Monk's Music

DOWNLOAD

Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (Roth Family Foundation Music in America Imprint)

by Gabriel Solis

Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) was one of jazz's greatest and most enigmatic figures. As a composer, pianist, and bandleader, Monk both extended the piano tradition known as Harlem stride and was at the center of modern jazz's creation during the 1940s, setting the stage for the experimentalism of the 1960s and '70s. This pathbreaking study combines cultural theory, biography, and musical analysis to shed new light on Monk's music and on the jazz canon itself. Gabriel Solis shows how the work of this stubbornly nonconformist composer emerged from the jazz world's fringes to find a central place in its canon. Solis reaches well beyond the usual life-and-times biography to address larger issues in jazz scholarship--ethnography and the role of memory in history's construction. He considers how Monk's stature has grown, from the narrowly focused wing of the avant-garde in the 1960s and '70s to the present, where he is claimed as an influence by musicians of all kinds. He looks at the ways musical lineages are created in the jazz world and, in the process, addresses the question of how musicians use performance itself to maintain, interpret, and debate the history of the musical tradition we call jazz.

The Mahler Family Letters

DOWNLOAD

The Mahler Family Letters

by Stephen McClatchie

Hundreds of the letters that Gustav Mahler addressed to his parents and siblings survive, yet they have remained virtually unknown. Now, for the first time Mahler scholar Stephen McClatchie presents over 500 of these letters in a clear, lively translation in The Mahler Family Letters . Drawn primarily from the Mahler-Rose Collection at the University of Western Ontario, the volume presents a complete, well-rounded view of the family's correspondence. Spanning the mid 1880s through 1910, the letters record the excitement of a young man with a bourgeoning career as a conductor and provide a glimpse into his day-to-day activities rehearsing and conducting operas and concerts in Budapeast and Hamburg, and composing his first symphonies and songs. On the private side, they document his parents' illnesses and deaths and the struggles of his siblings Alois, Justine, Otto, and Emma. The letters also give Mahler's insightful impressions of contemporaries such as Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Hans von Bulow, as well as his personal feelings about significant events, such as his first big success--the completion of Carl Maria von Weber's Die drei Pintos in 1889. In the fall of 1894, the character of the letters changes when Justine and Emma come to live with Mahler in Hamburg and then Vienna, removing the need to communicate by letter about quotidian matters. At this point, the letters relay noteworthy events such as Mahler's campaign to be named Director of the Vienna Court Opera, his conducting tours throughout Europe, and his courtship of Alma Schindler. The Mahler Family Letters provides a vital, nuanced source of information about Mahler's life, his personality, and his relationships. McClatchie has generously annotated each letter, contextualizing and clarifying contemporary historical references and Mahler family acquaintances, and created an indispensable resource for all Mahlerists, 19th-century musicologists, and historians of 19th-century Germany and Austria.

Structural Functions of Harmony

DOWNLOAD

password: www.AvaxHome.ru

Structural Functions of Harmony

by Arnold Schonberg

This book is Schoenberg's last completed theoretical work and represents his final thoughts on the subject of classical and romantic harmony. The earlier chapters recapitulate in consensed form the principles laid down in his Theory of Harmony; the later chapters break entirely new ground, for they analyze the system of key relationships within the structure of whole movements and affirm the principle of "monotonality," showing how all modulations within a movement are merely deviations from, and not negations of, its main tonality.Schoenberg's argument is supported by music examples, which range from entire development sections of classical symphonies to analyses of the experimental harmonic progressions of Strauss, Debussy, Reger, and Schoenberg's own early music. The final chapter, "Apollonian Evaluation of a Dionysian Epoch," discusses the music of our time, with particular reference to the possibility of new methods of harmonic analysis.Structural Functions of Harmony is a standard work on its subject and provides an invaluable key to the development of musical structure during the last two hundred and fifty years. This new edition, with corrections, a new preface, and an index of subject headings, has been prepared under the editorial supervision of Leonard Stein.

Bruckner: Symphony No. 8

DOWNLOAD

Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 (Cambridge Music Handbooks)

by Benjamin M. Korstvedt

Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony (1890), one of the last of the great Romantic symphonies, is a grandly complex masterpiece. This book explores this many-faceted work from several angles. It documents the complicated and often misunderstood history of the symphony's composition and revision and provides an accessible guide to its musical design. It demonstrates, by means of a study of well-known recordings, how performance styles have evolved in this century. It also revisits the conventional wisdom about the various versions and editions of the symphony and comes to some provocative new conclusions.

The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece

DOWNLOAD

The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece

by Andrew Barker

The ancient science of harmonics investigates the arrangements of pitched sounds which form the basis of musical melody, and the principles which govern them. It was the most important branch of Greek musical theory, studied by philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers as well as by musical specialists. This book examines its development during the period when its central ideas and rival schools of thought were established, laying the foundations for the speculations of later antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It concentrates particularly on the theorists' methods and purposes and the controversies that their various approaches to the subject provoked. It also seeks to locate the discipline within the broader cultural environment of the period; and it investigates, sometimes with surprising results, the ways in which the theorists' work draws on and in some cases influences that of philosophers and other intellectuals.

Philadelphia Maestros: Ormandy, Muti, Sawallisch

DOWNLOAD

Philadelphia Maestros: Ormandy, Muti, Sawallisch
by Phyllis Rodriquez-Peralta

Over the past century, the Philadelphia Orchestra has earned its reputation as one of the finest orchestras in the world. Philadelphia Maestros tells the tale of this marvelous orchestra through the tenures of three conductors: Eugene Ormandy, Riccardo Muti, and Wolfgang Sawallisch. With their singular approaches to sound and public image, all three maestros left an indelible mark on the Orchestra, and the cultural life of the city of Philadelphia.

Jimi Hendrix: The Man, the Magic, the Truth

Download

Jimi Hendrix: The Man, the Magic, the Truth

by Sharon Lawrence

The genius we never understood. . . . The man we never knew. . . . The truth we never heard. . . . The music we never forgot. . . . A revealing portrait of a legend by a close and trusted friend.

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

Download

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

by R. Larry Todd

An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, a legendary pianist and organist, and an accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized in his lifetime, he is best remembered today for several staples of the concert hall and for such popular music as "The Wedding March" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, R. Larry Todd offers a remarkably fresh account of this musical giant, based upon painstaking research in autograph manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and paintings. Rejecting the view of the composer as a craftsman of felicitous but sentimental, saccharine works (termed by one critic "moonlight with sugar water"), Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works. Here are engaging analyses of Mendelssohn's distinctive masterpieces--the zestful Octet, puckish Midsummer Night's Dream, haunting Hebrides Overtures, and elegiac Violin Concerto in E minor. Todd describes how the composer excelled in understatement and nuance, in subtle, coloristic orchestrations that lent his scores an undeniable freshness and vividness. He also explores Mendelssohn's changing awareness of his religious heritage, Wagner's virulent anti-Semitic attack on Mendelssohn's music, the composer's complex relationship with his sister Fanny Hensel, herself a child prodigy and prolific composer, his avocation as a painter and draughtsman, and his remarkable, polylingual correspondence with the cultural elite of his time. Mendelssohn: A Life offers a masterful blend of biography and musical analysis. Readers will discover many new facets of the familiar but misunderstood composer and gain new perspectives on one of the most formidable musical geniuses of all time.

Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age"

Download

Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age"

by John Daverio

Forced by a hand injury to abandon a career as a pianist, Robert Schumann went on to become one of the world's great composers. Among many works, his Spring Symphony (1841), Piano Concerto in A Minor (1841/1845), and the Third, or Rhenish, Symphony (1850) exemplify his infusion of classical forms with intense, personal emotion. His musical influence continues today and has inspired many other famous composers in the century since his death. Indeed Brahms, in a letter of January 1873, wrote: "The remembrance of Schumann is sacred to me. I will always take this noble pure artist as my model."
Now, in Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age," John Daverio presents the first comprehensive study of the composer's life and works to appear in nearly a century. Long regarded as a quintessentially romantic figure, Schumann also has been portrayed as a profoundly tragic one: a composer who began his career as a genius and ended it as a mere talent. Daverio takes issue with this Schumann myth, arguing instead that the composer's entire creative life was guided by the desire to imbue music with the intellectual substance of literature. A close analysis of the interdependence among Schumann's activities as reader, diarist, critic, and musician reveals the depth of his literary sensibility. Drawing on documents only recently brought to light, the author also provides a fresh outlook on the relationship between Schumann's mental illness--which brought on an extended sanitarium stay and eventual death in 1856--and his musical creativity. Schumann's character as man and artist thus emerges in all its complexity. The book concludes with an analysis of the late works and a postlude on Schumann's influence on successors from Brahms to Berg.
This well-researched study of Schumann interprets the composer's creative legacy in the context of his life and times, combining nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual history with a fascinating analysis of the works themselves.

The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity

Download

The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

by Alexandra Wilson

The first detailed investigation of the reception and cultural contexts of Puccini's music, this book offers a fresh view of this historically important but frequently overlooked composer. Wilson's study explores the ways in which Puccini's music and persona were held up as both the antidote to and the embodiment of the decadence widely felt to be afflicting late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Italy, a nation which although politically unified remained culturally divided. The book focuses upon two central, related questions which were debated throughout Puccini's career: his status as a national or international composer, and his status as a traditionalist or modernist. In addition, Wilson examines how Puccini's operas became caught up in a wide range of extra-musical controversies concerning such issues as gender and class. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of both the history of opera and of the wider artistic and intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Italy.

Wagner Beyond Good and Evil

Download

Wagner Beyond Good and Evil by John Deathridge

Product Description
John Deathridge presents a different and critical view of Richard Wagner based on recent research that does not shy away from some unpalatable truths about this most controversial of composers in the canon of Western music. Deathridge writes authoritatively on what Wagner did, said, and wrote, drawing from abundant material already well known but also from less familiar sources, including hitherto seldom discussed letters and diaries and previously unpublished musical sketches. At the same time, Deathridge suggests that a true estimation of Wagner does not lie in an all too easy condemnation of his many provocative actions and ideas. Rather, it is to be found in the questions about the modern world and our place in it posed by the best of his stage works, among them Tristan und Isolde and Der Ring des Nibelungen. Controversy about Wagner is unlikely to go away, but rather than taking the line of least resistance by regarding him blandly as a "classic" in the Western art tradition, Deathridge suggests that we need to confront the debates that have raged about him and reach beyond them, toward a fresh and engaging assessment of what he ultimately achieved.

From the Inside Flap
"This collection provides us with that rarest of objects: a genuinely new book on Wagner. Virtually every page offers fresh perspectives, some of them mined from the most unlikely of sources; indeed, the sheer eclecticism of the book, its willingness to range widely and irreverently through both popular and elite culture, is one of its greatest strengths."--Roger Parker, author of Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio

"John Deathridge is one of the most authoritative, widely-regarded Wagner scholars around in any language. Few can match his command of scholarship and primary sources, and no one else knows how to put them to such clever, provocative uses. In addition, Deathridge enjoys an impressive range of critical, historical, and literary reference. The writing is consistently lively and engaging. The collection will provide a welcome change of diet for those tired of the usual Wagnerian fare. This is a welcome contribution, indeed."--Thomas Grey, author of Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts

About the Author
John Deathridge is King Edward Professor of Music at King's College London. He is the author, with Carl Dahlhaus, of The New Grove Wagner, co-editor of the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis (WWV) and editor of, and contributor to, the English language edition of the Wagner Handbook.

Rossini

Download
Rossini (Master Musicians Series) by Richard Osborne

Review
Osborne's Rossini remains indispensable both as a conspectus of, and prolegomenon to, the life and work of this most colourful of operative composers. Conor Farrington. TLS.

Review

"Osborne's Rossini remains indispensable both as a conspectus of, and prolegomenon to, the life and work of this most colourful of operatic composers." Conor Farrington, Times Literary Supplement "The 1985 edition of Richard Osborne's Rossini was already the very best Rossini biography available; the new edition surpasses it in every way. Writing now with access to the published correspondence from throughout the composer's operatic career (through 1830) and with new editions and excellent performances of most of the operas, Osborne provides real insight into the life and works of a composer whose art had been poorly understood since the middle of the nineteenth century. He hones in on the major works and explains their historical significance and aesthetic appeal. Those who love Rossini and bel canto opera are truly in Osborne's debt."-Philip Gossett, Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music, University of Chicago
"Richard Osborne's Rossini is an invaluable work of scholarship and passion. Life and Works together, in great detail, give the reader a splendid fund of information and allow a much clearer picture than we have ever had before, of an often misunderstood, and under-rated genius."--Sir Roger Norrington


Product Description
Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered the course of opera in France. His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37, was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man. In reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses were the determining factors. After drafting the Stabat Mater in 1832, Rossini wrote no music of consequence for the best part of twenty-five years, before the clouds lifted and he began composing again in Paris in the late 1850s. During this glorious Indian summer of his career, he wrote 150 songs and solo piano pieces his 'Sins of Old Age' and his final masterpiece, the Petite Messe solennelle. The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant who dashed off The Barber of Seville in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. The original 1985 edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed Rossini redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre. Twenty years on, all Rossini's operas have been staged and recorded, a Critical Edition of his works is well advanced, and a scholarly edition of his correspondence, including 250 previously unknown letters from Rossini to his parents, is in progress. Drawing on these past two decades of scholarship and performance, this new edition of Rossini provides the most detailed portrait we have yet had of one of the worlds best-loved and most enigmatic composers.

About the Author

Richard Osborne is one of Britain's best known writers and broadcasters, and a leading authority on Rossini. Widely praised for its scholarship and readability, the original edition of his Master Musicians Rossini was seen as an infuential act of revaluation at a time of renewed interest in the composer's music and personality. Other books by Richard Osborne include Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music (1998) and Till I End My Song. English Music and Musicians 1440-1940: A Perspective from Eton (2002). critic and broadcaster, author of Conversations with Karajan (OUP 1991), Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music (Chatto & Windus 1998), and Till I End My Song. English Music and Musicians 1440-1940: A Perspective from Eton (Cygnet Press 2002).

Jazz Makers: Vanguards of Sound

Download

Jazz Makers: Vanguards of Sound (Oxford Profiles) by Alyn Shipton

From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up-This chronologically arranged collection of more than 50 biographical sketches ranges from the pioneers to contemporary players and includes such notables as Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, and Wynton Marsalis. An introduction to each era discusses the evolution of the styles that various individuals represent. Each profile focuses mainly on the subject's musical training, influences, and contributions rather than on personal background or family, and includes black-and-white photographs, a sidebar of pertinent facts, a discography, further reading, and Web sites. An excellent one-source overview of the important jazz contributors.
Janet Woodward, Garfield High School, Seattle, WA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"As a basic reference tool, this should be useful, given Shipton's thorough scholarship and careful writing and his own experience as a musician." -- Mississippi Rag
"Thoughtful, concisely written portraits summarize the lives and accomplishments of performers and composers. Well captioned black-and-white photos and many appendices accompany this useful book." -- The Horn Book Guide


Product Description
Jazz Makers gathers together short biographies of more than 50 of jazz's greatest stars, from its early beginnings to the present. The stories of these innovative instrumentalists, bandleaders, and composers reveal the fascinating history of jazz in six parts:
* The Pioneers, including Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith
* Swing Bands and Soloists, with Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday
* The Piano Giants, featuring Fats Waller, Art Tatum, and Mary Lou Williams
* Birth of Bebop, including Dizzy Gillepsie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis
* Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, and Fusion, with John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Stan Getz
* A Century of Jazz, featuring Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, and other contemporary greats.

About the Author
Alyn Shipton is at London Times.

John Lennon: The Life

Download-rapidshare

John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Glenn Frankel When in 1969 three eminent intellectuals were asked to name the "Man of the Decade," broadcaster Alistair Cooke chose John F. Kennedy and novelist Mary McCarthy chose Ho Chi Minh, but anthropologist Desmond Morris opted for John Lennon. It seemed an eccentric choice at the time, but Lennon's stature as a cultural icon has only soared, especially since his murder by a crazed fan in 1980. There are monuments dedicated to him all over the world, from an airport in his hometown of Liverpool to a "tower of light" in Iceland, a graffiti wall in Prague and a chunk of Central Park named Strawberry Fields. As a writer and sly humorist, he has been compared to Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mark Twain, and as an illustrator to James Thurber and Paul Klee. "If he were a painting, I'd hang him in the Metropolitan Museum," said Thomas Hoving, the museum's director. Any biographer who aspires to capture the Beatles' putative leader in all his brilliant and obscene glory has to wrestle with a few basic questions: How did a restless, angry and minimally educated young man from a terminally depressed British seaport rise to lead the foremost pop music group of the 20th century? Was John Lennon truly one of the post-war generation's most creative figures or just a fleeting curiosity? And how can one reconcile the drug-addled, abrasive and gleefully malicious egotist who produced such tripe as "Revolution Number Nine," "Two Virgins" and "The Fly" with the musical genius responsible for "A Day in the Life," "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Strawberry Fields"? For all the hundreds of Beatle books, there have been few biographies of the band's most intriguing and troubled member. Ray Coleman's Lennon: The Definitive Biography is a conscientious but tame account by a British journalist who knew and admired him, while Albert Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon is a vengeful, self-righteous hatchet job that makes no attempt to separate fact from fiction. Now comes Philip Norman. Twenty-eight years ago he produced Shout!, an exuberant and revelatory account of the Beatles' rise and fall. His new book, weighing in at 851 pages, should be his master work. But while it's often powerful and heartfelt, John Lennon: The Life falls short of resolving the deep questions about Lennon's life, loves and work and sheds little light on his proper place in the post-industrial pantheon. Norman recounts what is by now an achingly familiar story, beginning with Lennon's troubled childhood. He was raised by his starchy Aunt Mimi after his father went off to sea and his mother moved in with another man (she later died in a traffic accident). Then came his discovery of rock-and-roll; his tangled partnership with another motherless autodidact, Paul McCartney; the dizzying, stratospheric rise of the Beatles and the chaotic, heady years of Beatlemania -- the drugs, the extravagance and the ego-tripping of a man who decided during one LSD experience that he was Jesus; the group's slow implosion and the endless recriminations. Norman is particularly adept at fleshing out such overlooked side characters as Aunt Mimi and Lennon's wayward father, Freddie, pinpointing their roles in the shaping -- and misshaping -- of his character and creativity. Norman displays the same gift for brisk, what-happened-next narrative that made Shout! a page turner, but there are times when his prose falters: Aunt Mimi's "exterior brusqueness camouflaged a heart of purest gold." When the Beatles first arrived to conquer America in 1964, "fate once again seemed to be working as their press agent." Returning to the United States in 1971, "John unpacked his bags in a country where the generation gap had turned into a blazing abyss." Break out the fire extinguishers! Norman doesn't skimp on showing us the malicious side of "a fellow who seemed to have been born without brakes," as one of his art school teachers put it. Lennon whacked his first wife, Cynthia, across the face in a jealous rage, poured beer over manager Brian Epstein's head and pummeled Bob Wooler, a Liverpool deejay who championed the band, sending him to the hospital. Yet at times, Norman insists, Lennon could be sweet-natured and supportive. Norman's account is most revealing after the band collapses and Lennon tries to navigate life as an ex-Beatle. The author had the cooperation of Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, and lends a sympathetic ear to her side of the breakup story. As the book makes clear, Ono may have used Lennon to gain fame and fortune, but Lennon used her as a sledgehammer to break up the band he felt was suffocating him. Although her musical gifts were microscopic, he brought her to all of the group's recording sessions, whispered to her constantly in front of the others and insisted that they treat her as their professional peer. "She showed me what it was like to be Elvis Beatle and to be surrounded by sycophants and slaves who were only interested in keeping the situation as it was," Lennon told an interviewer. Still, even Ono suffered his wrath. She says he made her write out a list of everyone she'd ever slept with before they met and regarded every man as "an active and dangerous rival for her affections." Norman notes that "even when he went to the toilet, Yoko went too." And she recalls to Norman her humiliation when Lennon made love to a woman in the coatroom of a party Ono and he attended on the night of Richard Nixon's reelection victory in 1972. The most poignant intimacies come at the end of the book when Lennon's son Sean recalls his father, who was murdered when Sean was 5. "I remember the feel of the stubble on his chin . . . the scar I could see underneath it," he tells Norman. It's Sean, himself a musician, who understands his father's most enduring contribution to pop music: the sense of vulnerability and introspection that lies at the heart of such achingly sad songs as "Help!," "Norwegian Wood," "Girl" and "Julia." "For a man to feel insecure and question himself the way my dad did in songs is a post-modern phenomenon," says Sean. "He invented that."
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product Description

For more than a quarter century, Philip Norman's internationally bestselling Shout! has been unchallenged as the definitive biography of the Beatles. Now, at last, Norman turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom belonging to the world's most beloved pop group was never enough. Drawing on previously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, here is the comprehensive and most revealing portrait of John Lennon that is ever likely to be published.

This masterly biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at every aspect of Lennon's much-chronicled life, including the songs that have turned him, posthumously, into a near-secular saint. In three years of research, Norman has turned up an extraordinary amount of new information about even the best-known episodes of Lennon folklore—his upbringing by his strict Aunt Mimi; his allegedly wasted school and student days; the evolution of his peerless creative partnership with Paul McCartney; his Beatle-busting love affair with a Japanese performance artist; his forays into painting and literature; his experiments with Transcendental Meditation, primal scream therapy, and drugs. The book's numerous key informants and interviewees include Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin, Sean Lennon—whose moving reminiscence reveals his father as never before—and Yoko Ono, who speaks with sometimes shocking candor about the inner workings of her marriage to John.

Honest and unflinching, as John himself would wish, Norman gives us the whole man in all his endless contradictions—tough and cynical, hilariously funny but also naive, vulnerable and insecure—and reveals how the mother who gave him away as a toddler haunted his mind and his music for the rest of his days.

Historical Dictionary of Sacred Music

Downloade-uploading
Historical Dictionary of Sacred Music (Historical Dictionaries) by Joseph P. Swain

DESCRIPTION
Nearly all religious traditions have reserved a special place for sacred music. Whether it is music accompanying a ritual or purely for devotional purposes, music composed for entire congregations or for the trained soloist, or music set to holy words or purely instrumental, in some form or another, music is present. In fact, in some traditions the relation between the music and the ritual is so intimate that to distinguish between them would be inaccurate.

The Historical Dictionary of Sacred Music covers the most important aspects of the sacred music of Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and other smaller religious groups. It provides useful information on all the significant traditions of this music through the use of a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, appendixes, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on major types of music, composers, key religious figures, specialized positions, genres of composition, technical terms, instruments, fundamental documents and sources, significant places, and important musical compositions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph P. Swain has taught music history and theory at Phillips Academy and Colgate University for more than 25 years. He writes music criticism and critical theory and performs regularly as church organist, violist, and choir director.

Schoenberg

Download-depositfiles

Schoenberg by Malcolm MacDonald

Product Description
In this completely rewritten and updated edition of his long-indispensable study, Malcolm MacDonald takes advantage of 30 years of recent scholarship, new biographical information, and deeper understanding of Schoenberg's aims and significance to produce a superb guide to Schoenberg's life and work. MacDonald demonstrates the indissoluble links among Schoenberg's musical language (particularly the enigmatic and influential twelve-tone method), his personal character, and his creative ideas, as well as the deep connection between his genius as a teacher and as a revolutionary composer. Exploring newly considered influences on the composer's early life, MacDonald offers a fresh perspective on Schoenberg's creative process and the emotional content of his music. For example, as a previously unsuspected source of childhood trauma, the author points to the Vienna Ringtheater disaster of 1881, in which hundreds of people were burned to death, including Schoenberg's uncle and aunt-whose orphaned children were then adopted by Schoenberg's parents. MacDonald brings such experiences to bear on the music itself, examining virtually every work in the oeuvre to demonstrate its vitality and many-sidedness. A chronology of Schoenberg's life, a work-list, an updated bibliography, and a greatly expanded list of personal allusions and references round out the study, and enhance this new edition.

J.S. Bach: A Life in Music

Download

Download-Rapidshare

J.S. Bach: A Life in Music
by Peter Williams

Review
'... its freshness of approach and practical knowledge of the music are enthralling.' The Herald 'Peter williams' observations in this new well-written volume add an imaginative and fresh dimension that will keep the 'little grey cells' charged. ... This new volume could be a useful 'precursor' and we are the beneficiaries as a result.' The Journal of the London Bach Society '... Williams is a writer both erudite and compelling ... this is a biography unafraid to raise awkward questions and make a gallant attempt to answer them. ... William's study, a substantial read, fills an important place in English language Bach literature.' BBC Music Magazine 'Williams's book is dense and challenging ... a rewarding read, certain to enthral equally any lover of Bach's music and admirer of the techniques of forensic enquiry.' Musical Times

Review
2007 Outstanding Academic Title -- Choice Magazine

Product Description
Peter Wiliams approaches afresh the life and music of arguably the most studied of all composers, interpreting both Bach's life by deconstructing his original Obituary in the light of new information, and his music by evaluating his priorities and irrepressible creative energy. How, though belonging to musical families on both his parents' sides, did he come to possess so bewitching a sense of rhythm and melody, and a mastery of harmony that established nothing less than a norm in western culture? In considering that the works of a composer are his biography, the book's title 'A Life in Music' means both a life spent making music and one revealed in the music as we know it. A distinguished scholar and performer, Williams re-examines Bach's life as an orphan and a family man, as an extraordinarily gifted composer and player, and an energetic and ambitious artist who never suffered fools gladly.

Book Description
Peter Williams takes a new look at a composer who might today seem remote but whose music uniquely delights, suggesting new ways to understand Bach's genius. Chapters are divided chronologically, and the book contains a helpful glossary.

About the Author
Peter Williams is former Professor and Dean of Music at the University of Edinburgh and is Emeritus Arts and Sciences Professor of Music at Duke University.

The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia

Download

The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia
by Cliff Eisen

With the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth in 2006, there are a number of new books on the ever-popular composer, including this comprehensive encyclopedia. The editors are well-known British musicologists. Eisen has written many articles on the composer, and Keefe also edited the Cambridge Companion to Mozart (2003), a collection of essays on Mozart's music.

The encyclopedia has about 500 alphabetically arranged entries on everything from five pages on Travel to a paragraph on ^ Traeg, Johann, a publisher of Mozart's music, and from four pages on Genius to one paragraph on Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. There are about 50 contributors, the majority from English or U.S. universities. The entries have a consistent style, scholarly but readable. Most entries end with a short bibliography. See references often direct readers from individual works such as 'Coronation' Concerto to entries such as Concertos, but actual mention of the work can be hard to find within the six-page Concertos, which is loosely arranged chronologically by Kochel Number. An index entry with a page reference would have helped, and such problems could be eliminated altogether by an online version.

Although much of the volume discusses the historical aspects of Mozart, there are current references. For example, the entry Mozart in literature mentions current novels based on the composer. There are no musical notations or photographs, but a number of tables are provided; an interesting one lists the date, duration, place, and symptoms of Mozart's illnesses. The appendixes include a complete list of works, a list of Mozart films, a list of operas on DVD and video, and Mozart organizations and Web sites. This encyclopedia is the definitive source for Mozart information and should be a required purchase for music and large public and academic libraries. Christine Bulson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
"Like all good single volume encyclopedias, this one is also a delight for the casual browser who is not looking for anything in particular. Opening the book to read in an idle moment invariably provides both pleasure and instruction." --Opera News

"...contains some of the finest writing on Mozart I have read." New York Review of Books

"Entries are beautifully and entertainingly written by some of the best Mozart scholars in the world. [...] If all such gifts come as beautifully packaged as this one, it will indeed give Mozart lovers something to sing about." -- American Reference Books Annual

"...the ultimate contribution to Mozart this year. The paper exudes quality and the entries are deft and well-organised."
The Independent

"...a handsome, lavishly produced volume, offers easy access to all the information most music lovers will need about a favourite composer."
Sunday Times

"...for those who must know absolutely every fact about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart...the Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia leaves no Kochel number unturned." -- The Times

"With this lovingly fashioned book, volume can sometimes come in the form of minutiae, the details which, ironically enough, give what's essentially a learned tome a narrative thrust. Mozart is lifted from these pages, especially so for those who've long thrilled to his music; no matter how well-versed one is in the biographical chronology: the opera plots, the innuendoes of rivals, the scholarly points of contention, the paper trails of commissions--I'd argue that with this work Mozart the man--at least in the print record--reads as real as we're going to get him, outside of his own letters." --Fanfare

"This encyclopedia is the definitive source for Mozart information and should be a required purchase for music and large public and academic libraries." -- Booklist

"Cambridge University Press has issued a lavish new Mozart Encyclopedia." Tara Pepper, Newsweek International

“Thematic studies, such as “Sources for Mozart's Life and Works” and the biographical article on Mozart, are quite long and packed with useful information. The appendixes offer hard-to-find information about videos of operas and Mozart films, as well as addresses for organizations and Web sites devoted to Mozart and his work. The pool of contributors is a distinguished one of recognized Mozart authorities.”
Choice

"Aims to serve as a starting point for research as well as a summary of the latest in Mozart scholarship." Library Journal

"...this first resource to cover both Mozart's life and oeuvre is a browser's delight. The nearly four dozen contributors are international musicologists noted for their Mozart scholarship, and the editors have done a good job maintaining a consistent style and tone to their entries...An indispensable addition to all collections." - Library Journal, Larry Lipkis, Moravian College

"An essential referencework that provides comprehensive coverage of Mozart's life and works." -- Nineteenth Century Music

"Extensively cross-checked and indexed, this tome takes advantage of all the latest academic research to provide detailed and comprehensive entries on every person, place or thing involved with the composer's life." Gavriel Fiske

"This was a book waitingto happen, a handy reference for all things Mozartean: biography, repertoire, cultural milieux." - James M. Keller High Fidelity