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 1973.
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 1973.
In 1714, king George I ushered in a remarkable 123-year period of energy that changed the face of Britain and ultimately had a profound effect on the modern era. The pioneers of modern capitalism, industry, democracy, literature, and even architecture flourished during this time and their innovations and influence spread throughout the British empire, including the United States. Now this rich cultural period in Britain is effectively surveyed and summarized for quick reference in a first-of-its-kind encyclopedia, which contains entries by British, Canadian, American, and Australian scholars specializing in everything from finance and the fine arts to politics and patent law. More than 380 illustrations, mostly rare engravings, enhance the coverage, which runs the whole gamut of political, economic, literary, intellectual, artistic, commercial, and social life, and spotlights some 600 prominent individuals and families.
This new volume incorporates all entries from the previous editions by Arthur Wenk, expanding to cover writings drawn from periodicals, theses, dissertations, books, and Festschriften from 1940 to 2000. Over 9,000 references to analyses of works by over 1,000 composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are included.
Covers forty years which saw profound changes in music, most of them dominated by Beethoven. Provides a detailed, scholarly critical survey of the music of the period with chapters on French, Italian and German opera and on opera in other countries, on Beethoven's orchestral and chamber music and of his contemporaries on the concerto, on piano music, on solo song and on choral music, as well as an introductory chapter on general musical conditions of the time.
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.
The compelling story of the great Irish pioneers who left their homeland and in the process profoundly influenced their adoptive countries. From the first voyages of Saint Brendan in the early sixth century, an estimated 10 million people have left the Irish shores for other countries, and today, more than 80 million people worldwide claim Irish descent. In the centuries after the fall of Rome, Irish missionaries carried the word of the Christian God throughout Europe, while soldiers and mariners from across the land ventured overseas in all directions. The advent of the British Empire ignited a slow but extraordinary exodus from Ireland. These "Wild Geese" who opted to live outside of the Protestant state took their chances in the Spanish and French empires, as well as in the fledgling New World. These immigrants played an important role wherever they went: rising to high political and military positions in France and Spain, impacting the foundation of the United States, and fighting in the Civil War that followed it nearly eighty years later. Other Irish would come to the fore in business, science, engineering, and the arts, while some were destined for infamy as mobsters and gunslingers. Historian Turtle Bunbury explores the lives of these men and women, great and otherwise, whose pioneering journeys beyond the Irish shore have played a profound role in world history and have left their indelible mark far beyond Ireland. Throughout The Irish Diaspora, Bunbury takes these overlooked events and characters and weaves them into an entertaining, and often surprising, history of the Irish abroad.
Robert Schumann was a unique personality in 19th century music: a celebrated music critic and champion of new composers as well as a talented performer and composer himself, he did much to modernize the literature and performance style for the piano. This book covers the key period of c. 1815-55, exploring how the generation that came after Beethoven was central in reshaping and refining the conception of the concerto style, and particularly the piano concerto. It relates Schumann's own compositional development to his musical environment, recreating the exciting milieu in which Schumann and his contemporaries lived and worked. Written in scholarly, but non-technical language, Robert Schumann and the Development of the Piano Concerto will appeal to college and conservatory teachers and students, as well as music connoisseurs. Also includes 60 musical examples.
