Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart

Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart
Title Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart PDF eBook
Author Wye Jamison Allanbrook
Publisher University of Chicago Press
Pages 409
Release 2016-05-06
Genre Biography & Autobiography
ISBN 022643771X

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Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s widely influential Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart challenges the view that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music was a “pure play” of key and theme, more abstract than that of his predecessors. Allanbrook’s innovative work shows that Mozart used a vocabulary of symbolic gestures and musical rhythms to reveal the nature of his characters and their interrelations. The dance rhythms and meters that pervade his operas conveyed very specific meanings to the audiences of the day.

Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas

Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas
Title Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas PDF eBook
Author Kristi Brown-Montesano
Publisher Univ of California Press
Pages 344
Release 2021-11-09
Genre Biography & Autobiography
ISBN 0520385799

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Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni’s story the only one—or even the most interesting one—in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it’s Mozart’s men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist’s point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It’s time to give Mozart’s women—and Mozart’s multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character—their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart’s four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations. Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.

The Secular Commedia

The Secular Commedia
Title The Secular Commedia PDF eBook
Author Wye Jamison Allanbrook
Publisher Univ of California Press
Pages 253
Release 2014-06-07
Genre Music
ISBN 052095887X

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Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s The Secular Commedia is a stimulating and original rethinking of the music of the late eighteenth century. Hearing the symphonies and concertos of Haydn and Mozart with an ear tuned to operatic style, as their earliest listeners did, Allanbrook shows that this familiar music is built on a set of mimetic associations drawn from conventional modes of depicting character and emotion in opera buffa. Allanbrook mines a rich trove of writings by eighteenth-century philosophers and music theorists to show that vocal music was considered aesthetically superior to instrumental music and that listeners easily perceived the theatrical tropes that underpinned the style. Tracing Enlightenment notions of character and expression back to Greek and Latin writings about comedy and drama, she strips away preoccupations with symphonic form and teleology to reveal anew the kaleidoscopic variety and gestural vitality of the musical surface. In prose as graceful and nimble as the music she discusses, Allanbrook elucidates the idiom of this period for contemporary readers. With notes, musical examples, and a foreword by editors Mary Ann Smart and Richard Taruskin.

"Don Giovanni" Captured

Title "Don Giovanni" Captured PDF eBook
Author Richard Will
Publisher University of Chicago Press
Pages 315
Release 2022-06-14
Genre Music
ISBN 0226815412

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Part I. Clouds of feeling: excerpt audio recordings. Imagining excerpts; Rhetorics of seduction; Demons and dandies; All too human -- Part II. Invented works : complete audio records. The visual stage; Cruel laughter; Dancing in time -- Part III. Partial visions : video recordings. Zooming in, gazing back; Trauma retold; Libertines punished.

Mozart and the Enlightenment

Mozart and the Enlightenment
Title Mozart and the Enlightenment PDF eBook
Author Nicholas Till
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Pages 404
Release 1995
Genre History
ISBN 9780393313956

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In this illuminating new study of Mozart's operas, Nicholas Till shows that the composer was not a "divine idiot" but an artist whose work was informed by the ideas and discoveries of his time. Examining the dramatic emergence of a modern society in eighteenth-century Austria, Till reappraises the history and meaning of the Enlightenment and Mozart's role within it. Book jacket.

Mozart's Music of Friends

Mozart's Music of Friends
Title Mozart's Music of Friends PDF eBook
Author Edward Klorman
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Pages 359
Release 2016-04-21
Genre Art
ISBN 1107093651

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This study analyzes chamber music from Mozart's time within its highly social salon-performance context.

Mozart's Grace

Mozart's Grace
Title Mozart's Grace PDF eBook
Author Scott G. Burnham
Publisher Princeton University Press
Pages 205
Release 2013
Genre Music
ISBN 0691009104

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Concentrating on music's effects, this book focuses on the most important elements of Mozart's music. Moving beyond conventional analysis and using the figurative powers of language with skill and imagination, this book engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings.