Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune is the first book wholly dedicated to an historical, cultural, and analytical investigation of the French composer's famous composition for piano. Author Gurminder Kaur ...Bhogal explores why, over any other piece in Debussy's repertoire for piano, Clair de Lune achieved stardom in the decades following the composer's death, and how, as the third movement of the Suite Bergamasque, it managed to almost fully eclipse the other movements.
An essential resource for scholars and performers, this study by a world-renowned specialist illuminates the piano music of four major French composers, in comparative and reciprocal context. Howat ...explores the musical language and artistic ethos of this repertoire, juxtaposing structural analysis with editorial and performing issues. He also relates his four composers historically and stylistically to such predecessors as Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, the French harpsichord school, and Russian and Spanish music. Challenging long-held assumptions about performance practice, Howat elucidates the rhythmic vitality and invention inherent in French music. In granting Fauré and Chabrier equal consideration with Debussy and Ravel, he redresses a historic imbalance and reshapes our perceptions of this entire musical tradition. Outstanding historical documentation and analysis are supported by Howat's direct references to performing traditions shaped by the composers themselves. The book balances accessibility with scholarly and analytic rigor, combining a lifetime's scholarship with practical experience of teaching and the concert platform
Integrating the study of both music and art into an exploration of the early poetry of Eugenio Montale (1896-1982), this book situates Italy's premier poet of the twentieth century within the ...Modernist movement. Gian-Paolo Biasin finds in Montale's poetry broad resonances, reverberations, and comparisons that involve it in the European culture of its time and that invite the reading of poetry, music, and painting as texts in a cultural system. This interdisciplinary approach expands our appreciation of Montale's work in a way not possible with literary analysis alone.
Biasin's study first shows the structural homology between some of Debussy's preludes for piano and certain poems in Montale's Ossi di seppia, emphasizing the rhythmic qualities of the compositions. This formal analysis leads to an understanding of the respective texts' thematic, symbolic, and cultural meaning--specifically, antiheroism as a choice of life. Similar methodology is then used to reveal the relationship between the poetry of Montale and Giorgio Morandi's etchings and between Montale's poetic persona, Arsenio, and the novelistic characters of Svevo and Pirandello. Each of these comparisons brings to light a shared image, that of the clown (or antihero) as a mocking self-portrait of the modern artist.
Originally published in 1990.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Debussy Frederick Jensen, Eric
2014, 2014-07-14, 2014-07-03
eBook
Nearly one hundred years after the death of its composer, the music of Claude Debussy has lost none of its appeal. In this authoritative biography, author Eric Frederick Jensen brings together the ...most recent biographical research, including a revised catalogue of Debussy's compositions and the first complete edition of his correspondence. With separate, chronological sections on his life and music, Debussy is accessible to the general reader who wishes to focus on his life and personality, while providing detailed discussion of the music to musicians and students.
Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. ...Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists' masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty's thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty's most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.
Rather than solid frames, some less than perfect aesthetic objects have permeable membranes which allow them to diffuse effortlessly into the everyday world. In the parallel universes of music and ...literature, Linda Cummins extols the poetry of such imperfection. She places Debussy's work within a tradition thriving on anti-Aristotelian principles: motley collections, crumbling ruins real or fake, monstrous hybrids, patchwork and palimpsest, hasty sketches, ellipses, truncated beginnings and endings, meandering arabesques, irrelevant digressions, auto-quotations. Sensitive to the intermittences of memory and experience and with a keen ear for ironic intrusion, Cummins draws the reader into the Western cultural past in search of the surprisingly ubiquitous aesthetic of the unfinished, negatively silhouetted against expectations of rational coherence. Theories popularized by Schlegel and embraced by the French Symbolists are only the first waypoint on an elaborately illustrated tour reaching back to Petrarch. Cummins meticulously applies the derived results to Debussy's scores and finds convincing correlations in this chiasmatic crossover.
This book is the first major publication devoted to the music of Janácek, now widely regarded as one of the most important composers of the early twentieth century. The essays, all by leading ...scholars, deal with a broad range of subjects relating to opera, symphonic poem, instrumental music, cultural context and reception. Some topics, such as the sources of Janácek's musical expressivity, questions of narrative, Janácek as musical analyst and Janácek as realist, are considered seriously for the first time, whilst other more conventional topics, such as 'speech melody' and Janácek's ethnographic activities, are reappraised. A transcription of Janácek's analytical study of 'Jeux de vagues' from Debussy's La mer is published for the first time, and this document is considered in the light of Janácek's theory of music as a whole and of the reception of La mer.
Fransız besteci Claude Debussy, eserlerindeki yenilikler ile devrim yaratarak müzikte izlenimcilik akımının öncüsü olmuştur. 19. yüzyılda resim ve edebiyat dallarında görülen yeniliklerin etkileri ...bestecinin müzikal dilinin oluşmasında önemli rol oynamıştır. Gelenekten ayrılma olgusu, klasik armoni ve form yapısından uzaklaşarak biçimsel kaygı taşımadan renk ve tını faktörünü ön planda tutması, Debussy'nin eserlerinde en dikkat çeken özelliklerdendir.C. Debussy'nin Birinci Dünya Savaşı sırasında yazdığı "Keman ve Piyano Sonatı" keman repertuvarında önemli bir yere sahiptir. Konser ve sınav programlarında sıkça seslendirilen bu eserin Türkiye'de akademik çalışmalarda tek başına yer almamış olması bu çalışmanın konusunun seçimindeki en önemli etkendir.Çalışmanın birinci bölümünde bestecinin hayatına ve öncüsü olduğu izlenimci müziğin özelliklerine yer verilmiş, izlenimci ressam ve sembolist şairlerden söz edilmiş, bu akımların Debussy'nin müzikal kimliğine nasıl yön verdiğine değinilmiştir. İkinci bölümde bestecinin "Keman ve Piyano Sonatı" hakkında bilgi verilmiş ve eser yapısal olarak incelenmiştir. Üçüncü bölümde ise araştırmaya konu olan eserde kullanılan keman tekniklerine yönelik çalışma önerileri getirilmiştir. Metin çalışmasının, Debussy'nin müziğini araştıran ve eserlerini seslendiren sanatçı ve sanatçı adaylarına kaynak oluşturabileceği düşünülmektedir.
A forgotten figure of the new Hungarian musical movement of the 1910s, Géza Vilmos Zágon (1889-1918) was a talented composer, pianist and music writer. He belonged among those young composers who ...turned toward French culture instead of the traditional German orientation and searched for new inspiration in Paris. He was, at the same time, one of the few to be personally acquainted with leading personalities of the city's musical life: letters by Claude Debussy, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, Louis Laloy, Émile Vuillermoz and Albert Zunz Mathot have survived in his legacy. During his stay in France between 1912 and 1914, he acted as the representant of the former UMZE (Új Magyar Zene Egyesület, New Hungarian Music Association), and did not only bring attention to himself as a performer of his own works, but was also instrumental in promoting those by Bartók and Kodály. In the present study, I seek to demonstrate that Zágon served as an important liaison for Bartók's circle with some of the most influential groups of French avant-garde, the Société Musicale Indépendante, as well as Calvocoressi. In an effort to document these important relationships as well as Zágon's activity, I publish a selection of his correspondence in original language, with French translation provided where appropriate.
Claude Debussy's Paris was factionalized, politicized, and litigious. It was against this background of ferment and change--which characterized French society and music from the Franco-Prussian War ...to World War I--that Debussy re-thought music. This book captures the complexity of the composer's restless personal and artistic identity within the new picture emerging of the musical, social, and political world of fin-de-siècle Paris.
Debussy's setting did not simply mold his style. Rather, it challenged him to define a style and then to revamp it again and again as he situated himself simultaneously via the present and the past. These essays trace Debussy's perpetual reinvention, both social and creative, from his earliest to his last works. They explore tensions and contradictions in his best-known compositions and examine lesser-known pieces that reveal new aspects of Debussy's creative appropriation from poetry, painting, and non-Western music.
The contributors reveal the extent to which Debussy's personal and professional lives were intertwined and sometimes in conflict. Belonging to no one group or class, but crossing many, Debussy abjured the orthodox. A maverick who reviled all convention and searched for a music that authentically reflected experience, Debussy balked at entering any situation--salons, musical societies, or factions--that would categorize and thus distort him. Because of this, music lovers still argue over the degree to which Debussy's music is Impressionist, symbolist, or even French. Aptly, the volume's editor reads Debussy's last works as a dialogue with himself that reflects his inherently pluralistic, paradoxical, negotiated, and ever-changing identity.
William Austin's description of Debussy as ''one of the most original and adventurous musicians who ever lived'' is often repeated. This book illustrates how right Austin was and shows why Debussy's unclassifiable art continues to fascinate and perplex his historians even as it enthralls new listeners. The contributors are Leon Botstein, Christophe Charle, John Clevenger, Jane F. Fulcher, David Grayson, Brian Hart, Gail Hilson-Woldu, and Marie Rolf.
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