Choral Masterpieces

Choral Masterpieces
Author: Nicholas Tarling
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2014-05-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1442234539

In Choral Masterpieces: Major and Minor, historian Nicholas Tarling surveys the landscape of choral works, some standard masterpieces that are commonly performed by choruses around the world, others deserving a second, closer look. As noted in the foreword by Uwe Grodd , music director of the Auckland Choral Society, this work “is a collection of essays about a number of outstanding works, including Beethoven’s Miss Solemnis and Britten’s War Requiem, but he also invites attention to lesser masterpieces. If the choral movement, which includes both singers and listeners, is to survive, new works must be created and repertory expanded. The book is an easy and captivating read even if you are not a chorister.” Choral Masterpieces: Major and Minor features short essays on over 28 works, from major masterpieces such as Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion to off-the-beaten path choral works such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha and Frederick Delius’ A Mass of Life. Throughout, Tarling offers assessments that sparkle with unique insights and at the same time ground listener’s in the historical contexts of the work’s production and performance. Each work is transformed in Tarling’s able hands from musical work into a window into the mind and milieu of the composer. Choral Masterpieces: Major and Minor mixes choral mainstays with works that demand revisiting. Choral singers and their audiences, as well as choral societies and their directions and promoters, will find ample food for thoughts in these meditations on the choral tradition.

Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz

Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz
Author: Francesca Brittan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2017-09-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107136326

An exploration of fantastic soundworlds in nineteenth-century France, providing a fresh aesthetic and compositional context for Berlioz and others.

Berlioz

Berlioz
Author: Hugh Macdonald
Publisher: London : J.M. Dent
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1982
Genre: Music
ISBN:

Romanticism

Romanticism
Author: Hugh Honour
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2018-05-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429977182

"This stylish and erudite thematic study of the influence Romanticism exerts upon Western culture and particularly the visual arts is the companion volume to Honour's equally valuable Neo-classicism.... The text is supported by a useful selection of illustrations Excellent footnotes and a good index. Finely produced, Romanticism will stimulate the graduate and inform the undergraduate." —Choice "An interpretation that rings true for our own time.... His approach to his vast subject is essentially cool, analytic and balanced This is a book that covers an immense amount of material with a freshness of touch." —John Russell, The New York Times "A book of great interest and quality which gives form to a subject that is often treated very vaguely." —Kenneth Clark

Teaching Music

Teaching Music
Author: Gary Spruce
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2023-05-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000946452

Music education has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. Whereas lessons were once characterised by their passivity, children now learn about music through actively engaging in it by performing, composing, listening and appraising. This reader places music education in context and then goes on to examine a range of issues linked to the teaching and learning of music. The latter half of the book concentrates on music education within the classroom, highlighting the kinds of points which all teachers of music will have to consider.

Heroic Imagination

Heroic Imagination
Author: Frederic Ewen
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 766
Release: 2004-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814722251

Heroic Imagination Describes the historical period and the wide manifistation of creativity that took place between 1815 and 1848 in Europe, from Napoleon's downfall in the battle of Waterloo in 1815 to the "Restoration" that sought to bring back the old order preceding the French Revolution. While revolutions and historicle events were shaping the world, the "collective consciousness" of the public began to integrate with the creative consciousness of the individual. The creative energies of artists, philosophers, poets, political and social thinkers emerged and produced some of the most revered artistic geniuses in history, such as Beethoven, Byron, Pushkin, Balzac, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Goya, and Goethe. Frederic Ewen vividly depicts the "new" world of the early nineteenth century, and the assemblage of genius that produced a body of art that has become the unforgettable property of all ages.

Teaching Music in Secondary Schools

Teaching Music in Secondary Schools
Author: Gary Spruce
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2002
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780415262347

This series brings together a range of articles, extracts from books and reports that inform an understanding of secondary schools in today's educational climate.

Virgil Thomson: The State of Music & Other Writings (LOA #277)

Virgil Thomson: The State of Music & Other Writings (LOA #277)
Author: Virgil Thomson
Publisher: Library of America
Total Pages: 1356
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1598534688

A Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic presents an unprecedented collection of the writings of the great composer-critic and father of American classical music, Virgil Thomson Following on the critically acclaimed edition of Virgil Thomson’s collected newspaper music criticism, The Library of America and Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomson’s other literary and critical works, a body of writing that constitutes America’s musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson’s name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald Tribune. This no-holds-barred polemic—here presented in its revised edition of 1962—discusses the commissions, jobs, and other opportunities available to the American composer, a worker in a world of performance and broadcast institutions that, today as much as in Thomson’s time, are dominated by tin-eared, non-musical patrons of the arts who are shocked by the new and suspicious of native talent. Thomson’s autobiography, Virgil Thomson (1966), is more than just the story of the struggle of one such American composer, it is an intellectual, aesthetic, and personal chronicle of the twentieth century, from World War I–era Kansas City to Harvard in the age of straw boaters, from Paris in the Twenties and Thirties to Manhattan in the Forties and after. A classic American memoir, it is marked by a buoyant wit, a true gift for verbal portrait-making, and a cast of characters including Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Paul Bowles, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. American Music Since 1910 (1971) is a series of incisive essays on the lives and works of Ives, Ruggles, Varèse, Copland, Cage, and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words (1989), Thomson’s final book, is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set English—especially American English—to music, in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a judicious selection of Thomson’s magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984—thirty-seven pieces, most of them previously uncollected, including many long-form review-essays written for The New York Review of Books. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.