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Robert Philip, scholar, broadcaster, and musician, has compiled an essential handbook for lovers of classical music, designed to enhance their listening experience to the full. Covering four hundred works by sixty-eight composers from Corelli to Shostakovich, from 1700 to 1950, this engaging companion explores and unpacks the most frequently performed works, including symphonies, concertos, overtures, suites, and ballet scores. It offers intriguing details about each piece while avoiding technical terminology that might frustrate the non-specialist reader. Philip identifies key features in each work, as well as subtleties and surprises that await the attentive listener, and he includes enough background and biographical information to illuminate the composer's intentions. Organized alphabetically from Bach to Webern, this compendium will be indispensable for classical music enthusiasts, whether in the concert hall or enjoying recordings at home.

An invaluable guide for lovers of classical music designed to enhance their enjoyment of the core orchestral repertoire from 1700 to 1950Robert Philip, scholar, broadcaster, and musician, has compiled an essential handbook for lovers of classical music, designed to enhance their listening experience to the full. Covering four hundred works by sixty-eight composers from Corelli to Shostakovich, this engaging companion explores and unpacks the most frequently performed works, including symphonies, concertos, overtures, suites, and ballet scores. It offers intriguing details about each piece while avoiding technical terminology that might frustrate the non-specialist reader.Philip identifies key features in each work, as well as subtleties and surprises that await the attentive listener, and he includes enough background and biographical information to illuminate the composer's intentions. Organized alphabetically from Bach to Webern, this compendium will be indispensable for classical music enthusiasts, whether in the concert hall or enjoying recordings at home.

In this second edition of Orchestral \"Pops\" Music: A Handbook, Lucy Manning brings forward to the present her remarkable compendium of information about this form of orchestral music. Since the appearance of the first edition in 2008, this work has proven critical to successful \"pops\" concert programming. With changes in publishers and agents, the discontinuation of the publication of certain original material or, worst of all, presses going out of business, music directors, orchestra conductors, and professional instrumentalists face formidable challenges in tracking down accurate information about this vast repertoire. This revised handbook alleviates the time-consuming task of researching these changes by offering a list of works for orchestral \"pops\" concerts that is comprehensive, informative, and current. Manning's emphasis on clarity and accuracy gives users an indispensable tool for gathering vital information on the style, instrumentation, and availability of the repertoire listed, as well as notes on its performance. The user-friendly appendices include expanded instrumentation choices, easy-to-find durations, and handy title cross-references. In addition to corrections and updates, this new edition of Orchestral \"Pops\" Music includes at least 1,000 new title listings. Orchestral \"Pops\" Music: A Handbook is the ideal tool for working conductors and orchestral librarians, as well as music program directors at colleges, conservatories, and orchestras.

\"Berlioz frequently explored other worlds in his writings, from the imagined exotic enchantments of New Zealand to the rings of Saturn where Beethoven's spirit was said to reside. The settings for his musical works are more conservative, and his adventurousness has instead been located in his mastery of the orchestra, as both orchestrator and conductor. Inge van Rij's book takes a new approach to Berlioz's treatment of the orchestra by exploring the relationship between these two forms of control - the orchestra as abstract sound, and the orchestra as collective labour and instrumental technology. Van Rij reveals that the negotiation between worlds characteristic of Berlioz's writings also plays out in his music: orchestral technology may be concealed or ostentatiously displayed; musical instruments might be industrialised or exoticised; and the orchestral musicians themselves move between being a society of distinctive individuals and being a machine played by Berlioz himself\"-- Provided by publisher.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is the most-recorded orchestra in the United States, and its recordings have contributed much to its reputation as \"The World's Greatest Orchestra.\" In The Philadelphia Orchestra: An Annotated Discography, Richard A.

World-wide in scope and focusing on the second half of the 20th century, this work provides biographies and discographies of some 500 composers and conductors of light and popular orchestral music, including film, show, theatre and mood music. The book is arranged in two sequences: 1) Biographies and select discographies, both arranged alphabetically, of the well-known and better-known conductors and composers. These entries also include a list of suggested reading for those wishing to further their studies; and 2) Select discographies of conductors about whom little or no biographical information is available. The bibliography at the end of the book covers discographical sources, popular music and film music. This is the first time that the lives and recordings of such artists as Kostelanetz, Faith, and Gould as well as the orchestral recordings of such great popular composers as Gershwin, Kern, Porter, Rodgers, Berlin and Coward have been documented and presented in an encyclopedic form.

‘Simon Emmerson’s book provides an important new perspective on key aspects of the electroacoustic medium which hitherto have not received the attention they deserve. The product of meticulous and probing research, this critical account is both insightful and thought-provoking, not least in terms of the deeply informed discussion of key works within this rich and ever-growing legacy and the often overlooked issues of performance practice associated with their dissemination. It fills an important gap in the literature, successfully communicating both to the more specialist reader and also those new to this distinctive and significant medium of creativity’ – Professor Peter Manning, Head of Department and Director of CETL, Department of Music, Durham University ‘Simon Emmerson’s new book is a superb exploration of how we perceive and understand today’s technology-based music. He draws a historical line pointing out that music has evolved from the obvious efforts of people playing mechanical instruments to music that seems to happen without human effort. He then explores the ways in which we understand this new musical universe, populated by sounds that are produced by technology and seem to simply happen with no apparent cause. He discusses the relationships of these sounds to the real world, our perception of the new musical space in which these sounds exist; and our understandings of this new music through real-life ‘models’. Illuminating and insightful, this book is clearly the result of years of creativity and reflection and it will lead a reader to new depths of understanding of the musical revolution that is happening around us.’ – Joel Chadabe, President, Electronic Music Foundation and Professor Emeritus, State University of New York at Albany Drawing on recent ideas that explore new environments and the changing situations of composition and performance, Simon Emmerson provides a significant contribution to the study of contemporary music, bridging history, aesthetics and the ideas behind evolving performance practices. Whether created in a studio or performed on stage, how does electronic music reflect what is live and living? What is it to perform ‘live’ in the age of the laptop? Many performer-composers draw upon a library’ of materials, some created beforehand in a studio, some coded ‘on the fly’, others ‘plundered’ from the widest possible range of sources. But others refuse to abandon traditionally ‘created and structured’ electroacoustic work. Lying behind this maelstrom of activity is the perennial relationship to ‘theory’, that is, ideas, principles and practices that somehow lie behind composers’ and performers’ actions. Some composers claim they just ‘respond’ to sound and compose ‘with their ears’, while others use models and analogies of previously ‘non-musical’ processes. It is evident that in such new musical practices the human body has a new relationship to the sound. There is a historical dimension to this, for since the earliest electroacoustic experiments in 1948 the body has been celebrated or sublimated in a strange ‘dance’ of forces in which it has never quite gone away but rarely been overtly present. The relationship of the body performing to the spaces around has also undergone a revolution as the source of sound production has shifted to the loudspeaker. Emmerson considers these issues in the framework of our increasingly ‘acousmatic’ world in which we cannot see the source of the sounds we hear.