“Music’s Obedient Daughter”
“Music’s Obedient Daughter”

Author: Sabine Lichtenstein

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2014-03-01

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 9401210551

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A libretto is an indispensable part of an opera as a musical genre: with few exceptions, operas have been the subject of musicological studies, and instrumental versions of sung or unsung opera numbers may be heard, but we never listen to libretto texts being performed without the music. Thus as a literary form the libretto is a highly specific genre with its own particular attributes. This volume offers an approach to the libretto through the discussion of these attributes in many different examples. It explores what may be expected of a librettist in response to the demands of the genre’s characteristics, his trials and tribulations, his exchanges with the composer while adapting or converting a source, almost always a literary source, into the eventual libretto, and about the different musical ways of dealing with the text. In this way the volume clarifies the fundamental differences between the libretto and other literary genres.

Music
Music

Author: William Smythe Babcock Mathews

Publisher:

Published: 1894

Total Pages: 828

ISBN-13:

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Essays on Literature and Music (1967-2004)
Essays on Literature and Music (1967-2004)

Author: Steven Paul Scher

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 9789042017528

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The present volume meets a frequently expressed demand as it is the first collection of all the relevant essays and articles which Steven Paul Scher has written on Literature and Music over a period of almost forty years in the field of Word and Music Studies. Scher, The Daniel Webster Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA, is one of the founding fathers of Word and Music Studies and a leading authority in what is in the meantime a well-established intermedial field. He has published very widely in a variety of journals and collections of essays, which until now have not always been easy to lay one's hands on. His work covers a wide range of subjects and comprises theoretical, methodological and historical studies, which include discussions of Ferruccio Busoni, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Judith Weir, the Talking Heads and many others and which pay special attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann and German Romanticism. The range and depth of these studies have made him the 'mastermind' of Word and Music Studies who has defined the basic aims and objectives of the discipline. This volume is of interest to literary scholars and musicologists as well as comparatists and all those concerned about the rapidly expanding field of Intermedia Studies.

New Music Theatre in Europe
New Music Theatre in Europe

Author: Robert Adlington

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 555

ISBN-13: 0429837372

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Between 1955 and 1975 music theatre became a central preoccupation for European composers digesting the consequences of the revolutionary experiments in musical language that followed the end of the Second World War. The ‘new music theatre’ wrought multiple, significant transformations, serving as a crucible for the experimental rethinking of theatrical traditions, artistic genres, the conventions of performance, and the composer’s relation to society. This volume brings together leading specialists from across Europe to offer a new appraisal of the genre. It is structured according to six themes that investigate: the relation of new music theatre to earlier and contemporaneous theories of drama; the use of new technologies; the relation of new music theatre to progressive politics; the role of new venues and environments; the advancement of new conceptions of the performer; and the challenges that new music theatre lays down for music analysis. Contributing authors address canonical works by composers such as Berio, Birtwistle, Henze, Kagel, Ligeti, Nono, and Zimmermann, but also expand the field to figures and artistic developments not regularly represented in existing music histories. Particular attention is given to new music theatre as a site of intense exchange – between practitioners of different art forms, across national borders, and with diverse mediating institutions.

Manuel de Falla and Visions of Spanish Music
Manuel de Falla and Visions of Spanish Music

Author: Michael Christoforidis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-23

Total Pages: 503

ISBN-13: 1351392581

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Michael Christoforidis is widely recognized as a leading expert on one of Spain's most important composers, Manuel de Falla. This volume brings together both new chapters and revised versions of previously published work, some of which is made available here in English for the first time. The introductory chapter provides a biographical outline of the composer and characterisations of both Falla and his music during his lifetime. The sections that follow explore different facets of Falla’s mature works and musical identity. Part II traces the evolution of his flamenco-inspired Spanish style through contacts with Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky, while Part III explores the impact of post-World War I modernities on Falla’s musical nationalism. The final part reflects on aspects of Falla’s music and the politics of Spain in the 1930s and 1940s. Situating his discussion of these aspects of Falla's music within a broader context, including currents in literature and the visual arts, Christoforidis provides a distinctive and original contribution to the study of Falla as well as to the wider fields of musical modernism, exoticism, and music and politics.

Art Music
Art Music

Author: Matthew Del Nevo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1351531069

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Listening to music is not merely something one does, but something central to a way of living. Listening has the power to transport one into another way of being. It is a mode of feeling and forms the bedrock of deep emotion. Written from the viewpoint of a philosophy of sensibility, Matthew Del Nevo notes that this perspective may not be in fashion, but it follows a long tradition.Del Nevo emphasizes the aesthetic experience of listening to art music as it has developed and disintegrated in Western civilization. He recognizes a deep psychological element to what he calls soul—or more accurately sensibility. He addresses music in a non-technical way, taking up the powerful art theory of Charles Baudelaire, the music philosophy of Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, and takes a strong critical stand against modernist intellectual art music.The importance of this book for the musically- literate reader is its insight into the metaphysics of nostalgia. This comprehension is missing from nearly all musical instruction because we have lost sight of it. Del Nevo asserts that this understanding must be brought back into our culture. And since this is a book about listening to art music, it is no less about sensibility and its cultivation, which in its object form we call culture. An engaging book, Art Music will appeal to those interested in music, culture, and philosophy.

Words for Music
Words for Music

Author: V. C. Clinton-Baddeley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-03-12

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1107492467

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First published in 1941, this book examines how poetry might effectively be set to music. The substance of the text was originally delivered as a series of three talks on the BBC in September 1938, and examines the role of the poet in creating a libretto for which music needs to be written, as well as W. B. Yeats' enthusiasm for the revival of English song. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the combination of music and words.