The Search for the Absolute
The Search for the Absolute

Author: Jeffrey H. Williams

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-06-01

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 3031020812

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History and archaeology tell us that when our far ancestors began to settle in localized groups, they codified their lives and experiences, and formed a collective for mutual support. This proto-civilization would have arisen from each individual’s questions about the world, and their attempt to understand themselves and their place in the world. These groups, or tribes, evolved rules of conduct to facilitate communal living, and made a calendar for the group’s celebration of harvests, and other events upon which the group was utterly dependent. This process of social evolution is the origin of religion, and of a magical way of looking at Nature. Eventually, this developing worldview was also the origin of science, which is our investigation of Nature to understand something of what is happening around us, and to use this knowledge to ensure our survival in a violent, indifferent Universe. After all, science and religion seek to answer the same question: Why and how is the natural world the way it is? This book seeks to show how science evolved from religion and magic, in response to a need to understand Nature.

In Search of Wagner
In Search of Wagner

Author: Theodor Adorno

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2009-06-09

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1844673448

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Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Europe’s most controversial composer explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis. Measuring key elements of Wagner’s oeuvre with patent musical dexterity, Adorno sheds light on a nineteenth-century bourgeois figure whose operas betray the social gestures and high-culture fantasies that helped plant the seeds of the modern Culture Industry. A foreword by Slavoj Žižek situates Adorno’s reflections within present debates over Wagner’s anti-Semitism and the moral status of his work, proving why this book remains one of the most important character studies of the twentieth century.

Master Classes with Menahem Pressler
Master Classes with Menahem Pressler

Author: William Brown

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-09-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0253042941

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Menahem Pressler is a world-renowned piano soloist, master class teacher, and member of the acclaimed Beaux Arts Trio. In this companion to his first book, Menahem Pressler: Artistry in Piano Teaching, Pressler's former student William Brown brings together Pressler's teachings on an additional 37 piano masterworks by Johann Sebastian Bach, Samuel Barber, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy, George Frideric Handel, Franz Joseph Haydn, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Maurice Ravel, Franz Schubert, and Robert Schumann. With over 200 musical examples and measure-by-measure lessons on masterpieces of the piano repertoire as well as instructions on phrasing, fingering, imagery, dynamic contrasts, pianistic touches, articulation, and practice drills, pianists of all levels will benefit from Pressler's expertise.

Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction
Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction

Author: Arved Mark Ashby

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0520264797

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"Arved Ashby writes with a keen sense of the historical processes, ironies, and reversals that seem to characterize the ways that musicologists think about, and contemporary listeners experience, works and performance. This book is a major contribution to the burgeoning body of critical musicological literature on recordings; anybody interested in that field, or in the question of the 'artwork' in the contemporary world, needs to read this book--which fortunately, is a great pleasure to do."--Adam Krims, author of Music and Urban Geography "The relationship between classical music and recording is strangely conflicted: on the one hand recorded music is the perfect realization of aesthetic autonomy, on the other hand it commodifies music and transforms its role within society. Ashby's book offers a penetrating analysis of these cultural conflicts, showing how technological developments from the phonogram to the mp3 have changed our basic sense of what music is as well as the ways in which we consume it. What emerges from this sustained study of the relationship between technology and values is a view of classical musical culture that is both richer and truer to life."--Nicholas Cook, author of A Guide to Musical Analysis "Lively and persuasive. Ashby has the enviable, rare ability to lead the reader comfortably through highly complex material without oversimplifying. This is a must-read for composers, music theorists, performers, musicologists, critics, and anyone with an interest in classical music beyond the elementary level."--Jonathan Dunsby, author of Performing Music

Musicophilia
Musicophilia

Author: Oliver Sacks

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2010-02-05

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 0307373495

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What goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music? What is it about music, what gives it such peculiar power over us, power delectable and beneficent for the most part, but also capable of uncontrollable and sometimes destructive force? Music has no concepts, it lacks images; it has no power of representation, it has no relation to the world. And yet it is evident in all of us–we tap our feet, we keep time, hum, sing, conduct music, mirror the melodic contours and feelings of what we hear in our movements and expressions. In this book, Oliver Sacks explores the power music wields over us–a power that sometimes we control and at other times don’t. He explores, in his inimitable fashion, how it can provide access to otherwise unreachable emotional states, how it can revivify neurological avenues that have been frozen, evoke memories of earlier, lost events or states or bring those with neurological disorders back to a time when the world was much richer. This is a book that explores, like no other, the myriad dimensions of our experience of and with music.

Making Difficult Decisions
Making Difficult Decisions

Author: Peter J. A. Shaw

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-02-04

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1907293868

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You are faced with so many difficult decisions. Often your decision making seems random. It can be swayed by different situations and emotions. You need to be more rigorous in the way you make decisions and yet you have very little time to do so. Experience from others who have made tough decisions and a framework to help you do so would be invaluable. The courage to make decisions is sometimes a bit elusive. It is difficult to find the calmness to be able to make and live with those decisions. There is so much that can be learned from the experience of others. After working through this book you will have the courage of your convictions and the ability to make difficult decisions count. The book sets out a framework for making difficult decisions that has been tried and tested. It has been used successfully in one-to-one coaching with senior leaders in both the public, private and voluntary sectors. The framework is built on the following strands: Clarity; Conviction; Courage; and Communication.

Martinů's Subliminal States
Martinů's Subliminal States

Author: Bohuslav Martinů

Publisher: Eastman Studies in Music

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1580465579

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The composer's diaries, translated for the first time, with commentary on his distinctive musical aesthetics and his relationship to artistic cross-currents in Czechoslovakia, France, and America.

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.

Cosega Search
Cosega Search

Author: Brandt Legg

Publisher: Laughing Rain

Published:

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1935070045

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He had been looking for it his whole life. When he finally found it, it made no sense. Now everyone wants it. Nothing will ever be the same again. Ripley Gaines, a brilliant archeologist, has spent his life searching for an elusive artifact to prove his controversial theory. What he finds shocks even him. The discovery rewrites human history and promises to change the planet’s future. It has to be suppressed. The most powerful forces in the world align against him, and a deadly competition for the artifact ensues. Capturing Gaines is not enough; he, and everyone who has seen the artifact, must be killed. His only hope, is to stay alive long enough to decode the Cosega Sequence. Dig far enough into the past . . . you may just discover the future.