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The Indispensable Composers: A Personal Guide
By Anthony Tommasini. 2018
An exploration into the question of greatness from the Chief Classical Music Critic of the New York TimesWhen he began…
to listen to the great works of classical music as a child, Anthony Tommasini had many questions. Why did a particular piece move him? How did the music work? Over time, he realized that his passion for this music was not enough. He needed to understand it. Take Bach, for starters. Who was he? How does one account for his music and its unshakeable hold on us today? As a critic, Tommasini has devoted particular attention to living composers and overlooked repertory. But, like all classical music lovers, the canon has remained central for him. In 2011, in his role as the Chief Classical Music Critic for the New York Times, he wrote a popular series in which he somewhat cheekily set out to determine the all-time top ten composers. Inviting input from readers, Tommasini wrestled with questions of greatness. Readers joined the exercise in droves. Some railed against classical music’s obsession with greatness but then raged when Mahler was left off the final list. This intellectual game reminded them why they loved music in the first place. Now in THE INDISPENSABLE COMPOSERS, Tommasini offers his own personal guide to the canon--and what greatness really means in classical music. What does it mean to be canonical now? Who gets to say? And do we have enough perspective on the 20th century to even begin assessing it? To make his case, Tommasini draws on elements of biography, the anxiety of influence, the composer's relationships with colleagues, and shifting attitudes toward a composer's work over time. Because he has spent his life contemplating these titans, Tommasini shares impressions from performances he has heard or given or moments when his own biography proves revealing. As he argues for his particular pantheon of indispensable composers, Anthony Tommasini provides a masterclass in what to listen for and how to understand what music does to us.Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow
By Lucy Worsley. 2018
The story of the queen who defied convention and defined an era A passionate princess, an astute and clever queen,…
and a cunning widow, Victoria played many roles throughout her life. In Queen Victoria: Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life, Lucy Worsley introduces her as a woman leading a truly extraordinary life in a unique time period. Queen Victoria simultaneously managed to define a socially conservative vision of Victorian womanhood, while also defying its conventions. Beneath her exterior image of traditional daughter, wife, and widow, she was a strong-willed and masterful politician. Drawing from the vast collection of Victoria’s correspondence and the rich documentation of her life, Worsley recreates twenty-four of the most important days in Victoria's life. Each day gives a glimpse into the identity of this powerful, difficult queen and the contradictions that defined her. Queen Victoria is an intimate introduction to one of Britain’s most iconic rulers as a wife and widow, mother and matriarch, and above all, a woman of her time.This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
By Daniel J. Levitin. 2006
What can music teach us about the brain? What can the brain teach us about music? And what can both…
teach us about ourselves? In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin (The World in Six Songs and The Organized Mind) explores the connection between music - its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it - and the human brain. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, Levitin reveals:How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the worldWhy we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. DreThat practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertiseHow those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our headTaking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. A Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, This Is Your Brain on Music will attract readers of Oliver Sacks and David Byrne, as it is an unprecedented, eye-opening investigation into an obsession at the heart of human nature.This research monograph explores the rapidly expanding field of networked music making and the ways in which musicians of different…
cultures improvise together online. It draws on extensive research to uncover the creative and cognitive approaches that geographically dispersed musicians develop to interact in displaced tele-improvisatory collaboration. It presents a multimodal analysis of three tele-improvisatory performances that examine how cross-cultural musician’s express and perceive intentionality in these interactions, as well as their experiences of distributed agency and tele-presence.Tele-Improvisation: Intercultural Interaction in the Online Global Music Jam Session will provide essential reading for musician’s, postgraduate students, researchers and educators, working in the areas of telematic performance, musicology, music cognition, intercultural communication, distance collaboration and learning, digital humanities, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and HCI.La vida secreta del rock argentino
By Marcelo Fernandez Bitar. 2019
Este libro rescata el trabajo de los héroes anónimos que ayudaron a consolidar la carrera de figuras como Spinetta, Charly…
García y Soda Stereo. Un aspecto poco conocido en la historia del rock nacional es el vertiginoso avance técnico que ocurrió durante la década del 80 a la par del alcance masivo de las canciones más emblemáticas, la exportación de artistas hacia otros rincones de Latinoamérica y la llegada al país de figuras internacionales de primera línea. Detrás de escena hubo un puñado de actores que acompañaron el crecimiento del rock local con pasión, entusiasmo desbordante, amor por su profesión y ganas de trascender las fronteras. Marcelo Fernández Bitar rescata el trabajo de estos héroes anónimos que rodean los éxitos de la época de oro de figuras como Spinetta, Charly García y Soda Stereo. Figuras que, contra viento y marea, sorteando las crisis económicas, lograron que la escena musical creciera y sentara las bases para el fenómeno actual del rock en la Argentina.Hearing Voices takes a fresh look at sound in the poetry and prose of colonial Latin American poet and nun…
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51–95). A voracious autodidact, Sor Juana engaged with early modern music culture in a way that resonates deeply in her writing. Despite the privileging of harmony within Sor Juana’s work, however, links between the poet’s musical inheritance and subjects such as acoustics, cognition, writing, and visual art have remained unexplored. These lacunae have marginalized nonmusical aurality and contributed to the persistence of both ocularcentrism and a corresponding visual dominance in scholarship on Sor Juana—and indeed in early modern cultural production in general. As in many areas of her work, Sor Juana’s engagement with acoustical themes restructures gendered discourses and transposes them to a feminine key. Hearing Voices focuses on these aural conceits in highlighting the importance of sound and—in most cases—its relationship with gender in Sor Juana’s work and early modern culture. Sarah Finley explores attitudes toward women’s voices and music making; intersections of music, rhetoric, and painting; aurality in Baroque visual art; sound and ritual; and the connections between optics and acoustics. Finley demonstrates how Sor Juana’s striking aurality challenges ocularcentric interpretations and problematizes paradigms that pin vision to logos, writing, and other empirical models that traditionally favor men’s voices. Sound becomes a vehicle for women’s agency and responds to anxiety about the female voice, particularly in early modern convent culture.PEOPLE Celebrating Beatlemania
By The Editors of PEOPLE. 2018
Gateways to Understanding Music
By Dave Wilson, Timothy Rice. 2019
Gateways to Understanding Music explores music in all the categories that constitute contemporary musical experience: European classical music, popular music,…
jazz, and world music. Covering the oldest forms of human music making to the newest, the chronological narrative considers music from a global rather than a Eurocentric perspective. Each of sixty modular "gateways" covers a particular genre, style, or period of music. Every gateway opens with a guided listening example that unlocks a world of music through careful study of its structural elements. Based on their listening experience, students are asked to consider how the piece came to be composed or performed, how the piece or performance responded to the social and cultural issues at the time and place of its creation, and what that music means today. Students learn to listen to, explain, understand, and ultimately value all the music they may encounter in their world. FEATURES Global scope—Presents all music as worthy of study, including classical, world, popular, and jazz. Historical narrative—Begins with small-scale forager societies up to the present, with a shifting focus from global to European to American influences. Modular framework—60 gateways in 14 chapters allow flexibility to organize chronologically or by the seven recurring themes: aesthetics, emotion, social life, links to culture, politics, economics, and technology. Listening-guided learning—Leads to understanding the emotion, meaning, significance, and history of music. Introduction of musical concepts—Defined as needed and compiled into a Glossary for reference. Consistent structure—With the same step-by-step format, students learn through repeated practice how to listen and how to think about music. In addition to streamed audio examples, the companion website hosts essential instructors’ resources.Singing Ideas: Performance, Politics and Oral Poetry (Dance and Performance Studies #12)
By Tríona Ní Shíocháin. 2018
Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary;…
1774–1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, Máire Bhuí composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music
By Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley. 2012
Composer and peformer Alvin Lucier brings clarity to the world of experimental music as he takes the reader through more…
than a hundred groundbreaking musical works, including those of Robert Ashley, John Cage, Charles Ives, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Lucier explains in detail how each piece is made, unlocking secrets of the composers' style and technique. The book as a whole charts the progress of American experimental music from the 1950s to the present, covering such topics as indeterminacy, electronics, and minimalism, as well as radical innovations in music for the piano, string quartet, and opera. Clear, approachable and lively, Music 109 is Lucier's indispensable guide to late 20th-century composition. No previous musical knowledge is required, and all readers are welcome.Melody and Harmony
By Diana Thistle Tremblay, Annette Cate. 2018
Did you know that music is all about math? Every good composer knows their scales, along with the repetition, frequencies,…
and vibration that go into making harmonies and melodies that are pleasing to hear.PEOPLE Royal Women
By The Editors of PEOPLE. 1997
Computational Phonogram Archiving (Current Research in Systematic Musicology #5)
By Rolf Bader. 2019
The future of music archiving and search engines lies in deep learning and big data. Music information retrieval algorithms automatically…
analyze musical features like timbre, melody, rhythm or musical form, and artificial intelligence then sorts and relates these features. At the first International Symposium on Computational Ethnomusicological Archiving held on November 9 to 11, 2017 at the Institute of Systematic Musicology in Hamburg, Germany, a new Computational Phonogram Archiving standard was discussed as an interdisciplinary approach. Ethnomusicologists, music and computer scientists, systematic musicologists as well as music archivists, composers and musicians presented tools, methods and platforms and shared fieldwork and archiving experiences in the fields of musical acoustics, informatics, music theory as well as on music storage, reproduction and metadata. The Computational Phonogram Archiving standard is also in high demand in the music market as a search engine for music consumers. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the field written by leading researchers around the globe.The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music
By Susan McClary. 2019
Recognized as one of the most innovative and influential directors of our time, Peter Sellars has produced acclaimed—and often controversial—versions…
of many beloved operas and oratorios. He has also collaborated with several composers, including John C. Adams and Kaija Saariaho, to create challenging new operas. The Passions of Peter Sellars follows the development of his style, beginning with his interpretations of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas, proceeding to works for which he assembled the libretti and even the music, and concluding with his celebrated stagings of Bach’s passions with the Berlin Philharmonic. Many directors leave the musical aspects of opera entirely to the singers and conductor. Sellars, however, immerses himself in the score, and has created a distinctive visual vocabulary to embody musical gesture on stage, drawing on the energies of the music as he shapes characters, ensemble interaction, and large-scale dramatic trajectories. As a leading scholar of gender and music, and the history of opera, Susan McClary is ideally positioned to illuminate Sellars’s goal to address both the social tensions embodied in these operas as well as the spiritual dimensions of operatic performance. McClary considers Sellars’s productions of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte; Handel’s Theodora; Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise; John C. Adams’s Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, and Doctor Atomic; Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin, La Passion de Simone, and Only the Sound Remains; Purcell’s The Indian Queen; and Bach’s passions of Saint Matthew and Saint John. Approaching Sellars’s theatrical strategies from a musicological perspective, McClary blends insights from theater, film, and literary scholarship to explore the work of one of the most brilliant living interpreters of opera.Rock `n´ Roll Radio Milwaukee: Stories from the Fifth Beatle
By Bob Barry. 2018
Bob Barry ruled Milwaukee's airwaves in the '60s and '70s. The only time the Beatles performed here, Barry introduced them…
to the audience, and he was the only local personality who spent time in private with the Fab Four. If a band or musician came to town, he met them with a microphone. Chuck Berry, the Animals, Wings, the Rolling Stones--the list goes on. His popular "Bob Barry Calls the World" segment entertained thousands with cold calls to famous personalities, including Bob Hope, Sophia Loren, Elton John and Cher. Through it all, Barry maintained a calm and fun-loving demeanor, even when mocked by the WOKY Chicken or nearly eaten by wolves on the air. Packed with never-before-seen photos, this revealing memoir recalls the iconic DJ's many celebrity encounters, his career highlights and setbacks and the hijinks that made Milwaukee radio rock.None But the Lonely Heart and Other Songs for High Voice (Dover Song Collections)
By Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky.
One of the most expressive and versatile of the great nineteenth-century Romantic composers, Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky brought a sense of…
intimacy and emotional power to all of his music — whether for orchestra, opera, ballet, or art song. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians remarks on the characteristic charm of Tchaikovsky's songs, noting their "penetrating sweetness and sadness" as well as their "vocal excellence."In addition to the celebrated title work, this collection presents a rich selection of 40 enchanting melodies, including Don Juan's Serenade, Mignon's Song, Night of Stars, Serenade, Song of the Gipsy Girl, and other exquisite pieces for voice and piano. Featured texts by Goethe, Heine, Tolstoy, and other great poets appear in English and either German or French.One of the most beloved pieces in the modern violin repertoire, the Concerto in B Minor is among Edward Elgar's…
longest orchestral compositions and one of the last of his works to achieve and retain popular success. This practice and performance edition contains a piano reduction and a separate violin part.Famed violinist Fritz Kreisler pronounced Elgar the greatest living composer, placing him "on an equal footing with my idols, Beethoven and Brahms. He is of the same aristocratic family. His invention, his orchestration, his harmony, his grandeur—it is wonderful. I wish Elgar would write something for the violin." A commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society helped fulfill Kreisler's wish, and the violinist performed the Concerto in B Minor at its 1910 debut, with Elgar conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.From Cradle to Stage: Stories from the Mothers Who Rocked and Raised Rock Stars
By Virginia Hanlon Grohl. 2017
While the Grohl family had always been musical-the family sang together on long car trips, harmonizing to Motown and David…
Bowie-Virginia never expected her son to become a musician, let alone a rock star. But when she saw him perform in front of thousands of screaming fans for the first time, she knew that rock stardom was meant to be for her son. And as Virginia watched her son's star rise, she often wondered about the other mothers who raised sons and daughters who became rock stars. Were they as surprised as she was about their children's fame? Did they worry about their children's livelihood and wellbeing in an industry fraught with drugs and other dangers? Did they encourage their children's passions despite the odds against success, or attempt to dissuade them from their grandiose dreams? Do they remind their kids to pack a warm coat when they go on tour? Virginia decided to seek out other rock star mothers to ask these questions, and so began a two-year odyssey in which she interviewed such women as Verna Griffin, Dr. Dre's mother; Marianne Stipe, Michael Stipe of REM's mother; Janis Winehouse, Amy Winehouse's mother; Patsy Noah, Adam Levine's mother; Donna Haim, mother of the Haim sisters; Hester Diamond, Mike D of The Beastie Boys' mother. With exclusive family photographs and a foreword by Dave Grohl, From Cradle to Stage will appeal to mothers and rock fans everywhere.Roadies: The Secret History of Australian Rock'n'Roll
By Stuart Coupe. 2018
This is your backstage pass to the hidden side of the music industry - the tantrums, the fights, the tensions,…
the indulgence, the sex, the alcohol, the drugs. The roadies see it all, and now they are sharing their secrets. Roadies are the unsung heroes of the Australian music industry. They unload the PAs and equipment, they set it all up, they make sure everything is running smoothly before, during and after the gigs. Then they pack everything up in the middle of the night, put it in the back of the truck and hit the road to another town - to do it all over again. They know everything about the pre- and post-show excesses. They bear witness to overdoses, the groupies, the obsessive fans. They are part of - and often organise - all the craziness that goes on behind the scenes of the concerts and pub gigs you go to. From The Rolling Stones to AC/DC, Bob Marley to Courtney Love, Sherbet to The Ted Mulry Gang, INXS to Blondie - these guys have seen it all. And now they're stepping onto the stage and talking.The Roadies' Creed: If it's wet, drink it. If it's dry, smoke it. If it moves, **** it. If it doesn't move, throw it in the back of the truck.'Fabulous . . . a bold portrait' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD on Stuart Coupe's GUDINSKIChopin's Letters (Dover Books on Music)
By E. L. Voynich, Frederic Chopin. 1988
This superbly edited selection of nearly 300 of Chopin's letters, the first to be published in English, vividly reveals the…
composer as man and artist, and evokes the remarkable age — Europe of the 1830s and 1840s — he shared with an equally remarkable cast of characters, from Jenny Lind to Isabella II of Spain, from Queen Victoria to George Sand, from Heinrich Heine to Victor Hugo. Originally collected by the Polish musicologist Henryk Opienski, the letters have been translated and annotated by Chopin scholar E. L. Voynich. Students and admirers of Chopin will find in their pages vast resources to deepen their love and appreciation for — and wonderment at — the unique individuality and achievement of this great musical personality.