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An exploration of fantastic soundworlds in nineteenth-century France, providing a fresh aesthetic and compositional context for Berlioz and others.
The centrality of fantasy to French literary culture has long been accepted by critics, but the sonorous dimensions of the mode and its wider implications for musical production have gone largely unexplored. In this book, Francesca Brittan invites us to listen to fantasy, attending both to literary descriptions of sound in otherworldly narratives, and to the wave of 'fantastique' musical works published in France through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, including Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie fantastique, and pieces by Liszt, Adam, Meyerbeer, and others. Following the musico-literary aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann, they allowed waking and dreaming, reality and unreality to converge, yoking fairy sound to insect song, demonic noise to colonial 'babbling', and divine music to the strains of water and wind. Fantastic soundworlds disrupted France's native tradition of marvellous illusion, replacing it with a magical materialism inextricable from republican activism, theological heterodoxy, and the advent of 'radical' romanticism.
A stimulating new approach to understanding the relationship between music and culture in the long nineteenth century.
Stereomodernism and amplifying the Black Atlantic -- Sight reading: early Black South African transcriptions of freedom -- Négritude musicology: poetry, performance and statecraft in Senegal -- What women want: selling hi-fi in consumer magazines and film -- 'Soul to soul': echo-locating histories of slavery and freedom from Ghana -- Pirate's choice: hacking into (post- )pan-African futures -- Epilogue: Singing songs.
Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique is a key work in the understanding of romanticism, programme music, and the development of the orchestra, post-Beethoven. It is noted for having a title and a detailed programme, and for its connection with the composer's personal life and loves. This handbook situates the symphony within its time, and considers influences, literary as well as musical, that shaped its conception. Providing a close analysis of the symphony, its formal properties and melodic and textural elements (including harmony and counterpoint), it is a rich but accessible study which will appeal to music lovers, scholars, and students. It contains a translation of the programme, which sheds light on the form and character of each movement, and the unusual use of a melodic idée fixe representing a beloved woman. The unusual five-movement design permits a range of musical topics to be discussed and related to traditional symphonic elements: sonata form, a long Adagio, dance-type movements, and thematic development.
This book examines how Berlioz used musical forms to represent a narrative, and to depict emotions such as madness or love.
Expanded and diversified, this companion makes vivid Byron's ongoing relevance to myriad issues of politics, literature and life today.
One of the most prolific women composers of her time, Alice Mary Smith (183984) produced the greatest number of publicly performed large-scale orchestral and choral works of any of her gender. This edition presents three of her short orchestral compositions for the first time in print. The Andante for Clarinet and Orchestra, an orchestral transcription of the slow movement of Smiths Sonata for Clarinet and Piano of 1870, was greatly admired by the English clarinetist Henry Lazarus, who performed it multiple times. The two intermezzi, along with the overture, comprise the complete orchestral music from Smiths grand choral cantata The Masque of Pandora, a setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellows epic poem. Designed as independent instrumental movements, Smith fully orchestrated the intermezzi for a performance in 1879 by the New Philharmonic Society under William Ganz. In the introduction to the edition, Graham-Jones includes a brief biography of Smith and reproduces numerous reviews and program notes from the various performances of these three works.
Re-hearing Op. 131 -- Popular and early reception -- "A new kind of part writing" -- "Like an overly large fantasy" -- Op. 131 and the Rise of Attentive Listening.