There is a paucity of material regarding how choral music specifically was performed in the 1800s. The Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement has made remarkable advancements in choral music of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods, with modest forays into the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and other early nineteenth-century composers; however, there are no sources with a comprehensive examination of how choral music was performed. Using more than one-hundre...

Songs of Sonderling is the story of Jacob Sonderling’s unique contributions to Jewish liturgical music. Rabbi Sonderling was many things: a descendant of Chassidic rebbes, a rationalist, a Reform rabbi, a Zionist, an army chaplain, a celebrated orator, an artistic soul. From his early career at the Hamburg Temple and German Army service in World War I, to his wandering years in the Eastern United States and founding of the Society for Jewish Culture–Fairfax Temple in Los Angeles, ...

Nick Strimple's all-encompassing survey ranges from 19th-century masters, such as Elgar, to contemporary composers, such as Tan Dun and Paul McCartney. Repertory of every style and level of complexity is critically surveyed and described. This book is an essential resource for choral conductors and a valuable guide for choral singers and other music lovers.

**Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for CriticismA New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the YearTime magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007A Washington Post Book World** Best Book of 2007In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its m...

Alex Ross’s sweeping history of twentieth-century classical music, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, is a gripping account of a musical revolution.The landscape of twentieth-century classical music is a wild one: this was a period in which music fragmented into apparently divergent strands, each influenced by its own composers, performers and musical innovations. In this comprehensive tour, Alex Ross, music critic for the ‘New Yorker’, explores the people and places that sha...

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism s...

A TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2012A New Yorker Best Book of the YearLos Angeles Magazine's #1 Music Book of the YearA unique and revelatory book of music history that examines in great depth what is perhaps the best-known and most-popular symphony ever written and its four-note opening, which has fascinated musicians, historians, and philosophers for the last two hundred years.Music critic Matthew Guerrie...

A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, his music offers more than the usual listening satisfactions. Many believe it has the power to heal emotional wounds and ease the pain of death. Others struggle with the intellectual fascination of its contradictory meanings. Long, loud and seldom easy, his symphonies are used to accompany acts of mourning and Hollywood melodramas. Sometimes dismissed as death...

Two-and-a-half centuries after his death, the complex life of composer Johann Sebastian Bach continues to fascinate.Bach's colorful life was anchored in his belief that "music has been ordered by God's Spirit"?so much so that he began each composition by scrawling Jesu, juva (Jesus, help me) at the top of a blank page and concluded each with S.D.G. (short for Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone be the glory). Through the eyes of noted music and culture writer Rick Marsc...

In the decades since his execution by the Nazis in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor, theologian, and anti-Hitler conspirator, has become one of the most widely read and inspiring Christian thinkers of our time. Now, drawing on extensive new research, Strange Glory offers a definitive account, by turns majestic and intimate, of this modern icon.The scion of a grand family that rarely went to church, Dietrich decided as a thirteen-year-old to become a theologian....

This is the portrait of a world on the eve of its destruction. Bernard Wasserstein presents a disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught and World War Two.In this revisionist account of modern European Jewry, Wasserstein shows how the harsh realities of the age devastated the lives of communities and individuals. By 1939, the Jews faced an existential crisis that was as much the result of internal decay as of external at...

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was...