New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 18th May 2020
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include an exploration of Wagner's final opera, Parsifal; books on the music of Shostakovich and Brahms; the long-awaited final volume of Henry-Louis de La Grange's monumental biography of Gustav Mahler; a collection of the writings of Peter Maxwell Davies; essays on the impact of Benjamin Britten on contemporary British music; two studies of women and music in early Europe; and a guide to the performance of German Lieder.
Through interviews conducted with surviving members of Soviet orchestras, combined with his reading of philosophers, psychoanalysts, and neurologists, author Stephen Johnson paints a compelling picture of one man's music and its power to validate and sustain another man's life.
Available Format: Book
Gustav Mahler: The Arduous Road to Vienna (1860-1897)
Henry-Louis de La Grange; Brepols N.V.; Hardback
This long-awaited, revised Volume One completes Henry-Louis de La Grange's four-volume English-language biography of Gustav Mahler. The present instalment, covering the years 1860 to 1897, traces Mahler's life and career from his birth in a small Bohemian village to his appointment to the Vienna Hofoper. Some of his major works (Das klagende Lied, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and the first three symphonies) date from this period.
Available Format: Book
Brahms's A German Requiem - Reconsidering Its Biblical, Historical, and Musical Contexts
R. Allen Lott; University of Rochester Press; Hardback
This comprehensive reconsideration of the various contexts of Brahms's Requiem systematically documents its early performance history and critical reception. A discussion of the musical traditions used by Brahms demonstrates how the work is imbued with the language of Lutheran church music through references to chorales and through allusions to preceding masterworks by Schütz, Bach, Mendelssohn, and others.
Available Format: Book
Often considered to be the leading British composer of the twentieth-century's middle decades, Benjamin Britten continues to create significant contexts for the work of those who survived and succeeded him. This collection of revised reprints of essays, reviews and analyses first published between 1995 and 2018 takes the impact of Britten's life and work as its governing perspective, surveying a cross-section of contemporary classical composition in the UK.
Available Format: Book
Peter Maxwell Davies, Selected Writings
Nicholas Jones (editor); Cambridge University Press; Paperback
Spanning the composer's entire career, this compendium offers a selection of Peter Maxwell Davies's articles and essays, speeches and lectures, interviews, radio broadcasts, programme notes, tributes and letters to newspapers. A number of items are published for the first time, including a new article from Davies himself (commissioned specially for this book), and several BBC radio broadcast interviews and talks from the 1960s.
Available Format: Book
New in paperback, this is the memoir of Zuzana Růžičková, Holocaust survivor and harpsichordist. She grew up in 1930s Czechoslovakia, but her childhood was torn apart when, in 1939, the Nazis invaded. Uprooted from her home, she was afflicted with crippling injuries to her hands. Yet her bravery and passion ensured her survival, and she went on to become the first harpsichordist to record the entirety of Bach's keyboard works.
Available Format: Book
This book brings together nine chapters that investigate aspects of female music-making and musical experience in the medieval and early modern periods, including topics such as the spirituality of women in solitude and in community, and the notion of the allure of music and its risks in Venice during the Baroque.
Available Format: Book
This book examines the music-making of four generations of princesses, noblewomen and nuns in Ferrara, as performers, creators, and patrons. It rethinks the relationships between polyphony and song, sacred and secular, performer and composer, patron and musician, court and convent, and includes new archival evidence and analysis of music, people, and events over the course of the century.
Available Format: Book
This collection of twenty-one essays from leading teachers and scholars covers everything from teaching historical periods to enlivening the classroom. It is both a resource for current music history teachers and an ideal text for history pedagogy courses.
Available Format: Book
Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century: A Cultural History of the Songster
Paul Watt, Derek B. Scott, & Patrick Spedding (editors); Cambridge University Press; Paperback
This book is a cultural history of the nineteenth-century songster: pocket-sized anthologies of song texts, usually without musical notation. It examines the musical, social, commercial and aesthetic functions they served and the processes by which they were produced and disseminated, the repertory they included, and the people that both inspired their manufacture and facilitated their consumption.
Available Format: Book
German Song Onstage: Lieder Performance in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Natasha Loges & Laura Tunbridge (editors); Indiana University Press; Hardback
For much of the nineteenth century, the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were heard in the home and salon as well as on the concert platform. The historical case studies presented in this book are set alongside reflections from a selection of today's leading musicians, offering insights on current Lied practices.
Available Format: Book
Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (Third Edition)
Nicolas Collins; Routledge; Paperback
A practical and engaging introduction to the craft of making, as well as creatively cannibalising, electronic circuits for artistic purposes. Learn how to make contact microphones, pick-ups for electromagnetic fields, oscillators, distortion boxes, and mixers cheaply and quickly. This revised and expanded edition has been updated throughout to reflect recent developments in technology and DIY approaches.
Available Format: Book
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