Unheard Of

Unheard Of
Author: John Beckwith
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2012-04-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1554583985

Canadian composer John Beckwith recounts his early days in Victoria, his studies in Toronto with Alberto Guerrero, his first compositions, and his later studies in Paris with the renowned Nadia Boulanger, of whom he offers a comprehensive personal view. In the memoir’s central chapters Beckwith describes his activities as a writer, university teacher, scholar, and administrator. Then, turning to his creative output, he considers his compositions for instrumental music, his four operas, choral music, and music for voice. A final chapter touches on his personal and family life and his travel adventures. For over sixty years John Beckwith has participated in national musical initiatives in music education, promotion, and publishing. He has worked closely with performing groups such as the Orford Quartet and the Canadian Brass and conductors such as Elmer Iseler and Georg Tintner. A former reviewer for the Toronto Star and a CBC script writer and programmer in the 1950s and ’60s, he later produced many articles and books on musical topics. Acting under Robert Gill and Dora Mavor Moore in student days and married for twenty years to actor/director Pamela Terry, he witnessed first-hand the growth of Toronto theatre. He has collaborated with the writers Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, and bpNichol, and teamed repeatedly with James Reaney, a close friend. His life story is a slice of Canadian cultural history.

Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions - 2 Volume Set

Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions - 2 Volume Set
Author: Claudio Modena
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 1465
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0429621000

Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions contains about 160 papers that were presented at the IV International Seminar on Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions that was held from 10 to 13 November, 2004 in Padova Italy. Following publications of previous seminars that were organized in Barcelona, Spain (1995 and 1998) and Guimarães, Portugal (2001), state-of-the-art information is presented in these two volumes on the preservation, protection, and restoration of historical constructions, both comprising monumental structures and complete city centers. These two proceedings volumes are devoted to the possibilities of numerical and experimental techniques in the maintenance of historical structures. In this respect, the papers, originating from over 30 countries, are subdivided in the following areas: Historical aspects and general methodology, Materials and laboratory testing, Non-destructive testing and inspection techniques, Dynamic behavior and structural monitoring, Analytical and numerical approaches, Consolidation and strengthening techniques, Historical timber and metal structures, Seismic analysis and vulnerability assessment, Seismic strengthening and innovative systems, Case studies. Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions is a valuable source of information for scientists and practitioners working on structure-related issues of historical constructions

Structural Analysis of Historic Construction: Preserving Safety and Significance, Two Volume Set

Structural Analysis of Historic Construction: Preserving Safety and Significance, Two Volume Set
Author: Dina D'Ayala
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 1590
Release: 2008-06-02
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1439828229

The successful preservation of an historic building, complex or city depends on the continued use and daily care that come with it. The possibility of continued use depends on the adaptation of the building to modern standards and practice of living, requiring changes in constructional or structural features. Conservation engineering is the process

Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music

Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music
Author: Nicole V. Gagné
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2019-07-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1538122987

The contemporary music scene thus embodies a uniquely broad spectrum of activity, which has grown and changed down to the present hour. With new talents emerging and different technologies developing as we move further into the 21st century, no one can predict what paths music will take next. All we can be certain of is that the inspiration and originality that make music live will continue to bring awe, delight, fascination, and beauty to the people who listen to it. This book cover modernist and postmodern concert music worldwide from the years 1888 to 2018. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on the most important composers, musicians, methods, styles, and media in modernist and postmodern classical music worldwide, from 1888 to 2018. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about modern and contemporary classical music.

Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff

Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff
Author: Stephen Chase
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317168488

Christian Wolff is a composer who has followed a distinctive path often at the centre of avant-garde activity working alongside figures such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Cornelius Cardew. In a career spanning sixty years, he has produced a significant and influential body of work that has aimed to address, in a searching and provocative manner, what it means to be an experimental and socially aware artist. This book provides a wide-ranging introduction to a composer often overlooked despite his influence upon many of the major figures in new music since the 1950s from Cage to John Zorn to the new wave of experimentalists across the globe. As the first detailed analysis of the music of this prolific and highly individual composer, Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff contains contributions from leading experts in the field of new and experimental music, as well as from performers and composers who have worked with Wolff. The reception of Wolff's music is discussed in relation to the European avant-garde and also within the context of Wolff's association with Cage and Feldman. Music from his earliest compositions of the 1950s, the highly indeterminate scores, the politically-inspired pieces up to the most recent works are discussed in detail, both in relation to their compositional techniques, general aesthetic development, and matters of performance. The particular challenges and aesthetic issues arising from Wolff's idiosyncratic notations and the implications for performers are a central theme. Likewise, the ways in which Wolff's political persuasions - which arguably account for some of the notational methods he chooses - have been worked out through his music, are examined. With a foreword by his close associate Michael Parsons, this is a valuable addition to experimental music literature.

Sonic Mosaics

Sonic Mosaics
Author: Paul Steenhuisen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2009-01-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Paul Steenhuisen, in conversation with composers, offers readers insight into the creative process, and ways of listening and entering into works of new music. Steenhuisen, himself a composer of merit, talks one on one with thirty-two of his contemporaries--twenty-six of whom are Canadian--with a colleague's candour, sympathy, and expertise.

Prairie Bohemian

Prairie Bohemian
Author: Trevor W. Harrison
Publisher: University of Alberta
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2015-08-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1772120685

Gay never recorded an album, never won a Juno. His music existed in the moment, appreciated by the few who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. For the rest of us, those late-night jam sessions in a shack in an alley on the bad side of Edmonton never happened. We never got to hear him play the Cole Porter songs he loved with Carlos Montoya, never got to watch the ashes build dangerously on the end of his menthol cigarette. And when Frank Gay died, only the guitar players gently wept. — Shelley Youngblut Until his death in 1982, Edmonton luthier and guitarist Frank Gay built guitars for several famous musicians, including country stars Johnny Cash, Don Gibson, Webb Pierce, and Hank Snow. He captivated listeners with his singular talent on guitar and other instruments, and was well known within the music industry. Trevor Harrison’s detective work uncovers the story of this private, charming, and bohemian man, doing a tremendous service to Canadian culture and music history. Harrison pieces together Frank Gay’s life through interviews with people who knew him and saw him play. Very few recordings of him playing exist, and the sparse accounts of Gay’s life and work raise more questions than they answer. Musicians and instrument makers, as well as those interested in Canadian music or Edmonton’s colourful past, will be fascinated by this biography of western Canadian luthier, musician, and guitar virtuoso Frank Gay.

Boring Formless Nonsense

Boring Formless Nonsense
Author: Eldritch Priest
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-04-11
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1441146164

Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs shoulders with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping debates on failure as an aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a highly dubious concept. The book frames recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art whose affective and formal elements reflect on current issues in contemporary culture, and offers analyses of musical works and performance practices that are rarely heard, let alone considered as significant cultural phenomena - showing the role that obscurity and the esoteric have in articulating current cultural realities. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music.

Sacred Mobilities in Byzantium and Beyond

Sacred Mobilities in Byzantium and Beyond
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2024-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004704507

Questions about space and the sacred are now central to Byzantine studies. Recent scholarship has addressed issues of embodiment and performance, power and identity, environmental perceptions and territorial imaginations. At the same time, the mobility turn in the humanities prompts new approaches to and understandings of processes of circulation of people, objects and ideas. Drawing together illuminating contributions from scholars in history, art history, literature, geography, architecture and theology, Sacred Mobilities in Byzantium and Beyond sets the stage for further cross-disciplinary dialogue concerning Orthodox Christian spiritual culture and society in the Byzantine Empire and in the centuries after its fall. Contributors are Veronica della Dora, Ekaterine Gedevanishvili, Molly Greene, Mark Guscin, Christos Antonios Kakalis, Chrysovalantis Kyriacou, Maria Litina, Andrew Louth, Mihail Mitrea, Bissera Pentcheva, Rehav Rubin, and David Williams.

In the Time of Sky-Rhyming

In the Time of Sky-Rhyming
Author: Assistant Professor of Latinx Communities Jonathan E Calvillo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2024-10-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197762476

Jonathan E. Calvillo explores the rise of Hip Hop on the West Coast and the integral role the Los Angeles Latine community had on the movement - and in turn, Hip Hop's impact on Latines as it became a space for community, expression, and coping with inequality. Building his narrative around interviews and oral histories, he explores how incoming migrants, local-born Latines, and other minoritized populations joined Black Americans in the 1980s to build early underground sites of Hip Hop innovation, contributing to the genre's global expansion. The book details how Hip Hop's deep impact on Latines was based in part on the inequality, marginalization, and injustice that many Latines of this era faced - themes which were addressed in the movement. Many creatives from Brown Los Angeles found their place in early underground expressions of Hip Hop, including in breaking, rhyming, DJing, and graffiti elements. During this period, Central American refugees were settling in the urban corridors of the region, young Chicanos were coming of age in the post-civil rights era, Caribbean migrants moved from East to West, South American immigrants were finding their place, and Latines were interacting with Black Americans and other minoritized populations such as ethnic Samoans, Filipinos, and Koreans. Through the lens of Los Angeles Hip Hop history, this project speaks to the migratory flows of urban Brown Los Angeles, the relations between Black Americans and Latines in Los Angeles, and the formation of the racialized subcultures emblematic of urban Los Angeles. In documenting this story, the book sidesteps a media-heavy, music-industry account of Hip Hop history. Instead, it privileges original oral histories and secondary accounts of dozens of artists, to present a grassroots oriented narrative of the intraethnic, interracial negotiations that fueled Latines' identification with and contributions to Hip Hop.