Best Stravinsky Books
Here you will get Best Stravinsky Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. First Nights: Five Musical Premiers
Author: by Thomas Forrest Kelly
Published at: Yale University Press; New edition (September 1, 2001)
ISBN: 978-0300091052
This lively book takes us back to the first performances of five famous musical compositions: Monteverdi’s Orfeo in 1607, Handel’s Messiah in 1742, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1824, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in 1830, and Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps in 1913. Thomas Forrest Kelly sets the scene for each of these premieres, describing the cities in which they took place, the concert halls, audiences, conductors, and musicians, the sound of the music when it was first performed (often with instruments now extinct), and the popular and critical responses.
He explores how performance styles and conditions have changed over the centuries and what music can reveal about the societies that produce it. Kelly tells us, for example, that Handel recruited musicians he didn’t know to perform Messiah in a newly built hall in Dublin; that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was performed with a mixture of professional and amateur musicians after only three rehearsals; and that Berlioz was still buying strings for the violas and mutes for the violins on the day his symphony was first played.
2. The Rite of Spring in Full Score (Dover Music Scores) by Igor Stravinsky (1989-01-01)
Author: by Igor Stravinsky
Published at: Dover Publications; unknown edition (January 1, 1989)
ISBN: 978-0486258577
The full score of Stravinsky’s famous and controversial ballet The Rite of Spring. Quality Dover score.
3. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
Author: by Igor Stravinsky
Published at: Harvard University Press; Revised ed. edition (February 26, 1970)
ISBN: 978-0674678569
One of the greatest of contemporary composers has here set down in delightfully personal fashion his general ideas about music and some accounts of his own experience as a composer. Every concert-goer and lover of music will take keen pleasure in his notes about the essential features of music, the process of musical composition, inspiration, musical types, and musical execution.
Throughout the volume are to he found trenchant comments on such subjects as Wagnerism, the operas of Verdi, musical taste, musical snobbery, the influence of political ideas on Russian music under the Soviets, musical improvisation as opposed to musical construction, the nature of melody, and the function of the critic of music.
Musical people of every sort will welcome this first presentation in English of an unusually interesting book.
4. The Firebird in Full Score (Original 1910 Version) (Dover Music Scores)
Author: by Igor Stravinsky
Published at: Dover Publications; Reprint edition (January 1, 1988)
ISBN: 978-0486255354
In 1910, following his successful orchestration of selections for the ballet Les Sylphides, the innovative young composer Igor Stravinsky was commissioned by the director of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev, to create a completely new score. The dazzling result was The Firebird, a work which brought overnight success to its creator and distinguished him as the most gifted of the younger generation of Russian composers.
Based on Russian fairy tales, the piece, according to Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, has “all the coloring of a Russian child’s picture bookbrilliant orchestration, glowing coloran extraordinary evocative power which literally enchants the listener.”Today, The Firebird is as popular and enthusiastically received as it was following its triumphant premiere in Paris more than a century ago.
Greatly admired for its orchestrations and harmony, the composition is widely studied by practicing musicians and music students. Now the complete score of this modern masterpiece is available in this handsome, authoritative, and inexpensive edition, which includes a list of instruments and English translations of the stage directions.
5. Poulenc: A Biography
Author: by Roger Nichols
Published at: Yale University Press (June 9, 2020)
ISBN: 978-0300226508
An authoritative account of the life and work of Francis Poulenc, one of the most prolific and striking figures in twentieth-century classical music”An assured overview of Poulenc’s life and work.”Alex Ross, New YorkerEssential reading for anyone interested in the French musical culture of Poulenc’s time.
This is the biography the composer deserves. Christopher Dingle, BBC Music Magazine, Named one of the Best Books on Classical Music in 2020 by BBC Music Magazine Francis Poulenc is a key figure in twentieth-century classical music, as well as an unorthodox and striking individual.
Roger Nichols draws upon Poulenc’s music and other primary sources to write an authoritative life of this great artist. Although associated with five other French composers in what came to be called Les Six, Poulenc was very much sui generis in personality and in his music, where he excelled over a wide repertoireopera, songs, ballet scores, chamber works, piano pieces, sacred and secular choral works, orchestral works and concertos.
6. Petrushka in Full Score: Original Version (Dover Music Scores)
Author: by Igor Stravinsky
Published at: Dover Publications; Dover Music Scores edition (July 1, 1988)
ISBN: 978-0486256801
Stravinsky’s score for the ballet Petrushka, commissioned by Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, was first performed in Paris in 1911 and was an immediate sensation with the public and the critics. It followed by a year the great success of his score for The Firebird, also produced by the Ballets Russes, and it confirmed Stravinsky’s reputation as the most gifted of the younger generation of Russian composers.
The ballet had begun in Stravinsky’s mind as a “picture of a puppet suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios.” Soon Diaghilev had convinced the young composer to turn the work into a ballet score.
Benois was chosen to be his collaborator in the libretto, Fokine and Nijinsky became involved, and the bizarre tale of three dancing puppets Petrushka (a folk character in Russian lore), the Ballerina, and the Moor, brought to life in a tragic tale of love would soon become one of the most acclaimed and performed of ballet masterpieces.
7. Histoire Du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale): Authorized Edition (POCHE) (English, French and German Edition)
Author: by Igor Stravinsky
Published at: MUSIC SALES AMERICA; Bilingual edition (January 1, 1992)
ISBN: 978-0711938410
(Music Sales America). In this authoritative new edition of Stravinsky’s dramatic masterpiece, Histoire du Soldat , the publishers have sought to rationalise all the various, and sometimes conflicting, amendments made by the composer during his life time. This edition is for all who have an interest in the great musical masterpieces of the twentieth century.
To be read, played and danced in two parts. Scored for clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, violin, double bass and percussion.
8. Conversations with Igor Stravinsky
Author: by Robert Craft
Published at: Faber and Faber; Main edition (June 25, 2011)
ISBN:
978-0571255771
Conversations with Igor Stravinsky is the first of the celebrated series of conversation books in which Stravinsky, prompted by Robert Craft, reviewed his long and remarkable life. The composer brings the Imperial Russia of his childhood vividly into focus, at the same time scanning what were at the time the brave new horizons of Boulez and Stockhausen with extraordinary acuity.
Stravinsky answers searching questions about his musical development and recalls his association with Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet. There are sympathetic and extraordinarily illuminating reminiscences of such composers as Debussy and Ravel (‘the only musicians who immediately understood Le Sacre du Printemps’), while mischievous squibs are directed at others, most notably perhaps against Richard Strauss, all of whose operas Stravinsky wished ‘to admit …
To whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality’. The conversations are by no means confined to musical subjects, ranging uninhibitedly across all the arts: Stravinsky gives unforgettable sketches of Ibsen, Rodin, Proust, Giacometti, Dylan Thomas and T S Eliot. ‘The conversations between Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft are unique in musical history.
9. Artful Noise: Percussion Literature in the Twentieth Century (Music in American Life)
Author: by Thomas Siwe
Published at: University of Illinois Press; Illustrated edition (July 27, 2020)
ISBN: 978-0252085000
Twentieth-century composers created thousands of original works for solo percussion and percussion ensemble. Concise and ideal for the classroom, Artful Noise offers an essential and much-needed survey of this unique literature. Percussionist Thomas Siwe organizes and analyzes the groundbreaking musical literature that arose during the twentieth century.
Focusing on innovations in style and the evolution of the percussion ensemble, Siwe offers a historical overview that connects the music to scoring techniques, new instrumentation and evolving technologies as well as world events. Discussions of representative pieces by seminal composers examines the resources a work requires, its construction, and how it relates to other styles that developed during the same period.
In addition, Siwe details the form and purpose of many of the compositions while providing background information on noteworthy artists. Each chapter is supported with musical examples and concludes with a short list of related works specifically designed to steer musicians and instructors alike toward profitable explorations of composers, styles, and eras.
10. Three Early Ballets (The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring): Schirmer Library of Classics Volume 1978 Piano Solo (Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics)
Author: by Igor Stravinsky
Published at: G. Schirmer, Inc. (May 1, 1995)
ISBN: 978-0793544257
(Piano Collection).This edition brings together for the first time the three early ballets of Igor Stravinsky in versions for solo piano. Intended as both virtuoso performance pieces as well as study aids for musicians, they have been carefully proofread against the orchestral scores to insure that they agree in detail.
Pretrushka contains all of the music in the original 1911 version, The Firebird is a transcription of the full-length 1910 ballet and The Rite of Spring is presented in a revised form of the well-known Leyetchkiss transcription.
11. The Rite of Spring (Dover Miniature Music Scores)
Author: by Igor Stravinsky
Published at: Dover Publications (July 28, 2000)
ISBN: 978-0486411743
With this brilliant and uncompromising work perhaps the most famous musical work of the twentieth century Stravinsky changed the course of modern music forever. Discarding conventional harmonies for bizarrely dissonant chords, and uniform metrics for harshly jarring beat patterns, he created a sensational theater piece that, at the work’s 1931 premier, caused the music world’s most talked-about riot.”Every law of musical syntax, every canon of harmony seems to have been violated, every limit of rhythmic perversity and eccentricity of orchestration exceeded in this tumultuous cataclysm of sound,” says Grove’s; “yet with all its deliberate crudity and violence the ‘Rite’ is a clearly planned and perfectly controlled and coordinated piece of music [that] has long been accepted universally as a masterpiece and is in the repertory of every large symphony orchestra.”Reproduced here from an authoritative edition, the score is ideal for study in the classroom, at home, or in the concert hall.
13. Camb Companion to Stravinsky (Cambridge Companions to Music)
Author: by Jonathan Cross
Published at: Cambridge University Press; Revised ed. edition (August 18, 2003)
ISBN: 978-0521663779
Stravinsky’s work spanned the major part of the twentieth-century and was engaged with nearly all its principal compositional developments. Reflecting the breadth of his phenomenal achievement, this Companion contains a wide range of essays in three broad sections covering the contexts within which Stravinsky worked-Russian, modernist and compositional, with his key compositions-Russian, neoclassical and serial, and with the reception of his ideas-through performance, analysis and criticism.
The volume concludes with an interview with the composer Louis Andriessen and a major re-evaluation of “Stravinsky and us” by Richard Taruskin.
14. The Stravinsky Violin Collection: 9 Pieces for Violin and Piano
Author: by Igor Stravinsky
Published at: Boosey & Hawkes; Pck edition (October 1, 2007)
ISBN: 978-1423452874
(Boosey & Hawkes Chamber Music). Available for the first time in one volume, this collection includes the opera and ballet arrangements made with violinist Samuel Dushkin, a piece for unaccompanied violin, and Stravinsky’s one original work for violin and piano, Duo concertante.
Contents: Ballad * Chanson russe * Danse russe * Divertimento * Duo concertante * Elegie * Suite after themes, fragments and pieces by Giambattista Pergolesi * Suite italienne * Variation d’Apollon.
