Like Melies's film The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza gives us a hero, Desmond, who finds himself caught between two worlds, the night before and the morning after, the past and the present, the world that is and the world that was.

Set in a future world where the Earth has been remade into a paradise and humanity has been joined under a single, popularly-elected world government, this 1984 Prometheus Award-winning novel tells the story of Joan Darris, a brilliant young artist in the medium of laser concerts. Like the novels of Huxley, Burgess, and Rand, "The Rainbow Cadenza" uses black humor to reveal a fearsome future that ends with a ray of hope.

This book examines the concepts behind a philosophical project on postmodernism: the social and cultural condition of our time, the age of the achieved capitalism. It proposes an original theory of postmodern humanism based on the absence of form and describes the development of philosophical thought as a musical “cadenza” that produces meaning in the empty space between the past of the modern and the future of the postmodern. The book focuses on three main postmodernist themes: the denial of identity and the assertion of the differences, the shattered subject, and the absence of teleology in history and politics.

Many modern performers of Classical woodwind music use cadenzas that have a harmonic vocabulary, length, range and expression more suitable for late Romantic than Classical music. The Romantic period directly followed the Classical one, and its performer-composers wrote cadenzas in the style of their own music for use in their performances of earlier music. Hummel's cadenzas for Mozart's piano concertos are prime examples. In the same spirit, the modern performer separated in time from both Classical and Romantic performance practices would compose cadenzas in a style familiar to him, such as avant-garde or rock! The particular goal of this workbook is to show modern woodwind players how to compose effective cadenzas in the Classical style for the Classical concertos they perform -- the concertos by Mozart and his contemporaries. - Preface.

History’s greatest tenor hunts a killer at the Metropolitan Opera in this “hilarious” and “thoroughly delightful” mystery from a Shamus Award nominee (Publishers Weekly). Giacomo Puccini has always been a flirt. When he isn’t writing the most popular operas the world has ever known, he has an eye for the ladies, and he doesn’t care if his wife, Elvira, knows it. But after the composer participates in a harmless bit of chitchat with a servant girl, Elvira explodes with jealousy, driving the girl from the house and spreading lies so terrible that the innocent young woman takes her own life. Puccini is left shattered, driven nearly to suicide, and only Enrico Caruso can save him. The legendary tenor lures Puccini to New York to premiere his new opera on the Metropolitan stage. At first, all goes well. But when a member of the Metropolitan family is found murdered, all signs point to Puccini as the killer. To avert a real-life tragedy, the great Caruso takes on the most challenging role of his career: detective. A Cadenza for Caruso is the 1st book in the Opera Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Fiction. This brilliant first novel is a portrait of an artist at the end of an art form. The elderly Jewish-Hungarian composer Schneidermann, who survived a musical education, survived the war, survived Europe, survived the neglect of all his music, finally and suddenly vanishes during a movie matinee on the Upper West Side of New York. The novel begins with Schneidermann's friend--his last friend, his only friend--the violin virtuoso Laster, onstage at Carnegie Hall. He has finished playing the first movement of Schneidermann's last composition, his Violin Concerto. At this point he is supposed tobegin his cadenza...his solo. Instead, he drops his instrument and lifts his voice, delivering the text of this novel unto the audience, held captive through night into morning only by the spiel.

Many of Mozart's own cadenzas are preserved, but many more that he improvised in performance were never written down. In that spirit, famed pianist Lili Kraus sensed an obligation and a challenge to follow the tradition of using her own cadenzas where no original was available. This collection, then contains Mozart's original cadenzas as well as editorial versions by Ms. Kraus for Concertos 1-27.

Performance practice is the study of how music was performed over the centuries, both by its originators (the composers and performers who introduced the works) and, later, by revivalists. This first of its kind Dictionary offers entries on composers, musiciansperformers, technical terms, performance centers, musical instruments, and genres, all aimed at elucidating issues in performance practice. This A-Z guide will help students, scholars, and listeners understand how musical works were originally performed and subsequently changed over the centuries. Compiled by a leading scholar in the field, this work will serve as both a point-of-entry for beginners as well as a roadmap for advanced scholarship in the field.

Postmodernity's Musical Pasts considers music after 1945 as a representation of concepts such as "historicity" and "temporality". The volume understands postmodernity as a period in which both modernism and postmodernism co-exist. It is attracted to a wider interpretation of "historicity" that focuses on the complex nexus of past-present-future. "Historicity" is understood as leaning closely on "temporality", generally thought of as the linear progression of past, present and future. The volume broadens the absolutist understanding of temporality to include processes which can occur in circular, spiral, transcending and other formations. The book covers an extensive spectrum of topics from classical to popular and neo-traditional musics to concerns of the disciplines of musicology. Such a wide range of topics from both the centre and the periphery of the musicological canon mirrors the eclectic and diverse nature of the postwar era itself. The first section investigates how to understand manifestations of the past in musical composition with regard to time, on the one hand, and with regard to genre, style and idiom, on the other. A second section shows how time and history manifest themselves in art music. A third section takes the contrasts and transitional moments of post-1945 practices further by looking at the temporality of reception from different angles. A final part investigates questions of nostalgia and temporalities of belonging. TINA FR HAUF is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University, New York and serves on the faculty of The Graduate Center, CUNY. CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Arnold, Susana Asensio Llamas, Georg Burgstaller, Caitlin Carlos, Daniela Fugellie, Tina Fr hauf, John Koslovsky, Lawrence Kramer, Beate Kutschke, Laurenz L tteken, Max Noubel, Joshua S. Walden