A Critical History Of Opera

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A History of Opera

Author : Carolyn Abbate
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393089533
Total Pages : 648 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of Opera by : Carolyn Abbate

Download or read book A History of Opera written by Carolyn Abbate and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The best single volume ever written on the subject, such is its range, authority, and readability.”—Times Literary Supplement Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their “effervescent, witty” (Die Welt, Germany) retelling of the history of opera, examining its development, the musical and dramatic means by which it communicates, and its role in society. Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.

Black Opera

Author : Naomi Andre
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252050614
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Black Opera by : Naomi Andre

Download or read book Black Opera written by Naomi Andre and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.

Richard Wagner: Parsifal

Author : Lucy Beckett
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521296625
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (966 download)

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Book Synopsis Richard Wagner: Parsifal by : Lucy Beckett

Download or read book Richard Wagner: Parsifal written by Lucy Beckett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1981-08-20 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive account of Wagner's last, and strangest opera.

Analyzing Opera

Author : Carolyn Abbate
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520310810
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Analyzing Opera by : Carolyn Abbate

Download or read book Analyzing Opera written by Carolyn Abbate and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner explores the latest developments in opera analysis by considering, side by side, the works of the two greatest opera composers of the nineteenth century. Although the juxtaposition is not new, comparative studies have tended to view these masters as radically different both as musicians and as musical dramatists. Wagner and his "symphonic opera" set against Verdi "the melodist" is one of many familiar antitheses, and it serves to highlight the particular terms from which comparisons are often made. In this book some of the leading and most innovative music scholars challenge this view, suggesting that as we become more distant from the nineteenth century, we may see that Verdi and Wagner confronted largely similar problems, and even on occasion found similar solutions. But more than this, Analyzing Opera sets out to demonstrate the richness and variety of modern analytical approaches to the genre. As the editors point out in their introduction, today's musical scholars increasingly question the usefulness of organicist theories in analytical studies, and, as they do so, opera seems to become an ever more central area of investigation. Opera is peculiar: its clash of verbal, musical, and visual systems can produce incongruities and extravagant miscalculations. It invites a multiplicity of approaches, challenges orthodoxy, and embraces ambiguity. The sheer variety of essays presented here is witness to this fact and suggests that analyzing opera is one of the liveliest (and most polemical) areas in modern-day musical scholarship. Contributors: Philip Gossett, John Deathridge, James A. Hepokoski, Joseph Kerman, Thomas S. Grey, Matthew Brown, Anthony Newcomb, Martin Chusid, David Lawton, and Patrick McCreless. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Horse Opera

Author : Peter Stanfield
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252070495
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Horse Opera by : Peter Stanfield

Download or read book Horse Opera written by Peter Stanfield and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this innovative take on a neglected chapter of film history, Peter Stanfield challenges the commonly held view of the singing cowboy as an ephemeral figure of fun and argues instead that he was one of the most important cultural figures to emerge out of the Great Depression.The rural or newly urban working-class families who flocked to see the latest exploits of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, andother singing cowboys were an audience largely ignored by mainstreamHollywood film. Hard hit by the depression, faced with the threat--and often the reality--of dispossession and dislocation, pressured to adapt to new ways of living, these small-town filmgoers saw their ambitions, fantasies, and desires embodied in the singing cowboy and their social and political circumstances dramatized in ""B"" Westerns.Stanfield traces the singing cowboy's previously uncharted roots in the performance tradition of blackface minstrelsy and its literary antecedents in dime novels, magazine fiction, and the novels of B. M. Bower, showing how silent cinema conventions, the developing commercial music media, and the prevailing conditions of film production shaped the ""horse opera"" of the 1930s. Cowboy songs offered an alternative to the disruptive modern effects of jazz music, while the series Western--tapping into aesthetic principles shunned by the aspiring middle class--emphasized stunts, fist fights, slapstick comedy, disguises, and hidden identities over narrative logic and character psychology. Singing cowboys also linked recording, radio, publishing, live performance, and film media.Entertaining and thought-provoking, Horse Opera recovers not only the forgotten cowboys of the 1930s but also their forgotten audiences: the ordinary men and women whose lives were brightened by the sights and songs of the singing Western."

Musical Meaning

Author : Lawrence Kramer
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520382978
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Musical Meaning by : Lawrence Kramer

Download or read book Musical Meaning written by Lawrence Kramer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging widely over classical music, jazz, popular music, and film and television music, Musical Meaning uncovers the historical importance of asking about meaning in the lived experience of musical works, styles, and performances. Lawrence Kramer has been a pivotal figure in the development of new resources for understanding music. In this accessible and eloquently written book, he argues boldly that humanistic, not just technical, meaning is a basic force in music history and an indispensable factor in how, where, and when music is heard. He demonstrates that thinking about music can become a vital means of thinking about general questions of meaning, subjectivity, and value. First published in 2001, Musical Meaning anticipates many of the musicological topics of today, including race, performance, embodiment, and media. In addition, Kramer explores music itself as a source of understanding via his composition Revenants for piano, revised for this edition and available on the UC Press website.

A History of Opera

Author : Arthur Elson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis A History of Opera by : Arthur Elson

Download or read book A History of Opera written by Arthur Elson and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

A Critical History of New Music in China

Author : Jingzhi Liu
Publisher : Chinese University Press
ISBN 13 : 9629963604
Total Pages : 962 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis A Critical History of New Music in China by : Jingzhi Liu

Download or read book A Critical History of New Music in China written by Jingzhi Liu and published by Chinese University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese culture had fallen into a stasis, and intellectuals began to go abroad for new ideas. What emerged was an exciting musical genre that C. C. Liu terms "new music." With no direct ties to traditional Chinese music, "new music" reflects the compositional techniques and musical idioms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European styles. Liu traces the genesis and development of "new music" throughout the twentieth century, deftly examining the social and political forces that shaped "new music" and its uses by political activists and the government.

In Search of Opera

Author : Carolyn Abbate
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691117317
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis In Search of Opera by : Carolyn Abbate

Download or read book In Search of Opera written by Carolyn Abbate and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-31 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her new book, Carolyn Abbate considers the nature of operatic performance and the acoustic images of performance present in operas from Monteverdi to Ravel. Paying tribute to music's realization by musicians and singers, she argues that operatic works are indelibly bound to the contingency of live singing, playing, and staging. She seeks a middle ground between operas as abstractions and performance as the phenomenon that brings opera into being. Weaving between opera's "facts of life" and a series of works including The Magic Flute, Parsifal, and Pelléas, Abbate explores a spectrum of attitudes towards musical performance, which range from euphoric visions of singers as creators to uncanny images of musicians as lifeless objects that have been resuscitated by scripts. In doing so, she touches upon several critical issues: the Wagner problem; coloratura, virtuosity, and their critics; the implications of disembodied voice in opera and film; mechanical music; the mortality of musical sound; and opera's predilection for scenes positing mysterious unheard music. An intersection between transcendence and intense physical grounding, she asserts, is a quintessential element of the genre, one source of the rapture that operas and their singers can engender in listeners. In Search of Opera mediates between an experience of opera that can be passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with opera as a complicated aesthetic phenomenon. Marrying philosophical speculation to historical detail, Abbate contemplates a central dilemma: the ineffability of music and the diverse means by which a fugitive art is best expressed in words. All serious devotees of opera will want to read this imaginative book by s music-critical virtuoso.

Phaidon Book of the Opera

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 520 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (318 download)

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Book Synopsis Phaidon Book of the Opera by :

Download or read book Phaidon Book of the Opera written by and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arranged chronologically with an index of operas and a separate index of composers, librettists and literary sources.

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

Author : Alex Ross
Publisher : HarperCollins UK
ISBN 13 : 000751851X
Total Pages : 784 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (75 download)

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Book Synopsis Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by : Alex Ross

Download or read book Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music written by Alex Ross and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ’An absolutely masterly work’ Stephen Fry Alex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller 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.

The Wagner Operas

Author : Ernest Newman
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691027166
Total Pages : 412 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (271 download)

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Book Synopsis The Wagner Operas by : Ernest Newman

Download or read book The Wagner Operas written by Ernest Newman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1991-10-13 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic guide, the foremost Wagner expert of our century discusses ten of Wagner's most beloved operas, illuminates their key themes and the myths and literary sources behind the librettos, and demonstrates how the composer's style changed from work to work. Acclaimed as the most complete and intellectually satisfying analysis of the Wagner operas, the book has met with unreserved enthusiasm from specialist and casual music lover alike. Here, available for the first time in a single paperback volume, is the perfect companion for listening to, or attending, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger, the four operas of the Ring Cycle, and Parsifal. Newman enriches his treatment of the stories, texts, and music of the operas with biographical and historical materials from the store of knowledge that he acquired while completing his numerous books on Wagner, including the magisterial Life of Richard Wagner. The text of The Wagner Operas is filled with hundreds of musical examples from the scores, and all the important leitmotifs and their interrelationships are made clear in Newman's lucid prose. "This is as fine an introduction as any ever written about a major composer's masterpieces. Newman outlines with unfailing clarity and astuteness each opera's dramatic sources, and he takes the student through the completed opera, step by step, with all manner of incidental insight along the way."--Robert Bailey, New York University

Masculinity in Opera

Author : Philip Purvis
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136182160
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (361 download)

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Book Synopsis Masculinity in Opera by : Philip Purvis

Download or read book Masculinity in Opera written by Philip Purvis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the ways in which masculinity is negotiated, constructed, represented, and problematized within operatic music and practice. Although the consideration of masculine ontology and epistemology has pervaded cultural and sociological studies since the late 1980s, and masculinity has been the focus of recent if sporadic musicological discussion, the relationship between masculinity and opera has so far escaped detailed critical scrutiny. Operating from a position of sympathy with feminist and queer approaches and the phallocentric tendencies they identify, this study offers a unique perspective on the cultural relativism of opera by focusing on the male operatic subject. Anchored by musical analysis or close readings of musical discourse, the contributions take an interdisciplinary approach by also engaging with theatre, popular music, and cultural musicology scholarship. The various musical, theoretical, and socio-political trajectories of the essays are historically dispersed from seventeenth to twentieth- first-century operatic works and practices, visiting masculinity and the operatic voice, the complication or refusal of essentialist notions of masculinity, and the operatic representation of the ‘crisis’ of masculinity. This volume will not only enliven the study of masculinity in opera, but be an appealing contribution to music scholars interested in gender, history, and new musicology.

Curtain, Gong, Steam

Author : Gundula Kreuzer
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520966554
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Curtain, Gong, Steam by : Gundula Kreuzer

Download or read book Curtain, Gong, Steam written by Gundula Kreuzer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-05-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative book, Gundula Kreuzer argues for the foundational role of technologies in the conception, production, and study of nineteenth-century opera. She shows how composers increasingly incorporated novel audiovisual effects in their works and how the uses and meanings of the required apparatuses changed through the twentieth century, sometimes still resonating in stagings, performance art, and popular culture today. Focusing on devices (which she dubs “Wagnerian technologies”) intended to amalgamate opera’s various media while veiling their mechanics, Kreuzer offers a practical counternarrative to Wagner’s idealist theories of total illusionism. At the same time, Curtain, Gong, Steam’s multifaceted exploration of the three titular technologies repositions Wagner as catalyst more than inventor in the history of operatic production. With its broad chronological and geographical scope, this book deepens our understanding of the material and mechanical conditions of historical operatic practice as well as of individual works, both well known and obscure.

Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Author : Ellen Rosand
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520934566
Total Pages : 716 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (345 download)

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Book Synopsis Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice by : Ellen Rosand

Download or read book Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice written by Ellen Rosand and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-12-01 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ellen Rosand shows how opera, born of courtly entertainment, took root in the special social and economic environment of seventeenth-century Venice and there developed the stylistic and aesthetic characteristics we recognize as opera today. With ninety-one music examples, most of them complete pieces nowhere else in print, and enlivened by twenty-eight illustrations, this landmark study will be essential for all students of opera, amateur and professional, and for students of European cultural history in general. Because opera was new in the seventeenth century, the composers (most notably Monteverdi and Cavalli), librettists, impresarios, singers, and designers were especially aware of dealing with aesthetic issues as they worked. Rosand examines critically for the first time the voluminous literary and musical documentation left by the Venetian makers of opera. She determines how these pioneers viewed their art and explains the mechanics of the proliferation of opera, within only four decades, to stages across Europe. Rosand isolates two features of particular importance to this proliferation: the emergence of conventions—musical, dramatic, practical—that facilitated replication; and the acute self-consciousness of the creators who, in their scores, librettos, letters, and other documents, have left us a running commentary on the origins of a genre.

Unsung Voices

Author : Carolyn Abbate
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691026084
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (26 download)

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Book Synopsis Unsung Voices by : Carolyn Abbate

Download or read book Unsung Voices written by Carolyn Abbate and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-04-21 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work looks at the "voices" that speak to us through 19th-century classical music and opera. It proposes interpretive strategies that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, celebrating musical gestures often marginalized by conventional musical analysis.

Bayreuth

Author : Frederic Spotts
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300066654
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (666 download)

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Book Synopsis Bayreuth by : Frederic Spotts

Download or read book Bayreuth written by Frederic Spotts and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an overall account of the history of the Wagner festival, a critical analysis of its performers, productions, and enthusiasts establishes its remarkable beginnings, controversial associations, and surprising successes