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Author: Arman Schwartz
Publisher: Ad Ilissum
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9788822264473
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPuccini's operas rely to an unprecedented degree on unmediated sounds of the everyday world (birdcalls, musical boxes and so on). By exploring the origins and limits of the composer's realist acoustics Puccini's Soundscapes aims to rethink the shape of Puccini's career and reinterpret many of his major works.
Author: Arman Schwartz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-08-09
Total Pages: 361
ISBN-13: 1400884063
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGiacomo 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 A rich array of primary source material, including previously unpublished letters and documents, provides vital information on Puccini’s interactions with singers, conductors, and stage directors, and on the early reception of the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.
Author: Helen Hanson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-07-25
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 1838716211
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe technical crafts of sound in classical Hollywood cinema have, until recently, remained largely 'unsung' by histories of the studio era. Yet film sound – voice, music and sound effects – is a crucial aspect of film style and has been key to engaging and holding audiences since the transition to sound by Hollywood's major studios in 1929. This innovative new text restores sound technicians to Hollywood's creative history. Exploring a range of films from the early sound period (1931) through to the late studio period (1948), and drawing on a wide range of archival sources, the book reveals how Hollywood's sound designers worked and why they worked in the ways that they did. The book demonstrates how sound technicians developed conventions designed to tell stories through sound, placing them within the production cultures of studio era filmmaking, and uncovering a history of collective and collaborative creativity. In doing so, it traces the emergence of a body of highly skilled sound personnel, able to apply expert technical knowledge in the science of sound to the creation of cinematic soundscapes that are alive with mood and sensation.
Author: Alexandra Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2023-09-14
Total Pages: 517
ISBN-13: 1108875688
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExploring the many dimensions of Giacomo Puccini's historical legacy and significance, this book situates the much-loved opera composer within the cultural, social, political, and aesthetic contexts of his time and demonstrates how political concerns shape the way we approach and interpret his works in the present day.
Author: Suzanne Aspden
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-04-22
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 022659601X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSince its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house’s physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house’s spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house’s landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the “Old” world to the “New.” One of the book’s most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls’ schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera’s spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions.
Author: Karen Henson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-09-12
Total Pages: 245
ISBN-13: 1316760448
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first-century digital age. The authors pay particular attention to the soprano in her larger than life form, as the 'diva', and they consider how her voice and allure have been created by technologies and media including stagecraft and theatrical lighting, journalism, the telephone, sound recording, and visual media from the painted portrait to the high definition simulcast. In doing so, the authors experiment with new approaches to the female singer, to opera in the modern - and post-modern - eras, and to the often controversial subject of opera's involvement with technology and technological innovation.
Author: Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2023-12-05
Total Pages: 263
ISBN-13: 0520393481
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFanfare for a City invites us to listen to the sounds of Paris during the Second Empire (1852–1870), a regime that oversaw dramatic social change in the French capital. By exploring the sonic worlds of exhibitions, cafés, streets, and markets, Jacek Blaszkiewicz shows how the city's musical life shaped urban narratives about le nouveau Paris: a metropolis at a crossroads between its classical, Roman past and its capitalist, imperial future. At the heart of the narrative is "Baron" Haussmann, the engineer of imperial urbanism and the inspiration for a range of musical responses to modernity, from the enthusiastic to the nostalgic. Drawing on theoretical approaches from historical musicology, urban sociology, and sound studies to shed light on newly surfaced archival material, Fanfare for a City argues that urbanism was a driving force in how nineteenth-century music was produced, performed, and policed.
Author: Christopher Chowrimootoo
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2018-10-09
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 0520970705
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.
Author: Emily Richmond Pollock
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 0190063734
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'Opera After the Zero Hour' argues that newly composed opera in West Germany after World War II was a site for the renegotiation of musical traditions during an era in which tradition had become politically fraught.
Author: Lorna Fitzsimmons
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-07-08
Total Pages: 617
ISBN-13: 0190694521
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSince its emergence in sixteenth-century Germany, the magician Faust's quest has become one of the most profound themes in Western history. Though variants are found across all media, few adaptations have met with greater acclaim than in music. Bringing together more than two dozen authors in a foundational volume, The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music testifies to the spectacular impact the Faust theme has exerted over the centuries. The Handbook's three-part organization enables readers to follow the evolution of Faust in music across time and stylistic periods. Part I explores symphonic, choral, chamber, and solo Faust works by composers from Beethoven to Schnittke. Part II discusses the range of Faustian operas, and Part III examines Faust's presence in ballet and musical theater. Illustrating the interdisciplinary relationships between music and literature and the fascinating tapestry of intertextual relationships among the works of Faustian music themselves, the volume suggests that rather than merely retelling the story of Faust, these musical compositions contribute significant insights on the tale and its unrivalled cultural impact.
