Author: Benjamin Boretz
Publisher: New York : W. W. Norton
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description

Author: Bill Banfield
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0585464162
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
A sequel to the award-winning The Black Composer Speaks (Scarecrow Press, 1978), this exploration of the creative world of African American composers traces the lives and careers of 40 talented individuals and, in their own words, provides perspectives on a world that has been slow to recognize their remarkable contributions to classical music. The discussion places the music of these composers within the greater context of Western art music, but analyzes it through the lenses of sociology, Western concepts of art and taste, and vernacular musical forms, including spirituals, blues, jazz, and contemporary popular music. Each chapter is devoted to an individual composer, who discusses his or her musical training, compositional techniques and style, and the composer's personal philosophy as reflected in his or her music. A selected list of compositions for each composer is included, as well as a photo and sample of the composer's "hand." Banfield offers unprecedented insight into the history and influence of the African American composer with this documentary, which will appeal to everyone from the music scholar to the general reader.

Author: James R. Heintze
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780815321446
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author: James R. Heintze
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1135599416
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
As the century comes to a close, composition of music in the United States has reached little consensus in terms of style, techniques, or schools. In fourteen original articles, the contributors to this volume explore the broad range and diversity of post-World War II musical culture. Classical and jazz idioms are both covered, as is the broad history of electronic music in the United States.

Author: Bryan Gilliam
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822321149
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Stauss's death, scholarly interest in the composer continues to grow. Despite what was once a tendency by musicologists to overlook or deny Strauss's importance, these essays firmly place the German composer in the musical mainstream and situate him among the most influential composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Originally published in 1992, this volume examines Strauss's life and work from a number of approaches and during various periods of his long career, opening up unique corridors of insight into a crucial time in German history. Contributors discuss Strauss as a young composer steeped in a conservative instrumental tradition, as a brash young modernist tone poet of the 1890s, as an important composer of twentieth-century German opera, and as a cultural icon manipulated by the national socialists during the 1930s and early 1940s. Individual essays use Strauss's creative work as a framework for larger musicological questions such as the tension between narrative and structure in program music, the problem of extended tonality at the turn of the century, stylistic choice versus stylistic obligation, and conflicting perspectives of progressive versus conservative music. This collection will interest Strauss scholars, musicologists, and those interested in the artistic and cultural life of Germany from 1880 through the Second World War. Contributors. Kofi Agawu, Günter Brosche, Bryan Gilliam, Stephen Hefling, James A. Hepokoski, Timothy L. Jackson, Michael Kennedy, Lewis Lockwood, Barbara A. Peterson, Pamela Potter, Reinhold Schlötterer, R. Larry Todd

Author: Michael Saffle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136519726
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
The essays in this collection reflect the range and depth of musical life in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Contributions consider the rise and triumph of popular forms such as jazz, swing, and blues, as well as the contributions to art music of composers such as Ives, Cage, and Copland, among others. American contributions to music technology and dissemination, and the role of these forms in extending the audience for music, is also a focus.

Author: Steve Schwartz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442257679
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Populism and nationalism in classical music held a significant place between the world wars with composers such as George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein creating a soundtrack to the lives of everyday Americans. While biographies of these individual composers exist, no single book has taken on this period as a direct contradiction to the modernist dichotomy between the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. In Nationalist and Populist Composers: Voices of the American People, Steve Schwartz offers an overdue correction to this distortion of the American classical music tradition by showing that not all composers of this era fall into either the Stravinsky or Schoenberg camps. Exploring the rise and decline of musical populism in the United States, Schwartz examines the major works of George Gershwin, Randall Thompson, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Kurt Weill, Morton Gould, and Leonard Bernstein. Organized chronologically, chapters cover each composer’s life and career and then reveal how key works participated in populist and nationalist themes. Written for the both the scholar and amateur enthusiast interested in modern classical music and American social history, Nationalist and Populist Composers creates a contextual frame through which all audiences can better understand such works as Rhapsody in Blue, Appalachian Spring, and West Side Story.

Author: Michael Hicks
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252037065
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
In this first interpretive narrative of the life and work of Christian Wolff, Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund trace the influences and sensibilities of a contemporary composer's atypical career path and restless imagination. Written in full cooperation with Wolff, including access to his papers, this volume is a much-needed introduction to a leading avant-garde composer still living, writing music, and speaking about his own work. Wolff has pioneered various compositional and notational idioms, including overtly political music, indeterminacy, graphic scores, and extreme virtuosity. Trained as a classicist rather than a musician, Wolff has never quite had both feet in the rarefied world of contemporary composition. Yet he's considered a "composer's composer," with a mind ensconced equally in ancient Greek tragedy and experimental music and an eccentric and impulsive compositional approach that eludes a fixed stylistic fingerprint. Hicks and Asplund cover Wolff's family life and formative years, his role as a founder of the New York School of composers, and the context of his life and work as part of the John Cage circle, as well as his departures from it. Critically assessing Wolff's place within the experimental musical field, this volume captures both his eloquence and reticence and provides insights into his broad interests and activities within music and beyond.

Author: David C Paul
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252094697
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) has gone from being a virtual unknown to become one of the most respected and lauded composers in American music. In this sweeping survey of intellectual and musical history, David C. Paul tells the new story of how Ives's music was shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside of musical culture, charting the changes in the reception of Ives across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Paul focuses on the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein. Paul explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early twenties attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the thirties made a concert staple of his "Concord" Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. Paul shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of "American maverick" composers. Paul also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties. By embedding Ives' reception within the changing developments of a wide range of fields including intellectual history, American studies, literature, musicology, and American politics and society in general, Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer greatly advances our understanding of Ives and his influence on nearly a century of American culture.

Author: Michael K. Slayton
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810877481
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
In this collection of essays and interviews, nine gifted composers openly discuss their work.