The English Virtuoso

The English Virtuoso

Author: Craig A. Hanson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0226315878

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This study aims to overturn 20th-century criticism that cast the English virtuosi of the 17th and early 18th centuries as misguided dabblers, arguing that they were erudite individuals with solid grounding in the classics, deep appreciation for the arts and sincere curiosity about the natural world.


The Virtuoso Flute-Player

The Virtuoso Flute-Player

Author: Johann George Tromlitz

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1991-10-03

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780521399777

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This is an English translation of Tutor for Playing the Flute (1791) by Johann George Tromlitz. The most explicit of the eighteenth-century tutors for flute-playing, it now serves as a record of instrumental practice as well as a useful guide to the performance of German classical music. The Tutor covers all aspects of flute playing, including intonation, articulation, flute maintenance, posture and breathing, dynamics, ornaments, musical style, cadenzas, and the construction of the flute. This edition will be an indispensable manual for players of baroque and modern flutes, and the information it contains will be invaluable for all musicians, students, and specialists interested in the historically informed performance of German classical music. The text is annotated with critical notes and all of the original music examples are newly printed in modern notation. The volume also contains a fingering chart and a historical introduction.


Virtuoso

Virtuoso

Author: Grace Burrowes

Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Published: 2011-11

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 1402245718

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Starred review for The Soldier: "Captivating. . .Burrowes' sensual love story is intelligent and tender." Publishers Weekly (starred review) A genius with a terrible loss. . . Gifted pianist Valentine Windham, youngest son of the Duke of Moreland, has little interest in his father's obsession to see his sons married, and instead pours passion into his music. But when Val loses his music, he flees to the country, alone and tormented by what has been robbed from him. A widow with a heartbreaking secret. . . Grieving Ellen Markham has hidden herself away, looking for safety in solitude. Her curious new neighbor offers a kindred lonely soul whose desperation is matched only by his desire, but Ellen's devastating secret could be the one thing that destroys them both. Together they'll find there's no rescue from the past, but sometimes losing everything can help you find what you need most. Praise for The Heir: "Sweet, sexy, tender romance between two characters so vibrant they seem to leap off the page." Meredith Duran, author of Wicked Becomes You "Burrowes' enchanting romance charms from the beginning!" RT Book Reviews, 4 starts "Refreshing. . .a luminous and graceful erotic Regency." Publishers Weekly


Virtuoso

Virtuoso

Author: Yelena Moskovich

Publisher: Serpent's Tail

Published: 2019-01-17

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1782834346

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Longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2020 'A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the cruel absurdity of Antonin Artaud, the fierce candour of Anaïs Nin, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song ... Moskovich writes sentences that lilt and slink, her plots developing as a slow seduction and then clouding like a smoke-filled room.' Guardian Zorka. She had eyebrows like her name. 1980s Prague. For Jana, childhood means ration queues and the smell of boiled potatoes on the grey winter air. But just before Jana's seventh birthday, a new family moves in to their building: a bird-eyed mamka in a fox-fur coat, a stubble-faced papka - and a raven-haired girl named Zorka. As the first cracks begin to appear in the communist regime, Zorka teaches Jana to look beyond their building, beyond Prague, beyond Czechoslovakia ... and then, Zorka just disappears. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris for a Czech medical supply company, hasn't seen her in a decade. As Jana and Zorka's stories slowly circle across the surreal fluctuations of the past and present, the streets of 1980s Prague, the suburbs of 1990s Wisconsin and the lesbian bars of present-day Paris, they lead inexorably to a mysterious door on the Rue de Prague ... Written with the dramatic tension of Euripidean tragedy and the dreamlike quality of a David Lynch film, Virtuoso is an audacious, mesmerising novel of love in the post-communist diaspora.


The Virtuoso

The Virtuoso

Author: Thomas Shadwell

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1966-01-01

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9780803253681

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First published in 1676, The Virtuoso set a standard for theatrical satire. It was the most extensive dramatic treatment of modern science since Jonson's The Alchemist and took as its target no less than the Royal Society of London. Shadwell's barbs hit their targets often and cleanly. In 1689 he became Poet Laureate of England, a position he held until his death in 1692. The virtuoso of the title is Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, who like many after him confuses the extent of a collection with the depth of a science. Sir Gimcrack is fascinated by the geography of the moon, the worlds in his microscope, and the possibilities of human flight. More seriously and?for Shadwell's audience?more comically, his obsession with his arrays of worms and spiders proceeds at the expense of his wife and two beautiful nieces. The play also introduces Sir Formal Trifle, a pedantic ciceronian orator and coxcomb. His character established thereafter the theatrical type of the know-it-all blowhard. Famous for its wit and high-speed changes, The Virtuoso is also a display of the prestige of modern science and the pomposity of its ameteurs.


The Virtuoso as Subject

The Virtuoso as Subject

Author: Zarko Cvejić

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-06-22

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1443896829

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This book offers a novel interpretation of the sudden and steep decline of instrumental virtuosity in its critical reception between c. 1815 and c. 1850, documenting it with a large number of examples from Europe’s leading music periodicals at the time. The increasingly hostile critical reception of instrumental virtuosity during this period is interpreted from the perspective of contemporary aesthetics and philosophical conceptions of human subjectivity; the book’s main thesis is that virtuosity qua irreducibly bodily performance generated so much hostility because it was deemed incompatible with, and even threatening to, the new Romantic philosophical conception of music as a radically disembodied, abstract, autonomous art and, moreover, a symbol or model – if only a utopian one – of a similarly autonomous and free human subject, whose freedom and autonomy seemed increasingly untenable in the economic and political context of post-Napoleonic Europe. That is why music, newly reconceived as radically abstract and autonomous, plays such an important part in the philosophy of early German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, with their growing misgivings about the very possibility of human freedom, and not so much in the preceding generation of thinkers, such as Kant and Hegel, who still believed in the (transcendentally) free subject of the Enlightenment. For the early German Romantics, music becomes a model of human freedom, if freedom could exist. By contrast, virtuosity, irredeemably moored in the perishable human body, ephemeral, and beholden to such base motives as making money and gaining fame, is not only incompatible with music thus conceived, but also threatens to expose it as an illusion, in other words, as irreducibly corporeal, and, by extension, the human subject it was meant to symbolise as likewise an illusion. Only with that in mind, may we begin to understand the hostility of some early to mid-19th-century critics to instrumental virtuosity, which sometimes reached truly bizarre proportions. In order to accomplish this, the book looks at contemporary aesthetics and philosophy, the contemporary reception of virtuosity in performance and composition, and the impact of 19th-century gender ideology on the reception of some leading virtuosi, male and female alike.


Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science

Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science

Author: Richard Yeo

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-03-01

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 022610673X

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In Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science, Richard Yeo interprets a relatively unexplored set of primary archival sources: the notes and notebooks of some of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution. Notebooks were important to several key members of the Royal Society of London, including Robert Boyle, John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, John Locke, and others, who drew on Renaissance humanist techniques of excerpting from texts to build storehouses of proverbs, maxims, quotations, and other material in personal notebooks, or commonplace books. Yeo shows that these men appreciated the value of their own notes both as powerful tools for personal recollection, and, following Francis Bacon, as a system of precise record keeping from which they could retrieve large quantities of detailed information for collaboration. The virtuosi of the seventeenth century were also able to reach beyond Bacon and the humanists, drawing inspiration from the ancient Hippocratic medical tradition and its emphasis on the gradual accumulation of information over time. By reflecting on the interaction of memory, notebooks, and other records, Yeo argues, the English virtuosi shaped an ethos of long-term empirical scientific inquiry.


An American Virtuoso on the World Stage

An American Virtuoso on the World Stage

Author: Donna Staley Kline

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13:

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Through astonishing force of will and exertion of talent, a young Lucy Hickenlooper of South Texas reinvented herself as Olga Samaroff, international virtuoso concert pianist and one of the most influential musicians during the first half of the twentieth century, when music was still dominated by men and Old World prejudices. For those unfamiliar with her career, Olga Samaroff Stokowski may be known primarily for her tumultuous marriage to renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski. She was much more than a conductor's wife, however. Donna Staley Kline's biography reveals Olga as the driving and shaping force behind her husband's genius and offers the first considered look at a pioneering woman whose own career was marked by improbable firsts. She was the first American woman to win entrance into the piano class at Paris's prestigious Conservatoire Nationale de Musique; the first American female pianist to make her concert debut at Carnegie Hall, as well as to perform all thirty-two Beethoven sonatas; the first woman to serve as the music critic for a New York daily newspaper; the first American-born member of the piano faculty at the Juilliard School of Music; and among the first to make recordings and break ground in radio and television broadcasting. Carefully researched and drawing on interviews with her contemporaries and students, as well as on heretofore neglected letters and documents, An American Virtuoso on the World Stage will appeal to both music lovers and scholars in the field who seek a lively and penetrating look at one of American music's most important women. Olga's life story is of an American progressive who sought innovation and excellence and refused to yield to themusical establishment - and it is a story that has waited to be told.


Crescendo of the Virtuoso

Crescendo of the Virtuoso

Author: Paul Metzner

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-07-26

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0520377400

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During the Age of Revolution, Paris came alive with wildly popular virtuoso performances. Whether the performers were musicians or chefs, chess players or detectives, these virtuosos transformed their technical skills into dramatic spectacles, presenting the marvelous and the outré for spellbound audiences. Who these characters were, how they attained their fame, and why Paris became the focal point of their activities is the subject of Paul Metzner's absorbing study. Covering the years 1775 to 1850, Metzner describes the careers of a handful of virtuosos: chess masters who played several games at once; a chef who sculpted hundreds of four-foot-tall architectural fantasies in sugar; the first police detective, whose memoirs inspired the invention of the detective story; a violinist who played whole pieces on a single string. He examines these virtuosos as a group in the context of the society that was then the capital of Western civilization. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1999.