The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859

The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859 PDF Author: William Rothstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197609686
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 601

Get Book

Book Description
Though studying opera often requires attention to aesthetics, libretti, staging, singers, compositional history, and performance history, the music itself is central. This book examines operatic music by five Italian composers--Rossini, Bellini, Mercadante, Donizetti, and Verdi--and one non-Italian, Meyerbeer, during the period from Rossini's first international successes to Italian unification. Detailed analyses of form, rhythm, melody, and harmony reveal concepts of musical structure different from those usually discussed by music theorists, calling into question the notion of a common practice. Taking an eclectic analytical approach, author William Rothstein uses ideas originating in several centuries, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first, to argue that operatic music can be heard not only as passionate vocality but also in terms of musical forms, pitch structures, and rhythmic patterns--that is, as carefully crafted music worth theoretical attention. Although no single theory accounts for everything, Rothstein's analysis shows how certain recurring principles define a distinctively Italian practice, one that left its mark on the German repertoire more familiar to music theorists.

The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859

The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859 PDF Author: William Rothstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197609686
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 601

Get Book

Book Description
Though studying opera often requires attention to aesthetics, libretti, staging, singers, compositional history, and performance history, the music itself is central. This book examines operatic music by five Italian composers--Rossini, Bellini, Mercadante, Donizetti, and Verdi--and one non-Italian, Meyerbeer, during the period from Rossini's first international successes to Italian unification. Detailed analyses of form, rhythm, melody, and harmony reveal concepts of musical structure different from those usually discussed by music theorists, calling into question the notion of a common practice. Taking an eclectic analytical approach, author William Rothstein uses ideas originating in several centuries, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first, to argue that operatic music can be heard not only as passionate vocality but also in terms of musical forms, pitch structures, and rhythmic patterns--that is, as carefully crafted music worth theoretical attention. Although no single theory accounts for everything, Rothstein's analysis shows how certain recurring principles define a distinctively Italian practice, one that left its mark on the German repertoire more familiar to music theorists.

The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859

The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859 PDF Author: William Rothstein
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780197609705
Category : Theory, Analysis, and Composition
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859 examines operatic music by five Italian composers--Rossini, Bellini, Mercadante, Donizetti, and Verdi--and one non-Italian, Meyerbeer, showing how certain recurring principles define a distinctively Italian practice that left its mark on the German repertoire more familiar to music theorists.

Verdi and the Art of Italian Opera

Verdi and the Art of Italian Opera PDF Author: Steven Huebner
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250408
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book

Book Description
"Verdi's art emerged from a rich array of dramatic and musical practices operative in the Italy of his day. Drawing the reader into his creative world, this study (translated from the French original by the author himself) begins where Verdi began when it came time to set notes to paper: the libretto. Designed for the non-Italophone reader, Steven Huebner's Verdi and the Art of Italian Opera explains key principles of Italian poetry that shaped his music. From there, Huebner outlines the various musical textures available to the composer, including an exploration of the characteristics of recitative and aria. Working outward, subsequent chapters explore the syntax of Verdi's melodic writing and the larger-level forms that he used. A concluding chapter considers ways of conceiving musical unity in his operas. Huebner's long-needed study provides significant insights into Verdi's musico-dramatic strategies, pulling together-and making more easily accessible-principles and insights that are spread widely across the scholarly literature. Verdi remains by far the most performed opera composer on world stages today: singers, vocal coaches, stage directors, and opera lovers more generally will welcome this compact perspective on his art"--

Theorizing Music Evolution

Theorizing Music Evolution PDF Author: Miriam Piilonen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197695299
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Get Book

Book Description
What did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research? Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing nineteenth-century theories of music in the evolutionist writings of Darwin and Spencer. Author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of this Victorian music-evolutionism in light of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to music theorizing, Piilonen explores how historical thinkers constructed music in evolutionist terms and argues for an updated understanding of music as an especially fraught area of evolutionary thought. In this book, Piilonen delves into how historical evolutionists, in particular Darwin and Spencer, developed and applied a concept of music that served as a boundary-drawing device, used to trace or obscure the conceptual borders between human and animal. She takes as primary texts the early evolutionary treatises that double as theoretical accounts of music's origins. For Darwin, music served as a kind of proto-language common to humans and animals alike; he heard the songs of birds and the chirps of mice as musical, as articulated in texts such as The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Spencer, on the other hand, viewed music as a specifically human stage of evolutionary advance, beyond language acquisition, as outlined in his essay, "The Origin and Function of Music" (1857). These competing views established radically different perspectives on the origin and function of music in human cultural expression, while at the same time being mutually constitutive of one another. A ground-breaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, Theorizing Music Evolution turns to music evolution with an eye toward disrupting and intervening in these questions as they recur in the present.

Sounds As They Are

Sounds As They Are PDF Author: Richard Beaudoin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197659284
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book

Book Description
In Sounds as They Are, author Richard Beaudoin recognizes the often-overlooked sounds made by the bodies of performers and their recording equipment as music and analyzes these sounds using a bold new theory of inclusive track analysis (ITA). In doing so, he demonstrates new expressive, interpretive, and embodied possibilities and also uncovers insidious inequalities across music studies and the recording industry, including the silencing of certain sounds along lines of gender and race.

Times A-Changin'

Times A-Changin' PDF Author: Nancy Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197635210
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book

Book Description
"It is 1969 and Joni Mitchell is on television, standing empty-handed in the middle of a circular stage that is adorned with psychedelic colors. She is wearing a long, hunter-green dress, surrounded by an audience sitting cross-legged on the floor. She waits for television host Dick Cavett to introduce her next performance. The show is filming on the day after the 1969 Woodstock music festival, an event that Mitchell was initially scheduled to attend but from which she was held back by her management to ensure she could perform on The Dick Cavett Show the next day. The host introduces Mitchell and jokes with her about singing a capella, wondering aloud if someone stole her guitar. The singer laughs politely in response, denies any theft, and then proceeds to her performance, explaining to the audience that she will be singing a "song for America" that she wrote "as a Canadian living in this country." With her hands clasped behind her back, she performs "The Fiddle and the Drum" with no accompaniment, channeling the folk performance tradition on which the song is based. This song about military participation is a rare political statement from Mitchell who, unlike her peers Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie, had only released this one "protest song" by 1969. But the song's message was not a particularly risky proclamation. Her anti-war narrative echoed the opinions of the young Cavett Show audience that night, aligning with an established trend of resistance against the war in Vietnam. Similar to the way that Mitchell's song "Woodstock" would eventually capture the spirit of an event she did not attend, "The Fiddle and the Drum" characterizes a popular anti-war sentiment in the public consciousness of the late 1960s"--

Tonality

Tonality PDF Author: Dmitri Tymoczko
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197577105
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 633

Get Book

Book Description
This encyclopaedic book proposes a sweeping reformulation of the basic concepts of Western music theory, revealing simple structures underlying a wide range of practices from the Renaissance to contemporary pop. Its core innovation is a collection of simple geometrical models describing the implicit knowledge governing a broad range of music-making, much as the theory of grammar describes principles that tacitly guide our speaking and writing. Each of its central chapters re-examines a basic music-theoretical concept such as voice leading, repetition, nonharmonic tones, the origins of tonal harmony, the grammar of tonal harmony, modulation, and melody. These are flanked by two largely analytical chapters on rock harmony and Beethoven. Wide-ranging in scope, and with almost 700 musical examples from the Middle Ages to the present day, Tonality: An Owner's Manual weaves philosophy, mathematics, statistics, and computational analysis into a new and truly twenty-first century theory of music.

Italian Opera Since 1945

Italian Opera Since 1945 PDF Author: Raymond Fearn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113441918X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Nineteenth-century Italian Opera from Rossini to Puccini

Nineteenth-century Italian Opera from Rossini to Puccini PDF Author: Danièle Pistone
Publisher: Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
Intended for the performer and general music lover as well as for students and musicologists, this three-part retrospective of Italian opera of the romantic era focuses on the settings, characters, and styles of the librettos; the voices, orchestration, and formal structure of the music; and the contemporary exigencies of the performance itself, moving from behind-the-scenes administration and artistry to the front-and-center interpreters and the audiences they played to. More than 120 musical examples support the text, the majority of them in an alphabetical appendix of "Famous Melodies", which includes the themes of popular arias along with captions detailing the operas, the composers, the acts in which the melodies occur, and the characters who sing them. The book also includes appendices of main characters, celebrated singers and conductors, and principal librettists; a glossary; and a note on Italian pronunciation. Numerous illustrations and tables, an exhaustive topical bibliography, and a select, current CD discography round out this informative introduction to opera's golden age.

Italian Opera in English

Italian Opera in English PDF Author: John Graziano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135552371
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Get Book

Book Description
First Published in 1994. This is volume 3 of a 16-volume series providing comprehensive set of works from a full century of musical theatre in the United States of America. The work in this volume represents Italian opera in English though the works have British origins and strong French influences. This volume discusses various operatic interpretations of the Cinderella story, from its French operatic debut in 1810 to the most famous operas from Perrault and Rossini.