Ignace Paderewski Musician And Statesman

A biography of the Polish piano virtuoso who became the first prime minister of a united Poland after World War I.

This is a new release of the original 1942 edition.

The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).

"Dreams of Love: Playing the Romantic Pianist explores the attractions of the concert pianist from an innovative interdisciplinary perspective, demonstrating how such meanings have evolved over two centuries through technology and the popular media, including literature and cinema. Author Ivan Raykoff uses romantic both as the label for a historical era and musical style, as well as the more colloquial adjective referring to love, desire, and sensual feeling. Through this two-fold interpretive approach, music history and cultural mythology are read alongside one another to reveal the interconnected processes of music's social mediation. The word playing also invites multiple readings: performance or practicing, as pastime or profession, as play-acting and other modes of representation, or reproduction like a player piano. The Romantic pianist signifies more than just music; through established rituals and familiar representations of practicing, performing, and listening, the pianist also plays within a larger system of cultural ideology linking music to aspects of gender, sexuality, personal identity and social relationships, and the politics of the body."