The Szymanowski Companion

The Szymanowski Companion
Author: Stephen Downes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Music
ISBN: 131701443X

The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski is one of the most fascinating musical figures of the early twentieth century. His works included four symphonies, two violin concertos, the operas Hagith and King Roger, the ballet-pantomime Harnasie, the oratorio Stabat Mater, as well as numerous piano, violin, vocal and choral compositions. The profile and popularity of Szymanowski's music outside Poland has never been higher and continues to grow. The Szymanowski Companion constitutes the most significant and comprehensive reference source to the composer in English. Edited by two of the leading scholars in the field, Paul Cadrin and Stephen Downes, the collection consists of over 50 contributions from an international array of contributors, including recognized Polish experts. The Companion thus provides a systematic, authoritative and up-to-date compilation of information concerning the composer's life, thought and works.

Chamber Music

Chamber Music
Author: James M. Keller
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2011
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0195382536

Oxford's highly successful listener's guides--The Symphony, The Concerto, and Choral Masterworks--have been widely praised for their blend of captivating biography, crystal clear musical analysis, and delightful humor. Now James Keller follows these greatly admired volumes with Chamber Music. Approaching the tradition of chamber music with knowledge and passion, Keller here serves as the often-opinionated but always genial guide to 192 essential works by 56 composers, providing illuminating essays on what makes each piece distinctive and admirable. Keller spans the history of this intimate genre of music, from key works of the Baroque through the emotionally stirring "golden age" of the Classical and Romantic composers, to modern masterpieces rich in political, psychological, and sometimes comical overtones. For each piece, from Bach through to contemporary figures like George Crumb and Steve Reich, the author includes an astute musical analysis that casual music lovers can easily appreciate yet that more experienced listeners will find enriching. Keller shares the colorful, often surprising stories behind the compositions while revealing the delights of an art form once described by Goethe as the musical equivalent of "thoughtful people conversing."

Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism

Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism
Author: Kenneth H. Marcus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2016-01-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1316445224

Schoenberg is often viewed as an isolated composer who was ill-at-ease in exile. In this book Kenneth H. Marcus shows that in fact Schoenberg's connections to Hollywood ran deep, and most of the composer's exile compositions had some connection to the cultural and intellectual environment in which he found himself. He was friends with numerous successful film industry figures, including George Gershwin, Oscar Levant, David Raksin and Alfred Newman, and each contributed to the composer's life and work in different ways: helping him to obtain students, making recordings of his music, and arranging commissions. While teaching at both the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, Schoenberg was able to bridge two utterly different worlds: the film industry and the academy. Marcus shows that alongside Schoenberg's vital impact upon Southern California Modernism through his pedagogy, compositions and texts, he also taught students who became central to American musical modernism, including John Cage and Lou Harrison.

Ear Training for Twentieth-century Music

Ear Training for Twentieth-century Music
Author: Michael L. Friedmann
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780300045376

Michael Friedmann's Ear Training for Twentieth-Century Music is a skills text; using non-tonal materials, students are asked to improvise at the keyboard, sing at sight, take dictation, memorize melodies by rote, and identify selected set classes by eye and ear.

Debussy's Resonance

Debussy's Resonance
Author: François de Médicis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 642
Release: 2018
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1580465250

Some of Debussy's most beloved pieces, as well as lesser-known ones from his early years, set in a rich cultural context by leading experts from the English- and French-speaking worlds. The music of Claude Debussy has always been widely beloved by listeners and performers alike, more perhaps than that of any of the other pioneers of musical modernism. However rich in itself, his creative output also participated, and continues to participate, in a network of cultural connections, the scope and meaning of which can only be gleaned through multiple interpretive frameworks. Debussy's Resonance offers twenty new studies by some of themost active and respected English- and French-language scholars of French music. The book treats a large swath of the composer's music, from previously unexplored mélodies of his early years to late pieces such as the ballet Jeux and the Douze Études, and takes into consideration the numerous contexts that helped shape the works and the different ways that musicologists and critics have explained them. CONTRIBUTORS: Katherine Bergeron, Matthew Brown, David J. Code, Mark DeVoto, Michel Duchesneau, David Grayson, Denis Herlin, Jocelyn Ho, Roy Howat, Steven Huebner, Julian Johnson, Barbara L. Kelly, Richard Langham Smith, Mark McFarland, François de Médicis, Robert Orledge, Boyd Pomeroy. Caroline Rae, Marie Rolf, August Sheehy FRANÇOIS DE MÉDICIS is Professor of Music at the Université de Montréal. STEVEN HUEBNER is Professor of Music at McGill University.

Brahms

Brahms
Author: Hans A. Neunzig
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781904341178

Accessible and affordable biography illustrated throughout with over 30 full-color plates

A Chronicle of First Broadcast Performances of Musical Works in the United Kingdom, 1923-1996

A Chronicle of First Broadcast Performances of Musical Works in the United Kingdom, 1923-1996
Author: Alastair Mitchell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 823
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351791257

First published in 2001, this work provides detailed information taken from the ’Programmes-as-Broadcast’ daily log of output held at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham. Arranged in chronological order, entries are given for broadcasts of first performances of musical works in the United Kingdom, and include details of: the date of the broadcast, the composer, the title of the work, performers and conductor. In addition to its usefulness as a reference tool, the Chronicle enables us to gauge the trends in twentieth-century British musical life, and the role of the BBC in their promotion.