Sviatoslav Richter

Sviatoslav Richter

Author: Bruno Monsaingeon

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2002-09-15

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0691095493

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"Sviatoslav Richter was a dazzling performer but an intensely private man. Though world famous and revered by classical music lovers everywhere, he guarded himself and his thoughts as carefully as his talent. Fascinated, author and filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon tried vainly for years to interview the enigmatic pianist. Richter eventually yielded, granting Monsaingeon hours of taped conversation, unlimited access to his diaries and notebooks, and, ultimately his friendship. This book is the product of that friendship. It offers readers the sizable pleasure of lingering in the thoughts and words of one of the most important pianists of the twentieth century. Sviatoslav Richter belongs on the shelves of everyone with a classical music collection and will also appeal to lovers of autobiography and admirers of Russian musical culture." -- Back cover


The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet

The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet

Author: Robin Stowell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-11-13

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9780521000420

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This Companion offers a concise and authoritative survey of the string quartet by eleven chamber music specialists. Its fifteen carefully structured chapters provide coverage of a stimulating range of perspectives previously unavailable in one volume. It focuses on four main areas: the social and musical background to the quartet's development; the most celebrated ensembles; string quartet playing, including aspects of contemporary and historical performing practice; and the mainstream repertory, including significant 'mixed ensemble' compositions involving string quartet. Various musical and pictorial illustrations and informative appendixes, including a chronology of the most significant works, complete this indispensable guide. Written for all string quartet enthusiasts, this Companion will enrich readers' understanding of the history of the genre, the context and significance of quartets as cultural phenomena, and the musical, technical and interpretative problems of chamber music performance. It will also enhance their experience of listening to quartets in performance and on recordings.


Chamber Music

Chamber Music

Author: James M. Keller

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 0195382536

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Oxford's highly successful listener's guides--The Symphony, The Concerto, and Choral Masterworks--have been widely praised for their blend of captivating biography, crystal clear musical analysis, and delightful humor. Now James Keller follows these greatly admired volumes with Chamber Music. Approaching the tradition of chamber music with knowledge and passion, Keller here serves as the often-opinionated but always genial guide to 192 essential works by 56 composers, providing illuminating essays on what makes each piece distinctive and admirable. Keller spans the history of this intimate genre of music, from key works of the Baroque through the emotionally stirring "golden age" of the Classical and Romantic composers, to modern masterpieces rich in political, psychological, and sometimes comical overtones. For each piece, from Bach through to contemporary figures like George Crumb and Steve Reich, the author includes an astute musical analysis that casual music lovers can easily appreciate yet that more experienced listeners will find enriching. Keller shares the colorful, often surprising stories behind the compositions while revealing the delights of an art form once described by Goethe as the musical equivalent of "thoughtful people conversing."


A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music

A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music

Author: Robert S. Hatten

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2018-09-06

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0253038014

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In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of composers and performers, whose intentional actions either create music as notated or manifest music as significant sound, virtual agency is inferred from the implied actions of those sounds, as they move and reveal tendencies within music-stylistic contexts. From our most basic attributions of sources for perceived energies in music, to the highest realm of our engagement with musical subjectivity, Hatten explains how virtual agents arose as distinct from actual ones, how unspecified actants can take on characteristics of (virtual) human agents, and how virtual agents assume various actorial roles. Along the way, Hatten demonstrates some of the musical means by which composers and performers from different historical eras have staged and projected various levels of virtual agency, engaging listeners imaginatively and interactively within the expressive realms of their virtual and fictional musical worlds.


The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Author: Susan Wollenberg

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1351541579

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Since the publication of The London Pianoforte School (ed. Nicholas Temperley) twenty years ago, research has proliferated in the area of music for the piano during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into developments in the musical life of London, for a time the centre of piano manufacturing, publishing and performance. But none has focused on the piano exclusively within Britain. The eleven chapters in this volume explore major issues surrounding the instrument, its performers and music within an expanded geographical context created by the spread of the instrument and the growth of concert touring. Topics covered include: the piano trade and how piano manufacturing affected a major provincial town; the reception of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and Clementi's Gradus ad Parnassum during the nineteenth century; the shift from composer-pianists to pianist-interpreters in the first half of the century that triggered crucial changes in piano performance and concert structure; the growth of musical life in the peripheries outside major musical centres; the pianist as advocate for contemporary composers as well as for historical repertory; the status of British pianists both in relation to foreigners on tour in Britain and as welcomed star performers in outposts of the Empire; marketing forces that had an impact on piano sales, concerts and piano careers; leading virtuosos, writers and critics; the important role played by women pianists and the development of the recording industry, bringing the volume into the early twentieth century.


Decentering Music

Decentering Music

Author: Kevin Korsyn

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2004-12-02

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0190292792

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As a work of cultural criticism that recalls the concerns of Foucault, Hayden White, Zizek, and others Decentering Music examines the struggle for the authority to speak about music at a time when the humanities are in crisis. By linking the institutions that support musical research, including professional associations and universities, to complex historical changes such as globalization and the commodification of knowledge, Korsyn undertakes a critique of musical scholarship as an institutional discourse, while contributing to a general theory of disciplinary structures that goes beyond the limits of any single field. In asking a number of fundamental questions about the models through which disciplinary objects in music are constructed, Korsyn suggests unexpected relationships between works of musical scholarship and the cultural networks in which they participate. Thus David Lewin's theory of musical perceptions is compared to Richard Rorty's concept of the "liberal ironist," Susan McClary's feminist narrative of music history is juxtaposed with T.S. Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility," and Steven Feld's work in recording the music of the Kaluli people is compared to the treatment of ambient sound in contemporary cinema. Developing a framework for interpretation in dialogue with a number of poststructuralist writers, Korsyn goes far beyond applying their thought to the analysis of music; by showing the cultural dilemmas to which their work responds, Korsyn suggests how musical research already participates in these ideas. Rather than impose any single method, Decentering Music empowers readers to choose for themselves by interrogating their own values and ideological commitments, exploring the enabling conditions for statements about music. By demonstrating the complicity of opposing positions and challenging readers to reexamine their own values, Decentering Music will surely provoke debate, while appealing to readers in a variety of fields, and to anyone concerned about the crisis in the humanities.


Fanny Hensel

Fanny Hensel

Author: R. Larry Todd

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0195180801

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Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) was an extraordinary musician and astute observer of European culture. Previously she was known mainly as the granddaughter of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the sister of composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, yet Hensel is now recognized as the leading woman composer of the nineteenth century. She produced well over four hundred compositions and excelled in short, lyrical piano pieces and songs of epigrammatic intensity, but the expressive range of her art also accommodated challenging virtuoso piano and chamber works, orchestral music, and cantatas written in imitation of J.S. Bach. Her gender and position in society restricted her from opportunities afforded her brother, however, who himself quickly rose to an international career of the first rank. Hensel's own sphere of influence revolved around her Berlin residence, where she directed concerts that attracted such celebrities as Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann, Clara Novello, and her brother Felix. In this semi-public space, shared with exclusive audiences drawn from the elite of Berlin society, Hensel found her own voice as pianist, conductor and composer. For much of her life, she composed for her own pleasure, and her brother ranked her songs among the very best examples of the genre. Felix silently incorporated several of the songs into his own early publications, while a few other songs were published anonymously. Hensel began releasing her works under her own name in 1847, only to die of a stroke as the first reviews of her music began to appear. Tragically, the vast majority of her music was forgotten for a century and a half before its recent rediscovery. Renowned Mendelssohn scholar R. Larry Todd now offers a compelling, full account of Hensel's life and music, her extraordinary relationship with her brother, her position in one of Berlin's most eminent families, and her courageous struggle to define her own public voice as a composer [Publisher description].