Untwisting the Serpent

Untwisting the Serpent PDF

Author: Daniel Albright

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 9780226012544

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Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, rather than collaboration.

Modernism and Music

Modernism and Music PDF

Author: Daniel Albright

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2004-02-03

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 9780226012667

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If in earlier eras music may have seemed slow to respond to advances in other artistic media, during the modernist age it asserted itself in the vanguard. Modernism and Music provides a rich selection of texts on this moment, some translated into English for the first time. It offers not only important statements by composers and critics, but also musical speculations by poets, novelists, philosophers, and others-all of which combine with Daniel Albright's extensive, interlinked commentary to place modernist music in the full context of intellectual and cultural history.

Beckett and Aesthetics

Beckett and Aesthetics PDF

Author: Daniel Albright

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-12-22

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9780521829083

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Beckett and Aesthetics, first published in 2003, examines Samuel Beckett's struggle with the recalcitrance of artistic media, their refusal to yield to his artistic purposes. As a young man Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett escaped from this bind through allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation, estrangement and general failure. He arrived, Albright shows, at some grasp of fact through the most indirect route available. Albright explores Beckett's experimentation with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. This powerful and highly original book explores Beckett's own engagement with radio, film, and television, prose and drama as part of an attempt to escape the confines of the aesthetic. Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very notion of the aesthetic.

Weill's Musical Theater

Weill's Musical Theater PDF

Author: Stephen Hinton

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-04-10

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13: 0520271777

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“This book, the first scholarly consideration of Weill’s complete output of stage works, is without doubt the most important critical study of the composer’s oeuvre to date in any language. Hinton’s scholarship is superior and his insights original and illuminating. The product of several decades of engagement with Weill’s works, their sources and reception, as well as the secondary literature, the book is a stunning achievement. Brilliantly conceived and executed, it will take its place as one of the cornerstones of Weill studies.”—Kim H. Kowalke, University of Rochester and President, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music “In Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, Stephen Hinton reminds us that Kurt Weill was always a revolutionary. The composer’s insistent dedication to a provocative, constantly evolving lyric theater that spoke directly to audiences meant that Weill remained as controversial as he was popular. The celebrity that endeared him to Broadway made him anathema in Berlin. Some sixty years after Weill’s death, Hinton is finally able to demonstrate the consistent brilliance, theatrical power, and coherence of a composer who revolutionized every genre he touched (or used) and whose collaborators read as a who’s who of twentieth-century theater.” —David Savran, author of Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class "Stephen Hinton presents us with an image of Weill that is at once monumental yet still alive. A truly Protean figure, Weill is not an easy man to grasp in his totality; Brecht once wrote that a man thrown into water will have to develop webbed feet, and as a refugee from Nazi Germany, Weill had to become a cultural amphibian. But in Weill's Musical Theater we see the composer from every angle: through the gaze of countless critics and reviewers, through Weill's own eyes, and finally through the filter of Hinton's judicious, focused prose. This account will stand."—Daniel Albright, author of Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts

Music's Monisms

Music's Monisms PDF

Author: Daniel Albright

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-11-05

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 022679122X

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"The late Daniel Albright was one of the preeminent scholars of musical and literary modernism, leaving behind a rich body of work before his untimely passing. In the essays contained in Music's Monisms, he shows how musical phenomena, like literary ones, can be fruitfully investigated through the lens of monism, the philosophical belief that things that appear to be two are actually one. Albright shows how, in music, despite its many binaries-diatonic vs. chromatic, staccato vs. legato, major vs. minor, tonal vs. atonal-there is always a larger system at work that aims to reconcile all tension and resolve all conflict. Albright identifies a "radical monism" in the work of modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and musical works by Wagner, Debussy, Britten, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, and also delves into figures such as Maeterlinck, Rimbaud, and Yeats along the way. Through a series of close readings of musical and literary works, Albright advances powerful philosophical arguments that not only shed light on these specific figures but also aesthetic experience in general"--

Music Speaks

Music Speaks PDF

Author: Daniel Albright

Publisher: University Rochester Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 158046324X

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Explores the meaning(s) of music, the most intricate and significant language invented by our culture.

Quantum Poetics

Quantum Poetics PDF

Author: Daniel Albright

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-01-28

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780521573054

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Quantum Poetics examines the way modernist poets appropriated scientific metaphors as part of a general search for the pre-verbal origins of poetry. Daniel Albright traces Modernism's search for the elementary particles from which poems were constructed. The poetic possibilities offered by developments in scientific discourse intrigued Yeats, Eliot and Pound, writers intent on remapping the general theory of poetry. Using models supplied by physicists, Yeats sought for the basic units of poetic force, both through his sequence A Vision and through his belief in, and defence of, the purity of symbols. Pound's whole critical vocabulary, Albright claims, aims at drawing art and science together in a search for poetic precision, the tiniest textual particles that held poems together. Through a series of patient and original readings, Quantum Poetics demonstrates how modernists created a whole new way of thinking about poetry and science as two different aspects of the same quest.

Bad Modernisms

Bad Modernisms PDF

Author: Douglas Mao

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-04-14

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 0822387824

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Modernism is hot again. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, poets and architects, designers and critics, teachers and artists are rediscovering the virtues of the previous century’s most vibrant cultural constellation. Yet this widespread embrace raises questions about modernism’s relation to its own success. Modernism’s “badness”—its emphasis on outrageous behavior, its elevation of negativity, its refusal to be condoned—seems essential to its power. But once modernism is accepted as “good” or valuable (as a great deal of modernist art now is), its status as a subversive aesthetic intervention seems undermined. The contributors to Bad Modernisms tease out the contradictions in modernism’s commitment to badness. Bad Modernisms thus builds on and extends the “new modernist studies,” recent work marked by the application of diverse methods and attention to texts and artists not usually labeled as modernist. In this collection, these developments are exemplified by essays ranging from a reading of dandyism in 1920s Harlem as a performance of a “bad” black modernist imaginary to a consideration of Filipino American modernism in the context of anticolonialism. The contributors reconsider familiar figures—such as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Josef von Sternberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. H. Auden, and Wyndham Lewis—and bring to light the work of lesser-known artists, including the writer Carlos Bulosan and the experimental filmmaker Len Lye. Examining cultural artifacts ranging from novels to manifestos, from philosophical treatises to movie musicals, and from anthropological essays to advertising campaigns, these essays signal the capaciousness and energy galvanizing the new modernist studies. Contributors. Lisa Fluet, Laura Frost, Michael LeMahieu, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Jesse Matz, Joshua L. Miller, Monica L. Miller, Sianne Ngai, Martin Puchner, Rebecca L. Walkowitz

Oxford History of Western Music

Oxford History of Western Music PDF

Author: Richard Taruskin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-07-27

Total Pages: 3856

ISBN-13: 0199813698

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The Oxford History of Western Music is a magisterial survey of the traditions of Western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time. This text illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Taking a critical perspective, this text sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. Written by an authoritative, opinionated, and controversial figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a critical aesthetic position with respect to individual works, a context in which each composition may be evaluated and remembered. Taruskin combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. It also describes how the c