The Future of the Classical

The Future of the Classical
Author: Salvatore Settis
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2006-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0745635989

Every era has invented a different idea of the 'classical' to create its own identity. Thus the 'classical' does not concern only the past: it is also concerned with the present and a vision of the future. In this elegant new book, Salvatore Settis traces the ways in which we have related to our 'classical' past, starting with post-modern American skyscrapers and working his way back through our cultural history to the attitudes of the Greeks and Romans themselves. Settis argues that this obsession with cultural decay, ruins and a 'classical' past is specifically European and the product of a collective cultural trauma following the collapse of the Roman Empire. This situation differed from that of the Aztec and Inca empires whose collapse was more sudden and more complete, and from the Chinese Empire which always enjoyed a high degree of continuity. He demonstrates how the idea of the 'classical' has changed over the centuries through an unrelenting decay of 'classicism' and its equally unrelenting rebirth in an altered form. In the Modern Era this emulation of the 'ancients' by the 'moderns' was accompanied by new trends: the increasing belief that the former had now been surpassed by the latter, and an increasing preference for the Greek over the Roman. These conflicting interpretations were as much about the future as they were about the past. No civilization can invent itself if it does not have other societies in other times and other places to act as benchmarks. Settis argues that we will be better equipped to mould new generations for the future once we understand that the 'classical' is not a dead culture we inherited and for which we can take no credit, but something startling that has to be re-created every day and is a powerful spur to understanding the 'other'.

The Classical Revolution

The Classical Revolution
Author: John Borstlap
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2017-06-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0486823350

Essays by a prominent contemporary composer explore a current trend in classical music away from atonal characteristics and toward more traditional forms. Topics include cultural identity, musical meaning, and the aesthetics of beauty.

Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music

Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-11-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0393881253

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”

Understanding the Classical Music Profession

Understanding the Classical Music Profession
Author: Dr Dawn Elizabeth Bennett
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2013-01-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1409493849

Understanding the Classical Music Profession is an essential resource for educators, practitioners and researchers who seek to understand the careers of classically-trained musicians, and the extent to which professional practice is reflected within existing classical performance-based music education and training. Taking Australia as a case-study, Dawn Bennett outlines how Australia is now a service economy, and an important component of service provision is in the culture and recreation industries. Despite this, employment in culture and recreation is poorly understood and a lack of cultural intelligence contributes to a less than satisfactory environment that inhibits the creative potential of cultural practitioners. Musicians in the twenty-first century require a broad and evolving base of skills and knowledge to sustain their careers as cultural practitioners. Bennett maintains that a musician cannot be simply defined as a performer, but that a musician is someone who works within the profession of music in one or more specialist fields. The perception of a musician as a multi-skilled professional working within a portfolio career has significant implications for policy, funding, education and training, and for practitioners and students seeking to achieve sustainable careers. This indispensable book provides a comprehensive analysis of life as a musician, from education and training to professional practice as well as revealing the structure of the Australian cultural industries. Although Australia is the focus of the book, the basis of the research originates from many different places and most of the issues discussed relate directly to other countries throughout the world.

Backing Into the Future

Backing Into the Future
Author: Bernard Knox
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1994
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780393331172

Who has brought the world of ancient Greece and Rome to life for the uninitiated reader and scholar alike.

The Classical Tradition

The Classical Tradition
Author: Anthony Grafton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 1188
Release: 2010-10-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674035720

The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.

Classical Music

Classical Music
Author: Michael Beckerman
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1800641168

This kaleidoscopic collection reflects on the multifaceted world of classical music as it advances through the twenty-first century. With insights drawn from leading composers, performers, academics, journalists, and arts administrators, special focus is placed on classical music’s defining traditions, challenges and contemporary scope. Innovative in structure and approach, the volume comprises two parts. The first provides detailed analyses of issues central to classical music in the present day, including diversity, governance, the identity and perception of classical music, and the challenges facing the achievement of financial stability in non-profit arts organizations. The second part offers case studies, from Miami to Seoul, of the innovative ways in which some arts organizations have responded to the challenges analyzed in the first part. Introductory material, as well as several of the essays, provide some preliminary thoughts about the impact of the crisis year 2020 on the world of classical music. Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges will be a valuable and engaging resource for all readers interested in the development of the arts and classical music, especially academics, arts administrators and organizers, and classical music practitioners and audiences.

The Classical Guitar

The Classical Guitar
Author: John Morrish
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2002
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0879307250

Offering essays by the world's top experts in a full-color, coffee-table quality book, this is the first work to tell the complete story of the classical guitar and its repertoire, players and makers - from its 19th century European roots to modern international interpretations. This handsome softcover volume features lavish photography of classical guitars made by the best luthiers in the world. Additional essays cover use of the classical guitar in pop music, different playing and teaching techniques, the collectors' market, and the science of the guitar. It also features profiles of legendary artists such as Andres Segovia, Julian Bream and John Williams, plus a full discography, a glossary, an index, a bibliography, and a guitar measurement chart.

Classical Art

Classical Art
Author: Caroline Vout
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2018-05-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1400890276

How did the statues of ancient Greece wind up dictating art history in the West? How did the material culture of the Greeks and Romans come to be seen as "classical" and as "art"? What does "classical art" mean across time and place? In this ambitious, richly illustrated book, art historian and classicist Caroline Vout provides an original history of how classical art has been continuously redefined over the millennia as it has found itself in new contexts and cultures. All of this raises the question of classical art's future. What we call classical art did not simply appear in ancient Rome, or in the Renaissance, or in the eighteenth-century Academy. Endlessly repackaged and revered or rebuked, Greek and Roman artifacts have gathered an amazing array of values, both positive and negative, in each new historical period, even as these objects themselves have reshaped their surroundings. Vout shows how this process began in antiquity, as Greeks of the Hellenistic period transformed the art of fifth-century Greece, and continued through the Roman empire, Constantinople, European court societies, the neoclassical English country house, and the nineteenth century, up to the modern museum. A unique exploration of how each period of Western culture has transformed Greek and Roman antiquities and in turn been transformed by them, this book revolutionizes our understanding of what classical art has meant and continues to mean.

Classical Music

Classical Music
Author: Kent Nagano
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2019-02-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0773557547

How relevant is classical music today? The genre seems in danger of becoming nothing more than a hobby for the social elite. Yet Kent Nagano has another world in mind – one where everyone has access to classical music. In Classical Music: Expect the Unexpected the world-famous classical conductor tells the deeply personal story of his own engagement with the masterpieces and great composers of classical music, his work with the world's major orchestras, and his tireless commitment to bringing his music to everybody. Narrating his first childhood encounters with music's power to overcome social and ethnic boundaries, he celebrates an art form that has always taken part in debates about human values and societal developments. The constantly declining relevance of classical music in these disrupted times, he argues, not only impoverishes society from a cultural perspective but robs it of inspiration, wit, emotional depth, and a sense of community. Getting to grips with classical music's existential crisis, Nagano contends that it is too crucial to humanity's survival to be allowed to silently disappear from our everyday reality. In this moving autobiography, Kent Nagano makes a compelling plea for classical music that is as exhilarating as it is thought-provoking.