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Egyptian-born composer Halim El-Dabh has studied with the giants of 20th-century musical composition and conducting, including Leopold Stokowski, Irving Fine, and Leonard Bernstein. In the late 1950s El-Dabh worked with electronic music pioneers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. He was commissioned by choreographer and modern dance innovator Martha Graham to write the music for Clytemnestra and Lucifer. Although this biography focuses on his career from his arrival in the US in 1950 to his retirement from the faculty of Kent State University in 1991, his life in Egypt, its influence on him musically, and his creative life after retirement is also covered. In March 2002 El-Dabh presented a concert of his electronic and electro-acoustic works and three concerts of his orchestral chamber music in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina String Orchestra at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (the famous Library of Alexandria of antiquity). The accompanying CD features excerpts of this programme.
Winner, 2004 Dale W. Brown Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies Winner, 2005 Outstanding Publication, Communal Studies Association Co-published with the Pennsylvania German Society/Vandenhoeck && Ruprecht The Ephrata Cloister was a community of radical Pietists founded by Georg Conrad Beissel (1691&–1768), a charismatic mystic who had been a journeyman baker in Europe. In 1720 he and a few companions sought a new life in William Penn&’s land of religious freedom, eventually settling on the banks of the Cocalico Creek in what is now Lancaster County. They called their community &“Ephrata,&” after the Hebrew name for the area around Bethlehem. Voices of the Turtledoves is a fascinating look at the sacred world that flourished at Ephrata. In Voices of the Turtledoves, Jeff Bach is the first to draw extensively on Ephrata&’s manuscript resources and on recent archaeological investigations to present an overarching look at the community. He concludes that the key to understanding all the various aspects of life at Ephrata&—its architecture, manuscript art, and social organization&—is the religious thought of Beissel and his co-leaders.
Historians of the early Republic are just beginning to tell the stories of the period&’s ethnic minorities. In Foreigners in Their Own Land, Steven M. Nolt is the first to add the story of the Pennsylvania Germans to that larger mosaic, showing how they came to think of themselves as quintessential Americans and simultaneously constructed a durable sense of ethnicity. The Lutheran and Reformed Pennsylvania German populations of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Appalachian backcountry successfully combined elements of their Old World tradition with several emerging versions of national identity. Many took up democratic populist rhetoric to defend local cultural particularity and ethn...
From the early 1960s to the late 1980s, John A. Hostetler was the world&’s premier scholar of Amish life. Hailed by his peers for his illuminating and sensitive portrayals of this often misunderstood religious sect, Hostetler successfully spanned the divide between popular and academic culture, thereby shaping perceptions of the Amish throughout American society. He was also outspoken in his views of the modern world and of the Amish world&—views that continue to stir debate today. Born into an Old Order Amish family in 1918, Hostetler came of age in an era when the Amish were largely dismissed as a quaint and declining culture, a curious survival with little relevance for contemporary A...
Despite the great interest in &"plain&" groups in recent years, comparatively little has been written about women and the particular role they play in preserving traditional religious and cultural values in the modern world. In Plain Women, Margaret C. Reynolds portrays the women of the Old Order River Brethren, a significant branch of the Brethren in Christ located mainly in Pennsylvania. The members of this conservative offshoot of the Brethren are often confused with the Amish because of their plain attire, but, unlike the Amish, they have made some notable concessions to the modern world&—including the use of automobiles, computers, and home appliances. Noting these accommodations to m...
"To the Latest Posterity is filled with examples of family registers from museum and private collections, many of them never before published, including early handmade work as well as printed registers that were filled in by hand in the nineteenth century. Bringing the art into the twentieth century and beyond, the Earnests discuss the adoption of the art by the Amish, who continue the practice of illuminated family record keeping today."--Jacket.
The book provides a historical survey of the wind bands music and denotes how historical and cultural developments have influenced it over the course of time. Although the modern wind band developed first in the 19th century, it has its roots in the wind music of ancient times, and music survives that has been composed since the Middle Ages. Therefore, this book covers the music from that time to the present, including the dance music of the Renaissance, the Harmoniemusik of the Classical Period, and the nationalistic music of the Romantic Period, as well as the major wind band repertoire developed after 1900.
Examining how the Wengers have cautiously and incrementally adapted to the changes swirling around them, this book offers an invaluable case study of a traditional group caught in the throes of a postmodern world."--Jacket.
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Sheds light on the process of cultural change that occurred over the course of a century or more in the majority of Pennsylvania German communities and churches. The Pennsylvania Dutch comprised the largest single ethnic group in the early American Republic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet like other ethnic minorities in early America, they struggled to maintain their own distinct ethnic identity in everything that they did. Eventually their German Lutheran and Reformed customs and folkways gave way to Anglo-American pressure. The tune and chorale books printed for use in Pennsylvania Dutch churches document this gradual process of Americanization, including notable...