Afternoon of a fawn


Book Description




Three great orchestral works


Book Description

Complete scores of three orchestral favorites by vastly influential modern composer. Innovation, texture, shimmering impressionism. Reprinted from early French editions. New Contents, Glossary of French musical terms.




Afternoon of a Faun / L'après-Midi D'un Faune


Book Description

A gorgeous facsimile of the epochal collaboration between Mallarmé and Manet that inspired Nijinsky's most famous dance The second published collaboration between Stéphane Mallarmé and Édouard Manet (after Mallarmé's translation of Poe's "The Raven"), L'après-midi d'un faune is one of the poet's best-known works. It provided the basis for Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894), which in turn inspired Nijinsky's ballet L'après-midi d'un faune, first performed in Paris in 1912, with Nijinsky famously dancing the title role. Mallarmé's poem unfolds in a sensual reverie as a Pan-like faun, arising from slumber, recollects his encounters with two forest nymphs in a monologue filled with pastoral and erotic allusions. For Mallarmé, such publications were total works, with attention paid to every detail of layout, typography, punctuation and artwork. For the original 1876 publication, Manet created four wood engravings: two drawings that open and close the poem, and a frontispiece and ex-libris sheet that the artist hand-tinted with pink wash. This volume reproduces that first edition at full size accompanied by a new translation.




Writing Dancing Together


Book Description

With a political agenda foregrounding collaborative practice to promote ethical relations, these individually and joint written essays and interviews discuss dances often with visual art, theatre, film and music, drawing on continental philosophy to explore notions of space, time, identity, sensation, memory and ethics.




Nijinsky's Faune Restored


Book Description

This third volume in The Language of Dance series presents Nijinsky's ballet as he himself recorded it in 1915, making this authentic version, translated into Labanotation, immediately available to dance students, teachers, scholars and researchers. It intentionally includes the historical background, the chronology of Niminsky's performances of "Faune," Nijinsky's production notes, analysis of the choreographic style of the ballet, detailed study and performance notes, approaches to learning and teaching the ballet, research problems encountered in the transcription and revival, and a comprehensive explanation of Nijinsky's notation system with examples from his score. Supplemented by photographs of the 1912 production and with the music adjacent to the dance phrases, this book provides unique access to a much discussed and elusive ballet. Nijinsky's score of his "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" lay unused for nearly forty years after his death, because nobody could read it. In 1987







Debussy's Resonance


Book Description

Some of Debussy's most beloved pieces, as well as lesser-known ones from his early years, set in a rich cultural context by leading experts from the English- and French-speaking worlds. The music of Claude Debussy has always been widely beloved by listeners and performers alike, more perhaps than that of any of the other pioneers of musical modernism. However rich in itself, his creative output also participated, and continues to participate, in a network of cultural connections, the scope and meaning of which can only be gleaned through multiple interpretive frameworks. Debussy's Resonance offers twenty new studies by some of themost active and respected English- and French-language scholars of French music. The book treats a large swath of the composer's music, from previously unexplored mélodies of his early years to late pieces such as the ballet Jeux and the Douze Études, and takes into consideration the numerous contexts that helped shape the works and the different ways that musicologists and critics have explained them. CONTRIBUTORS: Katherine Bergeron, Matthew Brown, David J. Code, Mark DeVoto, Michel Duchesneau, David Grayson, Denis Herlin, Jocelyn Ho, Roy Howat, Steven Huebner, Julian Johnson, Barbara L. Kelly, Richard Langham Smith, Mark McFarland, François de Médicis, Robert Orledge, Boyd Pomeroy. Caroline Rae, Marie Rolf, August Sheehy FRANÇOIS DE MÉDICIS is Professor of Music at the Université de Montréal. STEVEN HUEBNER is Professor of Music at McGill University.




Debussy


Book Description

One of the most revered composers of the twentieth century, Claude Debussy (1862–1918) achieved the unheard of: he reinvented the language of music without alienating the majority of music lovers. Debussy drove French music into entirely new regions of beauty and excitement at a time when old traditions threatened to stifle it. Yet despite his profound influence on French culture, Debussy’s own life was complicated and often troubled by struggles over money, women, and ill health. Here, Stephen Walsh, acclaimed author of Stravinsky, chronicles both the composer himself and the unique moment in European history that bore him. Walsh’s engagingly original approach is to enrich a lively biography with analyses of Debussy’s music: from his first daring breaks with the rules as a Conservatoire student to his achievements as the greatest French composer of his time.




L'Après-midi D'un Faune


Book Description




Claude Debussy and the Poets


Book Description

Paul Dukas wrote about Debussy that the strongest influence he experienced was that of the poets, not that of the musicians. This book undertakes to demonstrate that thesis by studying Debussy's settings of songs by Banville, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Louÿs, and Debussy himself. A particular insight may be gained in the comparison of six poems by Verlaine set to music by both Fauré and Debussy. The book includes a poetic/musical analysis of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, based on the poem by Mallarmé.