The Beethoven Quartet Companion

Author: Robert Winter
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520082113
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
"Reading The Beethoven Quartet Companion made me want to listen to the quartets again from a new sociological as well as musical perspective. It is an invaluable guide not only for professional and amateur musicians but also for anyone who is curious about culture and wants to find out more."--Yo-Yo Ma "These essays are the most readable, useful, and well-informed commentary available today on these masterworks. Michael Steinberg's 'program notes' to each quartet, directed at once to the musical beginner and to the expert, are as eloquent and persuasive as popular writing about music can get. . . . His essays are followed by equally expert and accessible contributions by other masters on The Master, providing literate music lovers with the context and equipment for a richer enjoyment and clearer understanding of these sixteen unique conversations among two violins, a viola, and a cello."--David Littlejohn, author of The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera "A fine collection of essays to assist the music lover in the seemingly endless quest to illuminate the Beethoven string quartets."--Arnold Steinhardt, The Guarneri String Quartet "This book delivers on the implied promise of its title--it provides a lively, readable, and wide-ranging introduction to the quartets. Readers at many levels of experience will find it profitable."--Lewis Lockwood, author of Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process

The Beethoven Quartet Companion

Author: Robert Winter
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520917502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
While the Beethoven string quartets are to chamber music what the plays of Shakespeare are to drama, even seasoned concertgoers will welcome guidance with these personal and sometimes enigmatic works. This collection offers Beethoven lovers both detailed notes on the listening experience of each quartet and a stimulating range of more general perspectives: Who has the quartets' audience been? How were the quartets performed before the era of sound recordings? What is the relationship between "classical" and "romantic" in the quartets? How was their reception affected by social and economic history? What sorts of interpretive decisions are made by performers today? The Companion brings together a matchless group of Beethoven experts. Joseph Kerman is perhaps the world's most renowned Beethoven scholar. Robert Winter, an authority on sketches for the late quartets, has created interactive programs regarded as milestones in multimedia publishing. Maynard Solomon has written an acclaimed biography of Beethoven. Leon Botstein is the conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra as well as a distinguished social historian and college president. Robert Martin writes from his experience as cellist of the Sequoia Quartet. And the book is anchored by the program notes of Michael Steinberg, who has served as Artistic Advisor of the San Francisco Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra.

The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet

Author: Robin Stowell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826549
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 672

Book Description
This Companion offers a concise and authoritative survey of the string quartet by eleven chamber music specialists. Its fifteen carefully structured chapters provide coverage of a stimulating range of perspectives previously unavailable in one volume. It focuses on four main areas: the social and musical background to the quartet's development; the most celebrated ensembles; string quartet playing, including aspects of contemporary and historical performing practice; and the mainstream repertory, including significant 'mixed ensemble' compositions involving string quartet. Various musical and pictorial illustrations and informative appendixes, including a chronology of the most significant works, complete this indispensable guide. Written for all string quartet enthusiasts, this Companion will enrich readers' understanding of the history of the genre, the context and significance of quartets as cultural phenomena, and the musical, technical and interpretative problems of chamber music performance. It will also enhance their experience of listening to quartets in performance and on recordings.

Beethoven's Quartets

Author: Joseph de Marliave
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : String quartets
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Book Description

Beethoven for a Later Age

Author: Edward Dusinberre
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571317154
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
'They are not for you but for a later age!' Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartets. Tackling the Beethoven quartets is a rite of passage that has shaped the Takács Quartet's work together for over forty years. Using the history of the composition and first performances of the quartets as the backbone to his story, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takács since 1993 - recounts the life of the Quartet from its inception in Hungary, through emigration to the US and its present-day life as one of the world's renowned string quartets. He also describes what it was like for him, as a young man fresh out of the Juilliard School, to join the Quartet as its first non-Hungarian member - an exhilarating challenge. Beethoven for a Later Age takes the reader inside the life of a quartet, vividly showing how four people enjoy making music together over a long period of time. The key, the author argues, is in balancing continuity with change and experimentation - a theme that also lies at the heart of Beethoven's remarkable compositions.

The Cambridge Companion to Brahms

Author: Michael Musgrave
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139825305
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
This Companion gives a comprehensive view of the German composer Johannes Brahms (1833–97). Twelve specially-commissioned chapters by leading scholars and musicians provide systematic coverage of the composer's life and works. Their essays represent recent research and reflect changing attitudes towards a composer whose public image has long been out-of-date. The first part of the book contains three chapters on Brahms's early life in Hamburg and on the middle and later years in Vienna. The central section considers the musical works in all genres, while the last part of the book offers personal accounts and responses from a conductor (Roger Norrington), a composer (Hugh Wood), and an editor of Brahms's original manuscripts (Robert Pascall). The volume as a whole is an important addition to Brahms scholarship and provides indispensable information for all students and enthusiasts of Brahms's music.

The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven

Author: Glenn Stanley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107494044
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
This Companion, first published in 2000, provides a comprehensive view of Beethoven and his work. The first part of the book presents the composer as a private individual, as a professional, and at the work-place, discussing biographical problems, Beethoven's professional activities when not composing and his methods as a composer. In the heart of the book, individual chapters are devoted to all the major genres cultivated by Beethoven and to the elements of style and structure that cross all genres. The book concludes by looking at the ways that Beethoven and his music have been interpreted by performers, writers on music, and in the arts, literature, and philosophy. The essays in this volume, written by leading Beethoven specialists, maintain traditional emphases in Beethoven studies while incorporating other developments in musicology and theory.

Beethoven: The Music and the Life

Author: Lewis Lockwood
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393326381
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 621

Book Description
Written for the general reader, this book reveals how Beethoven's great works reflect both his artistic individuality and the deepest philosophical and political currents of his age.

The String Quartets of Beethoven

Author: William Kinderman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252091620
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
"We do not understand music--it understands us." This aphorism by Theodor W. Adorno expresses the quandary and the fascination many listeners have felt in approaching Beethoven's late quartets. No group of compositions occupies a more central position in chamber music, yet the meaning of these works continues to stimulate debate. William Kinderman's The String Quartets of Beethoven stands as the most detailed and comprehensive exploration of the subject. It collects new work by leading international scholars who draw on a variety of historical sources and analytical approaches to offer fresh insights into the aesthetics of the quartets, probing expressive and structural features that have hitherto received little attention. This volume also includes an appendix with updated information on the chronology and sources of the quartets and a detailed bibliography.

The Rest Is Noise

Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 706

Book Description
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.