New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 4th February 2019
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include textbooks from Cambridge University Press on music by Schubert, Handel, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Boulez, books on French Baroque Opera, Renaissance culture, and music and patriotism during the American Civil War, new biographies of Buddy Holly and Marie Duplessis (the woman who inspired the plot of Verdi's La Traviata), and a detailed history of sixteenth-century music.
Classical Composers
This collection addresses issues in Schubert studies including compositional technique, the topical issue of 'late' style, tonal strategy and form in the composer's instrumental music, and musical readings of the 'postmodern' Schubert. Offering fresh approaches to his instrumental and vocal works, it argues that the music that Schubert produced from 1822–8 is central to a paradigm shift in the history of music during the nineteenth century.
Available Format: Book
David Damschroder's ongoing reformulation of harmonic theory continues with an exploration of how Beethoven arranged chords to convey bold conceptions. The introductory chapters offer individual considerations of the tonal system's key features, illustrated by examples derived from Beethoven's piano sonatas. In the masterworks section that follows, he presents detailed analyses of movements from the symphonies, piano and violin sonatas, and string quartets.
Available Format: Book
In this book, David Kimbell sets Handel's operas in their biographical and cultural contexts, exploring the circumstances in which they were composed and performed, the librettos that were prepared for Handel, and what they tell us about his and his audience's values and the music he composed for them. The final chapter in this book reveals the differences and similarities between how Handel's operas were performed in his time and ours
Available Format: Book
This collection explores Boulez's works, influence, reception and legacy, shedding new light on his music and its historical and cultural contexts. It addresses recurring themes such as Boulez's approach to the serial principle and the related issues of form and large-scale structure. Featuring excerpts from Boulez's correspondence with his contemporaries, the book illuminates both Boulez's relationship with them and his thinking concerning the challenges which confronted leading figures of the European avant-garde.
Available Format: Book
David Damschroder offers a new way to examine Chopin's compositional style, integrating Schenkerian structural analyses with an innovative perspective on harmony. This study explores various harmonic notions through analyses of all forty-three Mazurkas Chopin published during his lifetime. Damschroder also integrates analyses of eight major works by Chopin with detailed commentary on the contrasting perspectives of other prominent Chopin analysts.
Available Format: Book
Four of Schumann's great masterpieces of the 1830s - Carnaval, Fantasiestücke, Kreisleriana, and Nachtstücke - are connected to the fiction of E.T.A. Hoffmann. John MacAuslan traces Schumann's stylistic shifts during this period to offer insights into the patterns that give shape to each work. He also relates the works to Schumann's reception of Bach and Beethoven, focusing on primary sources in his wide-ranging discussion of the broader intellectual and aesthetic contexts.
Available Format: Book
History & Reference
This volume departs from standard histories of Western music in two ways. First, it considers music as something primarily experienced by people in their daily lives and in particular locations, rather than as a story of genres, individual counties, and composers and their works. Second, by constraining discussion within the limits of a 100-year timespan, the culture of the sixteenth century is freed from its conventional absorption within the abstraction of 'the Renaissance', and is understood in terms of recent developments in the broader narrative of this period of European history.
Available Format: Book
Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. This book exposes the multiple roles that dance has played, considering the operas of Lully and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices.
Available Format: Book
This innovative study of Renaissance instrumentalists spans the early institutionalisation of instrumental music from c.1420 to the rise of the basso continuo and newer roles for instrumentalists around 1600. Employing a broad cultural narrative interwoven with detailed case studies, and close readings of musical sources, the authors show that instrumental music formed a vital and dynamic element in the artistic landscape.
Available Format: Book
This book supplies tools for developing research skills alongside examples of undergraduate research in dance scholarship. Dance can be studied as an expressive embodied art form with physical, cognitive, and affective domains, and as an integral part of society. To this end, the guidance provided by this book will equip future dance professionals with the means to move the field of dance forward.
Available Format: Book
The tragic story of a woman whose life inspired Verdi's La traviata as well as one of the most scandalous and successful French novels of the nineteenth century, Dumas's La Dame aux Camelias. The woman at the centre of the story, Marie Duplessis, escaped from her life as an abused teenage girl in provincial Normandy, rising in a short space of time to the apex of fashionable life in nineteenth century Paris, where she was considered the queen of the Parisian courtesans.
Available Format: Book
Popular Music
2019 will be the sixtieth anniversary of Buddy Holly's death at the age of twenty-two. Spencer Leigh's new biography is the most definitive account of Buddy Holly and his career. Leigh has spoken to musicians, songwriters, friends, fans and many people who have worked with Buddy.
Available Format: Book
Maryland, My Maryland was one of the most popular Confederate songs during the American Civil War, yet its story is full of ironies that draw attention to the often painful and contradictory actions and beliefs that were both cause and effect of the war. James A. Davis illuminates the incongruities underlying this Civil War anthem and what they reveal about patriotism during the war.
Available Format: Book
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