The Lives of Isaac Stern

Author: David Schoenbaum
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634620
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
A centennial celebration of the career and legacy of the first made-in-America violin virtuoso and one of the twentieth century’s greatest musicians. No single American could personify what Henry Luce called the American Century. But over his eighty-one years, Isaac Stern came closer than most. Russian-Jewish parents brought him to San Francisco at ten months; practice and talent got him to Carnegie Hall, critical acclaim, and the attention of the legendary impresario Sol Hurok at twenty-five. As America came of age, so too did Stern. He would go on to make music on five continents, records in formats from 78 rpm to digital, and friends as different as Frank Sinatra and Sir Isaiah Berlin. An unofficial cultural ambassador for Cold War America, he toured the world from Tokyo to Tehran and Tbilisi. He also shaped public policy from New York and Washington to Jerusalem and Shanghai. His passion for developing young talents—including Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Yo-Yo Ma, and Midori—led him to loan instruments to needy players, broker gigs for Soviet émigrés, and reply in person to inquiring fifth-graders. As the first historian to mine his papers at the Library of Congress, David Schoenbaum traces Stern’s sixty-year career from his formative years in San Francisco to concurrent careers as an activist, public citizen, chairman, and cultural leader in the Jewish community. Wide-ranging yet intimate, The Lives of Isaac Stern is a portrait of an artist and statesman who began as an American dreamer and left a lasting inheritance to his art, profession, and the world.

The Greatest Song of All

Author: Megan Hoyt
Publisher: Quill Tree Books
ISBN: 9780063045279
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 40

Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Bartali's Bicycle comes the inspiring story of violin virtuoso Isaac Stern and his mission to save the beloved Carnegie Hall from demolition. When Carnegie Hall first opened its doors in 1891, no one could have predicted its incredible success. With talented artists like Duke Ellington and Albert Einstein gracing its stage, the hall quickly became a place where all people--no matter their skin color, religion, or social status--could come together under one roof to be entertained. People like Isaac Stern. The son of Jewish immigrants who fled war-torn Ukraine for America to escape the Holocaust, Isaac was a talented violinist whose dream of one day performing on Carnegie Hall's legendary stage came true, many times over. So when a real estate tycoon sets out to demolish Carnegie Hall, Isaac knew something had to be done to preserve decades of hopes, dreams, and inclusivity. Author Megan Hoyt and illustrator Katie Hickey tell the true story of one man's fight to save a historical landmark whose timeless symbol of equality will forever stand the test of time.

My First 79 Years

Author: Isaac Stern
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
For sixty-four years, Isaac Stern has been a great--and greatly loved--performing artist, famous for his profound music-making, his gusto for life, his passionate dedication to sharing his knowledge and wisdom with younger musicians, and his determination in a good cause (Stern is, after all, The Man Who Saved Carnegie Hall). Indeed, there is no more revered musician in the world than Isaac Stern, revered not only as a great violinist but as a warm and generous personality and as a crucial figure and spokesperson in the world of the arts. Brought to America from Russia when he was ten months old, Stern grew up in San Francisco and was quickly recognized as an extraordinary talent. He began performing publicly while still very young, and was soon touring across the country and around the world. His fame escalated when he led the fight to save Carnegie Hall, and again when he was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary film "From Mao to Mozart. In this book he shares with us both his personal and his artistic experiences: the story of his rise to eminence; his feelings about music and the violin; his rich emotional life; his great friendships and collaborations with colleagues such as Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Casals; his background as an ardent supporter of Israel; his ideas and beliefs about art, life, love, and the world we live in. At seventy-nine, Stern's mind, his wit, and his spirit are as strong as ever, and they are conveyed to us in the most sympathetic and articulate way by Chaim Potok. The two men spent a year talking and sharing their perceptions, and the result is a book in which Stern's voice comes through with complete conviction andpersuasiveness. The man on the page is the musician and humanitarian we have loved and admired for so long. Here is the most readable and revealing musical autobiography of the decade.

The Nightingale's Sonata

Author: Thomas Wolf
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643131621
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
*Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal* A moving and uplifting history set to music that reveals the rich life of one of the first internationally renowned female violinists. Spanning generations, from the shores of the Black Sea to the glittering concert halls of New York, The Nightingale's Sonata is a richly woven tapestry centered around violin virtuoso Lea Luboshutz. Like many poor Jews, music offered an escape from the predjudices that dominated society in the last years of the Russian Empire. But Lea’s dramatic rise as an artist was further accentuated by her scandalous relationship with the revolutionary Onissim Goldovsky. As the world around them descends in to chaos, between revolution and war, we follow Lea and her family from Russia to Europe and eventually, America. We cross paths with Pablo Casals, Isadora Duncan, Emile Zola and even Leo Tolstoy. The little girl from Odessa will eventually end up as one of the founding faculty of the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, but along the way she will lose her true love, her father, and watch a son die young. The Iron Curtain would rise, but through it all, she plays on. Woven throughout this luminous odyssey is the story is Cesar Franck’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano.” As Lea was one of the first-ever internationally recognized female violinists, it is fitting that this pioneer was one of the strongest advocates for this young boundary-pushing composer and his masterwork.

Isaac Israeli

Author: Isaac Israeli
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226016153
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
Recognized as one of the earliest Jewish neo-Platonist writers, Isaac ben Solomon Israeli (ca. 855–955) influenced Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars through the Middle Ages. A native of Egypt who wrote in Arabic, Israeli explored definitions of such terms as imagination, sense-perception, desire, love, creation, and “coming-to-be” in his writings. This classic volume contains English translations of Israeli’s philosophical writings, including the Book of Definitions, the Book of Substances, and the Book on Spirit and Soul. Additionally, Isaac Israeli features a biographical sketch of the philosopher and extensive notes and comments on the texts, as well as a survey and appraisal of his philosophy. Restored to print for the first time in decades, Isaac Israeli will be essential reading for students and scholars of medieval philosophy and Jewish studies.

Indivisible by Four

Author: Arnold Steinhardt
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374527006
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
The author tells of his own development as a student, "of how he and his intrepid colleagues were converted to chamber music ... [and of how] four individualists master and then overcome the confining demands of ensemble playing."--Jacket.

The Unbinding of Isaac

Author: Stephen J. Stern
Publisher: Studies in Judaism
ISBN: 9781433111600
Category : Akedah
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The author upends traditional understandings of this controversial narrative through a phenomenological midrash or interpretation of Genesis 22 from the Dialogic and Jewish philosophies of Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and, most notably, Emmanuel Levinas. He intersects Jewish studies, Biblical studies, and philosophy in a literary/midrashic style that challenges traditional Western philosophical epistemology. Through the biblical narrative of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Rebecca, he explains that Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas Judaically exercise and offer an alternative epistemic orientation to the study of ethics than that of traditional Western or Hellenic-Christian philosophy.

The Book of Mischief

Author: Steve Stern
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970591
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 493

Book Description
"In the 25 years since [Stern] published his first book, younger Jewish writers have run with a similar shtick . . . But Stern was there first." —The Toronto Globe and Mail The Book of Mischief triumphantly showcases twenty-five years of outstanding work by one of our true masters of the short story. Steve Stern's stories take us from the unlikely old Jewish quarter of the Pinch in Memphis to a turn-of-thecentury immigrant community in New York; from the market towns of Eastern Europe to a down-at-the-heels Catskills resort. Along the way we meet a motley assortment of characters: Mendy Dreyfus, whose bungee jump goes uncannily awry; Elijah the prophet turned voyeur; and the misfit Zelik Rifkin, who discovers the tree of dreams. Perhaps it's no surprise that Kafka's cockroach also makes an appearance in these pages, animated as they are by instances of bewildering transformation. The earthbound take flight, the meek turn incendiary, the powerless find unwonted fame. Weaving his particular brand of mischief from the wondrous and the macabre, Stern transforms us all through the power of his brilliant imagination.

Power in Modernity

Author: Isaac Ariail Reed
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022668945X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination. Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money. He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity. Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?

The Violin: A Social History of the World's Most Versatile Instrument

Author: David Schoenbaum
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089606
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 753

Book Description
The life, times, and travels of a remarkable instrument and the people who have made, sold, played, and cherished it. A 16-ounce package of polished wood, strings, and air, the violin is perhaps the most affordable, portable, and adaptable instrument ever created. As congenial to reels, ragas, Delta blues, and indie rock as it is to solo Bach and late Beethoven, it has been played standing or sitting, alone or in groups, in bars, churches, concert halls, lumber camps, even concentration camps, by pros and amateurs, adults and children, men and women, at virtually any latitude on any continent. Despite dogged attempts by musicologists worldwide to find its source, the violin’s origins remain maddeningly elusive. The instrument surfaced from nowhere in particular, in a world that Columbus had only recently left behind and Shakespeare had yet to put on paper. By the end of the violin’s first century, people were just discovering its possibilities. But it was already the instrument of choice for some of the greatest music ever composed by the end of its second. By the dawn of its fifth, it was established on five continents as an icon of globalization, modernization, and social mobility, an A-list trophy, and a potential capital gain. In The Violin, David Schoenbaum has combined the stories of its makers, dealers, and players into a global history of the past five centuries. From the earliest days, when violin makers acquired their craft from box makers, to Stradivari and the Golden Age of Cremona; Vuillaume and the Hills, who turned it into a global collectible; and incomparable performers from Paganini and Joachim to Heifetz and Oistrakh, Schoenbaum lays out the business, politics, and art of the world’s most versatile instrument.