Twenty-seven Major American Symphony Orchestras
Author: Kate Hevner Mueller
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 1973
Total Pages: 472
ISBN-13:
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American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century
Author: John Spitzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-04-09
Total Pages: 504
ISBN-13: 0226769763
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStudies of concert life in nineteenth-century America have generally been limited to large orchestras and the programs we are familiar with today. But as this book reveals, audiences of that era enjoyed far more diverse musical experiences than this focus would suggest. To hear an orchestra, people were more likely to head to a beer garden, restaurant, or summer resort than to a concert hall. And what they heard weren’t just symphonic works—programs also included opera excerpts and arrangements, instrumental showpieces, comic numbers, and medleys of patriotic tunes. This book brings together musicologists and historians to investigate the many orchestras and programs that developed in nineteenth-century America. In addition to reflecting on the music that orchestras played and the socioeconomic aspects of building and maintaining orchestras, the book considers a wide range of topics, including audiences, entrepreneurs, concert arrangements, tours, and musicians’ unions. The authors also show that the period saw a massive influx of immigrant performers, the increasing ability of orchestras to travel across the nation, and the rising influence of women as listeners, patrons, and players. Painting a rich and detailed picture of nineteenth-century concert life, this collection will greatly broaden our understanding of America’s musical history.
Tales from the Symphony
Author: Robert Lee Watt
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2024-05-15
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 1538194759
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book contains conversations with nineteen African American classical musicians currently performing—or who have previously performed—in America’s major symphony orchestras. Each chapter focuses on the story of one musician and sheds light on the realities of African American musicians playing in a musical environment that absolutely forbade their membership over half a century ago. These conversations explore the deeply ingrained prejudices that some hold against African American people in symphony orchestras, conservatories, and other musical institutions. By amplifying these voices, the book provides a variety of perspectives on the almost cloistered world of these beloved institutions. The stories and lessons shared in this book will be invaluable to music students, teachers, and orchestral professionals.
The Orchestra
Author: Joan Peyser
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 660
ISBN-13: 9781423410263
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe symphonic orchestra is intriguingly considered in essays by 23 leading music authors and thinkers. Topics include historical beginnings, the role of the conductor, the orchestral audience, the nature of the repertoire, and how recordings have affected the modern orchestra. With a new editor's introduction for this 2006 edition and a glossary of terms.
The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony
Author: Julian Horton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-05-02
Total Pages: 469
ISBN-13: 0521884985
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA comprehensive guide to the historical, analytical and interpretative issues surrounding one of the major genres of Western music.
The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra
Author: Colin Lawson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003-04-24
Total Pages: 299
ISBN-13: 1139826611
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis guide to the orchestra and orchestral life is unique in the breadth of its coverage. It combines orchestral history and orchestral repertory with a practical bias offering critical thought about the past, present and future of the orchestra as a sociological and as an artistic phenomenon. This approach reflects many of the current global discussions about the orchestra's continued role in a changing society. Other topics discussed include the art of orchestration, scorereading, conductors and conducting, international orchestras, recording, as well as consideration of what it means to be an orchestral musician, an educator, or an informed listener. Written by experts in the field, the book will be of academic and practical interest to a wide-ranging readership of music historians and professional or amateur musicians as well as an invaluable resource for all those contemplating a career in the performing arts.
Understanding Toscanini
Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1994-01-01
Total Pages: 532
ISBN-13: 9780520085428
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs America's symbol of Great Music, Arturo Toscanini and the "masterpieces" he served were regarded with religious awe. As a celebrity personality, he was heralded for everything from his unwavering stance against Hitler and Mussolini and his cataclysmic tantrums, to his "democratic" penchants for television wrestling and soup for dinner. During his years with the Metropolitan Opera (1908-15) and the New York Philharmonic (1926-36) he was regularly proclaimed the "world's greatest conductor ." And with the NBC Symphony (1937-54), created for him by RCA's David Sarnoff, he became the beneficiary of a voracious multimedia promotional apparatus that spread Toscanini madness nationwide. According to Life, he was as well-known as Joe Dimaggio; Time twice put him on its cover; and the New York Herald Tribune attributed Toscanini's fame to simple recognition of his unique "greatness." In this boldly conceived and superbly realized study, Joseph Horowitz reveals how and why Toscanini became the object of unparalleled veneration in the United States. Combining biography, cultural history, and music criticism, Horowitz explores the cultural and commercial mechanisms that created America's Toscanini cult and fostered, in turn, a Eurocentric, anachronistic new audience for old music.
Shostakovich and His World
Author: Laurel E. Fay
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-06-08
Total Pages: 428
ISBN-13: 0691232199
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has a reputation as one of the leading composers of the twentieth century. But the story of his controversial role in history is still being told, and his full measure as a musician still being taken. This collection of essays goes far in expanding the traditional purview of Shostakovich's world, exploring the composer's creativity and art in terms of the expectations--historical, cultural, and political--that forged them. The collection contains documents that appear for the first time in English. Letters that young "Miti" wrote to his mother offer a glimpse into his dreams and ambitions at the outset of his career. Shostakovich's answers to a 1927 questionnaire reveal much about his formative tastes in the arts and the way he experienced the creative process. His previously unknown letters to Stalin shed new light on Shostakovich's position within the Soviet artistic elite. The essays delve into neglected aspects of Shostakovich's formidable legacy. Simon Morrison provides an in-depth examination of the choreography, costumes, décor, and music of his ballet The Bolt and Gerard McBurney of the musical references, parodies, and quotations in his operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki. David Fanning looks at Shostakovich's activities as a pedagogue and the mark they left on his students' and his own music. Peter J. Schmelz explores the composer's late-period adoption of twelve-tone writing in the context of the distinctively "Soviet" practice of serialism. Other contributors include Caryl Emerson, Christopher H. Gibbs, Levon Hakobian, Leonid Maximenkov, and Rosa Sadykhova. In a provocative concluding essay, Leon Botstein reflects on the different ways listeners approach the music of Shostakovich.
America's Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present
Author: Gilbert Chase
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 768
ISBN-13: 9780252062759
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA history of American music, its diversity, and the cultural influences that helped it develop.
Wagner Nights
Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2023-11-10
Total Pages: 414
ISBN-13: 0520323041
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs never before or since, Richard Wagner's name dominated American music-making at the close of the nineteenth century. Europe, too, was obsessed with Wagner, but—as Joseph Horowitz shows in this first history of Wagnerism in the United States—the American obsession was unique. The central figure in Wagner Nights is conductor Anton Seidl (1850-1898), a priestly and enigmatic personage in New York musical life. Seidl's own admirers included the women of the Brooklyn-based Seidl Society, who wore the letter "S" on their dresses. In the summers, Seidl conducted fourteen times a week at Brighton Beach, filling the three-thousand-seat music pavilion to capacity. The fact that most Wagnerites were women was a distinguishing feature of American Wagnerism and constituted a vital aspect of the fin-de-siècle ferment that anticipated the New American Woman. Drawing on the work of such cultural historians as T. Jackson Lears and Lawrence Levine, Horowitz's lively history reveals an "Americanized" Wagner never documented before. An entertaining and startling read, a treasury of operatic lore, Wagner Nights offers an unprecedented revisionist history of American culture a century ago. 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 1994.
