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Author: Sylvia Kahan
Publisher:
Published: 2009-07
Total Pages: 547
ISBN-13: 9781580463331
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A biography of Winnaretta Singer-Polignac, heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, who befriended and subsidized some of the most important musical and literary artists of the 20th Century, including Stravinsky, Proust, Ravel, Cocteau, and Colette.
Author: Sylvia Kahan
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Published: 2003-12-22
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9781580461665
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The American-born Winnaretta Singer (1865-1943) was a millionaire at the age of eighteen, due to her inheriting a substantial part of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Her 1893 marriage to Prince Edmond de Polignac, an amateur composer, brought her into contact with the most elite strata of French society. After Edmond's death in 1901, she used her fortune to benefit the arts, science, and letters. Her most significant contribution was in the musical domain: in addition to subsidizing individual artists (Boulanger, Haskil, Rubinstein, Horowitz) and organizations (the Ballets Russes, l'Opéra de Paris, l'Orchestre Symphonique de Paris), she made a lifelong project of commissioning new musical works from composers, many of them unknown and struggling, to be performed in her Paris salon. The list of works created as a result is long and extraordinary: Stravinsky's Renard, Satie's Socrate, Falla's El Retablo de Maese Pedro, and Poulenc's Two-Piano and Organ Concertos are among the best-known titles. In addition, her salon was a gathering place for luminaries of French culture such as Proust, Cocteau, Monet, Diaghilev, and Colette. Many of Proust's memorable evocations of salon culture were born during his attendance at concerts in the Polignac music room. Sylvia Kahan brings to life this eccentic and extravagant lover of the arts, whose influence on the 20th Century world of music and literature remains incalculable.
Author: Meta DuEwa Jones
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 306
ISBN-13: 0252036212
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This wide-ranging, ambitiously interdisciplinary study traces jazz's influence on African American poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary spoken word poetry. Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel Mackey as well as a generation of up-and-coming contemporary writers and performers, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within the jazz tradition and its representation in poetry. Applying prosodic analysis to emphasize the musicality of African American poetic performance, she examines the gendered meanings evident in collaborative performances and in the criticism, images, and sounds circulating within jazz cultures. Jones also considers poets who participated in contemporary venues for black writing such as the Dark Room Collective and the Cave Canem Foundation, including Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander, and Carl Phillips. Incorporating a finely honed discussion of the Black Arts Movement, the poetry-jazz fusion of the late 1950s, and slam and spoken word performance milieus such as Def Poetry Jam, she focuses on jazz and hip hop-influenced performance artists including Tracie Morris, Saul Williams, and Jessica Care Moore. Through attention to cadence, rhythm, and structure, The Muse is Music fills a gap in literary scholarship by attending to issues of gender in jazz and poetry and by analyzing recordings of poets both with and without musical accompaniment. Applying the methodology of textual close reading to a critical "close listening" of American poetry's resonant soundscape, Jones's analyses include exploring the formal innovation and queer performance of Langston Hughes's recorded collaboration with jazz musicians, delineating the relationship between punctuation and performance in the post-soul John Coltrane poem, and closely examining jazz improvisation and hip-hop stylization. An elaborate articulation of the connections between jazz, poetry and spoken word, and gender, The Muse Is Music offers valuable criticism of specific texts and performances and a convincing argument about the shape of jazz and African-American poetic performance in the contemporary era.
Author: Stephen Downes
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-29
Total Pages: 443
ISBN-13: 1351218360
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Muse has long been figured as a divine or erotically alluring consort to the virile male artist, who may inspire him or lead him to the edge of madness. This book explores the changing cultural expressions of the relationship between the male artist with a beloved, imagined or desired Muse, to offer new and penetrating perspectives on musical representations and transformations of creative masculine subjectivity, and important aspects of the shift from the styles and aesthetics of Romantic Idealism to Modernist Anxiety in music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of the chapters begins with explorations into male artists' relationships with their Muse, and moves to analysis and interpretation which uncovers cultural constructions of masculine artistic inspiration and production, and their association with creatively inspiring and erotically charged relationships with a Muse. New insights are offered into the musical meaning and cultural significance of selected works by Rossini, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Sibelius, Mahler, Bartók, Scriabin, Szymanowski, Debussy, Berg, Poulenc and Weill.
Author: Jeremy Wallach
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2008-12-15
Total Pages: 347
ISBN-13: 0299229033
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →What happens to “local” sound when globalization exposes musicians and audiences to cultural influences from around the world? Jeremy Wallach explores this question as it plays out in the eclectic, evolving world of Indonesian music after the fall of the repressive Soeharto regime. Against the backdrop of Indonesia’s chaotic and momentous transition to democracy, Wallach takes us to recording studios, music stores, concert venues, university campuses, video shoots, and urban neighborhoods. Integrating ground-level ethnographic research with insights drawn from contemporary cultural theory, he shows that access to globally circulating music and technologies has neither extinguished nor homogenized local music-making in Indonesia. Instead, it has provided young Indonesians with creative possibilities for exploring their identity in a diverse nation undergoing dramatic changes in an increasingly interconnected world. Ultimately, he finds, the unofficial, multicultural nationalism of Indonesian popular music provides a viable alternative to the religious, ethnic, regional, and class-based extremism that continues to threaten unity and democracy in that country.
Author: Victoria Levine Lindsay Levine
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2021-02-01
Total Pages: 361
ISBN-13: 0819578649
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this wide-ranging anthology, scholars offer diverse perspectives on ethnomusicology in dialogue with critical Indigenous studies. This volume is a collaboration between Indigenous and settler scholars from both Canada and the United States. The contributors explore the intersections between music, modernity, and Indigeneity in essays addressing topics that range from hip-hop to powwow, and television soundtracks of Native Classical and experimental music. Working from the shared premise that multiple modernities exist for Indigenous peoples, the authors seek to understand contemporary musical expression from Native perspectives and to decolonize the study of Native American/First Nations music. The essays coalesce around four main themes: innovative technology, identity formation and self-representation, political activism, and translocal musical exchange. Related topics include cosmopolitanism, hybridity, alliance studies, code-switching, and ontologies of sound. Featuring the work of both established and emerging scholars, the collection demonstrates the centrality of music in communicating the complex, diverse lived experience of Indigenous North Americans in the twenty-first century.
Author: Simon McVeigh
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2024-05-21
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 1837651345
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Traversing London's musical culture, this book boldly illuminates the emergence of Edwardian London as a beacon of musical innovation. The dawning of a new century saw London emerge as a hub in a fast-developing global music industry, mirroring Britain's pivotal position between the continent, the Americas and the British Empire. It was a period of expansion, experiment and entrepreneurial energy. Rather than conservative and inward-looking, London was invigorated by new ideas, from pioneering musical comedy and revue to the modernist departures of Debussy and Stravinsky. Meanwhile, Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, and a host of ambitious younger composers sought to reposition British music in a rapidly evolving soundscape. Music was central to society at every level. Just as opulent theatres proliferated in the West End, concert life was revitalised by new symphony orchestras, by the Queen's Hall promenade concerts, and by Sunday concerts at the vast Albert Hall. Through innumerable band and gramophone concerts in the parks, music from Wagner to Irving Berlin became available as never before. The book envisions a burgeoning urban culture through a series of snapshots - daily musical life in all its messy diversity. While tackling themes of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, high and low brows, centres and peripheries, it evokes contemporary voices and characterful individuals to illuminate the period. Challenging issues include the barriers faced by women and people of colour, and attitudes inhibiting the new generation of British composers - not to mention embedded imperialist ideologies reflecting London's precarious position at the centre of Empire. Engagingly written, Simon McVeigh's groundbreaking book reveals the exhilarating transformation of music in Edwardian London, which laid the foundations for the century to come.
Author: Paul Du Quenoy
Publisher: Academica Press,LLC
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781930901803
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This research monograph studies and reinterprets the works and ideas of Richard Wagner that have had such a profound influence on the artistic and intellectual life of France. His Romanticism influenced the French symbolists so greatly that they named their major journal La Revue Wagnerians. His musical themes, dramatic structures and philosophical tropes recurred in the works of almost every major French composer before World war One. Massenet was so devoted that he earned the sobriquet "Madamoiselle Wagner". Proust employed Wagnerian concepts and allusions in his modernist fiction and publicly defended Wagner's artistic achievements against the general assault on German kultur during the 1914-1918 war. Wagner remained important during the interwar years as well as the occupation 1940-1944 and after the Liberation. Du Quenoy interprets the phenomenon of France's infatuation with Wagner and discusses why Wagner's influence has been misunderstood and understudied. The author points to the effects of competition, war and political recrimination on the French psyche. In the face of such bitter struggle who would expect a German cultural icon to have played such an important and consistent role in French life? The author points to the strength and uniqueness of Wagner's creativity and his spiritual universalism as the answer. The author also discusses Wagnerism and Wagnerites in France's literary, musical and political culture.
Author: Annegret Fauser
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05
Total Pages: 392
ISBN-13: 135154148X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This volume explores the way in which composers, performers, and critics shaped individual and collective identities in music from Europe and the United States from the 1860s to the 1950s. Selected essays and articles engage with works and their reception by Richard Wagner, Georges Bizet (in an American incarnation), Lili and Nadia Boulanger, William Grant Still, and Aaron Copland, and with performers such as Wanda Landowska and even Marilyn Monroe. Ranging in context from the opera house through the concert hall to the salon, and from establishment cultures to counter-cultural products, the main focus is how music permits new ways of considering issues of nationality, class, race, and gender. These essays - three presented for the first time in English translation - reflect the work in both musical and cultural studies of a distinguished scholar whose international career spans the Atlantic and beyond.
Author: Stephen Rumph
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2020-09-29
Total Pages: 277
ISBN-13: 0520969901
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Gabriel Fauré’s mélodies offer an inexhaustible variety of style and expression that have made them the foundation of the French art song repertoire. During the second half of his long career, Fauré composed all but a handful of his songs within six carefully integrated cycles. Fauré moved systematically through his poetic contemporaries, exhausting Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal before immersing himself in the Parnassian poets. He would set nine poems by Armand Silvestre in swift succession (1878-84), seventeen by Paul Verlaine (1887-94), and eighteen by Charles Van Lerberghe (1906-14). As an artist deeply engaged with some of the most important cultural issues of the period, Fauré reimagined his musical idiom with each new poet and school, and his song cycles show the same sensitivity to the poetic material. Far more than Debussy, Ravel, or Poulenc, he crafted his song cycles as integrated works, reordering poems freely and using narratives, key schemes, and even leitmotifs to unify the individual songs. The Fauré Song Cycles explores the peculiar vision behind each synthesis of music and verse, revealing the astonishing imagination and insight of Fauré’s musical readings. This book offers not only close readings of Fauré’s musical works but an interdisciplinary study of how he responded to the changing schools and aesthetic currents of French poetry.
