Blind Tom, the Black Pianist-composer (1849-1908) PDF Download

Author: Geneva H. Southall
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810845459
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Blind Tom was the stage name of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a blind black pianist born into slavery in 1849. In this focused, consequential study, Southall reformulates the debate surrounding Blind Tom and expands its dimensions significantly.

Author: Jeffery Renard Allen
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970923
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom. Song of the Shank opens in 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere—inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots—who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother. As the novel ranges from Tom's boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.

Author: Sandra Jean Graham
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050304
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Spirituals performed by jubilee troupes became a sensation in post-Civil War America. First brought to the stage by choral ensembles like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, spirituals anchored a wide range of late nineteenth-century entertainments, including minstrelsy, variety, and plays by both black and white companies. In the first book-length treatment of postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons. In so doing they lay the foundation for a black entertainment industry whose artistic, financial, and cultural practices extended into the twentieth century. A companion website contains jubilee troupe personnel, recordings, and profiles of 85 jubilee groups. Please go to: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/graham/spirituals/

Author: Raoul Abdul
Publisher: Dodd Mead
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
From the moment that Joseph Boulogne Saint-Georges poised his violin to play at the court of Louis XVI in eighteenth-century France, the Black presence has been felt in the world of classical music. Today, the names of Leontyne Price and Andre Watts are household words. These are only two of the hundreds of Blacks who have made important contributions to the concert and opera scene. For over a quarter of a century, the author's provocative and often witty review of musical events have appeared in the Black press. In this informal history, he uses some of these pieces as a point of departure for discussion of Blacks in classical music from the eighteenth century to the present day. Included are composers, singers, operas and opera companies, keyboard artists, instrumentalists, conductors, orchestras, choruses, and critics.

Author: Mellonee V. Burnim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317934423
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
American Music: An Introduction, Second Edition is a collection of seventeen essays surveying major African American musical genres, both sacred and secular, from slavery to the present. With contributions by leading scholars in the field, the work brings together analyses of African American music based on ethnographic fieldwork, which privileges the voices of the music-makers themselves, woven into a richly textured mosaic of history and culture. At the same time, it incorporates musical treatments that bring clarity to the structural, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics that both distinguish and unify African American music. The second edition has been substantially revised and updated, and includes new essays on African and African American musical continuities, African-derived instrument construction and performance practice, techno, and quartet traditions. Musical transcriptions, photographs, illustrations, and a new audio CD bring the music to life.

Author: Marc Smirnoff
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 9781610752992
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Not only have a breathtaking array of musical giants come from the South—think Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Rodgers, to name just obvious examples—but so have a breathtaking array of American music genres. From blues to rock & roll to jazz to country to bluegrass—and areas in between—it all started in the American South. Since its debut in 1996, The Oxford American's more-or-less annual Southern Music Issue has become legendary for its passionate and wide-ranging approach to music and for working with some of America's greatest writers. These writers—from Peter Guralnick to Nick Tosches to Susan Straight to William Gay—probe the lives and legacies of Southern musicians you may or may not yet be familiar with, but whom you'll love being introduced, or reintroduced, to. In one creative, fresh way or another, these writers also uncover the essence of music—and why music has such power over us. To celebrate ten years of Southern music issues, most of which are sold-out or very hard to find, the fifty-five essays collected in this dynamic, wide-ranging, and vast anthology appeal to both music fans and fans of great writing.

Author: Ralph P. Locke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520083950
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
"The Victorian cup on my shelf--a present from my mother--reads 'Love the Giver.' Is it because the very word patronage implies the authority of the father that we have treated American women patrons and activists so unlovingly in the writing of our own history? This pioneering collection of superb scholarship redresses that imbalance. At the same time it brilliantly documents the interrelationship between various aspects of gender and the creation of our own culture."--Judith Tick, author of Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music "Together with the fine-grained and energetic research, I like the spirit of this book, which is ambitious, bold, and generous minded. Cultivating Music in America corrects long-standing prejudices, omissions, and misunderstandings about the role of women in setting up the structures of America's musical life, and, even more far-reaching, it sheds light on the character of American musical life itself. To read this book is to be brought to a fresh understanding of what is at stake when we discuss notions such as 'elitism, ' 'democratic taste, ' and the political and economic implications of art."--Richard Crawford, author of The American Musical Landscape "We all know we are indebted to royal patronage for the music of Mozart. But who launched American talent? The answer is women, this book teaches us. Music lovers will be grateful for these ten essays, sound in scholarship, that make a strong case for the women philanthropists who ought to join Carnegie and Rockefeller as household words as sponsors of music."--Karen J. Blair, author of The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America

Author: Ronald Ebrecht
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498527884
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
In this book, Ronald Ebrecht has meticulously studied each of Duruflé’s works and put together the first book to discuss in detail all of Duruflé’s music. With encouragement from Duruflé’s editor and the foundation established in his name, Ebrecht has compiled copious examples from manuscript sources to be published for the first time along with the little-known contextualizing works of Messiaen and Barraine. Most widely known for his masterpiece Requiem, the composer’s orchestral gems are analyzed alongside his delightful miniature: the orchestration of the Sicilienne. The organ works which set the standard for virtuosity at conservatories around the world are given new insightful and thorough evaluation by Ebrecht, whose long association with late 19th and early 20th century France and French music affords illuminating connections between Duruflé and his predecessors and successors with sweeping insight and minute detail.

Author: Jorge Variego
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190057238
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
"Composing with constraints proposes an innovative approach to the instruction of the craft of music composition based on tailored exercises to help students develop their creativity. The fundamental premise of Composing with constraints is based on my previous book on algorithmic composition, which-in a few words-states that all compositional approaches are algorithmic and can be reduced to a formal process that involves a series of logical steps. When composition gets condensed to a series of logical steps, it can then be taught and learned more efficiently. With this approach in mind, Composing with constraints proposes a variety of exercises in the form of algorithms to help the student composer and the instructor create tangible work plans, with high expectations and successful outcomes. The book is structured around the parameters of melody, rhythm, harmony, texture and pre-compositional approaches. All chapters start with a brief note on terminology and general recommendations for the instructor. The first five chapters offer a variety of exercises that range from analysis and style imitation, to the use of probabilities. The chapter about pre-compositional approaches offers original techniques that a student composer can implement in order to start a new work. Based on lateral thinking, this last section of the book fosters creative connections with other disciplines such as math, visual arts, and architectural acoustics. Each of the 100 exercises contained in the book proposes a unique set of guidelines and constraints intended to place the student in a specific compositional framework. Through those compositional boundaries the student is encouraged to produce creative work within a given structure. Using the methodologies in this book, students will be able to create their own outlines for their compositions, making intelligent and educated compositional choices that balance reasoning with intuition. Depending on the class in which it is adopted, Composing with constraints can be a priceless aid for the instructor. When used to complement a music theory class, the exercises can be used as compositional projects, to provide creative frameworks to the theoretical concepts studied in class and even to trigger group discussions. In a class on analysis, the book can be an invaluable tool for stylistic understanding, appropriation and imitation. Finally, when used in individual and group composition lessons, the book can provide an enormous palette of concrete assignments that the instructor can use to guide the students' compositional development and practice. The grading rubric provided in the book is an invaluable tool for both the instructor and the student. Divided in four categories (i.e. followed guidelines, orchestration, idiomatic use of the instruments and "open spaces"), the grading rules clarify in detail the grade awarded to the student, showing the aspects of the work that can be improved. Through the quantization of "open spaces", the rubric also helps the instructor ponder the students' creative use of the aspects of the exercises not constrained or left "free" in the guidelines. In sum, Composing with constraints is an excellent tool for the instruction of music composition offering clear organization, a helpful grading rubric, and a versatility that makes it applicable for a myriad of courses and levels"--

Author: Thomas Donahue
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442243457
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The harpsichord was the standard keyboard instrument for three centuries before the invention of the piano. It enjoyed a revival in the second half of the twentieth century, but because of the interruption in its history as a more regularly used instrument, many details about its construction are lacking. In The Harpsichord Stringing Handbook, Thomas Donahue integrates available historical evidence and modern physical principles—from both musicological and scientific literature—to provide practical quantitative information about the stringing of this instrument. The Harpsichord Stringing Handbook covers the composition and properties of iron and brass wire, the interrelationship of frequency to string length, safety factors involved with stringing, the scaling of string lengths, the calculation of diameters, and the determination of the transition from iron to brass in mixed-strung instruments. Supplemental topics include the elasticity and plasticity of wire, inharmonicity, tension and stress, and the interpolation of string lengths. Additional material includes data on selected historical harpsichords, absolute diameters of historical gauge numbering systems, a generated list of tensile strength values for historical wire, and sizes and tensile strengths of currently available wire. This book offers specific guidance for instrument makers, restorers, curators, technicians, musicians, kit builders, wire manufacturers, and acousticians, filling in critical details that historical treatises and surviving instruments may not clearly address.