The Modern Composer and His World

The Modern Composer and His World
Author: John Beckwith
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1978-12-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 144263345X

Proceedings of the International Conference of Composers attended by SCEG at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario in August 1960.

Erik Satie

Erik Satie
Author: Caroline Potter
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016
Genre: Art and music
ISBN: 1783270837

Satie's music and ideas are inextricably linked with the City of Light. This book situates Satie's work within the context and sonic environment of contemporary Paris.

Franz Liszt and His World

Franz Liszt and His World
Author: Christopher H. Gibbs
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2010-08-29
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1400828619

No nineteenth-century composer had more diverse ties to his contemporary world than Franz Liszt (1811-1886). At various points in his life he made his home in Vienna, Paris, Weimar, Rome, and Budapest. In his roles as keyboard virtuoso, conductor, master teacher, and abbé, he reinvented the concert experience, advanced a progressive agenda for symphonic and dramatic music, rethought the possibilities of church music and the oratorio, and transmitted the foundations of modern pianism. The essays brought together in Franz Liszt and His World advance our understanding of the composer with fresh perspectives and an emphasis on historical contexts. Rainer Kleinertz examines Wagner's enthusiasm for Liszt's symphonic poem Orpheus; Christopher Gibbs discusses Liszt's pathbreaking Viennese concerts of 1838; Dana Gooley assesses Liszt against the backdrop of antivirtuosity polemics; Ryan Minor investigates two cantatas written in honor of Beethoven; Anna Celenza offers new insights about Liszt's experience of Italy; Susan Youens shows how Liszt's songs engage with the modernity of Heinrich Heine's poems; James Deaville looks at how publishers sustained Liszt's popularity; and Leon Botstein explores Liszt's role in the transformation of nineteenth-century preoccupations regarding religion, the nation, and art. Franz Liszt and His World also includes key biographical and critical documents from Liszt's lifetime, which open new windows on how Liszt was viewed by his contemporaries and how he wished to be viewed by posterity. Introductions to and commentaries on these documents are provided by Peter Bloom, José Bowen, James Deaville, Allan Keiler, Rainer Kleinertz, Ralph Locke, Rena Charnin Mueller, and Benjamin Walton.

Camille Saint-Saëns and His World

Camille Saint-Saëns and His World
Author: Jann Pasler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1400845106

A revealing look at French composer and virtuoso Camille Saint-Saëns Camille Saint-Saëns—perhaps the foremost French musical figure of the late nineteenth century and a composer who wrote in nearly every musical genre, from opera and the symphony to film music—is now being rediscovered after a century of modernism overshadowed his earlier importance. In a wide-ranging and trenchant series of essays, articles, and documents, Camille Saint-Saëns and His World deconstructs the multiple realities behind the man and his music. Topics range from intimate glimpses of the private and playful Saint-Saëns, to the composer's interest in astronomy and republican politics, his performances of Mozart and Rameau over eight decades, and his extensive travels around the world. This collection also analyzes the role he played in various musical societies and his complicated relationship with such composers as Liszt, Massenet, Wagner, and Ravel. Featuring the best contemporary scholarship on this crucial, formative period in French music, Camille Saint-Saëns and His World restores the composer to his vital role as innovator and curator of Western music. The contributors are Byron Adams, Leon Botstein, Jean-Christophe Branger, Michel Duchesneau, Katharine Ellis, Annegret Fauser, Yves Gérard, Dana Gooley, Carolyn Guzski, Carol Hess, D. Kern Holoman, Léo Houziaux, Florence Launay, Stéphane Leteuré, Martin Marks, Mitchell Morris, Jann Pasler, William Peterson, Michael Puri, Sabina Teller Ratner, Laure Schnapper, Marie-Gabrielle Soret, Michael Stegemann, and Michael Strasser.

Chopin and His World

Chopin and His World
Author: Jonathan D. Bellman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0691177767

A new look at the life, times, and music of Polish composer and piano virtuoso Fryderyk Chopin Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49), although the most beloved of piano composers, remains a contradictory figure, an artist of virtually universal appeal who preferred the company of only a few sympathetic friends and listeners. Chopin and His World reexamines Chopin and his music in light of the cultural narratives formed during his lifetime. These include the romanticism of the ailing spirit, tragically singing its death-song as life ebbs; the Polish expatriate, helpless witness to the martyrdom of his beloved homeland, exiled among friendly but uncomprehending strangers; the sorcerer-bard of dream, memory, and Gothic terror; and the pianist's pianist, shunning the appreciative crowds yet composing and improvising idealized operas, scenes, dances, and narratives in the shadow of virtuoso-idol Franz Liszt. The international Chopin scholars gathered here demonstrate the ways in which Chopin responded to and was understood to exemplify these narratives, as an artist of his own time and one who transcended it. This collection also offers recently rediscovered artistic representations of his hands (with analysis), and—for the first time in English—an extended tribute to Chopin published in Poland upon his death and contemporary Polish writings contextualizing Chopin's compositional strategies. The contributors are Jonathan D. Bellman, Leon Botstein, Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Halina Goldberg, Jeffrey Kallberg, David Kasunic, Anatole Leikin, Eric McKee, James Parakilas, John Rink, and Sandra P. Rosenblum. Contemporary documents by Karol Kurpiński, Adam Mickiewicz, and Józef Sikorski are included.

Giacomo Puccini and His World

Giacomo Puccini and His World
Author: Arman Schwartz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2016-08-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691172862

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) is the world's most frequently performed operatic composer, yet he is only beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. In Giacomo Puccini and His World, an international roster of music specialists, several writing on Puccini for the first time, offers a variety of new critical perspectives on the composer and his works. Containing discussions of all of Puccini’s operas from Manon Lescaut (1893) to Turandot (1926), this volume aims to move beyond clichés of the composer as a Romantic epigone and to resituate him at the heart of early twentieth-century musical modernity. This collection’s essays explore Puccini’s engagement with spoken theater and operetta, and with new technologies like photography and cinema. Other essays consider the philosophical problems raised by "realist" opera, discuss the composer’s place in a variety of cosmopolitan formations, and reevaluate Puccini’s orientalism and his complex interactions with the Italian fascist state. A rich array of primary source material, including previously unpublished letters and documents, provides vital information on Puccini’s interactions with singers, conductors, and stage directors, and on the early reception of the verismo movement. Excerpts from Fausto Torrefranca’s notorious Giacomo Puccini and International Opera, perhaps the most vicious diatribe ever directed against the composer, appear here in English for the first time. The contributors are Micaela Baranello, Leon Botstein, Alessandra Campana, Delia Casadei, Ben Earle, Elaine Fitz Gibbon, Walter Frisch, Michele Girardi, Arthur Groos, Steven Huebner, Ellen Lockhart, Christopher Morris, Arman Schwartz, Emanuele Senici, and Alexandra Wilson.

Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers

Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers
Author: Patrick Kavanaugh
Publisher: Zondervan
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1996
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0310208068

This is a compelling and inspiring look at spiritual beliefs that influenced some of the world's greatest composers, now revised and expanded with eight additional composers.

Secret Lives of Great Composers

Secret Lives of Great Composers
Author: Elizabeth Lunday
Publisher: Quirk Books
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1594747466

Discover little-known stories from music history—including murder, riots, and heartbreak—in this entertaining tour through the fascinating (and surprising) lives of classical music masters With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Gioachino Rossini (draft-dodging womanizer) to Johann Sebastian Bach (jailbird) to Richard Wagner (alleged cross-dresser), Secret Lives of Great Composers recounts the seamy, steamy, and gritty history behind the great masters of international music. Here, you’ll learn that Edward Elgar dabbled with explosives; that John Cage was obsessed with fungus; that Berlioz plotted murder; and that Giacomo Puccini stole his church’s organ pipes and sold them as scrap metal so he could buy cigarettes. This is one music history lesson you’ll never forget!

Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss
Author: Bryan Gilliam
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1997
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780822321149

As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Stauss's death, scholarly interest in the composer continues to grow. Despite what was once a tendency by musicologists to overlook or deny Strauss's importance, these essays firmly place the German composer in the musical mainstream and situate him among the most influential composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Originally published in 1992, this volume examines Strauss's life and work from a number of approaches and during various periods of his long career, opening up unique corridors of insight into a crucial time in German history. Contributors discuss Strauss as a young composer steeped in a conservative instrumental tradition, as a brash young modernist tone poet of the 1890s, as an important composer of twentieth-century German opera, and as a cultural icon manipulated by the national socialists during the 1930s and early 1940s. Individual essays use Strauss's creative work as a framework for larger musicological questions such as the tension between narrative and structure in program music, the problem of extended tonality at the turn of the century, stylistic choice versus stylistic obligation, and conflicting perspectives of progressive versus conservative music. This collection will interest Strauss scholars, musicologists, and those interested in the artistic and cultural life of Germany from 1880 through the Second World War. Contributors. Kofi Agawu, Günter Brosche, Bryan Gilliam, Stephen Hefling, James A. Hepokoski, Timothy L. Jackson, Michael Kennedy, Lewis Lockwood, Barbara A. Peterson, Pamela Potter, Reinhold Schlötterer, R. Larry Todd