The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz

The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz
Author: Inge van Rij
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2015-02-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521896460

Inge van Rij's book demonstrates how Berlioz used the sights and sounds of the orchestra to explore other worlds.

The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz

The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz
Author: Inge Van Rij
Publisher:
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2015
Genre: Orchestral music
ISBN: 9781316252871

Inge van Rij's book demonstrates how Berlioz used the sights and sounds of the orchestra to explore other worlds.

Berlioz and His World

Berlioz and His World
Author: Francesca Brittan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2024-08-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0226837653

A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. Famously, in Richard Wagner’s estimation, he hovered as a “transient, marvelous exception,” a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who “does not belong in our musical solar system,” the likes of whom would never be seen again. For his contemporaries, as for later critics, Berlioz was simply too strange—and too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier with genre and form, and too difficult to analyze. He was, in many ways, a composer without a world. Berlioz and His World takes a deep dive into the composer’s complex legacy, tracing lines between his musical and literary output and the scientific, sociological, technological, and political influences that shaped him. Comprising nine essays covering key facets of Berlioz’s contribution and six short “object lessons” meant as conversation starters, the book reveals Berlioz as a richly intersectional figure. His very difficulty, his tendency to straddle the worlds of composer, conductor, and critic, is revealed as a strength, inviting new lines of cross-disciplinary inquiry and a fresh look at his European and American reception.

The Art of Music and Other Essays

The Art of Music and Other Essays
Author: Hector Berlioz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 1994-06-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780253311641

A Travers Chants is the collection of writings selected from his thirty-odd years of musical journalism. These essays cover a wide spectrum of intellectual inquiry: Beethoven's nine symphonies and his opera, Fidelio; Wagner and the partisans of the "Music of the Future"; Berlioz's idols - Gluck, Weber, and Mozart. There is an eloquent plea to stop the constant rise in concert pitch (an issue still discussed today), a serious piece on the place of music in church, and a humorous and imaginative account of musical customs in China.

Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz

Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz
Author: Francesca Brittan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2017-09-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108326358

The centrality of fantasy to French literary culture has long been accepted by critics, but the sonorous dimensions of the mode and its wider implications for musical production have gone largely unexplored. In this book, Francesca Brittan invites us to listen to fantasy, attending both to literary descriptions of sound in otherworldly narratives, and to the wave of 'fantastique' musical works published in France through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, including Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie fantastique, and pieces by Liszt, Adam, Meyerbeer, and others. Following the musico-literary aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann, they allowed waking and dreaming, reality and unreality to converge, yoking fairy sound to insect song, demonic noise to colonial 'babbling', and divine music to the strains of water and wind. Fantastic soundworlds disrupted France's native tradition of marvellous illusion, replacing it with a magical materialism inextricable from republican activism, theological heterodoxy, and the advent of 'radical' romanticism.

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique
Author: Julian Rushton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2023-11-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1316513831

Situates Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique within French Romanticism and considers influences, literary as well as musical, that shaped its conception.

Berlioz

Berlioz
Author: D. Kern Holoman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 710
Release: 1989
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674067783

A captivating and sumptuously illustrated biography, Berlioz is not only a complete account of the Romantic era composer, but also an acute analysis of his compositions and a description of his work as a conductor and critic. 139 halftones, 3 maps, 160 musical examples.

Memoirs of Hector Berlioz

Memoirs of Hector Berlioz
Author: Hector Berlioz
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 912
Release: 1932-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780486215631

Self-revelations of tormented great composer; musical life in Paris, Wagner and other contemporaries, musical opinions, much more. 11 plates.

Performing History

Performing History
Author: Nancy November
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1644694468

The fifteen essays of Performing History glimpse the diverse ways music historians “do” history, and the diverse ways in which music histories matter. This book’s chapters are structured into six key areas: historically informed performance; ethnomusicological perspectives; particular musical works that “tell,” “enact,” or “perform” war histories; operatic works that works that “tell,” “enact,” or “perform” power or enlightenment; musical works that deploy the body and a broad range of senses to convey histories; and histories involving popular music and performance. Diverse lines of evidence and manifold methodologies are represented here, ranging from traditional historical archival research to interviewing, performing, and composing. The modes of analyzing music and its associated texts represented here are as various as the kinds of evidence explored, including, for example, reading historical accounts against other contextual backdrops, and reading “between the lines” to access other voices than those provided by mainstream interpretation or traditional musicology.