[PDF] I Sang The Unsingable eBook

Author : Bethany Beardslee
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 420 pages
File Size : 34,34 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1580469000

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Memoir of Bethany Beardslee, the iconic American soprano known as the composer's singer.

Author : Zachary Bernstein
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 45,2 MB
Release : 2021-04-26
Category : Music
ISBN : 0190949252

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Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) was, at once, one of the century's foremost composers and a founder of American music theory. These two aspects of his creative life--"thinking in" and "thinking about" music, as he would put it--nourished each other. Theory and analysis inspired fresh compositional ideas, and compositional concerns focused theoretical and analytical inquiry. Accordingly, this book undertakes an excavation of the sources of his theorizing as a guide to analysis of his music. In Thinking In and About Music, author Zachary Bernstein shows how Babbitt's idiosyncratic synthesis of ideas from Heinrich Schenker, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science--at least as much as more obviously relevant predecessors such as Arnold Schoenberg--provide insight into his aesthetics and compositional technique. At the same time, a close look at his music reveals a host of concerns unaccounted for in his theories, some of which seem to directly contradict theoretical expectations. Bernstein argues, therefore, that new analytical models are needed to complement those suggested by Babbitt's theories. Departing from the serial logic of most previous work on the subject--and in an attempt to discuss Babbitt's music as it is actually heard rather than just deciphered--the book brings to bear theories of gesture and embodiment, rhetoric, text setting, and temporality. The result is a richly multi-faceted look at one of the twentieth century's most fascinating musical minds.

Author : Minna Proctor
Publisher : Catapult
Page : 88 pages
File Size : 19,6 MB
Release : 2017-09-19
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 1936787628

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“Landslide is that rare book that somehow succeeds in being both knowing and open–hearted, both formally sly and emotionally direct. Its timeless subjects—grief, storytelling, the giving up of childish things—are rendered in ways that are as movingly honest as they are probing and unfamiliar. A swift, compelling read.” —Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone Minna Zallman Proctor's Landslide is a captivating collection of interconnected personal essays. These “true stories” explore the author’s complicated relationship with her mother—who was diagnosed with cancer at age fifty–seven and died fifteen years later—and the ways in which their connection was long the “prime mover” of Proctor’s life, the subtle force coursing beneath her adulthood. As such, these vibrant essays also narrate the trials and triumphs of Proctor’s own life—shifting between America and Italy (and loving “being a foreigner, the constant sense of unfamiliarity that supplanted all of my expectations and disappointments”), her bumpy first marriage, the profound pleasure she takes in motherhood, and the confounding experience of trying to arrange a Jewish burial for her “Jewish, not quite Jewish” mother. Proctor has an integrity and humor that is never extinguished despite life’s mounting difficulties. She also slyly questions her own narrative throughout. “Not having told this story before means I never fixed many details in my memory,” she writes. “[I] have to rely on flashes, the transparent stills that hang in my mind, made of smell, the way the light casts, the wind on skin.” The essays in this book are a sharply intelligent exploration of what happens when death and divorce unmoor you from certainties, and about the unreliable stories we tell ourselves, and others, in order to live.

Author : Philip V. Bohlman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 14,17 MB
Release : 2005-12-08
Category : Music
ISBN : 0199883882

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Since the appearance of The Bay Psalm Book in 1640, music has served as a defining factor for American religious experience and has been of fundamental importance in the development of American identity and psyche. The essays in this long-awaited volume explore the diverse ways in which music shapes the distinctive presence of religion in the United States and address the fullness of music's presence in American religious history. Timely, challenging, and stimulating, this collection will appeal to students and scholars of American history, American studies, religious studies, theology, musicology, and ethnomusicology, as well as to practicing sacred musicians.

Author : Mhoze Chikowero
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 27,18 MB
Release : 2015-11-24
Category : Music
ISBN : 0253018099

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In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.