Conversations With Casals

Eighteen-year-old Hilda, known as "the girl in the gold bikini" when she swam at her country club in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, abruptly leaves the gilded life to take up residence in room 304 of the Hotel Marvelous—as a prostitute. There she becomes Hilda Hurricane, an erotic force of nature no man can resist. The exception is reporter-narrator Roberto Drummond, who attempts to unravel the mystery of why the girl in the gold bikini would forego a comfortable life to join the world's oldest profession. While some in Belo Horizonte cheer Hilda's liberated lifestyle, others seek to have her moved outside the city limits, and a would-be saint cannot seem to finish the exorcism he began outside the Hotel Marvelous. Set against the social and political upheaval of the 1960s, Hilda's story seduces even as Drummond becomes aware of more ominous forces approaching Belo Horizonte. Hilda Hurricane was both a critical and a commercial success in Brazil, with more than 200,000 copies sold. (The DVD of the television adaptation has sold more than a million copies.) Admirers of Kurt Vonnegut will revel in Drummond's similarly sharp satire and playful digressions, particularly about left-wing politics, which blur the boundary between fiction and autobiography. Yet the real genius of the author's interventions may be that they never slow the story long enough to lose sight of this mysterious beauty swept up in the turmoil of the times.

"This is an immensely valuable book and one which is clearly designed to appeal to all musicians—not just string players...Mr. Blum has captured in great detail the little things that so often make a great teacher. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the Art of Interpretation."—Music Teacher "The volume belongs to an exceptional class of literature: it is to be welcomed as a significant contribution. In his Forward, Antony Hopkins in a most eloquent way makes us fully aware of our possible great loss had the subject material forming this book not been preserved for posterity...throughout the book one remains not only an absorbed reader, but very much an active participant."—Violoncello Society Newsletter "Now we have an authoritative guide to this great artist's approach to interpretation...a book which should be compulsory reading for every player, conductor and teacher."—Music Journal of the Incorporated Society of Musicians "Blum has elegantly combined precise music terminology with meticulous music examples to present lucid and revealing details of interpretation that can be quickly and easily grasped. Only superlatives apply to this book, and all serious musicians would find immense pleasure and musical profit from reading this work. Highly recommended at all levels."—Choice

Each volume of the Dictionary of World Biography contains 250 entries on the lives of the individuals who shaped their times and left their mark on world history. This is not a who's who. Instead, each entry provides an in-depth essay on the life and career of the individual concerned. Essays commence with a quick reference section that provides basic facts on the individual's life and achievements. The extended biography places the life and works of the individual within an historical context, and the summary at the end of each essay provides a synopsis of the individual's place in history. All entries conclude with a fully annotated bibliography.

In The Art of Listening, Anthony Arnone interviews 13 of the top cello teachers of our time, sharing valuable insights about performing, teaching, music, and life. While almost every other aspect of twenty-first-century life has been changed by technological advancements, the art of playing and teaching the cello has largely remained the same. Our instruments are still made exactly the same way and much of what we learn is passed on by demonstration and word of mouth from generation to generation. We are as much historians of music as we are teachers of the instrument. The teaching lineage in the classical music world has formed a family tree of sorts with a select number of iconic names at the top of the tree, such as Pablo Casals, Gregor Piatigorsky, and Leonard Rose. A large percentage of professional cellists working today studied with these giants of the cello world, or with their students. In addition to discussing the impact of these masters and their personal experience as their students, the renowned cellists interviewed in this book touch on a variety of topics from teaching philosophies to how technology has changed classical music.

Johann Sebastian Bach – celebrated pipe organist, court composer and master of sacred music – was also a technical pioneer. Working in Germany in the early eighteenth century, he invented new instruments and carried out experiments in tuning, the effects of which are still with us today. Two hundred years later, a number of extraordinary musicians have utilised the music of Bach to thrilling effect through the art of recording, furthering their own virtuosity and reinventing the composer for our time. In Reinventing Bach, Paul Elie brilliantly blends the stories of modern musicians with a polyphonic account of our most celebrated composer’ s life to create a spellbinding narrative of the changing place of music in our lives. We see the sainted organist Albert Schweitzer playing to a mobile recording unit set up at London’ s Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach’ s organ works to the world beyond the churches, and Pablo Casals’ s Abbey Road recordings of Bach’ s cello suites transform the middle-class sitting room into a hotbed of existentialism; we watch Leopold Stokowski persuade Walt Disney to feature his own grand orchestrations of Bach in the animated classical-music movie Fantasia – which made Bach the sound of children’ s playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike – and we witness how Glenn Gould’ s Goldberg Variations made Bach the byword for postwar cool. Through the Beatles and Switched-on Bach and Gö del, Escher, Bach – through film, rock music, the Walkman, the CD and up to Yo-Yo Ma and the iPod – Elie shows us how dozens of gifted musicians searched, experimented and collaborated with one another in the service of a composer who emerged as the prototype of the spiritualised, technically savvy artist.

Barcelonian Gaspar Cassadó (1897-1966) was one of the greatest cello virtuosi of the twentieth century and a notable composer and arranger, leaving a vast and heterogeneous legacy. In this book, Gabrielle Kaufman provides the first full-length scholarly work dedicated to Cassadó, containing the results of seven years of research into his life and legacy, after following the cellist’s steps through Spain, France, Italy and Japan. The study presents in-depth descriptions of the three main parts of Cassadó’s creative output: composition, transcription and performance, especially focusing on Cassadó’s plural and multi-facetted creativity, which is examined from both cultural and historical perspectives. Cassadó’s role within the evolution of twentieth-century cello performance is thoroughly examined, including a discussion regarding the musical and technical aspects of performing Cassadó’s works, aimed directly at performers. The study presents the first attempt at a comprehensive catalogue of Cassadó’s works, both original and transcribed, as well as his recordings, using a number of new archival sources and testimonies. In addition, the composer’s significance within Spanish twentieth-century music is treated in detail through a number of case studies, sustained by examples from recovered score manuscripts. Illuminated by extraordinary source material Gaspar Cassadó: Cellist, Composer and Transcriber expands and deepens our knowledge of this complex figure, and will be of crucial importance to students and scholars in the fields of Performance Practice and Spanish Music, as well as to professional cellists and advanced cello students.

While interpretation of musical scores is amongst the most frequent of musical activities, it is also, strangely, one of the least researched. This collection of essays seeks to remedy this deficit by illuminating ways in which today’s curious musician – interested in probing beyond the dictates of a faintly understood score – can engage more deeply and thoughtfully with the act of interpretation. Skilful musical interpretation draws on a vast range of knowledges. The chapters of this collection accordingly address a similarly broad set of issues, including notation, rhetoric, theory, historiography, performers past and present, instrument builders, concert presenters, reception history, and more. Written by leading experts from a variety of musical subdisciplines, these essays are designed to be accessible and practically relevant for musical performance. Many of the chapters utilize case studies and, as such, will be useful for university and conservatory level students as well as music scholars. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Musicological Research.