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This book develops fresh ideas on harmony through analyzing the music of one of Western music's true innovators, Franz Schubert.
In this study Thomas Peattie offers a new account of Mahler's symphonies by considering the composer's reinvention of the genre in light of his career as a conductor and more broadly in terms of his sustained engagement with the musical, theatrical, and aesthetic traditions of the Austrian fin de siècle. Drawing on the ideas of landscape, mobility, and theatricality, Peattie creates a richly interdisciplinary framework that reveals the uniqueness of Mahler's symphonic idiom and its radical attitude toward the presentation and ordering of musical events. The book goes on to identify a fundamental tension between the music's episodic nature and its often-noted narrative impulse and suggests that Mahler's symphonic dramaturgy can be understood as a form of abstract theatre.
Used by humans since ancient times, evergreen oak forests still cover extensive mountain areas of the Mediterranean Basin. These broadleaved evergreen forests occupy a transitional zone between the cool-temperate deciduous forest biome and the drier Mediterranean pine forests and shrublands. Slow growing and casting a deep shade, the sclerophyllous holm oak (Quercus ilex) absolutely dominates the closed canopy of many Mediterranean evergreen oak forests. This is a synthesis of 20 years of research on the structure, function, and dynamics of holm oak forests in two intensively studied experimental areas in Spain. By combining observational measurements at the leaf, tree, plot, and catchment scales with field experiments and modelling, the authors explore how these forests cope with strong water limitation and repeated disturbances.
O. L. LANGE, P. S. NOBEL, C. B. OSMOND, and H. ZIEGLER In the last volume of the series 'Physiological Plant Ecology' we have asked contributors to address the bases of ecosystem processes in terms of key plant physiological properties. It has often been suggested that it is not profitable to attempt analysis of complex living systems in terms of the properties of component individuals or populations, i. e. , the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Nevertheless, assessments of ecological research over the last century show that other approaches are seldom more helpful. Although it is possible to describe complex systems of living organisms in holistic terms, the most useful descriptions...
Contributed to by leading experts, this book looks at the history of coppice woodlands, their physical environment, the different management techniques used and their effects on the flora and fauna. The implications of this for conservation is controversial and this is debated in a lively way in many of the chapters.
This indispensable handbook explains how scholars and students should work with and think about the composer's working manuscripts.
Sonata form is fundamentally a dramatic structure that creates, manipulates, and ultimately satisfies expectation. It engages its audience by inviting prediction, association, and interpretation. That sonata form was the chief vehicle of dramatic instrumental music for nearly 200 years is due to the power, the universality, and the tonal and stylistic adaptability of its conception. This book presents nine studies whose central focus is sonata form. Their diversity attests both to the manifold analytical approaches to which the form responds, and to the vast range of musical possibility within the form's exemplars. At the same time, common compositional issues, analytical methods, and overar...
This is a book about classical music – for people who say they love music “but don’t understand how it works”, as well as for performers and music students of all ages. Proposing that deeper enjoyment begins with an understanding of music’s basic structures, the book describes how the simple template of earlier dance-songs was adapted by composers writing music for instruments. The instrumental sonata became one of the great formal frameworks of western music: in symphonies, concertos, chamber music and solo sonatas, it dominated concert music for some 250 years – yet it is little understood by many music lovers. To simplify this vast field, Past Sounds singles out for study “s...
Unique and often startling encounters between music and the moving image in the films of Stanley Kubrick are trademarks of his style; witness the powerful effects of Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in 2001: A Space Odyssey and of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in A Clockwork Orange, each excerpt vetted by Kubrick himself. We'll Meet Again argues that, for Kubrick, music is neither post-production afterthought nor background nor incidental, but instead is core to films' effects and meanings. The book first identifies the building blocks in Kubrick's sonic world and illuminates the ways in which Kubrick uses them to support his characters and to define character relationships. It then delves int...
As Robert Schumann put it, 'Only few works are as clearly stamped with their author's imprint as his'. This book explores Schubert's stylistic traits in a series of chapters each discussing an individual 'fingerprint' with case studies drawn principally from the piano and chamber music. The notion of Schubert's compositional fingerprints has not previously formed the subject of a book-length study. The features of his personal style considered here include musical manifestations of Schubert's 'violent nature', the characteristics of his thematic material, and the signs of his 'classicizing' manner. In the process of the discussion, attention is given to matters of form, texture, harmony and ...