National Music and Other Essays

National Music and Other Essays

Author: Ralph Vaughan Williams

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13:

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Written by one of the greatest of English composers, this revised edition of Ralph Vaughan Williams's essays features a new introduction by Michael Kennedy plus several new essays.


Freedom and the Arts

Freedom and the Arts

Author: Charles Rosen

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-05-21

Total Pages: 647

ISBN-13: 0674069897

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Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work. Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state. When twentieth-century scholars transformed Mozart's bland, idealized nineteenth-century image into that of a modern revolutionary expressionist, they paradoxically restored the reputation he had among his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart became once again a complex innovator, challenging to perform and to understand. Drawing on a variety of critical methods, Rosen maintains that listening or reading with intensity-for pleasure-is the one activity indispensable for full appreciation. It allows us to experience multiple possibilities in literature and music, and to avoid recognizing only the revolutionary elements of artistic production. By reviving the sense that works of art have intrinsic merits that bring pleasure, we justify their continuing existence.


Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

Author: Pauline Fairclough

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-17

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1317005791

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When considering the role music played in the major totalitarian regimes of the century it is music's usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. But as a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship both between art music and politicised mass culture, and between entertainment and propaganda. Nationality, self/other, power and ideology are the dominant themes of this book, whilst key topics include: music in totalitarian regimes; music as propaganda; music and national identity; émigré communities and composers; music's role in shaping identities of 'self' and 'other' and music as both resistance to and instrument of oppression. Taking the contributions together it becomes clear that shared experiences such as war, dictatorship, colonialism, exile and emigration produced different, yet clearly inter-related musical consequences.


A Burst of Light

A Burst of Light

Author: Audre Lorde

Publisher: Courier Dover Publications

Published: 2017-09-13

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 0486818993

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Moving, incisive, and enduringly relevant writings by the African-American poet and feminist include her thoughts on the radical implications of self-care and living with cancer as well as essays on racism, lesbian culture, and political activism.


Seeking the Significance of Music Education

Seeking the Significance of Music Education

Author: Bennett Reimer

Publisher: R&L Education

Published: 2009-06-16

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1607092379

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Noted music educator Bennett Reimer has selected 24 of his previously published articles from a variety of professional journals spanning the past 50 years. During that time, he's tackled: -generating core values for the field of music education; -the core in larger societal and educational contexts; -what to teach and how to teach it effectively; -how we need to educate our teachers; -the role of research in our profession; and -how to improve our future status. Reimer precedes each essay with background reflections and his position, both professional and personal, on effectively addressing the issue at hand. The opening 'Letter to the Reader' presents a valuable overview based on his deeply grounded viewpoint. The entire music education profession will benefit from Reimer's perspective on past, present, and future concerns central to the functioning of music education in Seeking the Significance of Music Education: Essays and Reflections.


Essays in Honor of Steven Paul Scher and on Cultural Identity and the Musical Stage

Essays in Honor of Steven Paul Scher and on Cultural Identity and the Musical Stage

Author: Suzanne M. Lodato

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9789042010031

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The eighteen interdisciplinary essays in this volume were presented in 2001 in Sydney, Australia, at the Third International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was sponsored by The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The conference celebrated the sixty-fifth birthday of Steven Paul Scher, arguably the central figure in word and music studies during the last thirty-five years. The first section of this volume comprises ten articles that discuss, or are methodologically based upon, Scher's many analyses of and critical commentaries on the field, particularly on interrelationships between words and music. The authors cover such topics as semiotics, intermediality, hermeneutics, the de-essentialization of the arts, and the works of a wide range of literary figures and composers that include Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, T. S. Eliot, Goethe, Hölderlin, Mann, Britten, Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner. The second section consists of a second set of papers presented at the conference that are devoted to a different area of word and music studies: cultural identity and the musical stage. Eight scholars investigate - and often problematize - widespread assumptions regarding 'national' and 'cultural' music, language, plots, and production values in musical stage works. Topics include the National Socialists' construction of German national identity; reception-based examinations of cultural identity and various "national" opera styles; and the means by which composers, librettists, and lyricists have attempted to establish national or cultural identity through their stage works.


Perspectives on American Music since 1950

Perspectives on American Music since 1950

Author: James R. Heintze

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-01-26

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 1135599416

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As the century comes to a close, composition of music in the United States has reached little consensus in terms of style, techniques, or schools. In fourteen original articles, the contributors to this volume explore the broad range and diversity of post-World War II musical culture. Classical and jazz idioms are both covered, as is the broad history of electronic music in the United States.


The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise

Author: Alex Ross

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2007-10-16

Total Pages: 706

ISBN-13: 1429932880

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Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.


The Country of First Boys and Other Essays

The Country of First Boys and Other Essays

Author: Amartya Sen

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780199453252

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Time and again Amartya Sen, one of the polymaths of our times, has stirred our thoughts and world-views through his writings and speeches. Intrigued by the questions of social justice and welfare, he argues, in this work, some of the fundamental issues--poverty, hunger, education, globalization, freedom of speech, injustice, inequality, exclusion, exploitation--that we negotiate with in our day to day lives. With a passion and conviction masked by a gently persuasive style and characterised by an undogmatic engagement with differing points of view, Sen's The Country of First Boys asserts that public policy should swing sharply towards the poor, the illiterate, and those suffering from ill health and malnourishment. Written in non-technical and easy to understand language while at the same time relying on rigorous intellectual and academic analysis, this volume would open a window to the ideas of an internationally renowned Nobel laureate to a wide spectrum of readers.