This work is unique in the field: the reader is introduced to music from several centuries and to five of the most popular plays in great detail (Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream). Other plays are discussed (1 & 2 Henry IV, Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice). It contains no musical notation and assumes no previous knowledge of music or of Shakespeare. It can be used in the classroom by a professor of English or of music. Suggested CD and video recordings are listed and keyed by page number to examples in the book.
Chop's main claim to fame is his 1904 study of Delius, the first on the composer to be published; it laid the foundations for future Delius biographers. Chop also produced several scholarly articles on Delius in 1907, and played a crucial role in ensuring his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet reached the stage of Berlin's Komische Oper that year. This volume brings together Chop's collected criticism of Delius in translation for the first time, and includes the original texts, a commentary and note on the author plus several previously unpublished letters. In his day he was widely respected as a musicologist, music journalist and newspaper editor. He published a number of compositions.
This edition includes commentaries on all movements (14 fugues and 4 canons), as well as suggested cadenzas for the Canone alla decima, a comparative study of nine available keyboard completions of the final fugue, and a discussion of the B-A-C-H motif as found in the Art of Fugue. The book is also a keyboard edition with a new approach to suggested pedal parts, which can be used by pianists and harpsichordists as well as organists.
As founder of the Experimental Music Studio at the U. of Illinois in 1958, American composer Lejaren Hiller was a pioneer in the area of computer assisted music composition. In this study, Bohn provides detailed analyses of several of Hiller's most important works, including the ILLIAC Suite and the Computer Cantata . Other topics include (for exam
This work proposes a solution to what is often considered the central problem facing Scarlatti scholarship, determining the chronological order of his keyboard sonatas. In the data-poor arena of Scarlatti research, this work, avoiding a primarily musicological or organological approach, analyzes large-scale patterns of musical characteristics over all (or parts) of a sonata sequence founded primarily on the Parma manuscript. As a result of an extensive application of this analytic approach to the sequence, this work notes that many sequence patterns seem to be chronologically structured, that none seem anti-chronological, and that a few mirror historical changes in the music of Scarlatti's time. These phenomena and other observations delimit something like a general history of Scarlatti's musical development enriched further by a variety of localized events. Among some 26 patterns observed in the sequence are a systematic rise in Scarlatti's use of the major mode, stepped increases in sonata compass that seem to accord with the sequential availability of larger keyboards, and both an increase in the rate at which the sonatas were combined into sets of two or three works and the use by Scarlatti of progressively complex techniques for doing so. This work also sketches a methodological background for the chronological proposal, including a discussion of why chronological order seems a superior interpretation of the sequence compared to the thought that it may have been reorganized, whether at random or by specific criteria. This study also discusses such subjects as the probable location of the 30 essercizi within the sonata sequence, the likely mis-location of several other sonatas, implications of chronological order from organology, a broadly dated window for the latter part of the sequence, the relationship between conservative and radical elements in Scarlatti's compositions, a late-sequence change in his approach to writing slow sonatas, and the interplay of structural integration and musical diversity in the later sonatas. It presents a new catalog of the sonatas that, while substantially congruent with Kirkpatrick's, proposes modifications to his ordering of the first hundred sonatas as well to a few other but smaller regions of the sequence.
This is a biography on the career of jazz guitarist Charlie Christian, who was raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma during the Depression era in the Southwestern region of the United States. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the details surrounding the events that shaped Christian's musical development, beginning with his early influences of 'Territory bands' and 'western swing' groups. The book documents Christian's performances in the urban area of Oklahoma City on Second Street, better known as 'Deep Deuce', as well as his travels with both Anna Mae Winburn and the Alphonso Trent Orchestra. Christian's discovery by producer John Hammond led to Christian's membership in the Benny Goodman Sextet in August of 1939. The book also chronicles Christian's most significant radio broadcasts, live performances, and recordings for Columbia Records, and also includes facts regarding Christian's pioneering guitar style during the early 1940's, as his performances at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem represented the connection between swing and bebop. The biography finally uncovers details into Christian's private life, and his untimely death during the apex of the Goodman era. ... ground-b Christian's contributions to swing and early bebop.
Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) was one of the first American-born composers to gain international notoriety. Relatively little scholarly research has been done that deals specifically with the choral music of Edward MacDowell. This study examines his original choral music for mixed and women's voices, and his editions for men's voices. The choruses are analyzed with a format that considers the importance of meter, tempo, rhythm, melody, harmony, tonality, form, musical/textual agreement, and expressive features. MacDowell was trained in Europe, and his music reflects the influence of late German Romanticism. An important aspect of this study was the preparation of editions of MacDowell's choral music updated to current publication standards. These editions are included in an appendix, as well as copies of the original publications for comparison. The most important scholarly contribution of this book is to make some of MacDowell's choral music available again. MacDowell's choral compositions have been virtually lost from the standard repertoire. All of the works examined were published between 1890-1910; they are currently out of print and unavailable to most choral musicians. choral scholar and musician.
Integrating contemporary research in the domains of analysis, stylistic analysis, semiotics, and approaches based on cognitive science, this study of 31 arias of Giovanni Legrenzi, a minor composer of the Baroque era, formulates 118 rules which describe the texts of the arias and their formal, melodic, and harmonic properties as well as the movement of the bass. The rules are then applied to a sample of melodies culled from ten centuries of Western music. A computer program that tests the validity of these rules is also described.
Works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, Strauss, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Webern are analyzed symphonically.
This edition of Haydn's Divertimento with variations for harpsichord four hands, violin and violone is intended to meet the performer's needs for an accurate score in order to make interpretive decisions, while maintaining the original text. For purposes of visual simplification, the violone part has been moved from the bottom staff and placed below the violin parts. A detailed introduction discusses the origin and characteristics of the score, which was found in a library in Padua. Includes bibliographical references. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.