Author : Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt
Publisher : Philadelphia : Chilton Book Company
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 29,82 MB
Release : 1968
Category :
ISBN :
Author : Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt
Publisher : Philadelphia : Chilton Book Company
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 36,26 MB
Release : 1968
Category : Composers
ISBN :
""There is probably no one in the gallery of modern composers who is more of a key figure than Maurice Ravel," writes H. H. Stuckenschmidt, the noted German critic, who has here devoted all his energies to this much revered but enigmatic giant of French music. Ravel was a composer of exquisite taste and with a complementary ability to execute his ideas. In his private life he exercised some of this same meticulousness, with the result that there has never been enough information to take the curious music-lover much beyond surface knowledge of his character and temperament. Ravel, the man of Paris, the musical spokesman for the period during which he produced his greatest works (1890 to 1932) is shown by Stuckenschmidt to be a product of two contrasting elements in his heritage: the precision and clock-like exactness that came from his Swiss father and the warmth and sensuality that were the gifts of his Basque mother. Stuckenschmidt develops this theme with great skill, offering it as the key insight into both the composer's life and his creative efforts. The author does not scant analysis, however, and he supplies detailed descriptions of all the great works: L'Heure Espagnole, Gaspard de la Nuit, Daphnis and Chloë, La Valse, Bolero, the piano concerti, and many others." --
Author : Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt
Publisher :
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 20,15 MB
Release : 1969
Category :
ISBN : 9780714500249
Author : Madeleine Goss
Publisher : Read Books Ltd
Page : 199 pages
File Size : 13,25 MB
Release : 2013-01-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1447485793
A charming biography of Maurice Ravel, showing the relationships and events that shaped the music of France's most successful composer. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Author : Benjamin Ivry
Publisher :
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 22,55 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :
Maurice Ravel: A Life is the first convincing attempt to paint a portrait of the life and work of the hitherto enigmatic composer of Bolero, Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, and L'enfant Et Les Sortileges. Ivry offers here a convincing solution to the much-discussed "mystery" of Ravel's sexuality. More than simply "outing" Ravel as a gay man for the first time among numerous writers on this composer, this book discusses how his secretive sexuality impacted his work. Using unpublished documents, letters, articles and memoirs, many of which were previously unknown even to Arbie Orenstein, universally considered the world's leading scholar of Ravel studies, Ivry presents a more rounded view of Ravel, man and musician. Descriptions of musical works are in non-technical language, friendly to the reader with no specialized knowledge of classical music. Like Ivry's widely acclaimed biography of Poulenc, universally seen as the standard life of this composer in any language, his new Ravel is likely to become a classic of contemporary musical biography.
Author : James Burnett
Publisher : Omnibus Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 21,85 MB
Release : 2011-08-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 0857124358
Ir has been said that no music amplifies the french ideals of precision and good taste better than the work of Maurice Ravel, yet his background could scarecly have been more cosmopolitan. The son of a Swiss father and a Basque mother, he was born near St. Jean de Luz in 1875; he died in Paris at the age of sixty-two. His primary inspiration, and in consequence the character of his best music, came from art and life. He was exceptionally sensitive to the new current of thought and the aesthetic changes in the Arts following the First World War. Indeed, the music of Ravel is an accuarate reflection of the man himself. This lavishly illustrated book which sets the work and achievements of Ravel in the context of the events of his time, will appeal to the general music lover and also to the serious student.
Author : Jolanta T. Pekacz
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 35,57 MB
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 1351556967
Musical biography has rarely been an object of theoretical and methodological reflection. Our present-day perception of the lives of prominent composers and performers of the past has been largely formed by cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers and their twentieth-century followers. While older biographies are being scrutinized for veracity and 'updated' with new evidence, their historiographical premisses and narrative techniques remain largely unchallenged. The epistemological upheavals in the humanities since the 1960s have generated a body of theoretical thought that has undermined many of the assumptions of traditional biography. Consequently, many of these assumptions have lost their hold as viable underpinnings for present-day scholarly biography. For example, the accumulation of facts is no longer believed to bring us closer to an understanding of the subject; nor are the traditional views of the unified self and the self as a foundational idea taken for granted. This volume brings together musicologists and historians who explore, through individual case studies, the rich potential of these new theories for writing musical lives. The authors of this volume examine how the insights provided by these theories illuminate our critical reassessment of older biographies - and the interpretations of musical works these biographies were used to construe - and help forge new approaches to musical biography. The authors also explore the functions musical biographies served in different historical contexts, the relevance of biography for musical criticism, the reliability of archival evidence, the ethics of biography, the demands placed on biography by feminist and gender history, and the new possibilities offered by cinema. The contributors to this volume challenge the view that biography has little importance for music history, analysis, and criticism. Collectively, they reassert biography's centrality and relevance, and dem
Author : Nicole V. Gagné
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 545 pages
File Size : 13,69 MB
Release : 2019-07-17
Category : Music
ISBN : 1538122987
The contemporary music scene thus embodies a uniquely broad spectrum of activity, which has grown and changed down to the present hour. With new talents emerging and different technologies developing as we move further into the 21st century, no one can predict what paths music will take next. All we can be certain of is that the inspiration and originality that make music live will continue to bring awe, delight, fascination, and beauty to the people who listen to it. This book cover modernist and postmodern concert music worldwide from the years 1888 to 2018. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on the most important composers, musicians, methods, styles, and media in modernist and postmodern classical music worldwide, from 1888 to 2018. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about modern and contemporary classical music.
Author : Rollo H. Myers
Publisher : Praeger
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 32,26 MB
Release : 1973-06-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :
An evaluative biography by an authority on French music.
Author : Michael J. Puri
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 49,31 MB
Release : 2012-01-23
Category : Music
ISBN : 0199876010
The music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), beloved by musicians and audiences since its debut, has been a difficult topic for scholars. The traditional stylistic categories of impressionism, symbolism, and neoclassicism, while relevant, have offered too little purchase on this fascinating but enigmatic work. In Ravel the Decadent, author Michael Puri provides an innovative and productive solution by locating the aesthetic origins of this music in the French Decadence and demonstrating the extension of this influence across the length of his oeuvre. From an array of Decadent topics Puri selects three--memory, sublimation, and desire--and uses them to delineate the content of this music, pinpoint its overlap with contemporary cultural discourse, and link it to its biographical context, as well as to create new methods altogether for the analysis and interpretation of music. Ravel the Decadent opens by defining the main concepts, giving particular attention to memory and decadence. It then stakes out contrasting modes of memory in this music: a nostalgic mode that views the past as forever lost, and a more optimistic one that imagines its resurrection and reanimation. Acknowledging Ravel's lifelong identity as a dandy--a figure that embodies the Decadence and its aspiration toward the sublime--Puri identifies possible moments of musical self-portraiture before stepping back to theorize dandyism in European musical modernism at large. He then addresses the dialectic between desire and its sublimation in the pairing of two genres--the bacchanal and the idyl--and leverages the central trio of concepts to offer provocative readings of Ravel's two waltz sets, the Valses nobles et sentimentales and La valse. Puri concludes by invoking the same terms to identify a topic of "faun music" that promises to create new common ground between Ravel and Debussy. Rife with close readings that will satisfy the musicologist, Ravel the Decadent also suits a more general reader through its broadly humanistic key concepts, immersion in contemporary art and literature, and clarity of language.
