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Composers, performers, and audiences alike sought to negate their recent post in various ways: by affirming modern technology (electronic or mechanical music, sound recordings, radio, and film), exploring music of a more remote past (principally Baroque music), and celebrating popular music (particularly jazz). The essays contained in this volume address these fundamental themes.
The symphony has long been entangled with ideas of self and value. Though standard historical accounts suggest that composers' interest in the symphony was almost extinguished in the early 1930s, this book makes plain the genre's continued cultural dominance, and argues that the symphony can illuminate issues around space/geography, race, and postcolonialism in Germany, France, Mexico, and the United States. Focusing on a number of symphonies composed or premiered in 1933, this book recreates some of the cultural and political landscapes of an uncertain historical moment-a year when Hitler took power in Germany, and the Great Depression reached its peak in the United States. Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination asks what North American and European symphonies from the early 1930s can tell us about how people imagined selfhood during a period of international insecurity and political upheaval, of expansionist and colonial fantasies, scientised racism, and emergent fascism.
Over 100 often hilarious, sometimes sad, but always articulate letters from one of the most charismatic composers in history. Features his witty observations of royalty and their patronage, music, his family, his poverty, more.
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This study of six early twentieth-century periodicals serves to refine the traditional image of the inter-war journal as the pre-eminent vehicle of artistic and intellectual renewal. Every periodical has its own history but general themes are clearly identified. Traces emerge of a common commitment to the internationalisation of the arts and we find early and unexpected discussion of Freud, Chaplin and Joyce in Brussels and Berlin, jazz in Vienna and Brussels, Ezra Pound in the Netherlands and Belgium. In contrast to this internationalisation are the ambitions of the various editors to play a significant role in their national cultures. This tension between national and international influences was in the first instance stimulating and innovative. Later, as a result of political and socio-economic developments, the newly achieved openness and exchange were gradually diminished and finally disappeared as did the periodicals themselves.
Zeitmaße is one of a group of four acknowledged masterpieces composed between 1955 and 1957 that together established Karlheinz Stockhausen as the leading figure in the European avant-garde. Of the four works, it is the only one that has not been thoroughly analysed from the composer's sketches and, for this reason, remains the least-well understood. In this volume, Jerome Kohl provides a much-needed analysis of Zeitmaße, considering its standing in the group and in the wider context of Stockhausen's output. Using recently published correspondence and other documentation from the period, together with surviving sketch material, Kohl investigates the compositional procedures employed in Zei...
"An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thinking and listening that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic and its legacy-the phenomenological style, which involved a search for contact with the world of perception. Resisting the influence of naturalism, figures in this milieu argued for a new understanding and description of the musical experience as something based not in introspection but rather in an attitude of outward, open orientation, where musical experience acquires meaning when the act of listening is physically (materially) shared with others"--
This festschrift reflects the diversity and freedom Murray Lefkowitz, exemplary scholar and teacher, encouraged in his students and colleagues: the meaning behind an Obrecht mass title, a hitherto unknown medieval manuscript, an unexpected source for a well-known Stravinsky movement, a reinterpretation of evidence on Bach's religion and vocation. Each essay contributes to the literature in its own area of specialization, offering a tribute to an inspiring and exacting mentor.