Mozart in Motion

Mozart in Motion PDF Author: Patrick Mackie
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374606218
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In exhilarating, transformative prose, the poet Patrick Mackie reveals a musician in dialogue with culture at its most sweepingly progressive. Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand about his music, and what can it reveal to us about the great composer? Following Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death, from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments, from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer’s life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics, and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship. In Mozart in Motion, we are returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century and hear Mozart’s music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being.

Mozart in Motion

Mozart in Motion PDF Author: Patrick Mackie
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374606218
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In exhilarating, transformative prose, the poet Patrick Mackie reveals a musician in dialogue with culture at its most sweepingly progressive. Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand about his music, and what can it reveal to us about the great composer? Following Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death, from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments, from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer’s life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics, and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship. In Mozart in Motion, we are returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century and hear Mozart’s music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being.

Mozart

Mozart PDF Author: Jan Swafford
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062433598
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 832

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Book Description
From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.

The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag

The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag PDF Author: William Kinderman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252037162
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
"In this intriguing study, William Kinderman opens the door to the composer's workshop, investigating not just the final outcome but the process of creative endeavour in music. Focusing on the stages of composition, Kinderman maintains that the most rigorous basis for the study of artistic creativity comes not from anecdotal or autobiographical reports, but from original handwritten sketches, drafts, revised manuscripts, and corrected proof sheets. He explores works of major composers from the eighteenth century to the present, from Mozart's piano music and Beethoven's Piano Trio in F to Kurtag's Kafka Fragments and Hommage a R. Sch. Other chapters examine Robert Schumann's Fantasie in C, Mahler's Fifth Symphony, and Bartok's Dance Suite. Revealing the diversity of sources, rejected passages and movements, fragmentary unfinished works, and aborted projects that were absorbed into finished compositions, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag illustrates the wealth of insight that can be gained through studying the creative process." -- Blackwells.

Mozart in the Jungle

Mozart in the Jungle PDF Author: Blair Tindall
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 1555847463
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The memoir that inspired the two-time Golden Globe Award–winning comedy series: “Funny . . . heartbreaking . . . [and] utterly absorbing” (Lee Smith, New York Times–bestselling author of Guests on Earth). Oboist Blair Tindall recounts her decades-long professional career as a classical musician—from the recitals and Broadway orchestra performances to the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth in the backbiting New York classical music scene, where musicians trade sexual favors for plum jobs and assignments in orchestras across the city. Tindall and her fellow journeymen musicians often play drunk, high, or hopelessly hungover, live in decrepit apartments, and perform in hazardous conditions—working-class musicians who schlep across the city between low-paying gigs, without health-care benefits or retirement plans, a stark contrast to the rarefied experiences of overpaid classical musician superstars. An incisive, no-holds-barred account, Mozart in the Jungle is the first true, behind-the-scenes look at what goes on backstage and in the orchestra pit. The book that inspired the Amazon Original series starring Gael García Bernal and Lola Kirke, this is “a fresh, highly readable and caustic perspective on an overglamorized world” (Publishers Weekly).

Mozart's Grace

Mozart's Grace PDF Author: Scott Burnham
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691168067
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Aspects of beauty in the music of Mozart It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? In Mozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace. Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

Young Mozart

Young Mozart PDF Author: William Augel
Publisher: Humanoids, Inc.
ISBN: 1643379275
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Book Description
A tender and playful glimpse at the childhood of the world's greatest musical genius.

Songs in Motion

Songs in Motion PDF Author: Yonatan Malin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199712921
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Qualities of motion and emotion in song come from poetic images, melody, harmony, and voice leading, but they also come from rhythm and meter-the flow and articulation of words and music in time. This book explores rhythm and meter in the nineteenth-century German Lied, including songs for voice and piano by Fanny Hensel née Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. The Lied, as a genre, is characterized especially by the fusion of poetry and music. Poetic meter itself has expressive qualities, and rhythmic variations contribute further to the modes of signification. These features often carry over into songs, even as they are set in the more strictly determined periodicities of musical meter. A new method of declamatory-schema analysis is presented to illustrate common possibilities for setting trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter lines. Degrees of rhythmic regularity and irregularity are also considered. There has been a wealth of new work on metric theory and analysis in the past thirty years; here this research is reviewed and applied in song analysis. Topics include the nature of metric entrainment (drawing on music psychology), metric dissonance, hypermeter, and phrase rhythm. Whereas narrative accounts of the nineteenth-century Lied typically begin with Schubert, here forms of expansion and elision in songs by Hensel provide a point of departure. Repetition links up directly with motion in songs by Schubert, including his famous "Gretchen am Spinnrade." The doubling and reverberation of vocal melody creates a form of interiorized resonance in Schumann's songs. Brahms and Wolf are typically understood as polar opposites in the later nineteenth century; here the differences are clarified along with deeper affinities. Songs by both Brahms and Wolf may be understood as musical performances of poetic readings, and in this regard they both belong to a late period of cultural history.

Mozart

Mozart PDF Author: Paul Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101638125
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Eminent historian Paul Johnson dazzles with a rich, succinct portrait of Mozart and his music As he’s done in Napoleon, Churchill, Jesus, and Darwin, acclaimed historian and author Paul Johnson here offers a concise, illuminating biography of Mozart. Johnson’s focus is on the music—Mozart’s wondrous output of composition and his uncanny gift for instrumentation. Liszt once said that Mozart composed more bars than a trained copyist could write in a lifetime. Mozart’s gift and skill with instruments was also remarkable as he mastered all of them except the harp. For example, no sooner had the clarinet been invented and introduced than Mozart began playing and composing for it. In addition to his many insights into Mozart’s music, Johnson also challenges the many myths that have followed Mozart, including those about the composer’s health, wealth, religion, and relationships. Always engaging, Johnson offers readers and music lovers a superb examination of Mozart and his glorious music, which is still performed every day in concert halls and opera houses around the world.

What to Listen for in Mozart

What to Listen for in Mozart PDF Author: Robert Harris
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743244044
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
From Simon & Schuster, What to Listen for in Mozart is Robert Harris' essential introduction to the world's most popular composer. An introduction to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart explores the essentials of his work, examining his place in the aristocratic society of the late eighteenth century, and discusses his life and death.

The Mozart Effect for Children

The Mozart Effect for Children PDF Author: Don Campbell
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061934887
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
In his groundbreaking book, The Mozart Effect®, Don Campbell revealed the enormous healing powers of classical music. Now he shows you how to help the children in your life experience the same benefits. You don't have to be an expert on classical music to use this wise and compassionate book. Focusing each chapter on a particular age -- from prenatal through age ten -- Don Campbell explains how music is the perfect tool to improve children's language, movement, and social skills at home, school, and play. He presents dynamic, inventive ways to invigorate a child's imagination, and supplies simple exercises, musical menus, and entertaining games that will improve your child's memory. At once practical and profound, The Mozart Effect® for Children is an invaluable resource for all parents and educators who want to help their children imagine, achieve, and grow in every aspect of their lives.