Ever wondered why most classical music concerts are such stuffy affairs? Had to bluff your way through classical music conversations? Trying to get a handle on music by modern composers? Failed to convince teenagers of the merits of Beethoven or Bach? Or just want an absorbing read about music? This book is an illuminating guide that will be a hit with classical music lovers and those keen to discover more about the subject, written by an accomplished musician, historian, and musi...

Belle-époque Paris witnessed the emergence of a vibrant and diverse dance scene, one that crystallized around the Ballets Russes, the Russian dance company formed by impresario Sergey Diaghilev. The company has long served as a convenient turning point in the history of dance, celebrated for its revolutionary choreography and innovative productions. This book presents a fresh slant on this much-told history. Focusing on the relation between music and dance, Davinia Caddy approaches the Bal...

A Companion not only to the historic, path-breaking ballet production by Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Roerich and Stravinsky that premiered in Paris in 1913, but also to its legacy across the centuries. The newly commissioned essays will guide students and ballet-goers as they encounter this fascinating work and enable them to navigate the complex artistic currents it set in motion, intertwining music, theatrical ballet and modern dance with the wider world of ideas. The book embraces The Rite of ...

Long treated as peripheral to music history, dance has become prominent within musicological research, as a prime and popular subject for an increasing number of books, articles, conference papers and special symposiums. Despite this growing interest, there remains no thorough-going critical examination of the ways in which musicologists might engage with dance, thinking not only about specific repertoires or genres, but about fundamental commonalities between the two, including embodiment...

The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time, Richard Taruskin. Now in hardcover, the set has been reconstructed to be available for the first time as individual books, each one taking on a critical time period in the history of western music. All five books are also being offered in a shrink wrapped set for a discounted price. Each book in this magnificent set illuminates - through a repr...

From Gregorian chant to Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, the music of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods is both beautiful and intriguing, expanding our horizons as it nourishes our souls. In this Very Short Introduction, Thomas Forrest Kelly provides not only a compact overview of the music itself, but also a lively look at the many attempts over the last two centuries to revive it. Kelly shows that the early-music revival has long been grounded in the idea of spontaneity...

A dazzling appraisal of the definitive classical music performances available todayFor classical music lovers, there is nothing more beguiling and exciting than the range of technique and emotion that can capture or transform the great works in the hands of a conductor and musicians. But with hundreds of recordings released every year, discovering the jewels is a challenge, for newcomers as well as for connoisseurs.New York Times classical music crit...

Over three decades, Paul Griffiths's survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage's development of zen music; in Milton Babbit...

A modern take on a classical icon: this “luminous book” (Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book) tells the story of when, where, and how Chopin composed his most famous work, uncovering many surprises along the way and showing how his innovative music still animates and thrives in our culture centuries later.In this widely-praised book, Annik LaFarge presents a very different Frédéric Chopin from the melancholy, sickly...

Listen. What do you hear?We are surrounded by sounds all the time, but we tend not to hear them; our brains are very good at editing what our ears pick up. If we stop for a moment to listen, there they are: the ticking clock, traffic noise, fragments of conversation, a passing plane. These are examples of what the American composer John Cage called “illegal harmony”.In response to the noisiest century in history, modern composers have consistently flown in ...

Part history, part explanation of early music, this book also plays devil's advocate, criticizing current practices and urging experimentation. Haynes, a veteran of the movement, describes a vision of the future that involves improvisation, rhetorical expression, and composition.

A prominent conductor explores how aesthetic criteria masked the political goals of countries during the three great wars of the past centuryThis book offers a major reassessment of classical music in the twentieth century. John Mauceri argues that the history of music during this span was shaped by three major wars of that century: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War.Probing why so few works have been added to the canon since 1930, Mauceri examines...