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This book offers an insight into Beethoven's career, showing in well-documented detail the rise and decline of his powers as a performer.
The Science of Walking recounts the story of the growing interest and investment of Western scholars, physicians, and writers in the scientific study of an activity that seems utterly trivial in its everyday performance yet essential to our human nature: walking. Most people see walking as a natural and unremarkable activity of daily life, yet the mechanism has long puzzled scientists and doctors, who considered it an elusive, recalcitrant, and even mysterious act. In The Science of Walking, Andreas Mayer provides a history of investigations of the human gait that emerged at the intersection of a variety of disciplines, including physiology, neurology, orthopedic surgery, anthropology, and p...
We're all familiar with the image of a fierce and scowling Beethoven, struggling doggedly to overcome his rapidly progressing deafness. That Beethoven continued to play and compose for more than a decade after he lost his hearing is often seen as an act of superhuman heroism. But the truth is that Beethoven's response to his deafness was entirely human. And by demystifying what he did, we can learn a great deal about Beethoven's music. Perhaps no one is better positioned to help us do so than Robin Wallace, who not only has dedicated his life to the music of Beethoven but also has close personal experience with deafness. One day, at the age of forty-four, Wallace's late wife, Barbara, found ...
Few composers even begin to approach Beethoven's pervasive presence in modern Western culture, from the concert hall to the comic strip. Edited by a cultural historian and a music theorist, Beethoven and His World gathers eminent scholars from several disciplines who collectively speak to the range of Beethoven's importance and of our perennial fascination with him. The contributors address Beethoven's musical works and their cultural contexts. Reinhold Brinkmann explores the post-revolutionary context of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, while Lewis Lockwood establishes a typology of heroism in works like Fidelio. Elaine Sisman, Nicholas Marston, and Glenn Stanley discuss issues of temporality...
Discoveries from the Fortepiano meets the demand for a manual on authentic Classical piano performance practice that is at once accessible to the performer and accurate to the scholarship. Uncovering a wide range of eighteenth-century primary sources, noted keyboard pedagogue Donna Gunn examines contemporary philosophical beliefs and principles surrounding Classical Era performance practices. Remarkably researched and engagingly written, Discoveries from the Fortepiano is an indispensable aid to any pianist who seeks an academically and artistically sound approach to the performance of Classical works.
"In this book, Tom Beghin examines the French piano Beethoven famously acquired from the Erard firm in Paris in 1803. The Erard piano is one of only three extant instruments belonging to Beethoven and is housed in a museum in Austria. Beghin argues that the piano sonatas Beethoven composed between 1803 and 1810-including the "Waldstein" and the "Appassionata"-show the influence of the new French style of pianism and of the Erard in particular, specifically in the uses of tremolo, legato, and the "una corda" pedal, which softens dramatically the volume. Beghin shows that Beethoven was guided by a search for new sonorities and that the specific "touch" provided by the Erard's technology helped to point him toward new compositional horizons, especially at a time when he was forced to withdraw from performance due to his increasing deafness. The book combines informed historical analysis of the musical milieus in Vienna and Paris with the author's own experiments at the keyboard in order to reconstruct the specific techniques that Beethoven was exploiting and the ways they translated into his innovative piano writing"--
A new and wide-ranging collection of essays by leading international scholars, exploring the concept and practices of virtuosity in Franz Liszt and his contemporaries.
Bringing together leading scholars from around the world and across scholarly disciplines, this collection of 32 original chapters provides a comprehensive exploration of the relationships between cities and media. The volume showcases diverse methods for studying media and the city and posits "media urbanism" as an approach to the co-construction and interactions among media texts and technologies, media users, media industries, media histories, and urban space. Chapters serve as a guide to humanities-based ways of studying urban imaginaries, infrastructures and architectures, development and redevelopment, and strategies and tactics as well as a provocation toward new lines of inquiry that...
Matthew Dirst examines the leading role of Bach's keyboard works in the creation of his historical legacy.
Research in the field of keyboard studies, especially when intimately connected with issues of performance, is often concerned with the immediate working environments and practices of musicians of the past. An important pedagogical tool, the keyboard has served as the ’workbench’ of countless musicians over the centuries. In the process it has shaped the ways in which many historical musicians achieved their aspirations and went about meeting creative challenges. In recent decades interest has turned towards a contextualized understanding of creative processes in music, and keyboard studies appears well placed to contribute to the exploration of this wider concern. The nineteen essays co...