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Pierrot lunaire (1912) is one of the most important music theater works ever written. This is the first guide in English to a work that continues to be performed, broadcast, and recorded worldwide. The book describes the artistic environment around the turn of the century from which Pierrot emerged, and discusses Schoenberg's working methods and intentions in composition. In a clear and imaginative description of the work itself, the author takes each of the twenty-one melodramas in turn, considering both the music and the narrative. The text of all twenty-one poems is provided in German and in a new English translation by Andrew Porter.
The dawn of music semiology showcases the work of ten leading musicologists inspired by the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Reflecting the energy and diversity of the young field of music semiology, chapters in this volume discuss music and gesture, the psychology of music, and the role of ethnotheory, and offer new research on topics as diverse as modeling folk polyphony, spatialization in the Darmstadt repertoire, Schenker's theory of musical content, and modernism from Wagner to Boulez.
It is written in non-technical language in order that the lay reader may easily gain an insight into how performers think, and what they think about. It is performers who bring classical music to a worldwide public, and yet the public is largely unaware of what it feels like to perform music, what aspects of the activity are a mystery even to the musicians themselves, and which are amenable to scrutiny, experiment, and improvement.
Performing Music: Shared Concerns is about various aspects of music-making that have not previously been considered together and in this accessible form. It deals with 'performance studies' as a coherent subject, exploring such issues as the ideas of anxiety and artistry, recent thought in musical literature, tensions between Romanticism and Modernism, and the sound and design of music. It is written in non-technical language in order that the lay reader may easily gain an insight into how performers think, and what they think about. It is performers who bring classical music to a worldwide public, and yet the public is largely unaware of what it feels like to perform music, what aspects of the activity are a mystery even to the musicians themselves, and which are amenable to scrutiny, experiment, and improvement. This book offers a sustained but compact argument in a rich and entertaining narrative.
Music Lessons marks the first publication in English of a groundbreaking group of writings by French composer Pierre Boulez, his yearly lectures prepared for the Collège de France between 1976 and 1995. The lectures presented here offer a sustained intellectual engagement with themes of creativity in music by a widely influential cultural figure, who has long been central to the conversation around contemporary music. In his essays Boulez explores, among other topics, the process through which a musical idea is realized in a full-fledged composition, the complementary roles of craft and inspiration, and the degree to which the memory of other musical works can influence and change the act o...
"This book reflects the increasing significance of musical performance studies in recent decades. Originally published as separate essays over thirty years, the twelve chapters have been refashioned as a monograph which is both scholarly in nature and intensely personal, building on the author's extensive musical experience, most notably as a pianist. Hence the primary focus on piano music by Chopin, Schubert, Liszt, Brahms and Rachmaninoff. The book's cross-cutting themes nevertheless apply to diverse performance idioms and domains. By exploring themes in complementary ways, the book offers broad insights into musical ontology, epistemology and semantics while demonstrating various methodologies now used to study performance. Among other things, it highlights the powerful effects that experiencing music in performance can have on those who take part in it, in any capacity. There are many practical insights too. The volume has four sections, focusing on 'performance and performance studies', historical performance, analysis and performance, and artistic research. Case studies of romantic masterpieces for the piano feature throughout"--
What makes a classical song a song? In a wide-ranging 2004 discussion, covering such contrasting composers as Brahms and Berberian, Schubert and Kurtág, Jonathan Dunsby considers the nature of vocality in songs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essence and scope of poetic and literary meaning in the Lied tradition is subjected to close scrutiny against the backdrop of 'new musicological' thinking and music-theoretical orthodoxies. The reader is thus offered the best insights available within an evidence-based approach to musical discourse. Schoenberg figures conspicuously as both songsmith and theorist, and some easily comprehensible Schenkerian approaches are used to convey ideas of musical time and expressive focus. In this work of scholarship and theoretical depth, Professor Dunsby's highly original approach and engaging style will ensure its appeal to all practising musicians and students of Romantic and modern music.
To the growing list of Pendragon Press publications devoted to the work of Heinrich Schenker, we wish to announce the addition of this much-needed bibliography. The author, a student of Allen Forte, has created a work useful to a wide range of researchers music theorists, musicologists, music librarians and teachers. The Guide is the largest Schenkerian reference work ever published. At nearly 600 pages, it contains 3600 entries (2200 principal, 1400 secondary) representing the work of 1475 authors. Fifteen broad groupings encompass seventy topical headings, many of which are divided and subdivided again, resulting in a total of 271 headings under which entries are collected.
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