What to Listen For in Music

What to Listen For in Music
Author: Aaron Copland
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-02-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1101513144

Now in trade paperback: “The definitive guide to musical enjoyment” (Forum). In this fascinating analysis of how to listen to both contemporary and classical music analytically, eminent American composer Aaron Copland offers provocative suggestions that will bring readers a deeper appreciation of the most viscerally rewarding of all art forms.

Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland
Author: Howard Pollack
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 734
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780252069000

Features the biography of Aaron Copland, his life, and his music.

Unsettled Scores

Unsettled Scores
Author: Sally Bick
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2019-12-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 025205167X

The Hollywood careers of Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler brought the composers and their high art sensibility into direct conflict with the premier producer of America's potent mass culture. Drawn by Hollywood's potential to reach—and edify—the public, Copland and Eisler expertly wove sophisticated musical ideas into Hollywood and, each in their own distinctive way, left an indelible mark on movie history. Sally Bick's dual study of Copland and Eisler pairs interpretations of their writings on film composing with a close examination of their first Hollywood projects: Copland's music for Of Mice and Men and Eisler's score for Hangmen Also Die! Bick illuminates the different ways the composers treated a film score as means of expressing their political ideas on society, capitalism, and the human condition. She also delves into Copland's and Eisler's often conflicted attempts to adapt their music to fit Hollywood's commercial demands, an enterprise that took place even as they wrote hostile critiques of the film industry.

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.”

Aaron Copland and His World

Aaron Copland and His World
Author: Carol J. Oja
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 527
Release: 2005-08-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691124701

This text reassesses the legacy of one of America's best-loved composers at a pivotal moment - as his life and work shift from the realm of personal memory to that of history. The collection of 17 essays explores the stages of cultural change on which Aaron Copeland's long life unfolded.

Aaron Copland's Hollywood Film Scores

Aaron Copland's Hollywood Film Scores
Author: Paula Musegades
Publisher: Eastman Studies in Music
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1580469914

A pioneering study of how American composer Aaron Copland helped shape the sound of the Hollywood film industry and introduced the moviegoing public to modern musical styles.

Copland on Music

Copland on Music
Author: Aaron Copland
Publisher: Garden City, N.Y : Doubleday
Total Pages: 302
Release: 1960
Genre: Music
ISBN:

Whose fault is it that the artist counts for so little in the public mind? Has it always been thus? Is there something wrong, perhaps, with the nature of the art work being created in America? Is our system of education lacking in its attitude toward the art product? Should our state and federal governments take a more positive stand toward the cultural development of their citizens? These are some of the provocative questions which Aaron Copland raises and answers in Copland on Music.

In Search of a Concrete Music

In Search of a Concrete Music
Author: Pierre Schaeffer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2012-11-26
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520265742

Suitable for those interested in contemporary musicology or media history, this title offers a translation of the author's pioneering work - at once a journal of his experiments in sound composition and a treatise on the raison d'etre of concrete music.