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This book explores the experiences of women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who pursued careers as public performers, charting a new course in an era when women's musical activities were generally consigned to the parlor. Certain instruments had historically evolved as "appropriate for women," and the flamboyant personalities and extroverted emotionalism of Romantic virtuosos and conductors were the antithesis of those qualities traditionally admired in women. However, this work presents an unusual group of young women who nonetheless became noted virtuosos, studying abroad as teenagers and touring North America upon their return. Detailed profiles are given of three r...
One of the foremost piano virtuosi of her time, Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler reliably filled Carnegie Hall. As a ""new woman,"" she simultaneously embraced family life and forged an independent career built around a repertoire of the German music she tirelessly championed. Yet after her death she faded into obscurity. In this new biography, Beth Abelson Macleod reintroduces a figure long, and unjustly, overlooked by music history. Trained in Vienna, Bloomfield-Zeisler significantly advanced the development of classical music in the United States. Her powerful and sensitive performances, both in recital and with major orchestras, won her followers across the United States and Europe and often provided her American audiences with their first exposure to the pieces she played. The European-style salon in her Chicago home welcomed musicians, scientists, authors, artists, and politicians, while her marriage to attorney Sigmund Zeisler placed her at the center of a historical moment when Sigmund defended the anarchists in the 1886 Haymarket trial. In its re-creation of a musical and social milieu, Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler paints a vivid portrait of a dynamic artistic life.
This innovative study of nineteenth-century cellists and cello playing shows how simple concepts of posture, technique and expression changed over time, while acknowledging that many different practices co-existed. By placing an awareness of this diversity at the centre of an historical narrative, George Kennaway has produced a unique cultural history of performance practices. In addition to drawing upon an unusually wide range of source materials - from instructional methods to poetry, novels and film - Kennaway acknowledges the instability and ambiguity of the data that supports historically informed performance. By examining nineteenth-century assumptions about the very nature of the cell...
In this wide-ranging inside view of the history and practice of conducting, analysis and advice comes directly from working conductors, including Sir Charles Mackerras on opera, Bramwell Tovey on being an Artistic Director, Martyn Brabbins on modern music, Leon Botstein on programming and Vance George on choral conducting, and from those who work closely with conductors: a leading violinist describes working as a soloist with Stokowski, Ormandy and Barbirolli, while Solti and Abbado's studio producer explains orchestral recording, and one of the world's most powerful managers tells all. The book includes advice on how to conduct different types of groups (choral, opera, symphony, early music) and provides a substantial history of conducting as a study of national traditions. It is an unusually honest book about a secretive industry and managers, artistic directors, soloists, players and conductors openly discuss their different perspectives for the first time.
Opens a conversation about the life and work of the music teacher. The author regards music teaching as interrelated with the rest of lived life, and her themes encompass pedagogical skills as well as matters of character, disposition, value, personality, and musicality. She urges music teachers to think and act artfully.
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Positioned at a crossroads between feminist geographies and modernist studies, Excursions into Modernism considers transnational modernist fiction in tandem with more rarely explored travel narratives by women of the period who felt increasingly free to journey abroad and redefine themselves through travel. In an era when Western artists, writers, and musicians sought 'primitive' ideas for artistic renewal, Joyce E. Kelley locates a key similarity between fiction and travel writing in the way women authors use foreign experiences to inspire innovations with written expression and self-articulation. She focuses on the pairing of outward journeys with more inward, introspective ones made possi...
A combination of button accordion and bajo sexto, conjunto originated in the Texas-Mexico borderlands as a popular dance music and became a powerful form of regional identity. Today, listeners and musicians around the world have embraced the genre and the work of conjunto masters like Flaco Jiménez and Mingo Saldívar. Erin E. Bauer follows conjunto from its local origins through three processes of globalization--migration via media, hybridization, and appropriation--that boosted the music’s reach. As Bauer shows, conjunto’s encounter with globalizing forces raises fundamental questions. What is conjunto stylistically and socioculturally? Does context change how we categorize it? Do we consider the music to be conjunto based on its musical characteristics or due to its performance by Jiménez and other regional players? How do similar local genres like Tejano and norteño relate to ideas of categorization? A rare look at a fascinating musical phenomenon, Flaco’s Legacy reveals how conjunto came to encompass new people, places, and styles.
Startled by rapid social changes at the turn of the twentieth century, citizens of Atlanta wrestled with fears about the future of race relations, the shape of gender roles, the impact of social class, and the meaning of regional identity in a New South. Gavin James Campbell demonstrates how these anxieties were played out in Atlanta's popular musical entertainment. Examining the period from 1890 to 1925, Campbell focuses on three popular musical institutions: the New York Metropolitan Opera (which visited Atlanta each year), the Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention. White and black audiences charged these events with deep significance, Campbell argues, turni...
In Becoming Modern in Toronto, Keith Walden shows how the Toronto Industrial Exhibition, from its founding, in 1879, to 1903 (when it was renamed the Canadian National Exhibition), influenced the shaping and ordering of the emerging urban culture.