New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 28th October 2019
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include an analysis of Beethoven's compositions from the year 1806; an exploration of music in Vienna across three centuries; an enquiry into the nature and meaning of opera; a paperback reissue of Susan McClary's classic text looking at the Italian madrigal in the sixteenth century; an examination of the compositional techniques of Henry Purcell; a study of Caribbean carnival music in New York City; and the latest volume in Oxford University Press's Studies in Recorded Jazz series, taking a look at Dave Brubeck's seminal 1959 album, Time Out.
Classical Music
Vienna has long been associated with many of the most significant composers in Western music - from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, through the Strauss family, Brahms, Bruckner and Wolf, to Mahler, Lehár, Schoenberg and Webern. This book explores the history of music in Vienna, focusing on three different epochs, an approach which allows the very different relationships between music and society that existed in each of these periods to be distinguished.
Available Format: Book
This book mounts a searching enquiry into the elusive character of opera, arguing that any work of art can be grasped primarily through its constellation of Platonic ideas. Although it looks back to the infancy of opera, it concentrates on later, more familiar repertoire - principally Wagner, Verdi, Strauss and Britten.
Available Format: Book
This first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with the genre. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the form as decadent and irrelevant to modern society, even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career.
Available Format: Book
Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal
Susan McClary; University of California Press
Now available in paperback, this is an illuminating cultural interpretation of the sixteenth-century Italian madrigal, from its early manifestations in Philippe Verdelot's settings of Machiavelli in the 1520s to the tortured chromatic experiments of Carlo Gesualdo. Although McClary takes the lyrics into account, she focuses particularly on the details of the music itself, developing an analytical method that allows her to unravel the sophisticated allegorical structures characteristic of the madrigal.
Available Format: Book
Alan Howard offers the first analytical approach to Purcell's music to examine compositional methods alongside historically contemporary theory, challenging previous responses to Purcell's music that portrayed him as fundamentally conservative. This study offers fresh insights into the musical world in which Purcell lived and worked and situates his compositional concerns within the broader context of notions of artifice in Restoration culture.
Available Format: Book
Instrumental Music in an Age of Sociability: Haydn, Mozart and Friends
W. Dean Sutcliffe; Cambridge University Press
W. Dean Sutcliffe invites us to face up to the challenge of re-evaluating the communicative rationales that lie behind eighteenth-century instrumental style. Taking a behavioural perspective, he divides sociability into 'technical' and 'affective' realms, paying close attention both to particular recurring musical patterns as well as to some of the style's most salient expressive attributes, using Haydn as the pivotal figure.
Available Format: Book
With cheery narrator Orchestra Bob as their guide, children are encouraged to listen, learn, and enjoy as they are introduced to the most powerful works from the greatest composers throughout history whilst listening to musical examples of what they are learning about. Illustrated in exquisite and colourful detail with over 100 original drawings and photographs, this is the perfect introduction to the magical world of classical music.
Available Format: Book
Jazz & World Music
Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for this study. Blending oral history, archival research, and ethnography, it examines how members of New York's diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged trans-national identities through the self-conscious embrace and transformation of select Carnival music styles and performances.
Available Format: Book
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