Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber
Author: Barbara B. Heyman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 665
Release: 2019-12-27
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190863757

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) is one of the most admired and honored American composers of the twentieth century. An unabashed Romantic, largely independent of worldwide trends and the avant-garde, he infused his works with poetic lyricism and gave tonal language and forms new vitality. His rich legacy includes every genre, including the famous Adagio for Strings, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, three concertos, a plethora of songs, and two operas, the Pulitzer prize-winning Vanessa, and Antony and Cleopatra, the commissioned work that opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. Generously documented by letter, sketches, autograph manuscripts, and interviews with friends, colleagues, and performers with whom he worked, this ASCAP-Award winning book is still unquestionably the most authoritative biography on Barber, covering his entire career and interweaving the events of his life with his compositional process. This second edition benefits from many new discoveries, including a Violin Sonata recovered from an artist's estate, a diary Barber kept his seventeenth year, a trove of letters and manuscripts that were recovered from a suitcase found in a dumpster, documentation that dispels earlier myths about the composition of Barber's Violin Concerto, and research of scholars that was stimulated by Heyman's work. Barber's intimate relations are discussed when they bear on his creativity. A testament to the lasting significance of Romanticism, Samuel Barber stands as a model biography of an important musical figure.

Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber
Author: Barbara Heyman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 597
Release: 2011-02-09
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199837953

Samuel Barber: A Thematic Catalogue of the Complete Works is the first publication to list the entire musical output of Samuel Barber, one of the most beloved and frequently performed American composers. In this exhaustive study, renowned Barber biographer Barbara Heyman chronologically lists and details hundreds of core repertory and the most recently published works, as well as numerous works previously unknown and unpublished. Each entry includes information about first performances, commissions, and the circumstances and inspiration of the composition; the texts of songs; a musical extract containing the opening measures of each work, movement, or major aria; duration, revisions, editions, arrangements, and a select discography of historical and contemporary performances. The descriptions of manuscript sources provide details about the hundreds of holograph manuscripts, sketches, drafts, and significant publisher's proofs with Barber's corrections. Entries are enhanced by Heyman's extensive commentary, which draws from Barber's correspondence, interviews, and diaries. Useful appendices to the catalogue comprise a register of works by genre; an alphabetical directory of works; an index of first lines of vocal works; a listing by nationality of authors and translators of texts set by Barber; and a comprehensive discography. This thematic catalogue is an invaluable guide for musicians, scholars, and students, providing an essential foundation for any serious study of Barber and his music.

Samuel Barber

Samuel Barber
Author: Wayne Wentzel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1135271828

An annotated reference guide to Barber's life, works and achievements, it will prove valuable for anyone seeking information on him.

Music and the New Global Culture

Music and the New Global Culture
Author: Harry Liebersohn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2019-09-27
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022664927X

Music listeners today can effortlessly flip from K-pop to Ravi Shankar to Amadou & Mariam with a few quick clicks of a mouse. While contemporary globalized musical culture has become ubiquitous and unremarkable, its fascinating origins long predate the internet era. In Music and the New Global Culture, Harry Liebersohn traces the origins of global music to a handful of critical transformations that took place between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Britain, the arts and crafts movement inspired a fascination with non-Western music; Germany fostered a scholarly approach to global musical comparison, creating the field we now call ethnomusicology; and the United States provided the technological foundation for the dissemination of a diverse spectrum of musical cultures by launching the phonograph industry. This is not just a story of Western innovation, however: Liebersohn shows musical responses to globalization in diverse areas that include the major metropolises of India and China and remote settlements in South America and the Arctic. By tracing this long history of world music, Liebersohn shows how global movement has forever changed how we hear music—and indeed, how we feel about the world around us.

Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers

Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 977
Release: 2018-10-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190904569

Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers is the first edition of all known and available letters between Arnold Schoenberg and over seventy American composers written between 1915 and 1951, in English and English translation and with commentary. In six chronologically organized chapters, the correspondence first casts new light on Schoenberg's contacts with American composers before 1933, including correspondence with students and champions of his music (Israel Amter, James Francis Cooke, Henry Cowell, Edgar Varèse, and Adolph Weiss among others). The letters after 1933 show how Schoenberg gradually built a network of composer colleagues and friends, among them Mark Brunswick, Oscar Levant, Roger Sessions, Nicolas Slonimsky, Gerald Strang, with whom he discussed compositional ideas, specific musical works and writings, performances and the publication of his compositions. These letters also provide insight into his ideas about teaching in private settings, at the Malkin Conservatory and the University of California. The correspondence of his last years illuminates how the reception of Schoenberg's music in the United States was flourishing and how he attracted a growing number of disciples exploring twelve-tone composition. The book also qualifies the concept of and Schoenberg's association with the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg's Correspondence with American Composers not only illuminates a varied and vivid epistolary style, but clearly demonstrates Schoenberg's far-reaching connections in the American music world.

A Schoenberg Reader

A Schoenberg Reader
Author: Joseph Auner
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 030012712X

Arnold Schoenberg’s close involvement with many of the principal developments of twentieth-century music, most importantly the break with tonality and the creation of twelve-tone composition, generated controversy from the time of his earliest works to the present day. This authoritative new collection of Schoenberg’s essays, letters, literary writings, musical sketches, paintings, and drawings offers fresh insights into the composer’s life, work, and thought. The documents, many previously unpublished or untranslated, reveal the relationships between various aspects of Schoenberg’s activities in composition, music theory, criticism, painting, performance, and teaching. They also show the significance of events in his personal and family life, his evolving Jewish identity, his political concerns, and his close interactions with such figures as Gustav and Alma Mahler, Alban Berg, Wassily Kandinsky, and Thomas Mann. Extensive commentary by Joseph Auner places the documents and materials in context and traces important themes throughout Schoenberg’s career from turn-of-century Vienna to Weimar Berlin to nineteen-fifties Los Angeles.

French Musical Thought, 1600-1800

French Musical Thought, 1600-1800
Author: Georgia Cowart
Publisher: University Rochester Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1989
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780835718820

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France were witness to dramatic changes in all aspects of social and cultural life. During this era, a new and modern spirit of critical inquiry arose, a change in ethos that had a major effect on all the arts. French Musical Thought, 1600-1800 is a diverse collection of essays offering new perspectives and insight on musical opinion during one of the most fascinating periods in French history. The essays in this volume, the authors of which include musicologists, historians and literary scholars, illuminate clearly the relationship of critical thought in music to contemporary developments in philosophy, art, literature and politics. In the final analysis, scholars contend that music aesthetics, criticism and theory can be understood only against the backdrop of a dynamic cultural milieu.Contributors: Claude V. Palisca, Jane R. Stevens, Louis E. Auld, Gloria Flaherty, Robert M. Isherwood, Albert Cohen, Barbara Russano Hanning, David Allen Duncan, Charles Dill, Georgia Cowart.