A Symphony Of Cowbells

Petra just loves spring in Gimmelwald. Each season she and her family lead their prize dairy cows into the pastures to graze and each cow wears her own jingling, jangling, clanging bell. What a symphony! But when Petra's favorite cow, Elfi, loses her bell the whole herd is out of harmony and refuses to move. Will Petra be able to find Elfi's bell before it's too late? With charming illustrations, this whimsical story is sure to delight children and adults alike.

Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony stands out as one of the most provocative symphonic statements of the early twentieth century. Throughout its performance history, it has often been heard as "existing in the shadow" of the Sixth Symphony or as "too reminiscent" of Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Anna Stoll Knecht's Mahler's Seventh Symphony offers a new interpretation of the Seventh based on a detailed study of Mahler's compositional materials and a close reading of the finished work. With a focus on sketches previously considered as "discarded," Stoll Knecht exposes unexpected connections between the Seventh and both the Sixth and Meistersinger, confirming that Mahler's compositional project was firmly grounded in a dialogue with works from the past. This referential aspect acts as an important interpretive key to the work, enabling the first thorough analysis of the sketches and drafts for the Seventh, and shedding light on its complex compositional history. Considering each movement of the symphony through a double perspective, genetic and analytic, Stoll Knecht demonstrates how sketch studies and analytical approaches can interact with each other. Mahler's Seventh Symphony exposes new facets of Mahler's musical humor and leads us to rethink much-debated issues concerning the composer's cultural identity, revealing the Seventh's pivotal role within his output.

Helping Grieving People – When Tears Are Not Enough is a handbook for care providers who provide service, support and counseling to those grieving death, illness, and other losses. This book is also an excellent text for academic courses as well as for staff development training. The author addresses grief as it affects a variety of relationships and discusses different intervention and support strategies, always cognizant of individual and cultural differences in the expression and treatment of grief. Jeffreys has established a practical approach to preparing grief care providers through three basic tracks. The first track: Heart – calls for self-discovery, freeing oneself of accumulated loss in order to focus all attention on the griever. Second track: Head – emphasizes understanding the complex and dynamic phenomena of human grief. Third track: Hands – stresses the caregiver's actual intervention, and speaks to lay and professional levels of skill, as well as the various approaches for healing available. Accompanying these three motifs, the Handbook discusses the social and cultural contexts of grief as applied to various populations of grievers as well as the underlying psychological basis of human grief. Throughout the book, Jeffreys presents the role of the caregiver as an Exquisite Witness to the journey of grief and pain of bereaved family and friends, and also to the path taken by dying persons and their families. The second edition of Helping Grieving People remains true to the approach that has been so well received in the original volume. It includes updated research findings and addresses new information and developments in the field of loss, grief and bereavement.

Helping Grieving People is a training manual for care providers who will provide support and counseling to those grieving death, illness, and other losses. The author addresses grief as it affects a variety of relationships and discusses different intervention and support strategies, always cognizant of individual and cultural differences in the expression and treatment of grief. Jeffreys has established a practical approach to preparing trainee caregivers through three basic tracks: Heart, Head and Hand. The first step, Heart, calls for self discovery, freeing oneself of accumulated loss in order to focus all attention on the griever. Head emphasizes understanding the complex and dynamic phenomena of human grief. Hand stresses the caregiver's actual intervention, and speaks to the appropriate level of skill as well as the various methods of healing available. Following these three motifs, the Handbook discusses the social and cultural contexts of grief as well as its psychological constructs.

Mahler's Voices brings together a close reading of the renowned composer's music with wide-ranging cultural and historical interpretation, unique in being a study not of Mahler's works as such but of Mahler's musical style.

In this study Thomas Peattie offers a new account of Mahler's symphonies by considering the composer's reinvention of the genre in light of his career as a conductor and more broadly in terms of his sustained engagement with the musical, theatrical, and aesthetic traditions of the Austrian fin de siècle. Drawing on the ideas of landscape, mobility, and theatricality, Peattie creates a richly interdisciplinary framework that reveals the uniqueness of Mahler's symphonic idiom and its radical attitude toward the presentation and ordering of musical events. The book goes on to identify a fundamental tension between the music's episodic nature and its often-noted narrative impulse and suggests that Mahler's symphonic dramaturgy can be understood as a form of abstract theatre.

Bringing the research of musicologists, art historians, and film studies scholars into dialogue, this book explores the relationships between visual art forms and music. The chapters are organized around three core concepts – threshold, intermediality, and synchresis – which offer ways of understanding and discusssing the interplay between the arts of sounds and images. Refuting the idea that music and visual art forms only operate in parallel, the contributors instead consider how the arts of sound and vision are entwined across a wide array of materials, genres and time periods. Contributors delve into a rich variety of topics, ranging from the art of Renaissance Italy to the politics of opera in contemporary Los Angeles to the popular television series Breaking Bad. Placing these chapters in conversation, this volume develops a shared language for cross-disciplinary inquiry into arts that blend music and visual components, integrates insights from film studies with the conversation between musicology and art history, and moves the study of music and visual culture forward.

In a luxury spa hotel in the Swiss Alps, octogenarian friends Fred Ballinger and Mick Boyle look back on their eventful and successful lives as composer and film director, surrounded by a host of colorful and eccentric fellow guests, ranging from a South American soccer star to a famous Californian actor and a reigning Miss Universe. Ballinger is there simply to enjoy his retirement, while Boyle is working with five scriptwriters on his last film, which he hopes will be his masterpiece. When Ballinger is invited by Buckingham Palace to conduct his most famous piece at Prince Philip's birthday celebration and accept a knighthood in return, he refuses, citing personal reasons. As for Mick Boyle, he eventually receives a visit from Brenda Morel, his signature actress, who comes all the way from California to give her opinion of this latest film in which she is to star. At the same time as these two men face these turning points, the marriage of Fred's daughter to Mick's son brings further complications. Only by reconciling with their muses, and by coming to terms with old age and the weight of memory that comes with it, can the two friends move forward with what remains of their lives.