Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination

Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination
Author: Matthew Riley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 15
Release: 2007-02-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0521863619

A study of nostalgia in the music of the popular twentieth-century composer Edward Elgar.

The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism

The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism
Author: J. P. E. Harper-Scott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2012-08-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1139560247

Modernism is both a contested aesthetic category and a powerful political statement. Modernist music was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis and forcibly replaced by socialist realism under the Soviets. Sympathetic philosophers and critics have interpreted it as a vital intellectual defence against totalitarianism, yet some American critics consider it elitist, undemocratic and even unnatural. Drawing extensively on the philosophy of Heidegger and Badiou, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism proposes a new dialectical theory of faithful, reactive and obscure subjective responses to musical modernism, which embraces all the music of Western modernity. This systematic definition of musical modernism introduces readers to theory by Badiou, Žižek and Agamben. Basing his analyses on the music of William Walton, Harper-Scott explores connections between the revolutionary politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and responses to the event of modernism in order to challenge accepted narratives of music history in the twentieth century.

The Melody of Time

The Melody of Time
Author: Benedict Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190206055

Music has been seen since the Romantic era as the quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. The Melody of Time explores the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of time, spanning the dynamic century between Beethoven and Elgar.

Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music

Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music
Author: John Michael Cooper
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 847
Release: 2024-02-12
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1538157527

Library Journal praises the book as "an excellent one-volume ready reference resource for students, researchers, and others interested in music history." Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music, Second Edition covers the persons, ideas, practices, and works that made up the worlds of Western music during the long 19th century (ca. 1780–1918). It’s the first book to recognize that Romantic music was very nearly a global phenomenon. It includes more women, more Black musicians and other musicians of color, and more exponents of musical Romanticism from Central and South America as well as Central and Eastern Europe than any other single-volume study of Romantic music—thus challenging the conventional hegemony of musical Romanticisms by men and by Western European nations. This book includes entries on topics including anti-Semitism, sexism, and racism that were pervasive and defining to the worlds of musical Romanticism but are rarely addressed in general studies of that subject. It includes Romantic musicians who were not primarily composers, as well as topics such as the Haitian Revolution, spirituals, and ragtime that were more important for music in the long 19th century than is generally acknowledged. The result is an expansive, inclusive, diverse, and more richly textured portrayal of Romantic music than is elsewhere available. Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, an extensive bibliography, and a dictionary section with more than 600 cross-referenced entries on traditions, famous pieces, persons, places, technical terms, and institutions of Romantic music. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Romantic music.

British Music and Literary Context

British Music and Literary Context
Author: Michael Allis
Publisher: Boydell Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2012
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1843837307

Despite several recent monographs, editions and recordings devoted to the reassessment of British music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some negative perceptions still remain--particularly a sense that British composers in this period somehow lacked literary credentials. British Music and Literary Context counters this perception by showing that these composers displayed a real confidence and assurance in refiguring literary texts in their music. The book explores how a literary context might offer modern audiences and listeners a 'way in' to appreciate specific works that have traditionally been viewed as problematic. Each chapter of this interdisciplinary study juxtaposes a British composer with a particular literary counterpart or genre. Issues highlighted in the book include the vexed relationship between words and music, the refiguring of literary narratives as musical structures, and the ways in which musical settings or representations of literary texts might be seen as critical 'readings' of those texts. Anyone interested in nineteenth-century British music, literature and Victorian studies will enjoy this thought-provoking and perceptive book.

Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War

Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War
Author: Michael Baumgartner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2019-09-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1315298430

In the wake of World War II, the arts and culture of Europe became a site where the devastating events of the 20th century were remembered and understood. Exploring one of the most integral elements of the cinematic experience—music—the essays in this volume consider the numerous ways in which post-war European cinema dealt with memory, trauma and nostalgia, showing how the music of these films shaped the representation of the past. The contributors consider films from the United Kingdom, Poland, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands, providing a diverse and well-rounded understanding of film music in the context of historical memory. Memory is often underrepresented within scholarly musical studies, with most of these applications found in the disciplines of ethnomusicology, popular music studies, music cognition, and psychology and music therapy. Likewise, trauma has mainly been studied in relation to music in only a few historical contexts, while nostalgia has attracted even less academic attention. In three parts, this volume addresses each area of study as it relates to the music of European cinema from 1945 to 1989, applying an interdisciplinary approach to investigate how films use music to negotiate the precarious relationships we maintain with the past. Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War offers compelling arguments as to what makes music such a powerful medium for memory, trauma and nostalgia.

Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Author: Bennett Zon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317092376

Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley is the first book to focus upon aspects of performance in the broader context of nineteenth-century British musical culture. In four Parts, 'Musical Cultures', 'Societies', 'National Music' and 'Methods', this volume assesses the role music performance plays in articulating significant trends and currents of the cultural life of the period and includes articles on performance and individual instruments; orchestral and choral ensembles; church and synagogue music; music societies; cantatas; vocal albums; the middle-class salon, conducting; church music; and piano pedagogy. An introduction explores Temperley's vast contribution to musicology, highlighting his seminal importance in creating the field of nineteenth-century British music studies, and a bibliography provides an up-to-date list of his publications, including books and monographs, book chapters, journal articles, editions, reviews, critical editions, arrangements and compositions. Fittingly devoted to a significant element in Temperley's research, this book provides scholars of all nineteenth-century musical topics the opportunity to explore the richness of Britain's musical history.

Delius and the Sound of Place

Delius and the Sound of Place
Author: Daniel M. Grimley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 607
Release: 2018-12-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108560318

Few composers have responded as powerfully to place as Frederick Delius (1862–1934). Born in Yorkshire, Delius resided in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia before settling in France, where he spent the majority of his professional career. This book examines the role of place in selected works, including 'On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring', Appalachia, and The Song of the High Hills, reading place as a creative and historically mediated category in his music. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary art, and literature, and more recent writing in cultural geography and the philosophy of place, this is a new interpretation of Delius' work, and he emerges as one of the most original and compelling voices in early twentieth-century music. As the popularity of his music grows, this book challenges the idea of Delius as a large-scale rhapsodic composer, and reveals a richer and more productive relationship between place and music.

The Art of Appreciation

The Art of Appreciation
Author: Kate Guthrie
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520351673

The art of appreciation -- "Audiences of the future" : the Robert Mayer Concerts for Children (1924-1939) -- Victorians on radio : Music and the Ordinary Listener (1926-1939) -- Music education on film : Instruments of the Orchestra (1946) -- Outside the ivory tower : extra-mural music at the University of Birmingham (1948-1964) -- The Avant-garde goes to school : O Magnum Mysterium (1960) -- Epilogue : the middlebrow in an age of cultural pluralism.

Imagining Ithaca

Imagining Ithaca
Author: Kathleen Riley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2021-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192594427

'Though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one', said Charles Dickens, 'stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.' The ancient Greek word nostos, meaning homecoming or return, has a commensurate power and mystique. Irish philosopher-poet John Moriarty described it as 'a teeming word... a haunted word... a word to conjure with'. The most celebrated and culturally enduring nostos is that of Homer's Odysseus who spent ten years returning home after the fall of Troy. His journey back involved many obstacles, temptations, and fantastical adventures and even a katabasis, a rare descent by the living into the realm of the dead. All the while he was sustained and propelled by his memories of Ithaca ('His native home deep imag'd in his soul', as Pope's translation has it). From Virgil's Aeneid to James Joyce's Ulysses, from MGM's The Wizard of Oz to the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and from Derek Walcott's Omeros to Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and nostalgia has been continually summoned and reimagined by writers and filmmakers. At the same time, 'Ithaca' has proved to be an evocative and versatile abstraction. It is as much about possibility as it is about the past; it is a vision of Arcadia or a haunting, an object of longing, a repository of memory, 'a sleep and a forgetting'. In essence it is about seeking what is absent. Imagining Ithaca explores the idea of nostos, and its attendant pain (algos), in an excitingly eclectic range of sources: from Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, through the exilic memoirs of Nabokov and the time-travelling fantasies of Woody Allen, to Seamus Heaney's Virgilian descent into the London Underground and Michael Portillo's Telemachan railway journey to Salamanca. This kaleidoscopic exploration spans the end of the Great War, when the world at large was experiencing the complexities of homecoming, to the era of Brexit and COVID-19 which has put the notion of nostalgia firmly under the microscope.