Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
302
result(s) for
"Budiansky, Stephen"
Sort by:
Mad Music
Mad Music is the story of Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954), the innovative American composer who achieved international recognition, but only after he'd stopped making music. While many of his best works received little attention in his lifetime, Ives is now appreciated as perhaps the most important American composer of the twentieth century and father of the diverse lines of Aaron Copland and John Cage. Ives was also a famously wealthy crank who made millions in the insurance business and tried hard to establish a reputation as a crusty New Englander. To Stephen Budiansky, Ives's life story is a personification of America emerging as a world power: confident and successful, yet unsure of the role of art and culture in a modernizing nation. Though Ives steadfastly remained an outsider in many ways, his life and times inform us of subjects beyond music, including the mystic movement, progressive anticapitalism, and the initial hesitancy of turn-of-the-century-America modernist intellectuals. Deeply researched and elegantly written, this accessible biography tells a uniquely American story of a hidden genius, disparaged as a dilettante, who would shape the history of music in a profound way. Making use of newly published letters-and previously undiscovered archival sources bearing on the longstanding mystery of Ives's health and creative decline-this absorbing volume provides a definitive look at the life and times of a true American original.
eBook
Blackett's war : the men who defeated the Nazi U-boats and brought science to the art of warfare
In March 1941, after a year of devastating U-boat attacks, the British War Cabinet called upon an intensely private, bohemian physicist named Patrick Blackett to turn the tide of the naval campaign. Though he is little remembered today, Blackett did as much as anyone to defeat Nazi Germany, by revolutionizing the Allied anti-submarine effort through the disciplined, systematic implementation of simple mathematics and probability theory. This is the story of how British and American civilian intellectuals helped change the nature of twentieth-century warfare, by convincing disbelieving military brass to trust the new field of operational research. -- Back cover.
Book
Ives, Diabetes, and His \Exhausted Vein\ of Composition
The rapid decline of Charles Ives's compositional output after 1918 has long been the subject of much mystery-and even more speculation. Following a decade and a half of phenomenal creative productivity, during which time he produced nearly all of his most important works including The Unanswered Question, the Concord Sonata and First Piano Sonata, the Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies, Three Places in New England, the New England Holidays Symphony, two string quartets, and dozens of other compositions--while simultaneously building one of the most successful life insurance agencies in the US--Ives, at age 44, seemed to have \"exhausted the vein\" of his creative resources as his wife, Harmony, described it some years later. From that point on he began only a small number of new compositions; the last was in 1926, and it was shortly after that, as Harmony related to John Kirkpatrick, that Ives \"came downstairs one day and with tears in his eyes said that he couldn't seem to compose any more--nothing would go well, nothing sounded right.\" Here, Budiansky examines the nature and extent of Ives's health problems during and after his period of active composition have posed a vexing series of questions for biographers and students of his music.
Journal Article
Creatures of Our Own Making
After millions of years of coexistence, the lives of humans and mosquitoes have become intricately intertwined. The mosquito's ability to exploit almost any type of water--natural ponds and marshes or human creations such as irrigation ditches and used tires--is testimony to its evolutionary ingenuity
Journal Article
