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Entrenched until recently in Western aesthetics, Australian composers are now developing a functional cultural identity expressed through a distinctly nationalistic musical idiom. Its ongoing formation, inspired by Australias Aboriginal heritage and unique natural environment, seeks to distance the nations artistic developments from the geographically remote Occidental regions and emphasize its native cultures. Presently, however, mounting sociopolitical and ethical concerns surrounding the cultural borrowing between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are problematizing the developing nationalistic idiom, as composers must determine whether the two groups share any legitimate connection b...
Peter Sculthorpe, who died in 2014, remains Australia’s best-known composer and is widely held to be the most important creative musical spirit the country has produced. Beautifully written and fastidiously researched, this authorised biography provides an insight into Sculthorpe’s formation years: his quest for personal voice, and his arrival – through many creative friendships and collaborations – at a place in the collective heart of the nation. It charts the realisation of a youthful vocation to become not merely a composer, but an Australian composer. Graeme Skinner’s biography is also a social history, examining Sculthorpe’s unique role in the creation of Australian musical modernism in the 1960s – an important era in Australia’s cultural evolution.
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies is the most comprehensive and expansive critical handbook of Jewish music published to date. It is the first endeavor to address the diverse range of sounds, texts, archives, traditions, histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field. The thirty-one experts from thirteen countries who prepared the thirty original and groundbreaking chapters in this handbook are leaders in the disciplines of musicology and Jewish studies as well as adjacent fields. Chapters in the handbook provide a broad coverage of the subject area with considerable expansion of the topics that are normally covered in a resource of this type. De...
In this collection of academic essays, award-winning pianist and music professor Yaokun Yang shares her carefully compiled analyses of classical music and aesthetics during several different periods, focusing particularly on the aspect of piano performance practice. Yang, who devoted six years to her research, offers extensive commentary, historical background, and comparisons of varied composers and their music. The pieces she studies include Beethovens piano sonatas, an advanced piano teaching series, the development of opera in different areas, Bachs Brandenburg concertos, Haydns piano sonatas, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, Brahmss Intermezzo, Olivier Messiaens Vingt regards sur lenfant-Jsus, Prokofievs piano sonatas, Weberns Six Pieces for Large Orchestra, and Schumanns Piano Concerto. With this collection of analyses, Yang hopes to provide information and commentary to help contemporary pianists recognize the beauty and the challenges of performing different musical styles in appropriate ways.
Musical representations of Europe in myth and allegory are well known, but when and under what circumstances did the words "European" and "music" become linked together? What did the resulting term mean in music before 1800 and how did it evolve into the label "Western music," which features so prominently in pedagogical and scholarly discourses? In The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century, author D. R. M. Irving traces the emergence of such large-scale categories in Western European thought. Beginning in the 1670s, Jesuit missionaries in China began to refer to "European music," and for the next hundred years the term appeared almost exclusively in comparison with musics ...
This book presents accounts of creative processes and contextual issues of current-day and early-twentieth century women composers. This collection of essays balances narratives of struggle, artistic prowess, and of "breaking through" the obstacles in the profession. Part I: Creative Work – Then and Now illuminates historical and present-day women’s composition and various iterations and conceptions of the “feminine voice”; Part II: The State of the Industry in the Present Day provides solutions from the frontline to sector inequities; and Part III: Creating; Collaborating: Composer and Performer Reflections offers personal stories of current creation in music. A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds draws together topical issues in feminist musicology over the past century. This volume provides insight into the professional and compositional procedures of creative women in music and stands to be relevant for composers, performers, industry professionals, students, and feminist and musicological scholars for many years to come.
Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century is a comprehensive and fascinating survey of the key figures in gay and lesbian history from classical times to the mid-twentieth century. Among those included are: * Classical heroes - Achilles; Aeneas; Ganymede * Literary giants - Sappho; Christopher Marlowe; Arthur Rimbaud; Oscar Wilde * Royalty and politicians - Edward II; King James I; Horace Walpole; Michel de Montaigne. Over the course of some 500 entries, expert contributors provide a complete and vivid picture of gay and lesbian life in the Western world throughout the ages.
Robert Ariss - activist and academic - had a unique vision of HIV/AIDS. As an HIV seropositive individual for many years before his death on May 9, 1994, he was a full participant in, and critic of, the development of the gay community's response to the HIV epidemic both in Australia and internationally. Though Ariss' life is a definite presence in this study, Against Death: The Practice of Living with AIDS is not an autobiography. Instead, it is a unique and critical account of a public health crisis, a community's response, and the politics of sexuality. It was in Sydney, Australia, world-famous for its Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, that Robert Ariss lived and worked. It is his vision of that community - of its members infected with and affected by HIV - which is documented in this remarkable anthropological study. Yet the study's implications reach beyond Sydney to all communities living with HIV and AIDS.