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Author: Maynard Solomon
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1988
Total Pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9780674063792
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book contains virtually all of my important Beethoven essays, most of which were written during the past ten years. Primarily, these are depth studies of psychological, historical, and creative issues whose implications cannot be fully explored within the confines of a narrative biography.
Author: Alessandra Comini
Publisher: Sunstone Press
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 498
ISBN-13: 0865346615
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this unique study of the myth-making process across two centuries, Comini examines the contradictory imagery of Beethoven in contemporary verbal accounts, and in some 200 paintings, prints, sculptures, and monuments.
Author: William Benzon
Publisher:
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780198605577
DOWNLOAD EBOOK¿7FWhy does the brain create music? This text argues that the key to music's function lies in the very complexity of musical experience. As well as being both personal and social, the creation of music taps into the whole spectrum of human skills, both physical and mental."
Author: Esteban Buch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 9780226078243
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWho hasn't been stirred by the strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? That's a good question, claims Esteban Buch. German nationalists and French republicans, communists and Catholics have all, in the course of history, embraced the piece. It was performed under the direction of Leonard Bernstein at a concert to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet it also serves as a ghastly and ironic leitmotif in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Hitler celebrated his birthdays with it, and the government of Rhodesia made it their anthem. And played in German concentration camps by the imprisoned, it also figured prominently at Mitterand's 1981 investiture. In his remarkable history of one of the most popular symphonic works of the modern period, Buch traces such complex and contradictory uses—and abuses—of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony since its premier in 1824. Buch shows that Beethoven consciously drew on the tradition of European political music, with its mix of sacred and profane, military and religious themes, when he composed his symphony. But while Beethoven obviously had his own political aspirations for the piece—he wanted it to make a statement about ideal power—he could not have had any idea of the antithetical political uses, nationalist and universalist, to which the Ninth Symphony has been put since its creation. Buch shows us how the symphony has been "deployed" throughout nearly two centuries, and in the course of this exploration offers what was described by one French reviewer as "a fundamental examination of the moral value of art." Sensitive and fascinating, this account of the tangled political existence of a symphony is a rare book that shows the life of an artwork through time, shifted and realigned with the currents of history.
Author: W. D. Bateman
Publisher:
Published: 1875
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Michael Broyles
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2011-10-27
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 0253357047
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExamines America's early reception to Beethoven, the use of his work and image in American music, movies, stage works, and other forms of popular culture, and related topics.
Author: William Kinderman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-04-10
Total Pages: 445
ISBN-13: 0199886946
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCombining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman's Beethoven is both a richly drawn portrait of the man and a guide to his music. Kinderman traces the composer's intellectual and musical development from the early works written in Bonn to the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, looking at compositions from different and original perspectives that show Beethoven's art as a union of sensuous and rational, of expression and structure. In analyses of individual pieces, Kinderman shows that the deepening of Beethoven's musical thought was a continuous process over decades of his life. In this new updated edition, Kinderman gives more attention to the composer's early chamber music, his songs, his opera Fidelio, and to a number of often-neglected works of the composer's later years and fascinating projects left incomplete. A revised view emerges from this of Beethoven's aesthetics and the musical meaning of his works. Rather than the conventional image of a heroic and tormented figure, Kinderman provides a more complex, more fully rounded account of the composer. Although Beethoven's deafness and his other personal crises are addressed, together with this ever-increasing commitment to his art, so too are the lighter aspects of his personality: his humor, his love of puns, his great delight in juxtaposing the exalted and the commonplace.
Author: Eric Selland
Publisher:
Published: 2015-05-13
Total Pages: 74
ISBN-13: 9784907359102
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBeethoven's Dream completes the cycle of hybrid works which includes "The Condition of Music" and "Arc Tangent." As in these other works, Selland extracts fragments from a working notebook, juxtaposing appropriated text with his own extemporaneous writing to produce these meditations on daily life, memory, desire and loss. The book contains two long works, "Sketches" and "Beethoven's Dream," where Selland's interests in music, philosophy, and painting - and the love of Beethoven that he shared with his father - merge with the workaday world of Silicon Valley's high-tech factories; the tension between dissatisfaction with that world and the desire to inhabit more completely life as it actually has become is a major concern. Both works explore the intersecting points of past and present, dream and reality, internal and external, where identity emerges "as a cluster of unstable boundaries," in language whose resonances and silences are haunted by the internal transformations of which they are the traces. Forrest Gander wrote of "Arc Tangent," Eric Selland's previous Isobar book: "For all its formal dazzle, this is a deeply expressive book, often tinged with sadness. The first part shifts between prose, haibun, line-broken normative statements, and more intensely elliptical and syntactically acrobatic lyric. The second section then draws together much of the fracture of the earlier poems into an assemblage of observations on loss, distance, age, and stretched connections. A stunningly accomplished book."
Author: Lewis Lockwood
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-10-26
Total Pages: 231
ISBN-13: 039324928X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“[Beethoven’s] music never grows old— and, enjoyed alongside Mr. Lockwood’s expert commentary, it sparkles with fresh magic.”—Wall Street Journal More than any other composer, Beethoven left to posterity a vast body of material that documents the early stages of almost everything he wrote. From this trove of sketchbooks, Lewis Lockwood draws us into the composer’s mind, unveiling a creative process of astonishing scope and originality. For musicians and nonmusicians alike, Beethoven’s symphonies stand at the summit of artistic achievement, loved today as they were two hundred years ago for their emotional cogency, variety, and unprecedented individuality. Beethoven labored to complete nine of them over his lifetime—a quarter of Mozart’s output and a tenth of Haydn’s—yet no musical works are more iconic, more indelibly stamped on the memory of anyone who has heard them. They are the products of an imagination that drove the composer to build out of the highest musical traditions of the past something startlingly new. Lockwood brings to bear a long career of studying the surviving sources that yield insight into Beethoven’s creative work, including concept sketches for symphonies that were never finished. From these, Lockwood offers fascinating revelations into the historical and biographical circumstances in which the symphonies were composed. In this compelling story of Beethoven’s singular ambition, Lockwood introduces readers to the symphonies as individual artworks, broadly tracing their genesis against the backdrop of political upheavals, concert life, and their relationship to his major works in other genres. From the first symphonies, written during his emerging deafness, to the monumental Ninth, Lockwood brings to life Beethoven’s lifelong passion to compose works of unsurpassed beauty.
