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Who hasn't been stirred by the strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? That's a good question, claims Esteban Buch. German nationalists and French republicans, communists and Catholics have all, in the course of history, embraced the piece. It was performed under the direction of Leonard Bernstein at a concert to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet it also serves as a ghastly and ironic leitmotif in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Hitler celebrated his birthdays with it, and the government of Rhodesia made it their anthem. And played in German concentration camps by the imprisoned, it also figured prominently at Mitterand's 1981 investiture. In his remarkable history of one of the mos...
The Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) in Buenos Aires operated for less than a decade, but by the time of its closure in 1971 it had become the undeniable epicenter of Latin American avant-garde music. Providing the first in-depth study of CLAEM, author Eduardo Herrera tells the story of the fellowship program - funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Di Tella family - that, by allowing the region's promising young composers to study with a roster of acclaimed faculty, produced some of the most prominent figures within the art world, including Rafael Aponte Ledeé, Coriún Aharonián, and Blas Emilio Atehortúa. Combining oral histories, ethnographic research, a...
Brings new insights to the music of well-known European composers by telling a fascinating, little-known story about French music publishing, specifically through the lens of Jacques Durand's Édition Classique. French composers, performers and musicologists acted as editors of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European 'classics', primarily for piano. Among these editors were Fauré, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Ravel and Dukas; the objects of their enquiries included core works by Rameau, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin. Presenting six composer-editor case studies, the volume shows that the French 'accent', both musical and cultural, upon this predominantly Austro-Germ...
It is undeniable that technology has made a tangible impact on the nature of musical listening. The new media have changed our relationship with music in a myriad of ways, not least because the experience of listening can now be prolonged at will and repeated at any time and in any space. Moreover, among the more striking social phenomena ushered in by the technological revolution, one cannot fail to mention music’s current status as a commodity and popular music’s unprecedented global reach. In response to these new social and perceptual conditions, the act of listening has diversified into a wide range of patterns of behaviour which seem to resist any attempt at unification. Concentrat...
The volume focuses on music during the process of European integration since the Second World War. Often music in Europe is defined by its relation to the concept of Occidentalism (Musik im Abendland; western music). The emphasis here turns rather to recent manifestations of its evolvement in ensembles, events, musical organisations and ideas; questions of unity and diversity from Bergen to Tel Aviv, from Lisbon to Baku; and deals with the tension between local, regional and national music within the larger confluence of European music. The status of classical and avante-garde music, and to a degree rock and pop, during Europe's development the past sixty years are also reviewed within the context of eurocentrism – the domination of European music within world music, a term propagated by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists several decades ago and based on multiculturalism. Conversely, the search for a musical European identity and the ways in which this search has in turn been influenced by multiculturalism is an ongoing, dynamic process.
Adorno believed that a circular relationship was established between immediacy and mediation. Should we now say that this model with its clear Hegelian influence is outdated? Or does it need some theoretical integration? This volume addresses these questions by covering the performance of music, its technological reproduction and its modes of communication – in particular, pedagogy and dissemination through the media. Each of the book’s four parts deal with different aspects of the mediation process. The contributing authors outline the problematic moments in Adorno’s reasoning but also highlight its potential. In many chapters the pole of immediacy is explicitly brought into play, its different manifestations often proving to be fundamental for the understanding of mediation processes. The prime reference sources are Adorno’s Current of Music, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction and Composing for the Films. Critical readings of these texts are supplemented by reflections on performance studies, media theories, sociology of listening, post-structuralism and other contiguous research fields.
The chapters in this book show the important role that political documentary cinema has played in Latin America since the 1950s. Political documentary cinema in Latin America has a long history of tracing social injustice and suffering, depicting political unrest, intervening in periods of crisis and upheaval, and reflecting upon questions about ideology, cultural identity, genocide and traumatic memory. This collection bears witness to the region's film culture's diversity, discussing documentaries about workers' strikes, riots, and military coups against elected governments; crime, poverty, homelessness, prostitution, children's work, and violence against women; urban development, progress...
This volume brings together a selection of the most stimulating and influential writing on Haydn and his music in the English language. Written by a range of established and younger scholars it probes a variety of aesthetic, biographical, compositional, performance and reception issues. A specially written introduction summarizes the significance of each essay, directs the reader to appropriate complementary material and seeks the common ground between the essays; to assist with consistent referencing the individual essays retain their original pagination. This representative compendium of Haydn research provides the opportunity to explore the intellectual diversity of recent scholarship and is an indispensable publication for students of Haydn, whether new or old, amateur or professional.
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Political thinker, philosopher, patriot, and republican, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) sought solace from his intense activity as a political activist and writer by singing to his own guitar accompaniment. A genuine music lover, in 1836, Mazzini published a pamphlet (40 pages) entitled Filosofia della musica in which he denounced the condition into which music had fallen and suggested the remedy for its resurgence -- this time as a social art. The committed composer cannot restrict himself to writing notes and chords, but must understand the vast influence which [opera] could exercise on society. He should not renounce the idea in favor of the form; progressive operatic music must abandon the rigid rules of the classicists, to take on characteristic tint and historical reality; the idea of opera as entertainment must change to one of opera as a mission; the chorus, which portrays the people, must be used more. Little known among English-speaking musical scholars, Mazzini's work is presented here in a version edited and annotated by Franco Sciannameo. It comprises (1) a Foreword by American leading musicologist Lawrence Kramer, (2) a historical introduction which also offers a crit