Nineteenth Century Chamber Music proceeds chronologically by composer, beginning with the majestic works of Beethoven, and continuing through Schubert, Spohr and Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, the French composers, Smetana and Dvorák, and the end-of-the-century pre-modernists. Each chapter is written by a noted authority in the field. The book serves as a general introduction to Romantic chamber music, and would be ideal for a seminar course on the subject or as an adjunct text for Introduction to Romantic Music courses. Plus, musicologists and students of 19th century music will find this to be an invaluable resource.
Combining 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.
Revised edition: Adolf Busch (1891-1952) was an all-round musician and a moral beacon in troubled times. As first violin of the Busch String Quartet, founded in 1912, he was the greatest quartet-player of the last century and he led a famous conductorless orchestra, the Busch Chamber Players. He was also the busiest solo violinist of the inter-War years, regularly performing major concertos with such conductors as Nikisch, Toscanini, Weingartner, Walter, Furtwängler, Boult, Wood, Barbirolli and his elder brother Fritz. He was, moreover, an outstanding composer whose works enjoyed performances in Germany and further afield. Frequently he appeared as soloist and composer in the same concert. His courageous decision to boycott his native country from April 1933 - despite Hitler's efforts to persuade 'our German violinist' to return - drastically reduced his income and damaged his career as soloist and composer. In 1938, because of Mussolini's race laws, he imposed a similar boycott on Italy, where he was wildly popular. The following year he emigrated with his quartet colleagues to the United States, where he was not fully appreciated, although he had many successes with a new chamber orchestra and founded the Marlboro summer school. This biography, based on more than thirty years' research, examines Busch's exemplary behaviour in the context of a tumultuous era. Volume One traces his progress from childhood in Westphalia, through friendships with Fritz Steinbach, Donald Tovey and Max Reger, early triumphs in Berlin, London and Vienna, years of maturity and fulfilment, rejection of Hitler's Germany and close bonds with British musicians and concert-goers in the 1930s. It ends just before his move into American exile. Volume Two follows Busch through the Second World War, his return to give concerts in Europe in the late 1940s and his founding of the Marlboro summer school in Vermont shortly before his untimely death. A series of appendices consider Busch as violinist, violist and teacher, his taste and repertoire, his interpretations, his colleagues, his celebrated recordings and his compositions.
Bálint András Varga makes available here for the first time in English nineteen extended interviews with some of the most notable figures in music from the past fifty years, as well as lively snippets from interviews Varga conducted with thirteen other equally renowned musicians. Of special interest is an interview with the reclusive composer György Kurtág, here published for the first time in any language. From Boulanger to Stockhausen concludes with a poignant memoir by Varga of his experiences growing up in a Jewish family in Hungary during World War II and the early years of Communist rule. Varga's recollections also include details about his many interviews with some of these remarkable musicians, and about his employment at the Hungarian state radio station and then in the music-publishing industry, which brought him to, among other places, Vienna, where he now lives [Publisher description].
When actors transform themselves on stage, they must escape the confines of their controlled behaviors and become “connected” and emotionally engaged in their movement. When connected, movement becomes an uncensored expression of internal creative impulses. David Barker brings 45 years of acting and teaching experience to Connected Motion with one clear goal: training actors to move better. His process-oriented, improvisation-based approach has proven successful both on the stage and in the studio working with students. He presents concrete exercises and improvisations rather than theory and complex concepts. Instructors will find his ideas easy to apply no matter what movement system they use.
Intended for the music student, the professional musician, and the music lover, Chamber Music: An Essential History covers repertoire from the Renaissance to the present, crossing genres to include string quartets, piano trios, clarinet quintets, and other groupings. Mark A. Radice gives a thorough overview and history of this long-established and beloved genre, typically performed by groups of a size to fit into spaces such as homes or churches and tending originally toward the string and wind instruments rather than percussion. Radice begins with chamber music's earliest expressions in the seventeenth century, discusses its most common elements in terms of instruments and compositional style, and then investigates how those elements play out across several centuries of composers- among them Mozart, Bach, Haydn, and Brahms- and national interpretations of chamber music. While Chamber Music: An Essential History is intended largely as a textbook, it will also find an audience as a companion volume for musicologists and fans of classical music, who may be interested in the background to a familiar and important genre.
