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Thinking about Music

Thinking about Music PDF Author: Ross Lee Finney
Publisher: Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Thinking about Music presents the thoughts, ideas, and musings of one of the most important American composers and musical pedagogues of this century. American music, the American artist, American musical education, and the interrelationship of all these with the broader American culture were the concern of Finney during nearly 50 years of an active professional life. This volume of Finney's writings is one of the products of his year (1982-83) as holder of the Endowed Chair in Music at the University of Alabama. From among his many essays, public lectures, and speeches, twenty titles have been selected to express the essence of Finney's thoughts about music and culture, some appearing here for the first time in print. Born in Wells, Minnesota, December 23, 1906, reared in Valley Coty, North Dakota, and Minneapolis, where he studied with Donald N. Ferguson at the University of Minnesota, Finney received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Carleton College. After study with Nadia Boulanger and Alban Berg in Europe, Finney returned home to a career as a composer and professor that has spanned six decades. Finney offers the unique perspective of a major American composer covering the most important half-century (ca. 1930-1980) in the history of American music. Finney was an important observer and participant in that period of the flowering of American are music. As the volume spans a variety of subjects it is not strictly for musicians, and is particularly cogent on matters of the relationship of art, especially music, to American educations, and the relationship of the American artist to American culture. Finney was among the most successful teachers of composers in America's history and his ideas about music, art and the training of musicians and artists, therefore, are particularly important.

Thinking about Music

Thinking about Music PDF Author: Ross Lee Finney
Publisher: Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Thinking about Music presents the thoughts, ideas, and musings of one of the most important American composers and musical pedagogues of this century. American music, the American artist, American musical education, and the interrelationship of all these with the broader American culture were the concern of Finney during nearly 50 years of an active professional life. This volume of Finney's writings is one of the products of his year (1982-83) as holder of the Endowed Chair in Music at the University of Alabama. From among his many essays, public lectures, and speeches, twenty titles have been selected to express the essence of Finney's thoughts about music and culture, some appearing here for the first time in print. Born in Wells, Minnesota, December 23, 1906, reared in Valley Coty, North Dakota, and Minneapolis, where he studied with Donald N. Ferguson at the University of Minnesota, Finney received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Carleton College. After study with Nadia Boulanger and Alban Berg in Europe, Finney returned home to a career as a composer and professor that has spanned six decades. Finney offers the unique perspective of a major American composer covering the most important half-century (ca. 1930-1980) in the history of American music. Finney was an important observer and participant in that period of the flowering of American are music. As the volume spans a variety of subjects it is not strictly for musicians, and is particularly cogent on matters of the relationship of art, especially music, to American educations, and the relationship of the American artist to American culture. Finney was among the most successful teachers of composers in America's history and his ideas about music, art and the training of musicians and artists, therefore, are particularly important.

John Zorn

John Zorn PDF Author: John Brackett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Following his English edition of Alma Mahler-Werfel's Diaries 1898-1902, Antony Beaumont presents both the first comprehensive biography of the composer and conductor Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) and a critical assessment of his works. "Zemlinsky--all hail to you!" wrote the young Alma. "All hail to you and your art." When she first met him, Zemlinsky was the most promising Viennese composer of his generation. In 1901, when Alma abruptly ended their passionate love affair in order to marry Gustav Mahler, the crisis served to transform Zemlinsky's talent into mastery. Only long after his death, however, did his music begin to receive its due. Zemlinsky was central to the musical life of Vienna and Central Europe, and this brilliant biography illuminates a social and cultural milieu that disappeared forever with the triumph of Hitler's Reich. The author details the composer's early years as a protégé of Brahms and Mahler, his complex friendship with his brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg, the influence of his teaching on the boy-prodigy Erich Korngold, his kindly and helpful attitude toward the hypersensitive Anton Webern, and his heartfelt friendship with Alban Berg. Zemlinsky was one of the leading conductors of the interwar period, considered by both Schoenberg and Stravinsky the finest they had ever heard. The author charts Zemlinsky's career from Vienna to Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Prague, providing insight into his Catholic-Sephardic background and investigating his keen interest in esoteric aspects of music, including color symbolism and numerology. The author's analyses of Zemlinsky's major scores are accessible and fully contextualized.

Igor Stravinsky, His Life and Times

Igor Stravinsky, His Life and Times PDF Author: Arnold Dobrin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business writing
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description


The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise PDF Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 706

Book Description
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Reflections of an American Composer

Reflections of an American Composer PDF Author: Arthur Berger
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520232518
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
A book of memoirs and essays by notable composer, critic and teacher Arthur Berger. The author writes vividly about the music scenes in New York, Paris, and Boston, and of his work with notable colleagues such as Stravinsky, Copeland, and Virgil Thompson.

An Autobiography

An Autobiography PDF Author: Igor Stravinsky
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465513221
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description


Francis Jammes

Francis Jammes PDF Author: Kathryn Nuernberger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780964145450
Category : French poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Poetry. In the mountain villages of the remote French Basque Country in the early years of the twentieth century, Francis Jammes was writing poems, plays, and novels. Praised by his French contemporaries, Stéphane Mallarmé, André Gide, and Paul Claudel, among others, Jammes would become known among the American Modernists as one of their most essential influences. And then, thanks to the vagaries of time and taste, he and his works were forgotten. Known for his masterful imagery and charming frankness, Jammes' influence can be seen on the New York School and Deep Image poets. In addition to its significance to literary history, Jammes' work remains as surprising and resonant as when it was first published with acclaim. In this fifth volume of the Unsung Masters Series, published by Pleiades Press at the University of Central Missouri, editors Kathryn Nuernberger and Bruce Whiteman have selected more than seventy pages of representative poetry and prose by Jammes, and they have brought together essays by poets and critics who admire his work. Essays and appreciations by Jaswinder Bolina, Janine Canan, John Gallaher, Christopher Howell, Benjamin Johnson, and Kathryn Nuernberger demonstrate Jammes' influence on the development of twentieth century poetics and reintroduce readers to an astonishing literary voice worth reading in any time.

Alban Berg

Alban Berg PDF Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521338844
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Adorno's study of Alban Berg is a unique document. Itself now a part of music history, it is a personal account, by a pre-eminent philosopher and aesthetician, of the life and musical works of his mentor, friend and composition teacher. Shortly after Berg's death in 1935, Adorno contributed several analyses to the first Berg biography. Thirty years later he incorporated these chapters and several subsequent essays into one volume. Beyond analyses of individual pieces, the book explores the historical and cultural significance of Berg's music, its relationship to that of other twentieth-century composers, and to the larger issues of contemporary life. This is a classic study, made available here for the first time in English, and it provides a key to understanding Adorno himself as well as offering an individual perspective on one of the major composers of the twentieth century.

Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Volume One

Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Volume One PDF Author: Richard Taruskin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520293487
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 992

Book Description
This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music. Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturityÑPetrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces. Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism"Ñthe professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk artÑand how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music. Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed. Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.

Playing with Signs

Playing with Signs PDF Author: V. Kofi Agawu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691273626
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
An award-winning account of the importance of semiotic play in Classic instrumental music, including that of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven Of all the repertories of Western Art music, none is as explicitly listener-oriented as that of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet few attempts to analyze the so-called Classic Style have embraced the semiotic implications of this fact. In Playing with Signs, Kofi Agawu proposes a listener-oriented theory of Classic instrumental music that encompasses its two most fundamental communicative dimensions: expression and structure. Units of expression, defined in reference to topoi, are shown here to interact with, confront, and merge into units of structure, defined in terms of the rhetorical conventions of beginning, continuing, and ending. The book draws on examples from works by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven to show that the explicitly referential, even theatrical, surface of Classic music derives from a play with signs. Although addressed primarily to readers interested in musical analysis, the book opens fruitful avenues for further research into musical semiotics, aesthetics, and Classicism.