Actes

Actes

Author: Society of Dance History Scholars (U.S.). Annual Conference

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK


Le Tumulte Noir

Le Tumulte Noir

Author: Jody Blake

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780271017532

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.


The Cambridge Companion to Debussy

The Cambridge Companion to Debussy

Author: Simon Trezise

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-06-19

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780521654784

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Often considered the father of twentieth-century music, Debussy was a visionary whose influence is still felt. This book offers a wide-ranging series of essays on Debussy the man, the musician and composer. It contains insights into his character, his relationship to his Parisian environment and his musical works across all genres, with challenging views on the roles of nature and eroticism in his life and music. His music is considered through the characteristic themes of sonority, rhythm, tonality and form, with closing chapters considering the performance and reception of his music in the first years of the new century and our view of Debussy today as a major force in Western culture. This comprehensive view of Debussy is written by a team of specialists for students and informed music lovers.


Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music

Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music

Author: Siglind Bruhn

Publisher: Pendragon Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9780945193951

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In our visually-oriented society, music appears to stand apart from other arts. Yet just as a poet can write a poem whose focus is a painting, so musicians have composed scores based on poems, paintings, and other non-musical art forms. In instrumental music such reinterpretations are especially intriguing as the verbal or visual stimulus does not appear in performance but is rendered in musical form. In this study, Siglind Bruhn investigates how three French composers of the twentieth century, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Olivier Messiaen, express extra-musical subtexts in their piano works. She shows how the relation between the subtexts and the musical works can be broadly catagorized in terms of pictoriality and interiority. In all cases, Bruhn analyzes each musical piece and each source text in its entirety and in depth, drawing on her broad background in both literary and musical interpretation of the twentieth century. For pianists who seek to better understand an individual work, for scholars in the growing field of musical hermeneutics, and for lovers of music in general, this volume explores and makes explicit connections between music and other arts.


Opera and Modern Culture

Opera and Modern Culture

Author: Lawrence Kramer

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0520251601

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Outstanding. Kramer's scholarship is as impeccable as his insights are at once original and consistently brilliant. The presentation is thorough, and the argument is well anchored in theory, history and musical detail. Kramer's discourse is crystalline and jargon free. The connections from one chapter to another are seamless. The story is, simply stated, a page-turner."—Richard Leppert, editor of Theodor W. Adorno's Essays on Music "Lawrence Kramer's Opera and Modern Culture is remarkable both for its imaginative exploration of important issues and for the rich array of the author's engagements with other thinkers. In particular, by decentering without dismissing the composer (who could dismiss Wagner?), he makes works of reception—productions of Salome on video, uses of the Lohengrin Prelude by Charlie Chaplin and W.E.B. Du Bois—central texts in the process of understanding the phenomenon of opera, rather than footnotes to an idea that he really does dismiss: 'the work itself.'"—James Parakilas, author of Piano Roles: 300 Years of Life with the Piano and Introduction to Opera (forthcoming)


This Is Ragtime

This Is Ragtime

Author: Terry Waldo

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 1991-03-21

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9780306804397

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In This Is Ragtime , Terry Waldo, musician and scholar, explores ragtime in detail, offering music lovers and social historians a unique view of the music from its inception through its colorful evolution. Waldo tells the story of Scott Joplin and his frustrating attempts to elevate his music to the status of the classics, from his first rags to the tragedy surrounding his operatic masterpiece Treemonisha. Waldo also depicts the exciting and often bawdy settings of the music: the earthly minstrel shows, the whorehouses, the cold and commercial publishers of Tin Pin Alley, the traditional jazz emporiums of Dixieland, and finally the prestigious concert halls of the world. Amplifying Waldo's accounts of how and why ragtime continues to fascinate the music world are pithy interviews with most of its enduring personalities: Eubie Blake, Max Morath, Turk Murphy, Lu Watters, Joe "Fingers" Carr, Johnny Maddox, Gunther Schuller, William Bolcom, and Joshua Rifkin. Illustrated with art work and artifacts, This Is Ragtime is an enduring classic for all ragtime and jazz enthusiasts.


Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910

Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910

Author: Rae Beth Gordon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1351946420

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examining the extraordinary influence of Darwin's theory of evolution on French thought from 1875 to 1910, Rae Beth Gordon argues for a reconsideration of modernism both in time and in place that situates its beginnings in the French café-concert aesthetic. Gordon weaves the history of medical science, ethnology, and popular culture into a groundbreaking exploration of the cultural implications of gesture in dance performances at late-nineteenth-century Parisian café-concerts and music halls. While art historians have studied the ties between primitivism and modernism, their convergence in fin-de-siècle popular entertainment has been largely overlooked. Gordon argues that while the impact of Darwinism was unprecedented in science, it was no less present in popular culture through the popular press and popular entertainment, where it constituted a kind of "evolutionist aesthetic" on display in the café-concert, circus, and music-hall as well as in the spectator's reception of the representations on the stage. Modernity in these sites, Gordon contends, was composed by the convergence of contemporary medical theory with representations of the primitive, staged in entertainments that ranged from the can-can, Missing Links, and epileptic singers to the Cake-Walk. Her anthropology of gesture uncovers in these dislocations of the human form an aesthetic of disorder a half century before the eruptions of Dada and Surrealism.


Satie the Bohemian

Satie the Bohemian

Author: Steven Moore Whiting

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 1999-02-18

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 0191584525

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Erik Satie (1866-1925) came of age in the bohemian subculture of Montmartre, with its artists' cabarets and cafés-concerts. Yet apologists have all too often downplayed this background as potentially harmful to the reputation of a composer whom they regarded as the progenitor of modern French music. Whiting argues, on the contrary, that Satie's two decades in and around Montmartre decisively shaped his aesthetic priorities and compositional strategies. He gives the fullest account to date of Satie's professional activities as a popular musician, and of how he transferred the parodic techniques and musical idioms of cabaret entertainment to works for concert hall. From the esoteric Gymnopédies to the bizarre suites of the 1910s and avant-garde ballets of the 1920s (not to mention music journalism and playwriting), Satie's output may be daunting in its sheer diversity and heterodoxy; but his radical transvaluation of received artistic values makes far better sense once placed in the fascinating context of bohemian Montmartre.


Untwisting the Serpent

Untwisting the Serpent

Author: Daniel Albright

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9780226012537

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, rather than collaboration.