The Orpheus Myth and the Powers of Music
The Orpheus Myth and the Powers of Music

Author: Vladimir L. Marchenkov

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781576471760

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This book examines the key turning points in the history of the Orpheus myth as factors that shaped, and continues to shape, our conceptions of music's powers. From its beginnings in archaic Antiquity to the latest major opera based on it, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice has been used by poets, philosophers, and musicians to express an increasingly complex set of ideas about what music can do. The study follows three threads in the myth's history: changes in form, cultural status, and the resulting visions of the powers of song. The most spectacular change in form is the role played by Eurydice who evolves from a generic, voiceless type into a rich music-philosophical symbol. Equally fascinating is the entangled issue of Orpheus's success and failure. In terms of cultural status, the story remains a genuine myth, ?even alongside its non-mythical forms, ?until the early modern period. Modernity problematizes the existence of myth but its mythophobia becomes a symptom of its own profound irrationality. Accordingly, the powers of music evolve from mythic omnipotence to screaming contradictions that demand, but fail to achieve, resolution. From Monteverdi and Striggio to Birtwistle and Zinovieff, composers and librettists turn to Orpheus and Eurydice to express their sense of music's place in human existence. The undulating tapestry of their strikingly diverse answers points to the need to rethink, once again, the fundamentals of our musical culture.

Orpheus
Orpheus

Author: Ann Wroe

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2011-07-14

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1446400905

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For at least two and a half millennia, the figure of Orpheus has haunted humanity. Half-man, half-god, musician, magician, theologian, poet and lover, his story never leaves us. He may be myth, but his lyre still sounds, entrancing everything that hears it: animals, trees, water, stones, and men. In this extraordinary work Ann Wroe goes in search of Orpheus, from the forests where he walked and the mountains where he worshipped to the artefacts, texts and philosophies built up round him. She traces the man, and the power he represents, through the myriad versions of a fantastical life: his birth in Thrace, his studies in Egypt, his voyage with the Argonauts to fetch the Golden Fleece, his love for Eurydice and journey to Hades, and his terrible death. We see him tantalising Cicero and Plato, and breathing new music into Gluck and Monteverdi; occupying the mind of Jung and the surreal dreams of Cocteau; scandalising the Fathers of the early Church, and filling Rilke with poems like a whirlwind. He emerges as not simply another mythical figure but the force of creation itself, singing the song of light out of darkness and life out of death.

All Our Pretty Songs
All Our Pretty Songs

Author: Sarah McCarry

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Published: 2013-07-30

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1250027098

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This is a story about love, but not the kind of love you think. You'll see... In the lush and magical Pacific Northwest live two best friends who grew up like sisters: charismatic, mercurial, and beautiful Aurora, and the devoted, watchful narrator. Each of them is incomplete without the other. But their unbreakable bond is challenged when a mysterious and gifted musician named Jack comes between them. His music is like nothing I have ever heard. It is like the ocean surging, the wind that blows across the open water, the far call of gulls. Suddenly, each girl must decide what matters most: friendship, or love. What both girls don't know is that the stakes are even higher than either of them could have imagined. They're not the only ones who have noticed Jack's gift; his music has awakened an ancient evil—and a world both above and below which may not be mythical at all. We have paved over the ancient world but that does not mean we have erased it. The real and the mystical; the romantic and the heartbreaking all begin to swirl together in All Our Pretty Songs, Sarah McCarry's brilliant debut, carrying the two on journey that is both enthralling and terrifying. And it's up to the narrator to protect the people she loves—if she can.

Enlightenment Orpheus
Enlightenment Orpheus

Author: Vanessa Agnew

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-05

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0195336666

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The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Agnew persuasively connects the English traveler and music scholar Charles Burney with the ancient myth of Orpheus. She uses Burney as a guide through wide-ranging discussions of eighteenth-century musical travel, views on music's curative powers, interest in non-European music, and concerns about cultural identity. Arguing that what people said about music was central to some of the great Enlightenment debates surrounding such issues as human agency, cultural difference, and national identity, Agnew adds a new dimension to postcolonial studies, which has typically emphasized the literary and visual at the expense of the aural. She also demonstrates that these discussions must be viewed in context at the era's broad and well-entrenched transnational network, and emphasizes the importance of travel literature in generating knowledge at the time.A new and radically interdisciplinary approach to the question of the power of music - its aesthetic and historical interpretations and political uses - Enlightenment Orpheus will appeal to students and scholars in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, German studies, eighteenth-century history, and comparative studies.

Orpheus Girl
Orpheus Girl

Author: Brynne Rebele-Henry

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2019-10-08

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1641290757

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In her debut novel, award-winning poet Brynne Rebele-Henry re-imagines the Orpheus myth as a love story between two teenage girls who are sent to conversion therapy after being caught together in an intimate moment. Abandoned by a single mother she never knew, 16-year-old Raya—obsessed with ancient myths—lives with her grandmother in a small conservative Texas town. For years Raya has fought to hide her feelings for her best friend and true love, Sarah. When the two are outed, they are sent to Friendly Saviors: a re-education camp meant to “fix” them and make them heterosexual. Upon arrival, Raya vows to assume the role of Orpheus, to return to the world of the living with her love—and after she, Sarah, and the other teen residents are subjected to abusive and brutal “treatments” by the staff, Raya only becomes more determined to escape. In a haunting voice reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and the contemporary lyricism of David Levithan, Brynne Rebele-Henry weaves a powerful inversion of the Orpheus myth informed by the disturbing real-world truths of conversion therapy. Orpheus Girl is a story of dysfunctional families, trauma, first love, heartbreak, and ultimately, the fierce adolescent resilience that has the power to triumph over darkness and ignorance. CW: There are scenes in this book that depict self-harm, homophobia, transphobia, and violence against LGBTQ characters.

Orfeo
Orfeo

Author: Richard Powers

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2014-01-21

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1443422924

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The author of the National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Echo Maker, Richard Powers “may well be one of the smartest novelists now writing” (LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Seventy-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home DIY microbiology lab--the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to extract music from rich patterns beyond the ear’s ability to hear--has come to the attention of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid on his house, Els turns fugitive, waiting for the evidence to clear him and for the alarm surrounding his activities to blow over. His days in hiding provoke memories of a turbulent century of musical turf wars and cause Els to reflect on a life spent chasing after transcendent sounds to the bewilderment of an indifferent public. As the national hysteria for safety erupts again in the face of this latest threat, Els--the “Bioterrorist Bach”--feeling the noose around him tighten, embarks on a cross-country trip to visit the people in his past who have most shaped his failed musical journey. Through the help of these people--his ex-wife, his daughter and his long-time artistic collaborator-- Els comes up with a plan to turn this disastrous collision with the security state into one last, resonant artwork that might reach an audience beyond his wildest dreams. Inspired by Steve Kurtz, the bio-artist wrongly arrested for terrorism by the FBI, Orfeo probes the boundary between stifling safety and reckless, releasing danger. It explores the varieties of human hunger, in particular the desire to hear more and to make meaning where there is none. Finally, the book is a meditation on that most endangered and priceless of human resources: attention.

The Power of Music
The Power of Music

Author: Roger Kennedy

Publisher: Phoenix Publishing House

Published: 2020-07-31

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1800130015

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Emotion is an integral aspect of musical experience; music has the power to take us on an emotional and intellectual journey, transforming the listener along the way. The aim of this book is to examine the nature of this journey, using a variety of perspectives. No one discipline can do justice to music's complexity if one is to have a sense of the whole musical experience, even if one has to break up the whole experience into various elements for the purposes of clarification. The issues raised have some relationship to psychoanalytic understanding and listening, as after all psychoanalysis is a listening discipline; its bedrock is listening to the patient's communications. While of course there are significant differences between understanding of, and listening to, a musical performance and a patient in a consulting room, the book explores common ground. Evidence from neuroscience indicates that music acts on a number of different brain sites, and that the brain is likely to be hard-wired for musical perception and appreciation, and this offers some kind of neurological substrate for musical experiences, or a parallel mode of explanation for music's multiple effects on individuals and groups. After various excursions into early mother/baby experiences, evolutionary speculations, and neuroscientific findings, the book's main emphasis is that it is the intensity of the artistic vision which is responsible for music's power. That intense vision invites the viewer or the listener into the orbit of the work, engaging us to respond to the particular vision in an essentially intersubjective relationship between the work and the observer or listener. This is the area of what we might call the human soul. Music can be described as having soul when it hits the emotional core of the listener. And, of course, there is 'soul music', whose basic rhythms reach deep into the body to create a powerful feeling of aliveness. One can truly say that music of all the arts is most able to give shape to the elusive human subject or soul.

Orpheus
Orpheus

Author: John Warden

Publisher:

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9780802065933

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The myth of Orpheus, shaman and teacher, musician and lover, is the subject of this book. It brings together the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines to present a conspectus of the myth's career, to show how it grows and changes to meet changing demands -- always different, yet always the same. Early Greek evidence for the Orpheus myth and a speculative explanation of its origins are offered along with chapters on the treatments of the myth by Virgil and Ovid, on Orpheus and Christianity, and on the allegorizing treatment of Orpheus which characterizes the Middle Ages. Orpheus in the Renaissance is studied in the work of the philosopher Marsilio Ficino; in Italian art from 1400 to 1600; in operas by Peri and Monteverdi; in a religious allegorical play by Calderon; and in the writings of Spenser, Milton, and Bacon. The Orpheus myth has been crucial in the defining of a culture. Its history demonstrates effectively the persistence and plasticity of myth.

Orpheus
Orpheus

Author: Charles Segal

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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This volume surveys the literary treatment of the Orpheus myth as the myth of the essence of poetry - the ability to encounter the fullest possible intensity of beauty and sorrow and to transform them into song. The first half of the book concentrates on the ancient literary tradition, from the myth's Greek origins through the influential poetic versions of Ovid and Virgil and its treatment by other Latin authors such as Horace and Seneca. Later chapters focus on the continuities of the myth in modern literature, including the poetry of H.D., Rukeyser, Rich, Ashbery, and, especially, Rilke. The author's leitmotif throughout is the relation of poetry to art, love and death, the 'three points of the Orphic triangle'. Through close readings of individual texts, he shows how various versions of the myth oscillate between a poetry of transcendence that asserts its power over the necessities of nature - including the ultimate necessity, death - and a poetry that celebrates its immersion in the stream of life.