Collected Essays On Modern And Classical Music

This collection includes previously published and unpublished essays on modern music, postmodern musicology and literary theory, and analytical studies of Haydn and Schubert, written by the distinguished composer and Columbia University professor emeritus George Edwards.

Founded in 1935, The American Record Guide is America's oldest classical music review magazine. In 1987, when Donald Vroon assumed its editorship, he took on the Herculean task of writing editorials on a vast array of subjects, amassing a wealth of commentary and criticism on not only the foibles and failings, but glimmers of light in American culture. A staunch defender of the highbrow pleasures of good music composed, played, and heard with intelligence, Vroon takes no prisoners in assessing the challenges and failures and possible successes that confront America’s future as a nation of music listeners. In Classical Music in a Changing Culture: Essays from The American Record Guide, Vroon delves into a variety of topics: orchestra finances, contemporary music, classical music marketing, attracting young crowds, musical aesthetics, the future of classical music, the sale and distribution of music in the modern era; the decline of American culture and its causes; the role of misguided ideologies that affect American music, from political correctness to multiculturalism to period performance practice, and the true richness of our music and its subculture. As Vroon argues, since all criticism is cultural criticism, music criticism in the broadest sense—from its composition to its distribution to its reception—is a window onto broader culture issues. Classical Music in a Changing Culture should appeal to anyone serious about classical music and worried about its increasing marginalization in our contemporary culture. These essays are not written for specialists but for thinking readers who love music and care about its place in our lives.

This kaleidoscopic collection reflects on the multifaceted world of classical music as it advances through the twenty-first century. With insights drawn from leading composers, performers, academics, journalists, and arts administrators, special focus is placed on classical music’s defining traditions, challenges and contemporary scope. Innovative in structure and approach, the volume comprises two parts. The first provides detailed analyses of issues central to classical music in the present day, including diversity, governance, the identity and perception of classical music, and the challenges facing the achievement of financial stability in non-profit arts organizations. The second part offers case studies, from Miami to Seoul, of the innovative ways in which some arts organizations have responded to the challenges analyzed in the first part. Introductory material, as well as several of the essays, provide some preliminary thoughts about the impact of the crisis year 2020 on the world of classical music. Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges will be a valuable and engaging resource for all readers interested in the development of the arts and classical music, especially academics, arts administrators and organizers, and classical music practitioners and audiences.

Illuminating and challenging, 'Alfred Brendel on Music' provides an insight into the exceptional mind of a great pianist.

Over the past fifty years Roger Sessions has developed, in articles, lectures, and addresses, various themes that reflect the stages of his own musical and intellectual growth. These themes form the basis of the present collection of essays. Many of the essays deal with specific problems that musicians, especially composers, have faced during the past five decades: problems related to new musical styles and techniques, to the position of composers in society, to their responsibilities as teachers, to their role during the period of the world wars, to the mutual reactions of composer and audience, and to the basic questions of musical form and expression. The collection also includes a set of critical essays on such seminal figures as Bloch, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Roger Sessions is the composer of a recently recorded cantata on Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" as well as numerous other works. He is the author of The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, and Listener (Princeton). Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This kaleidoscopic collection reflects on the multifaceted world of classical music as it advances through the twenty-first century. With insights drawn from leading composers, performers, academics, journalists, and arts administrators, special focus is placed on classical music's defining traditions, challenges and contemporary scope. Innovative in structure and approach, the volume comprises two parts. The first provides detailed analyses of issues central to classical music in the present day, including diversity, governance, the identity and perception of classical music, and the challenges facing the achievement of financial stability in non-profit arts organizations. The second part offers case studies, from Miami to Seoul, of the innovative ways in which some arts organizations have responded to the challenges analyzed in the first part. Introductory material, as well as several of the essays, provide some preliminary thoughts about the impact of the crisis year 2020 on the world of classical music. Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges will be a valuable and engaging resource for all readers interested in the development of the arts and classical music, especially academics, arts administrators and organizers, and classical music practitioners and audiences.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

This volume is a collection of all-new original essays covering everything from feminist to postcolonial readings of the play as well as source queries and analyses of historical performances of the play. The Merchant of Venice is a collection of seventeen new essays that explore the concepts of anti-Semitism, the work of Christopher Marlowe, the politics of commerce and making the play palatable to a modern audience. The characters, Portia and Shylock, are examined in fascinating detail. With in-depth analyses of the text, the play in performance and individual characters, this book promises to be the essential resource on the play for all Shakespeare enthusiasts.