Five Lessons On Wagner

Download or read book Five Lessons on Wagner written by Alain Badiou and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over a century, Richard Wagner's music has been the subject of intense debate among philosophers, many of whom have attacked its ideological-some say racist and reactionary-underpinnings. In this major new work, Alain Badiou, radical philosopher and keen Wagner enthusiast, offers a detailed reading of the critical responses to the composer's work, which include Adorno's writings on the composer and Wagner's recuperation by Nazism as well as more recent readings by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and others. Slavoj Zizek provides an afterword, and both philosophers make a passionate case for re-examining the relevance of Wagner to the contemporary world.

Download or read book Ranciere and Music written by Joao Pedro Cachopo and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores Rancière's thought along a number of music-historical trajectories, including Italian and German opera, Romantic and modernist music, Latin American and South African music, jazz, and contemporary popular music, and sets him in dialogue with key thinkers including Adorno, Althusser, Badiou and Deleuze.

Download or read book Wagnerism written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist 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. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

Download or read book Baudelaire in Song written by Helen Abbott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-03 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we find it hard to explain what happens when words are set to music? This study looks at the kind of language we use to describe word/music relations, both in the academic literature and in manuals for singers or programme notes prepared by professional musicians. Helen Abbott's critique of word/music relations interrogates overlaps emerging from a range of academic disciplines including translation theory, adaptation theory, word/music theory, as well as critical musicology, métricométrie, and cognitive neuroscience. It also draws on other resources-whether adhesion science or financial modelling-to inform a new approach to analysing song in a model proposed here as the assemblage model. The assemblage model has two key stages of analysis. The first stage examines the bonds formed between the multiple layers that make up a song setting (including metre/prosody, form/structure, sound repetition, semantics, and live performance options). The second stage considers the overall outcome of each song in terms of the intensity or stability of the words and music present in a song (accretion/dilution). Taking the work of the major nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) as its main impetus, the volume examines how Baudelaire's poetry has inspired composers of all genres across the globe, from the 1860s to the present day. The case studies focus on Baudelaire song sets by European composers between 1880 and 1930, specifically Maurice Rollinat, Gustave Charpentier, Alexander Gretchaninov, Louis Vierne, and Alban Berg. Using this corpus, it tests out the assemblage model to uncover what happens to Baudelaire's poetry when it is set to music. It factors in the realities of song as a live performance genre, and reveals which parameters of song emerge as standard for French text-setting, and where composers diverge in their approach.

Download or read book The Pianolist written by Gustav Kobbé and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Pianolist, A Guide for Pianola Players" by Gustav Kobbé is a comprehensive manual for those seeking to master the art of playing the pianola, a mechanical instrument reproducing piano music. With detailed instructions on technique and interpretation and an extensive repertoire of music, this book is an essential resource for pianola enthusiasts and aspiring musicians alike.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen written by Mark Berry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion provides an overview and in-depth analysis of Wagner's Ring using traditional critical analysis alongside more recent approaches.

Download or read book Researching Music Censorship written by Helmi Järviluoma and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom of expression and its direct counterpart, censorship and silencing, are increasingly gaining attention in the world of art and culture. Through the growth of social media and its worldwide distribution, arts and cultural products are shared, and the increased visibility and audibility of culture is highlighted through iconic and pivotal clashes, such as the fatwa on The Satanic Verses in 1989, the recurring bans on the music of Wagner, the alleged censorship of playlists following 9/11, and the cartoon crisis in 2006. This volume takes the discussion directly to the field of music studies in a broad frame and insists on examining music censorship in a global perspective. The book addresses the important and increasingly relevant issue of scholarship on music censorship and thus contributes to a detailed understanding of the phenomenon. Often, words and semantic meaning are held to be determining to the restrictions on musicians and singers, but as this collection documents, the reasons for censorship might not always be found in verbal messages. Rather, the positioning of a more broad understanding of why and how music can convey meaning and accordingly trigger censorship and bans is at the heart of this work. The complexity of music censorship includes historical, structural as well as emotional ‘listenings’ and interpretations of sound. The topic, accordingly, is political, as well as scholarly urgent.