Reference

In this concise and accessible volume, a noted keyboard artist and Bach specialist takes a fresh look at the performance of J. S. Bach's keyboard music. Addressing the nonspecialist player, Richard Troeger presents a wide range of historical information and discusses its musical applications. The author shares accounts of the musical styles Bach employed and the instruments he knew. In direct and pragmatic terms, he clarifies the importance of notational and style details as guides to the composer's intentions, particularly emphasizing changes in notational norms between Bach's time and the present. Troeger offers core information on dynamics, articulation, tempo, rhythm, ornamentation and accompaniment. He considers controversial issues as well, establishing the importance of the clavichord in Bach's milieu and examining the link between baroque music and rhetoric - a dramatic relationship that can bring great vitality to performance.

Schumann - A Chorus of Voices is a significant contribution to Schumann's 200th-birthday year, 2010. In these hitherto unpublished interviews and conversations, more than thirty biographers, musicians, critics, and commentators offer their own unique perspectives on Schumann's life, work, controversies, and place in the history of Romantic music. Gathered by Schumann scholar John C. Tibbetts during more than thirty years of travel and research, these intimate and informal talks take the reader backstage to the rehearsal hall, scholar's study, archive, and music festival. Included are musicians Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Erich Leinsdorf, Jrg Demus, Emanuel Ax, Elly Ameling, Thomas Hampson, Steven Isserlis, Marin Alsop; scholars and biographers Jacques Barzun, Nancy B. Reich, Peter Ostwald, Leon Plantinga, and Larry Todd; critics and commentators Martin Bookspan, Eugenia Zuckerman, and Maurice Sendak; and archivists Gerd Nauhaus, Ute Baer, and Joachim Draheim. The accompanying disc features Van Cliburn Gold Medalist Jose Feghali performing and discussing Schumann's Carnaval, Opus 9, and pianist Ronald Brautigam performing the complete Noveletten, Opus 21 - not available anywhere else!

For the first time in operatic history, this revealing and long-awaited biography uncovers the tragically short yet elegant life and glorious career of the beautiful California soprano Sibyl Sanderson. A great read for opera romantics of all generations and a true story with all the drama of period fiction, this biography is enhanced by Jack Winsor Hansen's complete access to the Sanderson family archives and decades of dedicated research about her life in Europe and the United States. It includes exclusive, previously unpublished correspondence, diaries, memoirs, and extensive interviews with the people who knew Sanderson and those around her. Hardcover.

Encompassing a history of more than 2000 years, the music of the Arabs is unique among the world's various musical cultures. This book presents an overview of Arabic music throughout history and examines the artistic output of contemporary musicians, covering secular and sacred, instrumental and vocal, improvised and composed music. Typical musical structures are elucidated, and a detailed bibliography, a discography (mainly covering the last 50 years) and a guide to the Arabic alphabet for English speakers are also provided. The paperback edition (00331635) includes a CD of seven traditional Arabic pieces performed by contemporary Arab musicians.

Along with Beethoven's sonatas and the purely idiomatic works for piano of Chopin and Debussy, the solo keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach represents the heart of the pianist's repertory; in the more specialized field of music for the organ, Bach's primacy seems beyond challenge. This listener's guide to Bach's music for the keyboard provides the interested amateur with a close but non-technical look at these two crucial parts of the master's oeuvre. The composer's tendency to work exhaustively in tightly structured formats - such as the 48 preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier - provides a natural framework for this study; but the power, beauty, high polish, and occasionally the sheer strangeness of Bach's imagination are carefully examined as well.

As they engage with one of the 20th century's most provocative musical personalities, studies of the multifaceted Leonard Bernstein will always proffer new insights into the human condition. But this is the first book on Bernstein to be written by a composer, and the first by a colleague and friend who worked intimately with the maestro for more than three decades. Jack Gottlieb has been described as Bernstein's amanuensis and as the preeminent Bernstein scholar. This memoir presents fresh, sensitive, and revealing information about the everyday life of the maestro in Part One, featuring reminiscences peppered with anecdotes, humor, and stories by others. Part Two includes Gottlieb's commentaries and analyses of Bernstein's works, which have appeared in program notes for concerts by many of the world's orchestras, as jacket notes for recordings, and as articles in journals and elsewhere, beginning with the New York Philharmonic tribute A Valentine for Leonard Bernstein on February 13, 1961. Preceded by updated remarks, this collection allows those seeking firsthand information on Bernstein's compositions to find all of Gottlieb's valuable scholarship in one place.

With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Washington Post music critic Tim Page Penned by veteran music writer, critic, and Grammy nominee Alan Rich, currently a music critic for the alternative paper LA Weekly, this book is a collection of music criticism gleaned from four decades of concert-going, opera-going, and record-listening on both coasts. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Washington Post music critic Tim Page provides the book's introduction. Included are reviews and essays on musicians, both well-known and obscure, who have shaped worldwide musical tastes during those years: conductors including Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, and Esa-Pekka Salonen; performers Glenn Gould and the overexploited David Helfgott; composers both familiar (Baroque masters, Mozart, Schubert) and contemporary (John Adams and John Cage). Probing essays include lively insights on music criticism itself and on where (if anywhere) music may (or may not) be heading in the new millennium. His writing drew from the formidable Virgil Thomson praise as the most readable music reviewer ... our best muckraker.

The story of Tanglewood - the summer home of the Boston Symphony since 1935 - as told in first-person accounts by such Tanglewood luminaries as Leonard Bernstein, Serge Koussevitzky, Aaron Copland, Erich Leinsdorf, Phyllis Curtin, Seiji Ozawa, Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, John Harbison, James Levine, and many of the leading musicians, critics, and music professionals who consider Tanglewood a second home. A documentary coffee-table book including letters, speeches, interviews, vintage newspaper articles, and a treasure trove of photographs from the BSO's archvies, woven together by a narrative thread and commented on by the author. Among the dozens of stories included: Student Lenny Bernstein writes the folks back home about Koussie and the Boiks; ten years later, conductor Leonard Bernstein inspires the students with his own brand of oratory Boris Goldovsky reminisces about the glory days of the Tanglewood Opera Department where he discovered Leontyne Price, Sherrill Milnes, and an amazing number of soon-to-become-famous young American singers Gunther Schuller's 1979 Tanglewood manifesto is the talk of the music world Oliver Knussen relates how Rostopovich told the Shed audience of the death of Shostakovich after conducting the composer's Fifth Symphony Seiji Ozawa remembers his student trip to Tanglewood on a Bonanza bus with only a few phrases of English at his command and very few dollars in his pocket The transformation of Tanglewood under the orchestra's new Music Director, James Levine

Carol Montparker's 31 stories are remarkable for their frankness and emotional honesty. Creative nonfiction from a life in music, they are in turn tender and intense, lyrical and riotously funny. There is a poignant friendship with the elderly, irresistible Rudi; the anguish of a marriage that needed to end; true love found later; a narrow escape from an outlandishly surreal piano; moving tales from her teaching studio; each story with its own satisfying shape and rhythm. These autobiographical stories sparkle with vignettes of people, places and petss, but their deeper subject is that of the woman pianist in a male-dominated worlld. The subject is not new, but Ms. Montparker brings to it a rewarding freshnesss of insight. - Jerome Lowenthal Pianist; and faculty, The Juilliard School Thee pianist's latest book deserves to be read by anyone who plays or wishes to playy or ever wished to play the piano, and by everyone else too. She writes about muusic in a sane, wise, humane voice in this charming, instructive, often moving coollection. - Michael Kimmelman Chief Art Critic, The New York Times; and pianiist

The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer gathers a colorful and wide-ranging selection of pieces from leading musical commentators and critics. Included are revealing interviews with the composer as well as eloquent essays by Ingram Marshall, Michael Steinberg, Alex Ross, Sarah Cahill, Alan Rich, and many others. Editor Thomas May has grouped this collection into four sections: profiles of the artist (including a fascinating memory piece from Ingram Marshall on Adams's early San Francisco years), detailed essays on the major works, interviews with some leading collaborators and interpreters, and critical reception. This reader should be of use both as an introduction for the general reader to a preeminently significant American artist and as a reference for the more serious student or scholar.