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The Classical Music Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained (DK Big Ideas)
by DKLearn about the world&’s greatest classical compositions and musical traditions in The Classical Music Book.Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a simple and easy to follow format. Learn about Classic Music in this overview guide to the subject, great for novices looking to find out more and experts wishing to refresh their knowledge alike! The Classical Music Book brings a fresh and vibrant take on the topic through eye-catching graphics and diagrams to immerse yourself in. This captivating book will broaden your understanding of Classical Music, with:- More than 90 pieces of world-famous music - Packed with facts, charts, timelines and graphs to help explain core concepts- A visual approach to big subjects with striking illustrations and graphics throughout- Easy to follow text makes topics accessible for people at any level of understandingThe Classical Music Book is a captivating introduction to music theory, crucial composers and the impact of seminal pieces, aimed at adults with an interest in the subject and students wanting to gain more of an overview. Here you&’ll discover more than 90 works by famous composers from the early period to the modern day, through exciting text and bold graphics.Your Classical Music Questions, Simply ExplainedFrom Mozart to Mendelssohn, this fresh new guide goes beyond your typical music books, offering a comprehensive overview to classical music history and biography. If you thought it was difficult to learn about music theory, The Classical Music Book presents key information in an easy to follow layout. Explore the main ideas underpinning the world&’s greatest compositions and musical traditions, and define their importance to the musical canon and into their wider social, cultural, and historical context.The Big Ideas SeriesWith millions of copies sold worldwide, The Classical Music Book is part of the award-winning Big Ideas series from DK. The series uses striking graphics along with engaging writing, making big topics easy to understand.
The Psychophysical Ear
by Alexandra HuiIn the middle of the nineteenth century, German and Austrian concertgoers began to hear new rhythms and harmonies as non-Western musical ensembles began to make their way to European cities and classical music introduced new compositional trends. At the same time, leading physicists, physiologists, and psychologists were preoccupied with understanding the sensory perception of sound from a psychophysical perspective, seeking a direct and measurable relationship between physical stimulation and physical sensation. These scientists incorporated specific sounds into their experiments--the musical sounds listened to by upper middle class, liberal Germans and Austrians. In The Psychophysical Ear, Alexandra Hui examines this formative historical moment, when the worlds of natural science and music coalesced around the psychophysics of sound sensation, and new musical aesthetics were interwoven with new conceptions of sound and hearing. Hui, a historian and a classically trained musician, describes the network of scientists, musicians, music critics, musicologists, and composers involved in this redefinition of listening. She identifies a source of tension for the psychophysicists: the seeming irreconcilability between the idealist, universalizing goals of their science and the increasingly undeniable historical and cultural contingency of musical aesthetics. The convergence of the respective projects of the psychophysical study of sound sensation and the aesthetics of music was, however, fleeting. By the beginning of the twentieth century, with the professionalization of such fields as experimental psychology and ethnomusicology and the proliferation of new and different kinds of music, the aesthetic dimension of psychophysics began to disappear.
Relevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770–1860: Questioning Canons
by Randi Margrete SelvikRelevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770–1860: Questioning Canons reveals how various cultural processes have influenced what has been included, and what has been marginalised from canons of European music, dance, and theatre around the turn of the nineteenth century and the following decades. This collection of essays includes discussion of the piano repertory for young ladies in England; canonisation of the French minuet; marginalisation of the popular German dramatist Kotzebue from the dramatic canon; dance repertory and social life in Christiania (Oslo); informal cultural activities in Trondheim; repertory of Norwegian musical clocks; female itinerant performers in the Nordic sphere; preconditions, dissemination, and popularity of equestrian drama; marginalisation and amateur staging of a Singspiel by the renowned Danish playwright Oehlenschläger, also with perspectives on the music and its composers; and the perceived relevance of Henrik Ibsen’s staged theatre repertory and early dramas. By questioning established notions about canon, marginalisation, and relevance within the performing arts in the period 1770–1860, this book asserts itself as an intriguing text both to the culturally interested public and to scholars and students of musicology, dance research, and theatre studies.
The Beethoven Encyclopedia
by Paul NettlThis comprehensive A-to-Z reference is comprised of detailed and authoritative entries on every aspect of the great composer&’s life. Ludwig van Beethoven is one of the most famous and revered composers in classical music. His instantly recognizable concertos and symphonies continue to be among the most performed by symphonies across the globe. In this definitive reference volume, eminent musicologist Paul Nettl provides students and researchers with an in-depth biographical resource organized in alphabetical entries. The Beethoven Encyclopedia covers the German composer&’s music, personal life, and patrons, among other topics, such as the forces that inspired his genius.
The Nightingale: ‘The nature book of the year’
by Sam Lee'Wondering and wonderful. The nature book of the year.' JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL'This lovely book is almost as thrilling as the bird's immortal song - balm for a troubled soul and a glimpse of paradise.' JOANNA LUMLEY______________________________Come to the forest, sit by the fireside and listen to intoxicating song, as Sam Lee tells the story of the nightingale.Every year, as darkness falls upon woodlands, the nightingale heralds the arrival of Spring. Throughout history, its sweet song has inspired musicians, writers and artists around the world, from Germany, France and Italy to Greece, Ukraine and Korea. Here, passionate conservationist, renowned musician and folk expert Sam Lee tells the story of the nightingale. This book reveals in beautiful detail the bird's song, habitat, characteristics and migration patterns, as well as the environmental issues that threaten its livelihood.From Greek mythology to John Keats, to Persian poetry and 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square', Lee delves into the various ways we have celebrated the nightingale through traditions, folklore, music, literature, from ancient history to the present day. The Nightingale is a unique and lyrical portrait of a famed yet elusive songbird.______________________________'Sam Lee has brought the poetic magic that has long enchanted so many of his musical fans into the written word. Allow yourself to glimpse the world Sam sees, to be part of his love affair with the nightingale, and you will no doubt be delighted.' LILY COLE'A wonderful book.' STEPHEN MOSS'A magical marriage of the lyrical and practical: a book that makes us want to seek out the nightingale and then reveals how we can.' TRISTAN GOOLEY
A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific
by Robert M. UtleyEarly in the nineteenth century, the mountain men emerged as a small but distinctive group whose knowledge and experience of the trans-Mississippi West extended the national consciousness to continental dimensions. Though Lewis and Clark blazed a narrow corridor of geographical reality, the West remained largely terra incognita until trappers and traders--Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Smith--opened paths through the snow-choked mountain wilderness. They opened the way west to Fremont and played a major role in the pivotal years of 1845-1848 when Texas was annexed, the Oregon question was decided, and the Mexican War ended with the Southwest and California in American hands, the Pacific Ocean becoming our western boundary.
This Must Be the Place: How Music Can Make Your City Better
by Shain ShapiroThis Must Be the Place explores how music can make cities better.This Must Be the Place introduces and examines music&’s relationship to cities. Not the influence cities have on music, but the powerful impact music can have on how cities are developed, built, managed and governed.Told in an accessible way through personal stories from cities around the world — including London, Melbourne, Nashville, Austin and Zurich — This Must Be the Place takes a truly global perspective on the ways music is integral to everyday life but neglected in public policy.Arguing for the transformative role of artists and musicians in a post-pandemic world, This Must Be The Place not only examines the powerful impact music can have on our cities, but also serves as a how-to guide and toolkit for music-lovers, artists and activists everywhere to begin the process of reinventing the communities they live in.
The Arts and Culture of the American Civil War
by James A. DavisIn 1864, Union soldier Charles George described a charge into battle by General Phil Sheridan: "Such a picture of earnestness and determination I never saw as he showed as he came in sight of the battle field . . . What a scene for a painter!" These words proved prophetic, as Sheridan’s desperate ride provided the subject for numerous paintings and etchings as well as songs and poetry. George was not alone in thinking of art in the midst of combat; the significance of the issues under contention, the brutal intensity of the fighting, and the staggering number of casualties combined to form a tragedy so profound that some could not help but view it through an aesthetic lens, to see the war as a concert of death. It is hardly surprising that art influenced the perception and interpretation of the war given the intrinsic role that the arts played in the lives of antebellum Americans. Nor is it surprising that literature, music, and the visual arts were permanently altered by such an emotional and material catastrophe. In The Arts and Culture of the American Civil War, an interdisciplinary team of scholars explores the way the arts – theatre, music, fiction, poetry, painting, architecture, and dance – were influenced by the war as well as the unique ways that art functioned during and immediately following the war. Included are discussions of familiar topics (such as Ambrose Bierce, Peter Rothermel, and minstrelsy) with less-studied subjects (soldiers and dance, epistolary songs). The collection as a whole sheds light on the role of race, class, and gender in the production and consumption of the arts for soldiers and civilians at this time; it also draws attention to the ways that art shaped – and was shaped by – veterans long after the war.
California Polyphony: Ethnic Voices, Musical Crossroads (Music in American Life)
by Mina YangWhat does it mean to be "Californian"? California Polyphony: Ethnic Voices, Musical Crossroads suggests an answer that lies at the intersection of musicology, cultural history, and politics. Consisting of a series of musical case studies of major ethnic groups in California, this book approaches the notion of Californian identity from diverse perspectives, each nuanced by class, gender, and sexuality. In the early twentieth century, the concept of the Pacific Rim and an orientalist fascination with Asian music and culture dominated the popular imagination of white Californians, influencing their interactions with the Asian Other. Several decades later, as tensions rose between the Los Angeles Police Department and the African American community, the once-thriving jazz and blues nightclub scene of 1940s Central Avenue became a primary target for law enforcement's anti-vice crusade. The reactionary nature of the musical scores for Hollywood's noir films of the World War II and postwar eras negotiated the perceived demise of white female sexuality in the face of black culture and urban corruption. Mina Yang also considers Mexican Americans' conflicted assimilation into the white American mainstream from the early 1900s through the 1970s, as well as contemporary Korean Americans' struggles to express their cultural and national identities through hip-hop, a genre usually associated with African Americans. According to Yang, there has never been a straightforward definition of "Californian." This most populous and most affluent state in the Union has been setting musical and cultural trends for decades, and Yang's study thoughtfully illuminates the multiculutral nature of its musics.
Modernism and Popular Music
by Ronald SchleiferTraditionally, ideas about twentieth-century 'modernism' - whether focused on literature, music or the visual arts - have made a distinction between 'high' art and the 'popular' arts of best-selling fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas 'Fats' Waller and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the 'popularity' of popular music in order to reconsider received and seeming self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.
Victorian Vocalists
by Kurt GanzlVictorian Vocalists is a masterful and entertaining collection of 100 biographies of mid- to late-19th-century singers and stars. Kurt Gänzl paints a vivid picture of the Victorian operatic and concert world, revealing the backgrounds, journeys, successes, failures and misdemeanours of these singers. This volume is not only an outstanding reference work for anyone interested in vocalists of the era, but also a compelling, meticulously researched picture of life in the vast shark tank that was Victorian music.
Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels (Music in American Life)
by James Revell CarrHawaiian Music in Motion explores the performance, reception, transmission, and adaptation of Hawaiian music on board ships and in the islands, revealing the ways both maritime commerce and imperial confrontation facilitated the circulation of popular music in the nineteenth century. James Revell Carr draws on journals and ships' logs to trace the circulation of Hawaiian song and dance worldwide as Hawaiians served aboard American and European ships. He also examines important issues like American minstrelsy in Hawaii and the ways Hawaiians achieved their own ends by capitalizing on Americans' conflicting expectations and fraught discourse around hula and other musical practices.
Let's Do It: The Birth of Pop Music: A History
by Bob StanleyThe must-read music book of 2022—and the first such history bringing together all musical genres to tell the definitive narrative of the birth of Pop—from 1900 to the mid-1950s.Pop music didn't begin with the Beatles in 1963, or with Elvis in 1956, or even with the first seven-inch singles in 1949. There was a pre-history that went back to the first recorded music, right back to the turn of the century. Who were these earliest record stars—and were they in any meaningful way "pop stars"? Who was George Gershwin writing songs for? Why did swing, the hit sound for a decade or more, become almost invisible after World War II? The prequel to Bob Stanley&’s celebrated Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, this new volume is the first book to tell the definitive story of the birth of pop, from the invention of the 78 rpm record at the end of the nineteenth century to the beginnings of rock and the modern pop age. Covering superstars such as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra, alongside the unheralded songwriters and arrangers behind some of our most enduring songs, Stanley paints an aural portrait of pop music's formative years in stunning clarity, uncovering the silver threads and golden needles that bind the form together. Bringing the eclectic, evolving world of early pop to life—from ragtime, blues and jazz to Broadway, country, crooning, and beyond—Let's Do It is essential reading for all music lovers. "An encyclopaedic introduction to the fascinating and often forgotten creators of Anglo-American hit music in the first half of the twentieth century."—Neil Tennant (The Pet Shop Boys)
Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony (Dover Books on Music)
by Peter Ilyitch TchaikovskyWritten during Tchaikovsky’s years as professor at the renowned Moscow Conservatory, this volume presents a clear and thorough introduction to the study of harmony. The great Russian composer expounded upon his views of music while he was in the full flower of his creative powers, offering students a chance to learn the discipline’s fundamentals from one of its great masters. Out of print for decades and exceedingly rare in its original edition, Tchaikovsky’s Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony possesses an intrinsic historical interest, yet remains as useful and instructive today as it was a century ago. A complete course in writing music, this excellent manual features numerous examples and exercises. It functions equally well as a classroom text, an adjunct to private instruction, or as a guide to individual musicians.
Palestinian Music and Song: Expression And Resistance Since 1900 (Public Cultures Of The Middle East And North Africa Ser.)
by David A. Mcdonald Stig-Magnus Thorsén Heather Bursheh Moslih KanaanehDrawing from a long history of indigenous traditions and incorporating diverse influences of surrounding cultures, music in Palestine and among the millions of Palestinians in diaspora offers a unique window on cultural and political events of the past century. From the perspective of scholars, performers, composers, and activists, Palestinian Music and Song examines the many ways in which music has been a force of representation, nation building, and social action. From the turn of the 20th century, when Palestine became an exotic object of fascination for missionaries and scholars, to 21st-century transnational collaborations in hip hop and new media, this volume traces the conflicting dynamics of history and tradition, innovation and change, power and resistance.
Revival: The Art Work of the Future (Routledge Revivals)
by Carl Friedrich GlasenappThis volume brings our story down to 1843, an important era in Richard Wagner’s Life, with his entry, as composer, of two successful operas, upon a so-called "practical" career at one of the principal German theatres.
Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 & Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2: With Orchestral Reduction for Second Piano (Dover Classical Piano Music: Four Hands)
by Serge Rachmaninoff Peter Ilyitch TchaikovskyThis authoritative edition continues Dover's series of great piano concertos with orchestral reduction for second piano -- the universal standard, for students and professionals alike, for learning and rehearsing all concertos. Together for the first time are two of the most performed and recorded concertos of all time: the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 in G-flat Minor, Op. 23, and the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18.Both of these great Russian works have achieved unrivaled worldwide popularity and are absolute musts in the repertoire of every serious pianist. The Tchaikovsky concerto combines a virtuoso piano part with brilliant orchestral scoring. The Rachmaninoff concerto is universally admired for the dark, brooding opening, enormously popular themes, and passionate, lyrical final movement. Every pianist and serious piano student will want this attractive and modestly priced edition.
Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music
by Peter DoggettAmbitious and groundbreaking, Electric Shock tells the story of popular music, from the birth of recording in the 1890s to the digital age, from the first pop superstars of the twentieth century to the omnipresence of music in our lives, in hit singles, ringtones and on Spotify. Over that time, popular music has transformed the world in which we live. Its rhythms have influenced how we walk down the street, how we face ourselves in the mirror, and how we handle the outside world in our daily conversations and encounters. It has influenced our morals and social mores; it has transformed our attitudes towards race and gender, religion and politics. From the beginning of recording, when a musical performance could be preserved for the first time, to the digital age, when all of recorded music is only a mouse-click away; from the straitlaced ballads of the Victorian era and the ‘coon songs’ that shocked America in the early twentieth century to gangsta rap, death metal and the multiple strands of modern dance music: Peter Doggett takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the history of music. Within a narrative full of anecdotes and characters, Electric Shock mixes musical critique with wider social and cultural history and shows how revolutionary changes in technology have turned popular music into the lifeblood of the modern world.
Revival: Opera and Drama (Routledge Revivals)
by Carl Friedrich GlasenappThe second volume of Carl Friedrich Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.
Revival: The Theatre (Routledge Revivals)
by Carl Francis GlasenappThird volume of Carl Francis Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.
Revival: Art and Politics (Routledge Revivals)
by Carl Francis GlasenappFourth volume of Carl Francis Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.
Revival: Handel (Routledge Revivals)
by Richard Alexander StreatfieldIt is the inner meaning of Handel’s music, and its power of searching the profoundest recesses of the soul, that in the following pages I have endeavoured, so far as I am able, to elucidate. Its merely technical qualities have already been discussed enough and to spare. Books on Handel written by musicians already abound, but musicians as a rule take more interest in the means by which an end is attained than the end itself. They tell us a great deal about the methods by which a composer expresses himself, but very little about what he actually has to express. I have tried, how feebly and with what little success no one knows better than myself, to find the man Handel in his music, to trace his character, his view of life, his thoughts, feelings, and aspirations, as they are set forth in his works.
Revival: Modern Music and Musicians (Routledge Revivals)
by Richard Alexander StreatfieldA plethora of biographical accounts of some of the contemporary composers and musicians at the turn of the twentieth century.
Piano Tuning: A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs (Dover Books On Music: Piano)
by J. Cree FischerIf you have a note that has dropped in pitch, do you have to call in the tuner? A stuck key? Sympathetic rattle? Missing bridles? A broken hammer shank? An unglued ivory? The answer, in each case, is no: you can make all of these repairs yourself!This is the clearest and most complete book available for beginning tuners and amateur pianists. It explains all the basic processes practically and with model clarity. A non-musician can use this book without too much difficulty.You will learn how upright, grand, and square actions work, and how to take care of the smallest repairs — repairing stuck keys, poorly adjusted bottoms and capstans, crowded back checks, felts and leather on the hammers, hammer stems; softening damper and hammer felts; installing new bridles; eliminating "sympathetic rattle"; all with a minimum of tools and training.You will learn a professional method of tuning based on slightly flattened fifths, where only the octave and the upward fifth intervals are used. This is one of the easiest systems to learn, one capable of a great deal of control, and one perfectly suited to adjusting one or two keys. It is a tested method especially right for amateurs working without a teacher, and a method that trains the ear for other recommended systems. The author also explains "beats," the theory of the tempered scale, and useful experiments you can make with harmonic phenomena.If you want to experiment with tuning a piano, there is no better book to start with. It will help performers and teachers make occasional repairs and learn the structure and scale of the piano. Those who want to know how pianos work will find this book both clear and useful.
Revival: Their History and Character (Routledge Revivals)
by Francis W. GalphinThe study of musical instruments now no longer with us is necessary, not only for the musician and composer, but for the man of letters, the artist, and the chronicler of our national life; for many allusions to customs of bygone times cannot otherwise be understood, and we should be spared such a trying ordeal as we were recently subjected to by one of our leading illustrated papers, which introduced into a thirteenth century scene a twentieth century mandoline with an up to date mechanism.