One of contemporary opera’s most brilliant and prolific composers, the inestimable Ricky Ian Gordon, has not only laid bare his soul, but also richly chronicled the peaks and valleys of…
Category: Books
Book review: Georges Bizet’s Carmen
Nelly Furman acknowledges that “given the popularity of Carmen, any discourse on it–whether a remake of the story or a critical exercise like the one in this book–partakes of the…
Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart
In Musical Exoticism (Cambridge 2011) Ralph P. Locke undertook an
extensive appraisal of the portrayal of the ‘Other’ in works dating
from 1700 to the present day, an enquiry that embraced a wide range of genres
from Baroque opera to Algerian rap, and which was at once musical, cultural,
historical, political and ethical.
Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience
Is it okay to tweet during a concert, if it allows those who couldn’t attend to engage with the performance and the music? Or is it really just distracting, on top of all the coughing?
How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature is an international database for
musicological and ethnomusicological research, providing abstracts and indexing
for users all over the world. As such, RILM’s style guide (How to Write
About Music: The RILM Manual of Style) differs fairly significantly from
those of more generalized style guides such as MLA or APA.
Book Review: Opera in the British Isles, 1875 – 1918
Opera in the British Isles might seem a rather sparse subject in the period 1875 to 1918. Notoriously described as the land without music, even the revival of the native tradition of composers did not include a strong vein of opera.
Diary of a Redneck Opera Zinger
Heldentenor Jay Hunter Morris tells us about the lean times when the phone did not ring, as well as those thrilling moments when companies entrusted him with the most important roles in opera.
Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform
Commonly viewed as a ‘second-rate’ composer — a European radical persecuted by the Nazis whose trans-Atlantic emigration represented a sell-out to an inferior American popular culture —
Opera from Cambridge University Press
Although part of a series entitled Cambridge Introductions to Music, Robert Cannon’s wide-ranging, imaginative and thought-provoking survey of opera is certainly not a ‘beginners’ guide’.