What are you reading on classical music?

[piston]

Stephen Studd, Saint-Saens. A Critical Biography (London: 1999) 356 pages.

Contents:
Preface
Introduction
1. Child Prodigy
2. Student
3. Organist
4. Teacher
5. Pianist
6. Patriot
7. Symphonic Poet
8. Husband and Father
9. The Immortal
10. Man of the Theatre
11. The Travelling Philosopher
12. Reactionary and Royal Favourite
13. Grand Old Man
14. Patriot Again
15. World Weary
16. The Legacy
Appendix I: Essays
Appendix II: Poems
Appendix III: List of Works
Appendix IV: Select Discography
Notes, bibliography, index.

[Auntie Lynn]

Grand Obsession and The Parisian Worlds of Frederic Chopin - which is pretty good - it deals less about Fred and more about the social, economic, political and logistic ambience of Paris in the mid-1800's...

[Lance]

I'm vacillating between three books, something rare for me:

• The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germany's Most Illustrious and Infamous Family by Jonathan Carr
• Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy [Ervin Nyiregyhazi, pianist] by Kevin Bazzana
• Fats Waller: The cheerful Little Earful by Alyn Shipton

[/color]

[Guitarist]

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. Next is This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin.

[Ken]

I've been paging through the Mahler Companion by Mitchell and Nicholson. It doesn't provide the most thorough musical analysis of the composer's works, but situates them very well within the context and times in which they were written.

[TopoGigio]

La Vie et Les Aventures Parfois Secretes de Francis Tregian, Gentilhomme
et Musicien (Collectionneur Enthousiaste des Musiques de la Renaissance
il nous a leguè le Fitwillian Virginal Book,aussi celebre que sa vie etait
demeuree secrete)
...
plus connu comme Le Trajet d'une Riviere,Anne Cuneo.
Prix des Libraires,1995.
-------
737 pages...

[IcedNote]

Since I study music, the vast majority of my non-school reading isn't about music. Being a PhD candidate, perhaps I should work on that.

-G

[anasazi]

I just finished "Olga Samaraoff Stokowski: An American Virtuoso". Just a very interesting story, although it could have used even more research. I admit that her name had just never been mentioned or had dawned on me until I purchased her transcription of Bach's G minor organ fugue "The Little", transcribed for piano. So yeah, I ASSUMED that her interest in this music was because of her FAMOUS husband Leopold. Well, not so. Olga (actually Lucy Agnes Hickenlooper) transcribed the piece long before she met Stokowski and often opened her recitals with it. So that was one connection. Another was the Bok family. The editor of the Saturday Evening Post and his wife, the founder of the Curtis Institute. I had not long ago traveled to their winter home here in Florida.

Well, anyway, I think there is much more to this story, but I am convinced that I have discovered for myself (since her story seems to have not been on everyone's tongue) one of the real movers and shakers of classical music in America in the early 19th century. It was just very interesting to read the, not only prejudice against women in music, but also against American artists. Olga was one of the first pianists to buck the trend and establish a career without European credentials. After an unfortunate injury, she spent most of her life as a teacher, at both Julliard (which had just been founded) and Curtis (one day a week). Among her many many famous students: Willy Kappell, Rosaline Tureck.

This book, although I am sure more could be said, is like CONNECTIONS 101 in American Classical music.

[Wallingford]

BARTOK'S CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA: UNDERSTANDING BARTOK'S WORLD
by Benjamin Suchoff

The very book to slap in the face of anyone who claims that this work represents Bartok "dumbing down" his art: Besides a history of the work's comission & creation, there are individual chapters devoted to each of the movements, taking you measure by measure, even going so far as to trace the "origin" or "nationality" of the composer's original themes. For instance, in the second movement, we find that the tune for two bassoons is of Roumanian/Serbian nature, & the theme for two oboes is of Yugoslavian character. We also get a look at the closing bars of the last movement & Bartok's revision.

Anyone reading my posts with any regularity will find I dote on this work, & it's required reading for anyone of like mind.




Also, I'm trying to get to the novel by Nancy Moser, Mozart's Sister, which my parents got me for my last birthday.

[pizza]

Not a book, but the excellent liner notes for the many CDs I have of the reconstructions of Gershwin's works made from the treasure trove of manuscripts that had been presumed lost but were found in the Secaucus, N.J. warehouse in 1982. The process of reconstructing his works has fascinated me for years, and I hope someone will write a book about it.

[TopoGigio]

Not a book, but the excellent liner notes for the many CDs I have of the reconstructions of Gershwin's works made from the treasure trove of manuscripts that had been presumed lost but were found in the Secaucus, N.J. warehouse in 1982. The process of reconstructing his works has fascinated me for years, and I hope someone will write a book about it.

Can you provide some references without problem? You can write one boook for us!

[Selmer]

Just read Letters To My Wife. A collection of Mahler's letters and telegrams sent during their relationship. Riveting at times, and quite revealing of the composer's psyche.

[Wallingford]

I've been casually studying the art of rounds, in two delightful collections by Mary Catherine Taylor, Catch That Catch Can and Rounds And Rounds (published in the 1940s by Wm. Sloane Associates, NY).

Writing one of those little jobs isn't as simple as you might think.

[Gary]

I've been casually studying the art of rounds

Is that the type of music that sounds like a broken record?

[piston]

I have just begun reading a little book on Villa-Lobos written by David P. Appleby, a retired educator/musician who performed his music for over fifty years and who taught graduate-level classes on the history of Brazilian music, while on a Fulbright assignment in that country in 1989-90. Judging from the quality of his narrative (and the many typos), Appleby is not a professional author (despite a Ph.D. from Indiana University). Nevertheless the book is interesting as an unusual source of oral history. Appleby spent 17 years interviewing relatives and acquaintances of the famous Brazilian composer.

Well, Villa-Lobos was quite a story teller, especially of "tall tales"! Much of what has been said or written about his "research" among Brazilian Indians is.... false! Rather, he relied on the work of ethnomusicologists some of whom were not even Brazilian scholars. But these tall tales, along with his genuine interest in using indigenous culture in his own pieces, greatly helped his career. I was not aware of the critical role Arthur Rubenstein played early on in supporting Villa-Lobos and convincing wealthy Brazilian patrons to fund his trips to France during the 1920s. Another implication of Villa-Lobos' propensity to "construct" the recent past is that one really cannot know for certain when his early compositions were fully written. Given that he claimed to have written numerous works long before they were first performed, it's pretty hard to ascertain when they were actually completed.

Another interesting tidbit about the composer's personality is found in that, contrary to Copland and those other Americans who followed him to France, Villa-Lobos did not travel to that country to acquire a greater musical education. Rather, he went there to show Brazilian music to Europeans.

David P. Appleby, Heitor Villa-Lobos. A Life (1887-1959), The Scarecrow Press, Inc. [The editing is indeed quite scary]: 2002.

I'll be reading Volkov's Shostakovich and Stalin and Fay's Shostakovich and his World in the Maine woods.

[anasazi]

I'm now slowly winding my way through both Harlow Robinson's biography of Prokofiev and Michael Kennedy's biography of R. Strauss. I like to note the somewhat vague similarities that I have discovered. But in any case, both are very interesting reading.

[Reed]

Rounds:

"Is that the type of music that sounds like a broken record?"

Actually, it's the type of music that sounds like several copies of the same broken record, played out of phase.

[mnmleung]

I am picking random pages from Boris Berman's "Notes from the Pianist's Bench" and reading a couple of pages at a time.

Back in 1980s when I was in high school, I was interested in chapters from Harold C Schonberg's "The Great Pianists from Mozart to the Present" about pianists whose records I could lay my hands on. 20+ years later, I am reading about (not so often mentioned) pianists whose concerti I now hear occasionally on radio: Dreyschock, Field, Henselt etc.

[premont]

Well, just having finished

Nicolaus Harnoncourt: Musik als Klangrede

and almost having finished

Ewald Kooiman & Gerhard Weinberger; Zur Interpretation der Orgelmusik Joh. Seb. Bach´s

I have started rereading :

Robert Donington: The interpretation of early music

Harnoncourts book does not contain much unknown to the reader of to day ( it was released 1982), but it is written in a fascinating, colourful and ironical style, as you might expect.
Kooiman and Weinberger refer relative detailled sources contemporary with Bach dealing with interpretation (articulation, registration and so on).

[anasazi]

Currently reading "Dear People" a bio of Robert Shaw by Musselman. Interesting, but not all that well written (meaning, the author isn't a good story-teller). Also, it badly needs to be updated, since it only goes to about 1976 or so.

It was very difficult to locate this book, I had to use my library's interlibrary loan to even find a copy.

[MaestroDJS]

What am I reading? During the past 2 months, the wonders of 21st-Century technology have let me excavate digitized archives for 19th-Century journals like these:

Appletons' Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1892, New York (1893)
Dwight's Journal of Music, Boston, Saturday, June 29, 1872
New York World, Saturday, June 29, 1872
The New York Times, July 9, 1872
New York Sun, July 18, 1872.
Weekly Review, New York, July 18, 1872
Dwight's Journal of Music, Boston, Saturday, August 10, 1872
Dwight's Journal of Music, Boston, Saturday, October 5, 1872
The New York Times, Wednesday, May 9, 1897
The New York Times, Wednesday, October 20, 1900

Why am I reading these? They contain contemporary accounts of the concerts which Johann Strauss, Jr. conducted in Boston and New York in 1872, during his only visit to the United States. They are mighty interesting reading, with some fascinating personal glimpses of Strauss and the musical life of the time.

In the 1850s, famous European musicians began to tour the United States, such as Swiss piano virtuoso Sigismond Thalberg (1812-1871), Belgian violinist-composer Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881), Swedish soprano Jenny Lind (1820-1887) etc. As transatlantic transport and communications improved, other luminaries followed.

Through friendly persuasion and the offer of truly big bucks, Johann Strauss, Jr. was enticed to conduct at The World's Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival in Boston in 1872, plus other concerts in Boston and New York. The festival was the brainchild of the famous musical director Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore. Strauss was initially reluctant to accept the offer, but his reservations were overcome by the prospect of almost literally sailing a boatload of money back to Vienna.

After Strauss, other European musical greats followed his example and toured the United States, such as Jacques Offenbach in 1876 and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1891. Then in 1892 Antonín Dvořák arrived in the United States and stayed: for 3 years as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. His example paved the way for a flood of great European musicians who visited or emigrated to the United States in the 20th Century, at about the same time the United States began to develop its own musical identity.

These are all part of my duties as Coordinator of the Classical Music SIG [Special Interest Group] of Mensa International. Yes, it's a tough job (a labor of love actually), but somebody has to do it.

For more:

Johann Strauss, Jr. in the United States, 1872
http://classicalmusicguide.com/viewtopi ... 10&t=22364

[TopoGigio]

And then, the music...we have Jabuka (Das Apfelfest) in Naxos:
http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp ... .660216-17
---
Im fond of his last work, the ballet Aschenbrödel, very much...
---
More Recordings!!! I dont work!!!

[James]

I am currently reading 2 books on Stockhausen; Other Planets & Stockhausen on Music. Great stuff.

[Jack Kelso]

I'm reading four simultaneously:

Analyses of the Handel oratorios; a Berlioz biography (I'll check out the authors!); and (still!) biographies/analyses of Schumann/his works by John Daverio (in English)---and another by Martin Demmler (in German). I recently finished Hans Gal's astute bio of Brahms.

I like reading bits and pieces at a time, a chapter here and there....

Tschüß!
Jack

[TopoGigio]

Im reading half `a book, maybe...its about the death penalty for a musicien...
Dominique Fernandez`Tribunal d'Honneur...
Ah,yes, he is Tchaï...kovski...i believe...

[Jack Kelso]

In reference to my previous post, the Handel book is:

"Händels Oratorien, Oden und Serenaten" by Hans-Joachim Marx.

The Berlioz book is called simply "Berlioz" and is by Wolfgang Dömling.

Both are very well researched and highly informative.

Tschüß!
Jack

[Seán]

Gustav Mahler
Letters to his Wife
Edited by Henry-Louis De La Grange and Gunther Weiss
First complete edition revised and translated by Anthony Beaumont

[Auntie Lynn]

So I spent most of the night after work night before last at the SFPL closely scrutinizing a tremendous resource - there is a big big big new thematic index of all of Dvorak's oeuvre. But don't try and lift it without a truss...it's huge - but worth the time and effort...

[annalisa_moretti]

well i like to read libretti >.> <.< it's like, such an interesting world to indulge into.. it's also nice to read analysis on libretti.. like i read summaries of some operas.. it was interesting.. im yet waiting for the libretto of tosca