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Virgil Thomson: A Reader: Selected Writings, 1924-1984
by Richard KostelanetzThis essential reader includes Thomson's essays on making a living as a musician; his articles on classic composers; his relation to his contemporaries; his articles on newcomers in the music world, including John Cage and Pierre Boulez; his autobiographical writings and commentary on his own works.
Virgil Thomson: Library of America #277
by Tim Page Virgil ThomsonAn unprecedented collection of polemical and autobiographical writings by America's greatest composer-critic. Following on the critically acclaimed 2014 edition of Virgil Thomson's collected newspaper music criticism, The Library of America and Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomson's other literary and critical works, a body of writing that constitutes America's musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson's name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald Tribune. This no-holds-barred polemic, here presented in its revised edition of 1962, discusses the commissions, jobs, and other opportunities available to the American composer, a worker in a world of performance and broadcast institutions that, today as much as in Thomson's time, are dominated by tin-eared, non-musical patrons of the arts who are shocked by the new and suspicious of native talent. Thomson's autobiography, Virgil Thomson (1966), is more than just the story of the struggle of one such American composer, it is an intellectual, aesthetic, and personal chronicle of the twentieth century, from World War I-era Kansas City to Harvard in the age of straw boaters, from Paris in the Twenties and Thirties to Manhattan in the Forties and after. A classic American memoir, it is marked by a buoyant wit, a true gift for verbal portrait-making, and a cast of characters including Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Paul Bowles, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. American Music Since 1910 (1971) is a series of incisive essays on the lives and works of Ives, Ruggles, Varèse, Copland, Cage, and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words (1989), Thomson's final book, is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set English--especially American English--to music, in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a judicious selection of Thomson's magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984--thirty-seven pieces, most of them previously uncollected, including many long-form review-essays written for The New York Review of Books.From the Hardcover edition.
Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles, 1940-1954 - The Musical Scene; The Art Of Judging Music; Music Right And Left; Music Reviewed; Other Writings (Library of America Virgil Thomson Edition #1)
by Tim Page Virgil ThomsonRevisit the Golden Age of classical music in America through the witty and adventurous reviews of our greatest critic-composer: For fourteen memorable years Virgil Thomson surveyed the worlds of opera and classical music as the chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. An accomplished composer who knew music from the inside, Thomson communicated its pleasures and complexities to a wide readership in a hugely entertaining, authoritative style, and his daily reviews and Sunday articles set a high-water mark in American cultural journalism. Thomson collected his newspaper columns in four volumes: The Musical Scene, The Art of Judging Music, Music Right and Left, and Music Reviewed. All are gathered here, together with a generous selection of Thomson's uncollected writings. The result is a singular chronicle of a magical time when an unrivaled roster of great conductors (Koussevitzky, Toscanini, Beecham, Stokowski) and legendary performers (Horowitz, Rubinstein, Heifetz, Stern) presented new masters (Copland, Stravinsky, Britten, Bernstein) and re-introduced the classics to a rapt American audience.
Virgil Thomson: A Library of America E-Book Classic
by Virgil ThomsonVirgil Thomson was a gifted composer and one of the nation's foremost cultural critics. The best-selling autobiography Virgil Thomson (1966) is his gossipy telling of his own extraordinary progress from unteachable smart aleck to revered elder statesman. It recounts his artistically precocious Kansas City boyhood, demanding Harvard education, apprenticeship in Paris between the wars, and hard-won musical and literary maturity in New York. As narrator and protagonist, Thomson fascinates not only with his own story but also with those of his associates, collaborators, friends, and rivals, among them Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Nadia Boulanger, George Antheil, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Pare Lorentz, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. Virgil Thomson is an authentic work of Americana and a first-rate, first-person history of the rise of modernism.Complete with 32 pages of photographs.
Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle
by Anthony TommasiniIn the first full-scale biography of a dominating figure in twentieth-century American music, Anthony Tommasini tells the richly textured story of Virgil Thomson's experiences as a composer, influential critic, and gay man. Writing with exclusive, full access to Thomson's papers and from extensive interviews and research, he recounts: Thomson's early years in turn-of-the-century Kansas City's strange mixture of antebellum racial divides. . . his first steps in the arts, guided by a troubled older man, himself a closeted homosexual in a time when disclosure could destroy a life. . . the crystallizing of his musical ambitions as an often-contentious student of Nadia Boulanger's in Paris. . . his pioneering collaboration with Gertrude Stein on Four Saints in Three Acts. . . his rivalry with fellow composers such as Aaron Copland. . . how he settled personal scores and advanced his own agenda during his reign on the New York Herald Tribune as America's most important, and best, music critic. . . his lasting impact on, and sometimes troubled interactions with, younger composers such as Leonard Bernstein, John Cage, Paul Bowles, Ned Rorem, and Philip Glass. . . and through it all the unending struggle to write, and win an audience for, music that spoke directly and simply to the life of his time. --BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Border Crossings)
by Pamela L. CaughieFirst Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Virginia Woolf & Music
by Adriana Varga&“A truly comprehensive, multi-perspective, and up-to-date survey of the undeniable role of music in Woolf &’s life and writings&” (Music and Letters). Through Virginia Woolf's diaries, letters, fiction, and the testimony of her contemporaries, this fascinating volume explores the inspiration and influences of music—from classical through mid-twentieth century—on the preeminent Modernist author of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One&’s Own, and other masterful compositions. In a letter to violinist Elizabeth Trevelyan, Woolf revealed: &“I always think of my books as music before I write them.&” In a journal entry she compared herself to an &“improviser with [my] hands rambling over the piano.&“ Approaching the author&’s career from a unique perspective, Virginia Woolf and Music examines her musical background; music in her fiction and her own critical writings on the subject; its importance in the Bloomsbury milieu; and its role within the larger framework of aesthetics, politics, gender studies, language, and Modernism. Illuminating the rich nature of Woolf's works, these essays from scores of literary and music scholars are &“a fascinating and important contribution to scholarship about Virginia Woolf, music, and interdisciplinary art&” (Music Reference Services Quarterly).
The Virtual Haydn: Paradox of a Twenty-First-Century Keyboardist
by Tom BeghinHaydn’s music has been performed continuously for more than two hundred years. But what do we play, and what do we listen to, when it comes to Haydn? Can we still appreciate the rich rhetorical nuances of this music, which from its earliest days was meant to be played by professionals and amateurs alike? With The Virtual Haydn, Tom Beghin—himself a professional keyboard player—delves deeply into eighteenth-century history and musicology to help us hear a properly complex Haydn. Unusually for a scholarly work, the book is presented in the first person, as Beghin takes us on what is clearly a very personal journey into the past. When a discussion of a group of Viennese sonatas, for example, leads him into an analysis of the contemporary interest in physiognomy, Beghin applies what he learns about the role of facial expressions during his own performance of the music. Elsewhere, he analyzes gesture and gender, changes in keyboard technology, and the role of amateurs in eighteenth-century musical culture. The resulting book is itself a fascinating, bravura performance, one that partakes of eighteenth-century idiosyncrasy while drawing on a panoply of twenty-first-century knowledge.
Virtual Music: How the Web Got Wired for Sound
by William DuckworthVirtual Music: How the Web Got Wired for Sound is a personal story of how one composer has created new music on the web, a history of interactive music, and a guide for aspiring musicians who want to harness the new creative opportunities offered by web composing. Also includes a 4-page color insert.
Virtuosi: A Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists
by Mark MitchellVirtuosiA Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great PianistsMark MitchellA bravura performance!"Vigorous, opinionated, and always entertaining, here is a personal essayist of great charm and sincerity. Mitchell's erudition—his collection of odd and illuminating bits of knowledge—is always a delight and adds a sauce piquanteto the whole dish!" —Edmund White"...a literary work of real élan, vibrancy, and grace—the very qualities that in his view define the virtuoso. [Mr. Mitchell explores] the traditional linking of musical and sexual virtuosity, the ethical implications of the original instruments' movement, the near deification of Mozart in Anglo-Saxon culture, and, in a particularly witty section, the relationship of the virtuoso to his stool. Throughout, Mr. Mitchell's prose is humorous, intimate, and unapologeticaly polemical." —Cynthia OzickThe artistic merit of performers with superior technique has long been almost ipso facto denied. At last, Mark Mitchell launches a counterattack. In essays crackling with pianistic lore, Mitchell takes on topics such as encores, prodigies, competitions, virtuosi in film and literature, and the erotics of musical performance. Liszt, Horowitz, and Argerich share these pages with the eccentric Pachmann, Ervin Nyiregyh ("the skid-row pianist"), and Liberace. The illustrations include rare portraits of long-forgotten girl prodigies, historic concert programs, and stills from a lost 1927 film on Beethoven. Punctuating this celebration of personal voice are vignettes, running from the beginnings of the author's obsession with the piano to the particularities of concert-going in Italy (where he now lives).Mark Mitchell's piano studies led to a friendship with Vladimir Horowitz and other pianistic luminaries. With David Leavitt he co-authored Italian Pleasures and co-edited Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. He also edited The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing.
Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945–1958
by Kiril TomoffIn the 1940s and 1950s, Soviet musicians and ensembles were acclaimed across the globe. They toured the world, wowing critics and audiences, projecting an image of the USSR as a sophisticated promoter of cultural and artistic excellence. In Virtuosi Abroad, Kiril Tomoff focuses on music and the Soviet Union's star musicians to explore the dynamics of the cultural Cold War. He views the competition in the cultural sphere as part of the ongoing U.S. and Soviet efforts to integrate the rest of the world into their respective imperial projects. Tomoff argues that the spectacular Soviet successes in the system of international music competitions, taken together with the rapturous receptions accorded touring musicians, helped to persuade the Soviet leadership of the superiority of their system. This, combined with the historical triumphalism central to the Marxist-Leninist worldview, led to confidence that the USSR would be the inevitable winner in the global competition with the United States. Successes masked the fact that the very conditions that made them possible depended on a quiet process by which the USSR began to participate in an international legal and economic system dominated by the United States. Once the Soviet leadership transposed its talk of system superiority to the economic sphere, focusing in particular on consumer goods and popular culture, it had entered a competition that it could not win.
Virtuosity
by Jessica MartinezAn intensely romantic, “brilliant debut” (Kirkus Reviews) about a dangerous addiction, a fierce rivalry, and a forbidden love.Now is not the time for Carmen to fall in love. And Jeremy is hands-down the wrong guy for her to fall for. He is infuriating, arrogant, and the only person who can stand in the way of Carmen getting the one thing she wants most: to win the prestigious Guarneri competition. Carmen’s whole life is violin, and until she met Jeremy, her whole focus was winning. But what if Jeremy isn’t just hot…what if Jeremy is better?Carmen knows that kissing Jeremy can’t end well, but she just can't stay away. Nobody else understands her—and riles her up—like he does. Still, she can’t trust him with her biggest secret: She is so desperate to win, she takes antianxiety drugs to perform, and what started as an easy fix has become a hungry addiction. Carmen is sick of not feeling anything on stage and even sicker of always doing what she’s told, doing what’s expected.Sometimes being on top just means you have a long way to fall….
Virtuosity
by Jessica MartinezAn intensely romantic, “brilliant debut” (Kirkus Reviews) about a dangerous addiction, a fierce rivalry, and a forbidden love.Now is not the time for Carmen to fall in love. And Jeremy is hands-down the wrong guy for her to fall for. He is infuriating, arrogant, and the only person who can stand in the way of Carmen getting the one thing she wants most: to win the prestigious Guarneri competition. Carmen’s whole life is violin, and until she met Jeremy, her whole focus was winning. But what if Jeremy isn’t just hot…what if Jeremy is better?Carmen knows that kissing Jeremy can’t end well, but she just can't stay away. Nobody else understands her—and riles her up—like he does. Still, she can’t trust him with her biggest secret: She is so desperate to win, she takes antianxiety drugs to perform, and what started as an easy fix has become a hungry addiction. Carmen is sick of not feeling anything on stage and even sicker of always doing what she’s told, doing what’s expected.Sometimes being on top just means you have a long way to fall….
El Visitante
by Alma MaritanoContinuación de Baqueros y trenzas, es una novela juvenil que narra la historia de un grupo de adolescentes en la ciudad de Rosario, Argentina.
Visualizing The Beatles: A Complete Graphic History of the World's Favorite Band
by John Pring Rob ThomasForeword by Rob SheffieldFilled with stunning full-color infographics, a unique, album-by-album visual history of the evolution of the Beatles that examines how their style, their sound, their instruments, their songs, their tours, and the world they inhabited transformed over the course of a decade.Combining data, colorful artwork, interactive charts, graphs, and timelines, Visualizing the Beatles is a fresh and imaginative look at the world’s most popular band. Meticulously examining the songs on every Beatles’ album from Please Please Me to Let It Be, UK-based graphic artists John Pring and Rob Thomas deconstruct:lyrical contentsongwriting creditsinspiration for the songsinstruments usedcover designschart positionand more . . . .They also break down the success of Beatles’ singles across the world, their tour dates, venues, and cities, their hairstyles, fashion choices and favorite guitars, and a wealth of other Beatles’ minutiae. Visualizing the Beatles also includes illustrations involving the conspiracy theories of the "Paul is dead" hoax as well as A-to-Z lists of every artist or performer who has ever covered a Beatles’ song.Comprehensive, entertaining, and packed with fun facts, Visualizing the Beatles is a wonderful introduction for new fans and a must-have for devotees, offering a new way to think about this extraordinary band whose influence continues to shape music.
Visualizing Music
by Eric IsaacsonTo feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually?Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition, Isaacson offers a guide to understanding what makes musical images effective or ineffective and provides readers with extensive principles and strategies to create excellent images of their own. Illustrated with over 300 diagrams from both historical and modern sources, including examples and theories from Western art music, world music, and jazz, folk, and popular music, Visualizing Music explores the decisions made around image creation. Together with an extensive online supplement and dozens of redrawings that show the impact of effective techniques, Visualizing Music is a captivating guide to thinking differently about design that will help music scholars better understand the power of musical images, thereby shifting the ephemeral to material.
Vital Performance: Historically Informed Romantic Performance in Cultural Context
by Andrew SneddenHistorically Informed Performance, or HIP, has become an influential and exciting development for scholars, musicians, and audiences alike. Yet it has not been unchallenged, with debate over the desirability of its central goals and the accuracy of its results. The author suggests ways out of this impasse in Romantic performance style. In this wide-ranging study, pianist and scholar Andrew John Snedden takes a step back, examining the strengths and limitations of HIP. He proposes that many problems are avoided when performance styles are understood as expressions of their cultural era rather than as simply composer intention, explaining not merely how we play, but why we play the way we do, and why the nineteenth century Romantics played very differently. Snedden examines the principal evidence we have for Romantic performance style, especially in translation of score indications and analysis of early recordings, finally focusing on the performance styles of Liszt and Chopin. He concludes with a call for the reanimation of culturally appropriate performance styles in Romantic repertoire. This study will be of great interest to scholars, performers, and students, to anyone wondering about how our performances reflect our culture, and about how the Romantics played their own culturally-embedded music.
Vivaldi: The Manchester Violin Sonatas (The\baroque Composers Ser. #Vol. 47)
by Michael TalbotSince 1978, the 300th anniversary of Vivaldi's death, there has been an explosion of serious writing about his music, life and times. Much of this has taken the form of articles published in academic journals or conference proceedings, some of which are not easy to obtain. The twenty-two articles selected by Michael Talbot for this volume form a representative selection of the best writing on Vivaldi from the last 30 years, featuring such major figures in Vivaldi research as Reinhard Strohm, Paul Everett, Gastone Vio and Federico Maria Sardelli. Aspects covered include biography, Venetian cultural history, manuscript studies, genre studies and musical analysis. The intention is to serve as a 'first port of call' for those wishing to learn more about Vivaldi or to refresh their existing knowledge. An introduction by Michael Talbot reviews the state of Vivaldi scholarship past and present and comments on the significance of the articles.
Vivaldi's Music for Flute and Recorder
by Michael TalbotFederico Maria Sardelli writes from the perspective of a professional baroque flautist and recorder-player, as well as from that of an experienced and committed scholar, in order to shed light on the bewildering array of sizes and tunings of the recorder and transverse flute families as they relate to Antonio Vivaldi's compositions. Sardelli draws copiously on primary documents to analyse and place in context the capable and surprisingly progressive instrumental technique displayed in Vivaldi's music. The book includes a discussion of the much-disputed chronology of Vivaldi's works, drawing on both internal and external evidence. Each known piece by him in which the flute or the recorder appears is evaluated fully from historical, biographical, technical and aesthetic standpoints. This book is designed to appeal not only to Vivaldi scholars and lovers of the composer's music, but also to players of the two instruments, students of organology and those with an interest in late baroque music in general. Vivaldi is a composer who constantly springs surprises as, even today, new pieces are discovered or old ones reinterpreted. Much has happened since Sardelli's book was first published in Italian, and this new English version takes full account of all these new discoveries and developments. The reader will be left with a much fuller picture of the composer and his times, and the knowledge and insights gained from minutely examining his music for these two wind instruments will be found to have a wider relevance for his work as a whole. Generous music examples and illustrations bring the book's arguments to life.
Vivo Movie Novelization (Vivo)
by Ximena HastingsVivo, the highly anticipated animated movie-musical with original songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, will soon be dancing onto Netflix! This funny and heartfelt novelization features eight pages of images from the film and is sure to have readers singing and laughing along!Meet Vivo and experience his passion for music. Join him as he travels from Havana to Miami on a musical journey. TM & © 2021 Sony Pictures Animation Inc. All Rights Reserved.
VJ
by Mark Goodman Nina Blackwood Martha Quinn Gavin Edwards Alan HunterThe original MTV VJs offer a behind-the-scenes oral history of the early years of MTV, circa 1981 to 1985, when it was exploding, reshaping the culture, and forming "the MTV generation."MTV's first VJs (along with the late J.J. Jackson) had front-row seats to a cultural revolution--and the hijinks of rock stars from Adam Ant to Cyndi Lauper. Their worlds collided, of course: John Cougar invited Nina Blackwood to a late night "party" that proved to be a seduction attempt. Mark Goodman partied with David Lee Roth, who offered him cocaine and groupies. Aretha Franklin made chili for Alan Hunter. After Martha Quinn interviewed Bob Dylan, he whisked her off to Ireland in his private jet. While the book has plenty of dish--secret romances, nude photographs, incoherent celebrities--it also tells the story of four VJs growing up alongside MTV's devoted viewers. Using MTV as a focal point, the book tells the story of the 1980s, from the neon-colored drawstring pants to the Reagan administration. Readers don't just get the inside scoop on music stars like Bob Dylan, Madonna, and Duran Duran, but a deeper understanding of how MTV changed our culture. Or as the VJs put it: "We're the reason you have no attention span."
The Vocal Athlete: Application And Technique For The Hybrid Singer
by Marci Daniels Rosenberg Wendy LeBorgneThe Vocal Athlete: Application and Technique for the Hybrid Singer is a compilation of voice exercises created and used by well-known voice pedagogues from preeminent colleges, established private studios, and clinical settings. The exercises focus on various aspects of contemporary commercial music (CCM) including bodywork, mental preparation, registration, and much more. The book is designed to accompany its companion text, The Vocal Athlete-a first of its kind in singing science and pedagogy developed for singers of all styles, with a particular emphasis on CCM.. Also included is a CD of the singing exercises to further enhance understanding of techniques and skills used in training this type of singer. Both The Vocal Athlete: Application and Technique for the Hybrid Singer and its companion text are invaluable tools for anyone who uses or trains the singing voice or works with CCM singers.
Vocal Chamber Music: A Performer's Guide
by Barbara Winchester Kay DunlapThis invaluable resource is a revised edition of an essential index to vocal works composed for at least one solo voice and one instrument (other than piano or guitar) up to twelve solo voices and twelve solo instruments. The book includes a brief introduction on how to teach vocal chamber music, with tips on running a successful ensemble. Vocal Chamber Music: A Performer's Guide, 2nd Edition is a much needed and important book for voice teachers, singers, music directors and music libraries, for information that is normally difficult to find and usually requires assembling from various sources.
Vocal Music and Contemporary Identities: Unlimited Voices in East Asia and the West (Routledge Research in Music #3)
by Christian Utz Frederick LauLooking at musical globalization and vocal music, this collection of essays studies the complex relationship between the human voice and cultural identity in 20th- and 21st-century music in both East Asian and Western music. The authors approach musical meaning in specific case studies against the background of general trends of cultural globalization and the construction/deconstruction of identity produced by human (and artificial) voices. The essays proceed from different angles, notably sociocultural and historical contexts, philosophical and literary aesthetics, vocal technique, analysis of vocal microstructures, text/phonetics-music-relationships, historical vocal sources or models for contemporary art and pop music, and areas of conflict between vocalization, "ethnicity," and cultural identity. They pinpoint crucial topical features that have shaped identity-discourses in art and popular musical situations since the1950s, with a special focus on the past two decades. The volume thus offers a unique compilation of texts on the human voice in a period of heightened cultural globalization by utilizing systematic methodological research and firsthand accounts on compositional practice by current Asian and Western authors.
Vocal Wisdom Maxims of Giovanni Battista Lamperti [1931 edition]
by Giovanni B. LampertiGiovanni Battista Lamperti (1839 -1910) was an Italian singing teacher and son of the singing teacher Francesco Lamperti. He is source for Vocal Wisdom: Maxims of Giovanni Battista Lamperti (1931). His preferred teaching arrangement was having three or four students present at each lesson: each would get their turn while the others observed and learned thereby. He was said to be a strict, exacting instructor not given to flattery, but who enthusiastically praised his students upon exceptional achievement. Many of Giovanni's students became international opera stars including Irene Abendroth, Marcella Sembrich, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Paul Bulss, Roberto Stagno, David Bispham and Franz Nachbaur. The Technics of Bel Canto is the only book (other than the maxims recalled and published posthumously by his pupil William E. Brown) that Giovanni ever wrote on his method.-Print ed.