Music
In this classic work of American music writing, renowned critic Albert Murray argues beautifully and authoritatively that "the blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance."
In Stomping the Blues Murray explores its history, influences, development, and meaning as only he can. More than two hundred vintage photographs capture the ambiance Murray evokes in lyrical prose. Only the sounds are missing from this lyrical, sensual tribute to the blues.
Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multi-layered orchestration can seem bewilderingly specialised and complex.In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall does away with stuffy biographies, unhelpful labels and tired terminology. Instead he leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation - harmony, notation, sung theatre, the orchestra, dance music, recording, broadcasting - strikes us with its original force. He focuses on what changed when and why, picking out the discoveries that revolutionised man-made sound and bringing to life musical visionaries from the little-known Pérotin to the colossus of Wagner. Along the way, he also gives refreshingly clear descriptions of what music is and how it works: what scales are all about, why some chords sound discordant and what all post-war pop songs have in common.The story of music is the story of our urge to invent, connect, rebel - and entertain. Howard Goodall's beautifully clear and compelling account is both a hymn to human endeavour and a groundbreaking map of our musical journey.
A new look at one of the most important composers of the twentith century
Stravinsky and His World brings together an international roster of scholars to explore fresh perspectives on the life and music of Igor Stravinsky. Situating Stravinsky in new intellectual and musical contexts, the essays in this volume shed valuable light on one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. Contributors examine Stravinsky's interaction with Spanish and Latin American modernism, rethink the stylistic label neoclassicism with a section on the ideological conflict over his lesser-known opera buffa Mavra, and reassess his connections to his homeland, paying special attention to Stravinsky's visit to the Soviet Union in 1962. The essays also explore Stravinsky's musical and religious differences with Arthur Lourié, delve into Stravinsky's collaboration with Pyotr Suvchinsky and Roland-Manuel in the genesis of his groundbreaking Poetics of Music, and look at how the movement within stasis evident in the scores of Stravinsky's Orpheus and Oedipus Rex reflected the composer's fierce belief in fate. Rare documents--including Spanish and Mexican interviews, Russian letters, articles by Arthur Lourié, and rarely seen French and Russian texts--supplement the volume, bringing to life Stravinsky's rich intellectual milieu and intense personal relationships. The contributors are Tatiana Baranova, Leon Botstein, Jonathan Cross, Valérie Dufour, Gretchen Horlacher, Tamara Levitz, Klára Móricz, Leonora Saavedra, and Svetlana Savenko.
Beginning chapters discuss the standard use of rhythm and mensuration in Palestrina's time, the ecclesiastical modes, and treatment of words. Author Knud Jeppesen proceeds to explore Palestrina's music in terms of the elements that constitute his personal style, isolating unusual vertical lines and establishing common and uncommon interval skips and rhythmic accents.
The heart of the book presents a modern empirical treatment of dissonance. Palestrina's contrapuntal technique forged new harmonic devices, placing dissonance on unaccented beats and highlighting text in very unorthodox ways for his time. These new uses of dissonance and resolution are explored in meticulous detail. In addition, Jeppesen includes a complete history of the evolving concept and treatment of dissonance before Palestrina, including quotations from the earliest theoretical works and numerous musical examples that illustrate the practices of Palestrina's predecessors.
African music. He describes the whole range of African
musical genres from the Senegambian/Manding style
through Congolese soukous, Cameroonian makossa, West
African Highlife, and the music of struggle and
liberation of South Africa and locates each in its
social, political, and historical context. "Sweet "
"Mother" contains information available in no other
single source, including an extensive discography and
bibliography."
One of the last great composers in the Austro-Germanic tradition, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) created nine symphonies (the now-legendary Symphony No. 10 was left unfinished) that explored far-reaching, innovative, and visionary approaches to melody, tonal organization, and formal structure. Outstanding among these is the work that obsessed Mahler for seven years -- the imposing Symphony No. 2 ("Resurrection"), scored for soprano solo, alto, solo, full chorus, and a vastly expanded orchestra.
Plagued by incessant visions of his own death, Mahler composed a tone poem Totenfeirer (Funeral Rite) that was to become the foundation and first movement of Symphony No. 2, posing the great question, "To what purpose have you lived?" Mahler described the middle movements as post-funeral memories, nostalgic daydreams, and a harsh awakening to the meaningless realities of real life, answered finally by the angelic folk poem "Primal Light," the terror of the Last Judgment, and the salvation of resurrections: "With wings that I wont ... I shall mount to the light ... I shall die, so as to live!" -- an intimation of immortality through the monument of his works.
This profound work is presented here in full score with original instrumentation, bar-numbered movements, and with ample margins at the bottom of each score page for notes and analysis. Ideal for study in the classroom, at home, or in the concert hall, this affordable, high-quality, conveniently sized volume will be the edition of choice for music students and music lovers alike.
Mahler's third symphony, scored for a massive orchestra, was conceived as a vast cycle in six movements, including the opening march, the moving setting for alto solo of Nietzsche's "Oh Mensch! Gib Acht!" and a setting for women's and boys' choirs of "Es sungen drei Engel," on a text from Das Knaben Wunderhorn.
Ideal for study in the classroom, at home, or in the concert hall, this affordable miniature-score edition offers music lovers, performers, and students an opportunity to study the orchestral innovations of this great music and explore the genius of the composer often regarded as the last great Austrian symphonist.
It may be in fact that I have taken on a task that is too much for me: there is no precedent, so I am obliged to invent new forms. -- Claude Debussy.
Unquestionably one of the most influential of modern composers, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) overturned traditional concepts of form, harmony, and coloring in creating a body of music characterized by innovation, individuality of style, and perfection of workmanship.
Among his most popular, most performed, most recorded works are the three compositions reprinted in this volume: the revolutionary Prélude à l'aprés-midi d'une faune, which, in a sense, awakened modern music; the exquisite Nocturnes, shimmering models of delicate impressionism; and La Mer, complex, suggestive, a masterpiece of orchestral texture.
This Dover volume presents the complete scores of all three works -- reproduced from early French editions -- in one convenient source. Musicians and music lovers will appreciate this inexpensive edition of a trio of orchestral favorites: pieces that mark not only key points in the composer's personal progress but also in the progress of modern music as well.
Mozart composed three of his greatest operas in collaboration with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. The librettos of these brilliant works are presented here in a format opera enthusiasts will love: excellent line-for-line English translations on pages facing the Italian text. The translators have attempted to present the three operas "as readably and as dramatically as possible, finding the natural or colloquial English phrase" to convey the essential spirit of each work.
The result is a handy, readable reference ideal for following a recorded performance or to refresh one's memory before or after a live performance. Introductions, plot synopses, and lists of characters for each opera complete this indispensable companion for any opera-goer or lover of Mozart's music.
Greil Marcus has been one of the most distinctive voices in American music criticism for over forty years. His books, including Mystery Train and The Shape of Things to Come, traverse soundscapes of folk and blues, rock and punk, attuning readers to the surprising, often hidden affinities between the music and broader streams of American politics and culture.
Drawn from Marcus's 2013 Massey Lectures at Harvard, his new work delves into three episodes in the history of American commonplace song: Bascom Lamar Lunsford's 1928 "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground," Geeshie Wiley's 1930 "Last Kind Words Blues," and Bob Dylan's 1964 "Ballad of Hollis Brown." How each of these songs manages to convey the uncanny sense that it was written by no one illuminates different aspects of the commonplace song tradition. Some songs truly did come together over time without an identifiable author. Others draw melodies and motifs from obscure sources but, in the hands of a particular artist, take a final, indelible shape. And, as in the case of Dylan's "Hollis Brown," there are songs that were written by a single author but that communicate as anonymous productions, as if they were folk songs passed down over many generations.
In three songs that seem to be written by no one, Marcus shows, we discover not only three different ways of talking about the United States but three different nations within its formal boundaries.
Known as the "Prince of Bummers," Leonard Cohen is a multi-talented poet, singer-songwriter, novelist, and Zen Buddhist whose career has spanned more than forty years and inspired countless other artists. In this critically acclaimed biography originally published in 1996 by Pantheon Books, Ira Nadel draws on extensive interviews with Cohen, as well as excerpts from his unpublished letters, journals, notebooks, songs, and other writings, to offer a full portrait of this enigmatic man and his artistic career. A new concluding chapter brings Cohen's story up-to-date, including the release of the albums Dear Heather, Ten New Songs, The Essential Leonard Cohen, and Blue Alert, as well as the publication of Book of Longing and the screening of the documentary film Leonard Cohen, I'm Your Man.
Our voices carry farther than ever before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? In this book, Damon Krukowski examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. In Ways of Hearing--modeled on Ways of Seeing, John Berger's influential 1972 book on visual culture--Krukowski offers readers a set of tools for critical listening in the digital age. Just as Ways of Seeing began as a BBC television series, Ways of Hearing is based on a six-part podcast produced for the groundbreaking public radio podcast network Radiotopia. Inventive uses of text and design help bring the message beyond the range of earbuds.
Each chapter of Ways of Hearing explores a different aspect of listening in the digital age: time, space, love, money, and power. Digital time, for example, is designed for machines. When we trade broadcast for podcast, or analog for digital in the recording studio, we give up the opportunity to perceive time together through our media. On the street, we experience public space privately, as our headphones allow us to avoid "ear contact" with the city. Heard on a cell phone, our loved ones' voices are compressed, stripped of context by digital technology. Music has been dematerialized, no longer an object to be bought and sold. With recommendation algorithms and playlists, digital corporations have created a media universe that adapts to us, eliminating the pleasures of brick-and-mortar browsing. Krukowski lays out a choice: do we want a world enriched by the messiness of noise, or one that strives toward the purity of signal only?
In an absorbing narrative enlivened by the commentary of key personalities, Marc Myers describes the myriad of events and trends that affected the music's evolution, among them, the American Federation of Musicians strike in the early 1940s, changes in radio and concert-promotion, the introduction of the long-playing record, the suburbanization of Los Angeles, the Civil Rights movement, the "British invasion" and the rise of electronic instruments. This groundbreaking book deepens our appreciation of this music by identifying many of the developments outside of jazz itself that contributed most to its texture, complexity, and growth.
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