'Allegri's Miserere' in the Sistine Chapel

'Allegri's Miserere' in the Sistine Chapel
Author: Graham O'Reilly
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2020
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1783274875

The Miserere by Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652) is one of the most popular, oft performed and recorded choral pieces of late Renaissance/early Baroque music. Yet the piece known today bears little resemblanceto Allegri's original or to the piece as it was performed before 1870.

The Two Kinds of Decay

The Two Kinds of Decay
Author: Sarah Manguso
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2009-05-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1429940980

A poet and author recounts her nine-year struggle with a rare autoimmune disease in this spare and unsparing memoir of illness and recovery. At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be. Praise for The Two Kinds of Decay A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Best Book of the Year, San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out Chicago “Moving . . . a fiercely truthful memoir.” —The Boston Globe “Hers is not a day-by-day description of this grueling time, but an impressionistic text filled with bright, poetic flashes. . . . Many sick people learn to live in the moment, but the power of Manguso’s writing makes that truism revelatory.” —The Washington Post Book World “Sarah Manguso has miraculously elevated the act of memory. She has found honesty, fear, longing and beauty in every moment of her young life, giving this book an intensity found nowhere else. You put it down panting with wonder and grief, but never with pity. A breakthrough in the memoir, and in writing.” —Andrew Sean Greer

The Rome Zoo

The Rome Zoo
Author: Pascal Janovjak
Publisher: Black Inc.
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1743821859

Rome, too, wants the sound of roaring as evening falls ... The Rome Zoo: a place born of fantasy and driven by a nation’s aspirations. It has witnessed – and reflected in its tarnished mirror – the great follies of the twentieth century. Now, in an ongoing battle that has seen it survive world wars and epidemics, the zoo must once again reinvent itself, and assert its relevance in the Eternal City. Caught up in these machinations is a cast of characters worthy of this baroque backdrop: a man desperate to find meaning in his own life, a woman tasked with halting the zoo’s decline and a rare animal, the last of its species, who bewitches the world. Drifting between past and present, The Rome Zoo weaves together these and many other stories, forming a colourful and evocative tapestry of life at this strange place. It is both a love story and a poignant juxtaposition of the human need to classify, to subdue, with the untameable nature of our dramas and anxieties. Spellbinding and disturbing, precise and dreamy, this award-winning novel, translated by Stephanie Smee, is unlike any other. Winner of the Swiss Literature Award, the Prix Michel-Dentan and the Prix du public de la RTS “Like all truly great literary allegories, The Rome Zoo is both innocent and wise, filled equally with tenderness and darkness. A gorgeous, dream-like fable of Italy's past and present.” —Ceridwen Dovey

The Mozart Myths

The Mozart Myths
Author: William Stafford
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1993-10-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780804722223

This is an ambitious attempt to separate what is actually known (and can be known) about Mozart from the many myths and legends that have grown up about his life and character, notably the circumstances of his death and his alleged immaturity, drinking, extravagance, womanizing, unreliability, and professional failure.

Maurice Duruflé, 1902-1986

Maurice Duruflé, 1902-1986
Author: Ronald Ebrecht
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2002-06-11
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1461669634

Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) is best known as composer of the hauntingly beautiful and moving Requiem of 1947, and as organist during his long tenure at the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont in Paris. He studied composition and organ with Tournemire, Vierne, Gigout, and Dukas among others, and became well known outside France through tours and conferences, often attended with his wife, the late Marie-Madeleine Chevalier. Ebrecht has brought together in this centenary tribute a fine collection of articles on Duruflé's life and work that will enthrall all those who have come under the spell of this great master of French Impressionism. About the contributors: Marie-Claire Alain the renowned French organist, recording artist, and teacher was one of Duruflés first harmony students at the Paris Conservatoire. James Frazier has studied liturgy and music at several universities, and was a Fulbright scholar in France, where he studied privately with Madame Duruflé. Maria Rubis Bauer concluded her doctoral dissertation on Duruflé at the University of Kansas. Jeffrey Reynolds is Associate Professor of Humanities and chair of the music department at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Herndon Spillman's landmark recording of the complete works of Duruflé won him a Grand Prix du Disque in 1973. He is Professor of Music at Louisiana State University. Eliane Chevalier was the sister of Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, with whom she shared a passion for music. Ned Tipton is Director of Music of the American Cathedral in Paris.

Mozart in Context

Mozart in Context
Author: Simon P. Keefe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2018-12-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1316850838

The vibrant intellectual, social and political climate of mid eighteenth-century Europe presented opportunities and challenges for artists and musicians alike. This book focuses on Mozart the man and musician as he responds to different aspects of that world. It reveals his views on music, aesthetics and other matters; on places in Austria and across Europe that shaped his life; on career contexts and environments, including patronage, activities as an impresario, publishing, theatrical culture and financial matters; on engagement with performers and performance, focusing on Mozart's experiences as a practicing musician; and on reception and legacy from his own time through to the present day. Probing diverse Mozartian contexts in a variety of ways, the contributors reflect the vitality of existing scholarship and point towards areas primed for further study. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of late eighteenth-century music and for Mozart aficionados and music lovers in general.

The Castrato

The Castrato
Author: Martha Feldman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2016-08-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520292448

The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy—involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives—whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers—from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini—were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.

Franz Liszt: The virtuoso years, 1811-1847

Franz Liszt: The virtuoso years, 1811-1847
Author: Alan Walker
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 516
Release: 1987
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780801494215

The third volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt. "You can't help but keep turning the pages, wondering how it will all turn out: and Walker's accumulated readings of Liszt's music have to be taken seriously indeed."--D. Kern Holoman, New York Review of Books "A conscientious scholar passionate about his subject. Mr. Walker makes the man and his age come to life. These three volumes will be the definitive work to which all subsequent Liszt biographies will aspire."--Harold C. Schonberg, Wall Street Journal "What distinguishes Walker from Liszt's dozens of earlier biographers is that he is equally strong on the music and the life. A formidable musicologist with a lively polemical style, he discusses the composer's works with greater understanding and clarity than any previous biographer. And whereas many have recycled the same erroneous, often damaging information, Walker has relied on his own prodigious, globe-trotting research, a project spanning twenty-five years. The result is a textured portrait of Liszt and his times without rival."--Elliot Ravetz, Time "The prose is so lively that the reader is often swept along by the narrative.... This three-part work... is now the definitive work on Liszt in English and belongs in all music collections."--Library Journal

Bonfire Songs

Bonfire Songs
Author: Patrick Paul Macey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780198166696

Fra Girolamo Savonarola had a profound effect on the political and moral life of Florence in the 1490s, and his legacy lived on during the century after his execution in 1498, not just in Florence but in Ferrara and beyond the Alps, as far as Paris, Munich, and London. This study reconstructscontexts and musical settings for the popular tradition of sacred laude that were sung during the Savonarolan carnivals in 1496, 1497, and 1498. It further examines a broad network of patronage for the courtly tradition of Latin motets that provided elaborate musical settings for Savonarola'smeditations on Psalms 30 and 50. The friar's success in Florence can be partially attributed to his adoption of sacred laude (and the tunes of bawdy carnival songs) that had been promoted by Lorenzo de' Medici. The texts of the old carnival songs were suppressed, but the music was adapted to laudewith texts that proclaim the friar's prophecy of castigation and renewal. The citizens could thus internalize Savonarola's message by singing it. Savonarola himself wrote several lauda texts, and their musical settings are reconstructed here, as well as those for an underground tradition of laudewritten to venerate him after his execution. Part II turns to the courtly tradition and the Latin motet. Several Catholic patrons, scattered from Ferrara to France to England, were drawn to the friar's prison meditation on Psalms 30 and 50, and they commissioned elaborate musical settings of the opening words of both. A dozen motets on thefriar's psalm meditations can be traced from composes such as Willaert, Rore, Le Jeune, Lassus, and Byrd. Savonarola's highly personal texts inspired some of the most moving musical setings of the sixteenth century, in spite of the Church's unfavourable attitude toward the friar's disruptiveexample, which had set a precedent for Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther.