From Spirituals to Symphonies

From Spirituals to Symphonies
Title From Spirituals to Symphonies PDF eBook
Author Helen Walker-Hill
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Pages 429
Release 2007
Genre African American women composers
ISBN 0252074548

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Exploding the assumption that black women's only important musical contributions have been in folk, jazz, and pop Helen Walker-Hill's unique study provides a carefully researched examination of the history and scope of musical composition by African American women composers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the effect of race, gender, and class, From Spirituals to Symphonies notes the important role played by individual personalities and circumstances in shaping this underappreciated category of American art. The study also provides in-depth exploration of the backgrounds, experiences, and musical compositions of eight African American women including Margaret Bonds, Undine Smith Moore, and Julia Perry, who combined the techniques of Western art music with their own cultural traditions and individual gifts. Despite having gained national and international recognition during their lifetimes, the contributions of many of these women are today forgotten.

Recorded Solo Concert Spirituals, 1916-2022

Recorded Solo Concert Spirituals, 1916-2022
Title Recorded Solo Concert Spirituals, 1916-2022 PDF eBook
Author
Publisher McFarland
Pages 1253
Release 2023-05-08
Genre Music
ISBN 147664845X

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This work catalogs commercially produced recordings of Negro spirituals composed for solo concert vocalists. More than 5,000 tracks are listed, with entries sourced from a variety of recording formats. The featured recordings enhance the study of concert spiritual performance in studio, concert, worship service or competition settings. Arranged alphabetically, entries variously identify the accompaniment--including chorus, piano, orchestra, guitar, flute, and violin--in concert spiritual recordings. The voice types of soloists are included, as is the level of dialect used by various performers. The composers, publishers and format information are also listed when available. While structured like a discography, this guide extends beyond solely providing historical context and encourages the use of the recordings themselves.

New World Symphonies

New World Symphonies
Title New World Symphonies PDF eBook
Author Jack Sullivan
Publisher Yale University Press
Pages 304
Release 1999-01-01
Genre Music
ISBN 9780300072310

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This groundbreaking book shows for the first time the profound and transformative influence of American literature, music, and mythology on European music. Although the impact of the European tradition on American composers is widely acknowledged, Jack Sullivan demonstrates that an even more powerful musical current has flowed from the New World to the Old. The spread of rock and roll around the world, the author contends, is only the latest chapter in a cross-cultural story that began in the nineteenth century with Gottschalk in Paris and Dvorák in New York. Sullivan brings popular and canonical culture into his wide-ranging discussion. He explores the effects on European music of American authors as diverse as Twain, DuBois, Melville, and Langston Hughes, examining in particular Dvorák's fascination with Longfellow, the obsession of Debussy and Ravel with Poe, and the inspiration Whitman provided for Holst, Vaughan Williams, and dozens more. Sullivan uncovers the African American musical influence on Europe, beginning with spirituals and culminating in the impact of jazz on Stravinsky, Bartók, Walton, and others. He analyzes the lure of Hollywood and Broadway for such composers as Weill, Korngold, and Britten and considers the power of the American landscape--from the remoteness of the prairie to the brutal energy of the American city. In European music, Sullivan finds, American culture and mythology continue to resonate.

Singing Down the Barriers

Singing Down the Barriers
Title Singing Down the Barriers PDF eBook
Author Emery Stephens
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield
Pages 204
Release 2023-07-03
Genre Music
ISBN 1538169932

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"This book provides practical approaches for singers and singing teachers who wish to intentionally study, perform, and amplify composers from the African diaspora. It will help them to not only program music by underrepresented composers but also to create brave spaces in which to facilitate critical discussion on race, equity, and American music"--

Music by Black Women Composers

Music by Black Women Composers
Title Music by Black Women Composers PDF eBook
Author Helen Walker-Hill
Publisher Center for Black Music Rsrch
Pages 128
Release 1995
Genre Music
ISBN 9780929911045

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The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow

The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow
Title The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow PDF eBook
Author Kate Guthrie
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 633
Release 2025-03-06
Genre History
ISBN 0197523935

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The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either highbrow modernism on the one hand or lowbrow popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes. While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomenon, excavating the kinds of critical writings, marketing practices, and compositional styles with which it was associated. By reanimating a range of musical practices and products--from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, opera criticism to rock journalism, and modern jazz to pop-rock--the contributors investigate how artists, critics, and audiences breached the divide from both above and below. In the process, the handbook chapters push the boundaries of middlebrow studies and demonstrate the category's relevance outside of the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world by delving into the nineteenth century, interrogating the present day, and looking to Germany, Russia, and beyond. The handbook's second aim is to complicate the disciplinary divisions that have flowed from the entrenched oppositions between high and low genres. Breaking new ground by bringing together scholars of classical and popular music, these chapters trace common middlebrow themes across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Across this broad vista, contributors account for the kinds of syntheses, overlaps, and juxtapositions that made the cultural middle such a richly textured and endlessly contested terrain.

Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music

Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
Title Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music PDF eBook
Author Joseph Horowitz
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Pages 256
Release 2021-11-23
Genre Music
ISBN 0393881253

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A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”