janita R. Hall-Swadley’s The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt, Liszt heralds his admiration for early nineteenth-century opera and musical stage works. He honors Gluck, the musical prophet, as the cultivator of dramatic truth in the Romantic opera Orpheus, expounds on Beethoven’s harmonic inventions and innovative treatment of form in Fidelio, and argues for the latter’s incidental music to Goethe’s Egmont as the epitome of music organicism, a complete unity of words and tone. He also comments on Weber’s Euryanthe as offering the most progressive musical characterizations and declamation—even more so than his popular work Der Freischütz—and on how both works prefigure Wagner’s music dramas; awards Mendelssohn, whose genius Liszt ranks only slightly less than Beethoven’s, top honors for creating in Midsummer’s Night Dream the highest standards of music poetry; suggests how Scribe and Meyerbeer’s Robert the Devil paints a mental image of art’s eternal flames, where poet and musician share equal space in the development of music tragedy; reveals how the poetic deficiencies in the libretto to Schubert’s Alfonso and Estrella are too easily overlooked because of the music’s melodic and lyrical supremacy; and offers in contrast Auber’s Mute from Portici, a remarkable text by many historically picturesque musical motives that are universal and nationalistic at the same time. Finally Liszt offers an early gender study in music in his essay about Bellini’s Montague and Capulet (as well as its impact on nineteenth-century audiences), a look at Boieldieu’s White Lady as a sublime depiction of literary music, and Donizetti’s Favorite as colored with a special type of imagery, a laterna magica, in Liszt’s hand. The beloved soprano Pauline Viardot-Garcia receives special attention in an essay devoted entirely to her, and Liszt proffers a critique of entr’acte music as a pointless tradition that dethrones music and insults the artist and composer by making music a “palate cleanser.” This volume includes a detailed discussion about what it meant to be patronized by Liszt and how his support—financial, literary, and musical—helped shape many a music career. It also offers commentary on how gender in opera was sometimes obscured not only for dramatic interest but also as part of the process of outlining a nation’s identity,as well as a thorough study of Liszt’s concepts of Gestalt theory, the Archetype, and his musical Weltanschauung (his musical "world view"), all revealing his contribution to 19th-century music philosophy as it relates to opera. Finally, a historical review of entr’acte music is presented—how it began and how it developed—to clarify Liszt’s stance against it, making this volume a necessary read for music historians, serious musicians, and music connoisseurs alike.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music written by Lorna Fitzsimmons and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 960 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its emergence in sixteenth-century Germany, the magician Faust's quest has become one of the most profound themes in Western history. Though variants are found across all media, few adaptations have met with greater acclaim than in music. Bringing together more than two dozen authors in a foundational volume, The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music testifies to the spectacular impact the Faust theme has exerted over the centuries. The Handbook's three-part organization enables readers to follow the evolution of Faust in music across time and stylistic periods. Part I explores symphonic, choral, chamber, and solo Faust works by composers from Beethoven to Schnittke. Part II discusses the range of Faustian operas, and Part III examines Faust's presence in ballet and musical theater. Illustrating the interdisciplinary relationships between music and literature and the fascinating tapestry of intertextual relationships among the works of Faustian music themselves, the volume suggests that rather than merely retelling the story of Faust, these musical compositions contribute significant insights on the tale and its unrivalled cultural impact.
Download or read book The Melody of Time written by Benedict Taylor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music has been seen since the Romantic era as the quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. The Melody of Time explores the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of time, spanning the dynamic century between Beethoven and Elgar.
Download or read book From the Ruins of Enlightenment written by Richard Kramer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a book about Vienna in 1815, at the close of the Napoleonic era and the Napoleonic wars, and on the verge of the Congress of Vienna, which would redraw national boundaries and reconfigure the European community for a full century. Beethoven and Schubert were both citizens of Vienna at this time, Beethoven half-way through his composing career and socially withdrawn because of his almost total deafness; Schubert not yet twenty years-old and in the middle of one of his most prolific periods, with 140 songs and a symphony composed over the course of 1815 alone. Seemingly oblivious to the momentous events and deeply immersed in their own world, they each seemed to be composing 'against' something, in Richard Kramer's compelling reading: 'against the Enlightenment' in Beethoven's case, for whom only a sense of stripped-down nostalgia remained of the optimistic spirit of the 1790s; 'against Beethoven' in Schubert's case, who felt the looming presence of the older composer even as his own musical imagination bloomed. In taking his readers through a carefully chosen selection of works dating from 1815-songs, string quartets, piano sonatas, and more-Kramer insightfully unearths previously undetected resonances and associations and illuminates the two composers' 'lonely and singular journeys' through the 'rich solitude of their music'"--
Download or read book Self quotation in Schubert written by Scott Messing and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the history of musical self-quotation, and reveals and explores a previously unidentified case of Schubert quoting one of his own songs in a major instrumental work.
Download or read book A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music written by Robert S. Hatten and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of composers and performers, whose intentional actions either create music as notated or manifest music as significant sound, virtual agency is inferred from the implied actions of those sounds, as they move and reveal tendencies within music-stylistic contexts. From our most basic attributions of sources for perceived energies in music, to the highest realm of our engagement with musical subjectivity, Hatten explains how virtual agents arose as distinct from actual ones, how unspecified actants can take on characteristics of (virtual) human agents, and how virtual agents assume various actorial roles. Along the way, Hatten demonstrates some of the musical means by which composers and performers from different historical eras have staged and projected various levels of virtual agency, engaging listeners imaginatively and interactively within the expressive realms of their virtual and fictional musical worlds.
Download or read book Late Style and its Discontents written by Gordon McMullan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Late style' is a critical term routinely deployed to characterise the work of selected authors, composers, and creative artists as they enter their last phase of production—often, but not only, in old age. Taken at face value, this terminology merely points to a chronological division in the artist's oeuvre, 'late' being the antonym of 'early' or the third term in the triad 'early-middle-late'. However, almost from its inception, the idea of late style or late work has been freighted with aesthetic associations and expectations that promote it as a special episode in the artist's creative life. Late style is often characterised as the imaginative response made by exceptional talents to the imminence of their death. In their confrontation with death creative artists, critics claim, produce work that is by turns a determination to continue while strength remains, a summation of their life's work and a radical vision of the essence of their craft. And because this creative phenomenon is understood as primarily an existential response to a common fate, so late style is understood as something that transcends the particularities of place, time and medium. Critics seeking to understand late work regularly invoke the examples of Titian, Goethe, and Beethoven as exemplars of what constitutes late work, proposing that something unites the late style of authors, composers, and creative artists who otherwise would not be bracketed together and that lateness per se is a special order of creative work. The essays in this collection resist this position. Ranging across literature, the visual arts, music, and scientific work, the material assembled here looks closely at the material, biographical and other contexts in which the work was produced and seeks both to question the assumptions surrounding late style and to prompt a more critical understanding of the last works of writers, artists and composers.
Download or read book The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology written by Benjamin Binder and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-07 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There seems to be an essential relationship between the performance and the scholarship of the German Lied. Yet the process by which scholarly inquiry and performative practices mutually benefit one another can appear mysterious and undefined, in part because any dialogue between the two invariably unfolds in relatively informal environments – such as the rehearsal studio, seminar room or conference workshop. Contributions from leading musicologists and prominent Lied performers here build on and deepen these interactions to reconsider topics including Werktreue aesthetics and concert practices; the authority of the composer versus the performer; the value of lesser-known, incomplete, or compositionally modified songs; and the traditions, habits and prejudices of song recitalists regarding issues like transposition, programming and dramatic modes of presentation. The book as a whole reveals the reciprocal relevance of Lied musicology and Lied performance, thereby opening doors to fresh and exciting modes of interpretative artistry and intellectual discovery.
Download or read book Franz Schubert and His World written by Christopher H. Gibbs and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life, times, and music of Franz Schubert During his short lifetime, Franz Schubert (1797–1828) contributed to a wide variety of musical genres, from intimate songs and dances to ambitious chamber pieces, symphonies, and operas. The essays and translated documents in Franz Schubert and His World examine his compositions and ties to the Viennese cultural context, revealing surprising and overlooked aspects of his music. Contributors explore Schubert's youthful participation in the Nonsense Society, his circle of friends, and changing views about the composer during his life and in the century after his death. New insights are offered about the connections between Schubert’s music and the popular theater of the day, his strategies for circumventing censorship, the musical and narrative relationships linking his song settings of poems by Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten, and musical tributes he composed to commemorate the death of Beethoven just twenty months before his own. The book also includes translations of excerpts from a literary journal produced by Schubert’s classmates and of Franz Liszt’s essay on the opera Alfonso und Estrella. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Leon Botstein, Lisa Feurzeig, John Gingerich, Kristina Muxfeldt, and Rita Steblin.
Download or read book Analyzing the Music of Living Composers and Others written by Jack Boss and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing the Music of Living Composers (and Others) is a collection of essays that grew out of the 2010 annual meeting of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis. The stated purpose was to apply traditional music-analytic techniques, as well as new, innovative techniques, to describing the music of composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The goal was to take steps toward making the music of our time a bit less impenetrable for our colleagues, students and other listeners by showing how it follows, varies, and sometimes controverts the organizational schemes of older music. This collection includes chapters analyzing music of older eras as well, including a number that throw light on the analysis of recent music in unexpected ways, and there are also several chapters that propose innovative analytic approaches to recent popular music and jazz.
Download or read book Letters Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807 written by Anna Seward and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1811, this six-volume selection of letters by Anna Seward (1742-1809) offers a wealth of Romantic literary criticism.
Download or read book Unlocking Meaning in Art Song written by Beverly Stein and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-08-20 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlocking Meaning in Art Song teaches singers how to analyze songs in order to discover deeper meanings and create more compelling interpretations and performances. The first part of the book introduces important practical skills for analyzing the text as well as key musical elements including melody, rhythm, structure, linear motion, and harmony. The remainder of the book presents an in-depth guided analysis of twenty Schubert songs. The questions and prompts in these chapters allow students, singers, and other readers to discover for themselves the amazing ways in which music and expressive meaning are structured. Songs range from simpler analytical difficulty (such as An die Musik) to medium difficulty (such as Gretchen am Spinnrade), and finally to more complex (such as Erlkönig). The techniques presented in this book can be applied to all types of songs, allowing singers to build critical skills and artful consciousness. This is an ideal resource for song literature courses, voice teachers, students, collaborative pianists, and theory faculty.
Download or read book Letters of Anna Seward written between the years 1784 and 1807 Edited by A Constable written by Anna Seward and published by . This book was released on 1811 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
