Nigel Kennedy changed the course of classical music in the late 1980s with his interpretation of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’. He was revolutionary: in his performance and presentation; in his technique and his open-minded attitude. A natural boundary-pusher and musical adventurer, Nigel Kennedy blew minds
Reverence for J. S. Bach's music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public.
Eschewing the great composer style of music ......
Experiencing Mahler surveys the symphonies and major song sets of Gustav Mahler, presenting them not just as artworks but as vivid and deeply felt journeys. Mahler took the symphony, perhaps the most tradition-bound genre in Western music, and opened it to the widest span of human experience. He introduced themes of love, nature, the chasmic depth ......
From the 1920s to the 1940s, Leo Sowerby created popular secular works while his sacred compositions led admirers to call him the "dean of American church musicians." Yet in time, Sowerby's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Canticle of the Sun and the rest of his corpus lost favor with the A-list symphonies and prominent musicians who had once made him a ......
Based on his decades of experience conducting these works, Leonard Slatkin delves into eight of the most beloved orchestral pieces of the twentieth century and tackles problems conductors face before stepping onto the podium. These works are:
Rediscovering the genius of the medieval composer, theologian, and visionary
A Renaissance woman long before the Renaissance, the visionary Hildegard of Bingen (10981179) corresponded with Europe's elite, founded and led a noted women's religious community, and wrote on topics ranging from theology to natural ......
Great music arouses wonder: how did the composer create such an original work of art? What was the artist's inspiration, and how did that idea become a reality? Cultural products inevitably arise from a context, a submerged landscape that is often not easily accessible. To bring such things to light, studies of the creative process find their ......
Right Back Where I Started is a musical odyssey of the heart, mind, and spirit, a journey from the innocent Pacific Northwest of the 1960s to China, Slovenia, Italy, Romania, the Middle East, and countless locations in America, crossing paths with the likes of Renee Fleming, Bill Clinton, James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, and William Shatner. In ......
The Concert Composer's Business Handbook is written for composers of original music--mostly or completely within the world of concert or classical music--as a one-stop resource of information on earning income from music that they write. Drawing on a breadth of experience in the professional field, Stephen L. Rosenhaus addresses a variety of ......
