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Musical biography has rarely been an object of theoretical and methodological reflection. Our present-day perception of the lives of prominent composers and performers of the past has been largely formed by cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers and their twentieth-century followers. While older biographies are being scrutinized for veracity and 'updated' with new evidence, their historiographical premisses and narrative techniques remain largely unchallenged. The epistemological upheavals in the humanities since the 1960s have generated a body of theoretical thought that has undermined many of the assumptions of traditional biography. Consequently, many of thes...
Chopin's Polish Ballade examines the Second Ballade, Op. 38, and how that work gave voice to the Polish cultural preoccupations of the 1830s, using musical conventions from French opera and amateur piano music. This approach provides answers to several persistent questions about the work's form, programmatic content, and poetic inspiration.
The Cambridge Companion to Chopin provides the enquiring music-lover with helpful insights into a musical style which recognises no contradiction between the accessible and the sophisticated, the popular and the significant. Twelve essays by leading Chopin scholars make up three parts. Part 1 discusses the sources of Chopin's style in the music of his predecessors and the social history of the period. Part 2 profiles the mature music, and Part 3 considers the afterlife of the music - its reception, its criticism and its compositional influence in the works of subsequent composers.
"The Frédéric Chopin Annik LaFarge presents here is not the melancholy, sickly, romantic figure so often portrayed. The artist she discovered is, instead, a purely independent spirit: an innovator who created a new musical language, an autodidact who became a spiritually generous, trailblazing teacher, a stalwart patriot during a time of revolution and exile. In Chasing Chopin she follows in his footsteps during the three years, 1837-1840, when he composed his iconic "Funeral March"-dum dum da dum-using its composition story to illuminate the key themes of his life: a deep attachment to his Polish homeland; his complex relationship with writer George Sand; their harrowing but consequential...
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Amadeus . . . Yankee Doodle Dandy . . . Swanee River . . . Rhapsody in Blue. Even before movies had sound, filmmakers dramatized the lives of composers. Movie biographies—or biopics—have depicted composers as diverse as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George M. Cohan, Stephen Foster, and George Gershwin. In this enticing book, the first devoted entirely to such films, John C. Tibbetts surveys different styles and periods from the Hollywood of the 1920s and 1930s to the international cinema of today, exploring the role that film biographies play in our understanding of history and culture. Tibbetts delves into such questions as: How historically accurate are composer biopics? How and why have inaccuracies and distortions been perpetrated? What strategies have been used to represent visually the creative process? The book examines the films in several contexts and considers their role in commodifying and popularizing music. Extensive archival research, dozens of illustrations, and numerous interviews make this an appealing book for film and music enthusiasts at all levels.
This volume gathers together a cross-section of essays and book chapters dealing with the ways in which musicians and their music have been pressed into the service of political, nationalist and racial ideologies. Arranged chronologically according to their subject matter, the selections cover Western and non-Western musics, as well as art and popular musics, from the eighteenth century to the present day. The introduction features detailed commentaries on sources beyond those included in the volume, and as such provides an invaluable and comprehensive reading list for researchers and educators alike. The volume brings together for the first time seminal articles written by leading scholars, and presents them in such a way as to contribute significantly to our understanding of the use and abuse of music for ideological ends.
Frédéric Chopin: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer. The second edition includes research published since the publication of the first edition and provides electronic resources.