The clouds drift across the bright blue sky--all except one. Little Cloud trails behind. He is busy changing shapes to become a fluffy sheep, a zooming airplane, and even a clown with a funny hat. Eric Carle's trademark collages will make every reader want to run outside and discover their very own little cloud.
At the height of the Enlightenment, four conservatories in Naples stood at the center of European composition. Maestros taught their students to compose with unprecedented swiftness and elegance using the partimento, an instructional tool derived from the basso continuo that encouraged improvisation as the path to musical fluency. Although the practice vanished in the early nineteenth century, its legacy lived on in the music of the next generation. In The Art of Partimento, performer and music-historian Giorgio Sanguinetti chronicles the history of this long-forgotten Neapolitan art. Sanguinetti has painstakingly reconstructed the oral tradition that accompanied these partimento manuscripts, now scattered throughout Europe. Beginning with the origins of the partimento in the circles of Corelli, Pasquini, and Alessandro Scarlatti in Rome and tracing it through the peak of the tradition in Naples, The Art of Partimento gives a glimpse into the daily life and work of an eighteenth century composer. The Art of the Partimento is also a complete practical handbook to reviving the tradition today. Step by step, Sanguinetti guides the aspiring composer through elementary realization to more advanced exercises in diminution, imitation, and motivic coherence. Based on the teachings of the original masters, Sanguinetti challenges the reader to become a part of history, providing a variety of original partimenti in a range of genres, forms, styles, and difficulty levels along the way and allowing the student to learn the art of the partimento for themselves at their own pace. As both history and practical guide, The Art of Partimento presents a new and innovative way of thinking about music theory. Sanguinetti's unique approach unites musicology and music theory with performance, which allows for a richer and deeper understanding than any one method alone, and offers students and scholars of composition and music theory the opportunity not only to understand the life of this fascinating tradition, but to participate in it as well.
With nearly 400 scores to his credit, Ennio Morricone is one of the most prolific and influential film composers working today. He has collaborated with many significant directors, and his scores for such films as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; Once Upon a Time in America; Days of Heaven; The Mission; The Untouchables; Malèna; and Cinema Paradiso leave moviegoers with the conviction that something special was achieved—a conviction shared by composers, scholars, and fans alike. In Composing for the Cinema: The Theory and Praxis of Music in Film, Morricone and musicologist Sergio Miceli present a series of lectures on the composition and analysis of film music. Adapted from several lectures and seminars, these lessons show how sound design can be analyzed and offer a variety of musical solutions to many different kinds of film. Though aimed at composers, Morricone’s expositions are easy to understand and fascinating even to those without any musical training. Drawing upon scores by himself and others, the composer also provides insight into his relationships with many of the directors with whom he has collaborated, including Sergio Leone, Giuseppe Tornatore, Franco Zeffirelli, Warren Beatty, Ridley Scott, Roland Joffé, the Taviani Brothers, and others. Translated and edited by Gillian B. Anderson, an orchestral conductor and musicologist, these lessons reveal Morricone’s passion about musical expression. Delivered in a conversational mode that is both comprehensible and interesting, this groundbreaking work intertwines analysis with practical details of film music composition. Aimed at a wide audience of composers, musicians, film historians, and fans, Composing for the Cinema contains a treasure trove of practical information and observations from a distinguished musicologist and one of the most accomplished composers on the international film scene.
Everybody in the bar had to drop a quarter in the jukebox or be shamed by “Momo” Villarreal. It wasn’t about the money, Mary Ann Villarreal’s grandmother insisted. It was about the music—more songs for all the patrons of the Pecan Lounge in Tivoli, Texas. But for Mary Ann, whose schoolbooks those quarters bought, the money didn’t hurt. When as an adult Villarreal began to wonder how the few recordings of women singers made their way into that jukebox, questions about the money seemed inseparable from those about the music. In Listening to Rosita, Villarreal seeks answers by pursuing the story of a small group of Tejana singers and entrepreneurs in Corpus Christi, Houston, and San Antonio—the “Texas Triangle”—during the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately she recovers a social world and cultural landscape in central south Texas where Mexican American women negotiated the shifting boundaries of race and economics to assert a public presence. Drawing on oral history, interviews, and insights from ethnic and gender studies, Listening to Rosita provides a counternarrative to previous research on la música tejana, which has focused almost solely on musicians or musical genres. Villarreal instead chronicles women’s roles and contributions to the music industry. In spotlighting the sixty-year singing career of San Antonian Rosita Fernández, the author pulls the curtain back on all the women whose names and stories have been glaringly absent from the ethnic and economic history of Tejana music and culture. In this oral history of the Tejana cantantes who performed and owned businesses in the Texas Triangle, Listening to Rosita shows how ethnic Mexican entrepreneurs developed a unique identity in striving for success in a society that demeaned and segregated them. In telling their story, this book supplies a critical chapter long missing from the history of the West.
Sky is a four-level course for you students. Flexible and easy to teach, Sky gives students the motivation to learn the confidence to succeed in English.
Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) was the greatest Italian painter of the eighteenth century, best known for his monumental frescoes and epic altarpieces. The scale of these paintings is immense, even overpowering. Yet some of Tiepolo's finest work can be found in the small oil sketches that he often made in preparation for these grand commissions. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Giambattista Tiepolo: Fifteen Oil Sketches brings together a group of the artist's oil sketches from the Courtauld Institute in London that spans his entire career and reveals the amazing confidence and fluidity with which he created these paintings. The unusual intimacy of these preparatory sketches-made directly on the canvas with no preliminary underdrawing-reveals a great artist's vigorous imagination at work. The exhibit will run from May 3, 2005, to September 4, 2005. An introductory essay situates these works within the context of eighteenth-century art and Tiepolo's life and career.
Originally published in French as "La Philosophie, une Ecole de la Liberte. Enseignement de la philosophie et apprentissage du philosopher : Etat des lieux et regards pour l'avenir." - This study is dedicated to all those who engaged themselves, with vigour and conviction, in the defence of the teaching of philosophy a fertile guarantor of liberty and autonomy. This publication is also dedicated to the young spirits of today, bound to become the active citizens of tomorrow.
A comprehensive new history of the Eastern Roman Empire based on the science of the human past. As modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome’s power but fear Rome’s ruin—will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive. In New Rome, Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional texts and well-known artifacts to offer a novel, scientifically minded interpretation of antiquity’s end. It turns out that the descent of Rome is inscribed not only in parchments but also in ice cores and DNA. From these and other sources, we learn that pollution and pandemics influenced the fate of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. During its final five centuries, the empire in the east survived devastation by natural disasters, the degradation of the human environment, and pathogens previously unknown to the empire’s densely populated, unsanitary cities. Despite the Plague of Justinian, regular “barbarian” invasions, a war with Persia, and the rise of Islam, the empire endured as a political entity. However, Greco-Roman civilization, a world of interconnected cities that had shared a common material culture for a millennium, did not. Politics, war, and religious strife drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Braiding the political history of the empire together with its urban, material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the Eastern Empire’s transformation into Byzantium.