Conductors and Composers of Popular Orchestral Music
Conductors and Composers of Popular Orchestral Music

Author: Naomi Musiker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1135917779

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World-wide in scope and focusing on the second half of the 20th century, this work provides biographies and discographies of some 500 composers and conductors of light and popular orchestral music, including film, show, theatre and mood music. The book is arranged in two sequences: 1) Biographies and select discographies, both arranged alphabetically, of the well-known and better-known conductors and composers. These entries also include a list of suggested reading for those wishing to further their studies; and 2) Select discographies of conductors about whom little or no biographical information is available. The bibliography at the end of the book covers discographical sources, popular music and film music. This is the first time that the lives and recordings of such artists as Kostelanetz, Faith, and Gould as well as the orchestral recordings of such great popular composers as Gershwin, Kern, Porter, Rodgers, Berlin and Coward have been documented and presented in an encyclopedic form.

Music as Alchemy
Music as Alchemy

Author: Tom Service

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2012-06-05

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0571268714

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How are conductors' silent gestures magicked into sound by a group of more than a hundred brilliant but belligerent musicians? The mute choreography of great conductors has fascinated and frustrated musicians and music-lovers for centuries. Orchestras can be inspired to the heights of musical and expressive possibility by their maestros, or flabbergasted that someone who doesn't even make a sound should be elevated to demigod-like status by the public. This is the first book to go inside the rehearsal rooms of some of the most inspirational orchestral partnerships in the world - how Simon Rattle works at the Berlin Philharmonic, how Mariss Jansons deals with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, and how Claudio Abbado creates the world's most luxurious pick-up band every year with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. From London to Budapest, Bamberg to Vienna, great orchestral concerts are recreated as a collection of countless human and musical stories.

Classical Music For Dummies
Classical Music For Dummies

Author: David Pogue

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-06-25

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 1119049741

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Haydn, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms, oh, my! The beginner's guide to classical music Classical Music For Dummies is a friendly, funny, easy-to-understand guide to composers, instruments, orchestras, concerts, recordings, and more. Classical music is widely considered one of the pinnacles of human achievement, and this informative guide will shows you just how beautiful and rewarding it can be. You'll learn how Bach is different from Beethoven, how Mozart is different still, and why not all "classical" music is actually Classical if it's really Baroque or Romantic. You'll be introduced to the composers and their work, and discover the groundbreaking pieces that shake the world every time they're played. Begin building your classical music library with the essential recordings that define orchestral, choral, and operatic beauty as you get acquainted with the orchestras and musicians that bring the composers to life. Whether you want to play classical music or just learn more about it, Classical Music For Dummies will teach you everything you need to know to get the most out of this increasingly popular genre. Distinguish flute from piccolo, violin from viola, and trumpet from trombone Learn the difference between overtures, requiems, arias, and masses Explore the composers that shaped music as we know it Discover the recordings your music library cannot be without Classical music has begun sneaking into the mainstream — if your interest has been piqued, there's never been a better time to develop an appreciation for this incredibly rich, complex, and varied body of work. Classical Music For Dummies lays the groundwork, and demonstrates just how amazing classical music can be.

Beethoven, A Life
Beethoven, A Life

Author: Jan Caeyers

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 0520390210

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"With unprecedented access to the archives at the Beethoven House in Bonn, ... Beethoven conductor and scholar Jan Caeyers ... weaves together a deeply human and complex image of Beethoven--his troubled youth, his unpredictable mood swings, his desires, relationships, and conflicts with family and friends, the mysteries surrounding his affair with the 'immortal beloved, ' and the dramatic tale of his deafness. Caeyers also offers new insights into Beethoven's music and its gradual transformation from the work of a skilled craftsman into that of a consummate artist"--Publisher marketing.

The Listening Service
The Listening Service

Author: Tom Service

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2022-05-17

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0571342973

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Based on his critically-acclaimed BBC Radio 3 programme The Listening Service, in which Tom Service takes an idea on an ear-opening and mind-expanding walk through the musical landscape every week, this book is a celebration of music's multi-dimensional power in our lives. With 101 short chapters based on the programmes and grouped thematically the book will open ears and imaginations to find answers to the questions we all have about why and how music - from Toots and the Maytals and J S Bach, Gustav Mahler and Miley Cyrus, to Anna Meredith and Mozart - works its magic over us. With direct links to the programmes using a QR code, the chapters draw on powerful and communicative anecdotes and analogies, as well as the latest scientific research, and above all, a spirit of discovery and connection across genres, cultures, and histories. At its heart is the conviction that music changes us.

The Rest Is Noise
The Rest Is Noise

Author: Alex Ross

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2007-10-16

Total Pages: 706

ISBN-13: 1429932880

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Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Listen to This
Listen to This

Author: Alex Ross

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2010-09-28

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1429977612

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One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.

Schumann
Schumann

Author: John Alexander Fuller-Maitland

Publisher:

Published: 1884

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13:

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Mahler and Strauss
Mahler and Strauss

Author: Charles Youmans

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-09-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0253021669

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A rare case among history's great music contemporaries, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed a close friendship until Mahler's death in 1911. Unlike similar musical pairs (Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Schoenberg and Stravinsky), these two composers may have disagreed on the matters of musical taste and social comportment, but deeply respected one another's artistic talents, freely exchanging advice from the earliest days of professional apprenticeship through the security and aggravations of artistic fame. Using a wealth of documentary material, this book reconstructs the 24-year relationship between Mahler and Strauss through collage—"a meaning that arises from fragments," to borrow Adorno's characterization of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Fourteen different topics, all of central importance to the life and work of the two composers, provide distinct vantage points from which to view both the professional and personal relationships. Some address musical concerns: Wagnerism, program music, intertextuality, and the craft of conducting. Others treat the connection of music to related disciplines (philosophy, literature), or to matters relevant to artists in general (autobiography, irony). And the most intimate dimensions of life—childhood, marriage, personal character—are the most extensively and colorfully documented, offering an abundance of comparative material. This integrated look at Mahler and Strauss discloses provocative revelations about the two greatest western composers at the turn of the 20th century.

Sourcebook for Research in Music, Third Edition
Sourcebook for Research in Music, Third Edition

Author: Allen Scott

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2015-06-01

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 0253014565

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Since it was first published in 1993, the Sourcebook for Research in Music has become an invaluable resource in musical scholarship. The balance between depth of content and brevity of format makes it ideal for use as a textbook for students, a reference work for faculty and professional musicians, and as an aid for librarians. The introductory chapter includes a comprehensive list of bibliographical terms with definitions; bibliographic terms in German, French, and Italian; and the plan of the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal music classification systems. Integrating helpful commentary to instruct the reader on the scope and usefulness of specific items, this updated and expanded edition accounts for the rapid growth in new editions of standard works, in fields such as ethnomusicology, performance practice, women in music, popular music, education, business, and music technology. These enhancements to its already extensive bibliographies ensures that the Sourcebook will continue to be an indispensable reference for years to come.