Opera And Its Symbols The Unity Of Words Music And Staging Mit Abb U Noten

The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni offers an original reading of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni, using as a lens the portrayal of the title role by its creator, the baritone Luigi Bassi (1766–1825). Although Bassi was coached in the role by the composer himself, his portrayal has never been studied in depth before, and this book presents a large number of new sources (first- and second-hand accounts), which allows us to reconstruct his performance scene by scene. The book confronts Bassi’s portrayal with a study of the opera’s early German reception and performance history, demonstrating how Don Giovanni as we know it today was not only created by Mozart, Da Ponte and Luigi Bassi but also by the early German adapters, translators, critics and performers who turned the title character into the arrogant and violent villain we still encounter in most of today’s stage productions. Incorporating discussion of dramaturgical thinking of the late Enlightenment and the difficult moral problems that the opera raises, this is an important study for scholars and researchers from opera studies, theatre and performance studies, music history as well as conductors, directors and singers.

Plainchant is the oldest substantial body of music that has been preserved in any shape or form. It was first written down in Western Europe in the eighth to ninth centuries. Many thousands of chants have been sung at different times or places in a multitude of forms and styles, responding to the differing needs of the church through the ages. This book provides a clear and concise introduction, designed both for those to whom the subject is new and those who require a reference work for advanced study. It begins with an explanation of the liturgies that plainchant was designed to serve. It describes all the chief genres of chant, different types of liturgical book, and plainchant notations. After an exposition of early medieval theoretical writing on plainchant, Hiley provides a historical survey that traces the constantly changing nature of the repertory. He also discusses important musicians and centers of composition. Copiously illustrated with over 200 musical examples, this book highlights the diversity of practice and richness of the chant repertory in the Middle Ages. It will be an indispensable introduction and reference source on this important music for many years to come.

There have been numerous publications in the last decades on the Bible in literature, film, and art. But until now, no reference work has yet appeared on the Bible as it appears in Western music. In The Bible in Music: A Dictionary of Songs, Works, and More, scholars Siobhán Dowling Long and John F. A. Sawyer correct this gap in Biblical reference literature, providing for the first time a convenient guide to musical interpretations of the Bible. Alongside examples of classical music from the Middle Ages through modern times, Dowling Long and Sawyer also bring attention to the Bible’s impact on popular culture with numerous entries on hymns, spirituals, musicals, film music, and contemporary popular music. Each entry contains essential information about the original context of the work (date, composer, etc.) and, where relevant, its afterlife in literature, film, politics, and liturgy. It includes an index of biblical references and an index of biblical names, as well as a detailed timeline that brings to the fore key events, works, and publications, placing them in their historical context. There is also a bibliography, a glossary of technical terms, and an index of artists, authors, and composers. The Bible in Music will fascinate anyone familiar with the Bible, but it is also designed to encourage choirs, musicians, musicologists, lecturers, teachers, and students of music and religious education to discover and perform some less well-known pieces, as well as helping them to listen to familiar music with a fresh awareness of what it is about.

Simone Verovio was the first printer to produce a substantial number of musical prints using engraved copper plates. This intaglio printing technique not only allowed him to print on demand, but also to combine different kinds of notation on one page opening: voice parts with corresponding harpsichord and lute intabulations. This detailed comparison of intaglio and relief printing techniques in the editions associated with Verovio sheds light on the production of sheet music around 1600 and the comparison of the vocal and instrumental parts provides ground-breaking insights into historical performance practice.

What if the house you are about to enter was built with the confessed purpose of seducing you, of creating various sensations destined to touch your soul and make you reflect on who you are? Could architecture have such power? This was the assumption of generations of architects at the beginning of modernity. Exploring the role of theatre and fiction in defining character in architecture, Louise Pelletier examines how architecture developed to express political and social intent. Applying this to the modern day, Pelletier considers how architects can learn from these eighteenth century attitudes in order to restore architecture's communicative dimension. Through an in-depth and interdisciplinary analysis of the beginning of modernity, Louise Pelletier encourages today's architects to consider the political and linguistic implications of their tools. Combining theory, historical studies and research, Architecture in Words will provoke thought and enrich the work of any architect.

This book unfolds the manifold, complex and intertwined relations between Fuzzy Logic and music in a first comprehensive overview on this topic: systematically as an outline, as completely as possible, in the aspects of Fuzzy Logic in this relation, and especially in music as a process with three main phases, five anthropological layers, and thirteen forms of existence of the art work (Classics, Jazz, Pop, Folklore). Being concerned with the ontological, gnoseological, psychological, and (music-) aesthetical status and the relative importance of different phenomena of relationship between music and Fuzzy Logic, the explication follows the four main principles (with five phenotypes) of Fuzzy Logic with respect to music: similarity, sharpening 1 as filtering, sharpening 2 as crystallization, blurring, and variation. The book reports on years of author’s research on topics that have been only little explored so far in the area of Music and Fuzzy Logic. It merges concepts of music analysis with fuzzy logical modes of thinking, in a unique way that is expected to attract both specialists of music and specialists of Fuzzy Logic, and also non-specialists in both fields. The book introduces the concept of dialectic between sharpening and – conscious – “blurring”. In turn, some important aspects of this dialectic are discussed, placing them in an historical dimension, and ending in the postulation of a 'musical turn' in the sciences, with some important reflections concerning a “Philosophy of Fuzzy Logic”. Moreover, a production-oriented thinking is borrowed from fuzzy logic to musicology in this book, opening new perspectives in music, and possibly also in other artistic fields.

Andrei Bely was one of the most prolific poets, novelists, and theoreticians among the Russian Symbolists. Engaged throughout his life with the essence of language, his thoughts and findings emerge repeatedly in his essays and novels. None of his writings on the subject, however, are as remarkable and multi-faceted as this Poem about Sound. Glossolalia is a complex examination of philology, philosophy, esoterica, and poetry, all in search of the relationship between sound and sense. It reverberates with sound associations and transcends all boundaries of language, discipline, and tradition. It is simultaneously a treatise on the origins of language and the world's creation through the movements of sounds. Bely reenacts, through the mouth, the cosmology of Rudolf Steiner. Bely's work, in its bold attempt to invoke the "living word," remains one of the most far-reaching poetic experiments of the twentieth Century, and this edition offers his fascinating text for the first time in both an English and a German translation, along with the original Russian version and an in-depth commentary by Thomas R. Beyer. Illustrated.

Musical Performance covers many aspects like Musical Acoustics, Music Psychology, or motor and prosodic actions. It deals with basic concepts of the origin or music and its evolution, ranges over neurocognitive foundations, and covers computational, technological, or simulation solutions. This volume gives an overview about current research in the foundation of musical performance studies on all these levels. Recent concepts of synchronized systems, evolutionary concepts, basic understanding of performance as Gestalt patterns, theories of chill as performance goals or historical aspects are covered. The neurocognitive basis of motor action in terms of music, musical syntax, as well as therapeutic aspects are discussed. State-of-the-art applications in performance realizations, like virtual room acoustics, virtual musicians, new concepts of real-time physical modeling using complex performance data as input or sensor and gesture studies with soft- and hardware solutions are presented. So although the field is still much larger, this volume presents current trends in terms of understanding, implementing, and perceiving performance.