The Integrated String Player

The Integrated String Player
Author: Pedro de Alcantara
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199899312

Pedro de Alcantara's The Integrated String Player: Embodied Vibration is a practical guide for all string players: violinists and violists, cellists and bassists, but also gamba players and anyone who makes music drawing a bow across a string. Dozens of exercises, supported by a dedicated website with 80 video clips, cover all the basics of string playing, including left-hand articulation, vibrato, changes of position, double-stopping, sound production, string crossings, and many other techniques. Each exercise, however simple or complex, can become a meditation with the goal of integrating the musical, technical, and metaphysical aspects of a player's practice. Part I is devoted to the fundamentals of coordination, rhythm, and listening in depth. Part II focuses on the left hand, with an emphasis on healthy gestures that are charged with musicality and meaning. Part III covers the bowing arm, exploring innovative concepts such as expressive gesticulation, mechanical intelligence, and the use of the bow as the player's voice, both literally and symbolically. Part IV covers the integration of analytical thought and sensorial practice, providing an extensive study of the harmonic series, the circle of fifths, Tartini tones, and many other sonic aspects that are essential to a string player's musical freedom. In addition, the conversational, linguistic, compositional, and improvisatory dimensions of string playing are discussed and supported by multiple practical exercises. The Integrated String Player is addressed to players of all abilities and from all aesthetic backgrounds: students and professionals, teachers and performers, classically trained musicians and jazz players, chamber-music players and orchestral players.

Indirect Procedures

Indirect Procedures
Author: Pedro de Alcantara
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199874824

A musician's life is filled with many stressful situations: passing auditions, rehearsing and performing with difficult partners, sitting for long hours in uncomfortable chairs, going on stage to face audiences large and small, who may or may not be receptive to the performance they are presented. And yet many musicians are able to surmount these looming obstacles with grace and balance, to find satisfaction and artistry in their music and build productive and lasting careers. Indirect Procedures will guide you around these obstacles and along that path to becoming a balanced and successful musician. Based on the work of Frederick Matthias Alexander, this book is a thorough and practical approach to the issues of musicians' health and wellbeing. Author Pedro de Alcantara introduces concepts and exercises for musicians to let go of excessive tensions, stay focused, and direct their energies as they handle the challenges of practicing, rehearsing, and performing. Complemented by an extensive, easy-to-use companion website, and working alongside Integrated Practice, this new edition of Indirect Procedures is an invaluable and essential resource for today's musicians to learn to sing, play, and conduct with less effort and stronger results.

Integrated Practice

Integrated Practice
Author: Pedro de Alcantara
Publisher:
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2011
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0195317076

To be a musician is to "speak music." When you have something to say and the means to say it, your gestures and sounds become both meaningful and free. Offering an innovative, comprehensive approach to musicians' health and wellbeing, Integrated Practice gives you the tools to combine total-body awareness with a deep and practical understanding of the rhythmic structure of the musical language, so that you can use the musical text itself as your guide toward psychophysical and creative freedom. The book shows you how to establish an imaginative dialogue between the relatively inflexible structure of music and your individual personality as a singer, instrumentalist, or conductor, and it explains how you can use the acoustic phenomenon of the harmonic series to make big, beautiful sounds with little muscular effort. Integrated Practice comes with more than a hundred and fifty exercises demonstrated by video and audio clips on an extensive companion website that will inform your daily practice, improvising, rehearsing, and performing. With this array of resources for every learning style, Integrated Practice is the essential handbook to personal achievement in successful, expressive musical performance.

The Integrative Mind

The Integrative Mind
Author: Tobin Hart
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2014-06-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1475807023

In a world on fire with unprecedented possibility as well as peril, what kind of mind is needed in order to thrive and survive? How can education help develop human potential to be a match for this reality? The Integrative Mind radically updates the vision that we hold for education, the pedagogy that can help us achieve it, and the human consciousness that underlies it all. Consciousness and culture has been thrown out of balance by the neglect of key ways of meeting the world. The solution at the edge of this new episteme is not so much about what we know but instead about how we know. With practical applications and contemporary research, Tobin Hart shows that the way into the future requires a recalibration of mind. Hart explores five “missing minds”: contemplative, empathic, beautiful, embodied, and imaginative. These help open the aperture of consciousness enabling us to move, as Thomas Berry said, from seeing the world as a collection of objects to experiencing it as a communion of subjects. The result is an essential deepening of understanding and our humanity.

The Baroque Violin and Viola, Vol. II

The Baroque Violin and Viola, Vol. II
Author: Walter S. Reiter
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2020-09-24
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0197525113

"The Early Music revival has had far-reaching consequences on how music of the past is performed, both by specialists and non-specialists. This timely book is a practical step-by-step course of lessons for violinists and violists in both these categories, covering the interpretation, technique, culture and historical background of the Baroque violin repertoire. Written by a violinist and teacher specialising in Baroque music over many years, it guides readers from the basics (how to hold the violin) to Bach, via music from a wide variety of styles. Avoiding obscure musicological jargon, it is eminently readable and accessible. Packed with information, detailed observations on the music under discussion and relevant quotations from historical and contemporary sources, it covers everything the Baroque violin student should know and may be considered as equivalent to two to three years of individual lessons. The book contains over 100 Exercises devised for and tested on students over the years. The author's holistic approach is evident through the Exercises aimed at bringing out the individual voice of each student, and his insistence that what happens within, the identification and manipulation of Affects, is a vital part of successful performance. Imitating the voice, both spoken and sung, is a constant theme, beginning with the simple device of playing words. There are 50 Lessons, including five Ornamentation Modules and ones on specific topics: Temperament, Rhetoric, the Affects etc. All the music, transcribed for both violin and viola, is downloadable from the website, where there is also a series of videos"--

The Violin

The Violin
Author: Robert Riggs
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2016
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1580465064

Provides new perspectives on the violin's beloved concert repertoire, its diverse roles in indigenous musical traditions on four continents, and its metaphorical presence in visual arts and literature. With a colorful history that spans 450 years, the violin has proven to be one of the world's most important and versatile instruments. Addressed to performing musicians, serious concertgoers, and collectors of recordings, The Violin offers insightful, up-to-date essays on a wide range of topics. Essays discuss beloved masterpieces from the violin's solo repertoire, with individual chapters on the Italian Baroque, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and the violin concerto in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the evolution of performance styles and interpretation as documented in recordings. The volume also illustrates the broad cultural and geographic reach of the instrument, offering readers a taste of the traditional music of Argentina, Mexico, Norway, and India, in which the violin's participation is an essential and characteristic element. Other chapters are devoted to American fiddling andto the violin and violinists as metaphors in literature and the visual arts. CONTRIBUTORS: Chris Goertzen, Eitan Ornoy, Robert Riggs, Peter Walls, Peter Wollny. Musicologist and violinist Robert Riggs (PhD, Harvard University) chairs the Department of Music at the University of Mississippi and is the author of articles on Mozart as well as the monograph Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher (URP 2010).

The Contemporary Violin

The Contemporary Violin
Author: Patricia Strange
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2003-01-21
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1461664101

Written by a composer and a musician, The Contemporary Violin offers a unique menu of avant-garde musical possibilities that both performers and composers will enjoy exploring. Allen and Patricia Strange's comprehensive study critically examines extended performance techniques found in the violin literature of the latter half of the twentieth century. Drawing from both published and private manuscripts, the authors present extended performance options for the acoustic, modified, electric, and MIDI violin, with signal processing and computer-related techniques, and include more than 400 notated examples. The authors begin with bowing techniques and proceed systematically through other aspects of string playing, including MIDI technologies. Their correspondence and research with many performers and composers, the book's extensive score and text bibliography, and the discography of more than 130 recordings make The Contemporary Violin a valuable contemporary music reference and guide. An additional benefit is its listing of Internet resources that will keep the reader up to date with recent developments in contemporary performance and composition. First published by UC Press, 2001.

The Strad

The Strad
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 422
Release: 1898
Genre: Bowed stringed instruments
ISBN:

The Sounding Symbol

The Sounding Symbol
Author: George Odam
Publisher: Nelson Thornes
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1995
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780748723232

Providing music teachers and student teachers with an understanding of what constitutes good practice in the classroom, this text combines recent research of music theory - particularly on music and the brain - with a strong practical emphasis on how this applies in class.

The Power of Practice

The Power of Practice
Author: Kristin Wendland
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2024-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1438496052

The Power of Practice showcases the pioneering achievements of renowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin (1916-99) and how both disciplines transformed his life and practice. Menuhin's contributions as a performer, teacher, and humanitarian are celebrated around the world. Less well known, however, is Menuhin's devotion to the practice of yoga and his close friendship with the renowned yogi B. K. S. Iyengar (1918–2014), whose guidance profoundly influenced Menuhin as both a musician and a philanthropist. Menuhin applied his understanding of Iyengar's teachings to his philosophy of musical practice, creating new ways to approach the teaching of violin technique. He also took broader lessons from yoga to inform his approach to interacting with the larger world as a cultural ambassador and influential artist. Through the lens of the life and work of the celebrated violinist and devoted yogi, this book uncovers deep connections between music and yoga. It shows how the practice of both disciplines can profoundly transform our world into a better place.