“This is a short book but a teeming one, boiling over with the insights that have accrued over forty years and more, ever since Pieter van den Toorn set the musicological world on its ear with his revelations about Stravinsky's creative methods, deduced from an unprecedentedly close and fruitful examination of the published scores. Since then he has been at the manuscripts as well, and has made even further-reaching observations about Stravinsky's epochal rhythmic innovations. All of this he now places at the disposal of musicians and general readers, laid out with a chronology of the composer's life and times—a great gift to us all and a fitting crown to a most distinguished scholarly career.” —Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) divided his time between law studies and music until 1906, when, under the tutelage of composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, he dedicated himself exclusively to composition. Five years later, he achieved international fame with his ballet scores The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, the last of which caused a riot at its Paris premiere in 1913. For the next 50 years, both Stravinsky’s music style and his life were characterized by dramatic changes, as he moved from his “Russian period” to neo-classicism to serialism, and from Russia to Switzerland to France to the United States. Yet no matter how much his style changed, his music was always distinctively his, and his compositions remain among the greatest produced in the twentieth century. In Simply Stravinsky, Professor Pieter van den Toorn takes a fresh look at the composer and his legacy, providing a compact, exciting, and accessible introduction to the twentieth century’s most celebrated composer and his timeless music. From Stravinsky’s apprenticeship in St. Petersburg to his life among the émigré community in Southern California, Prof. van den Toorn shows how the composer’s music was tied to his personality and how it came to influence artists from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass. Designed for classical music beginners, as well as those who want to know more about one of the great musical innovators, Simply Stravinsky is an insightful and highly readable portrait of the man who helped define modern music.

Composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, Russian comrades, worked together to bring a very different and new ballet to a Parisian audienceN"The Rite of Spring"Nand rioting filled the streets! Full color.

“Simply Proust pulls off with ease the arduous task of making Marcel Proust’s masterwork accessible, without sacrificing none of the complexity that makes it one of the most important novels of the 20th Century. To do this, Jack Jordan vividly paints vast the cultural, scientific, and philosophical background that fed In Search of Lost Time. Armed with this knowledge, both new and repeat readers are bound to gain fresh insights into the brilliance of Proust’s novel.” —Hervé G. Picherit, Associate Professor of French, University of Texas at Austin Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was born in Paris during a time of great social and political upheaval, a ferment that is dealt with extensively in his monumental work In Search of Lost Time. He was a sickly child and spent the earlier part of his short life pursuing a variety of sometimes frivolous activities, which led to his not being taken seriously as a writer. It was not until 1909, when he was 38 years old, that he began work on the groundbreaking novel for which he is known, a task that consumed the rest of his life. In Simply Proust, Professor Jack Louis Jordan presents an incisive, yet thoroughly accessible, introduction to Proust’s landmark work, helping the reader to fully appreciate the scope of the author’s achievement, as well as the fascinating process that underlay its creation. Emphasizing the fundamental role of psychology and the unconscious, Jordan shows how Proust’s methodology and our understanding of his novel are connected, and how this makes for a unique and endlessly revealing literary experience. At once philosophical, psychological, and deeply human, Simply Proust offers an invaluable entry point into a masterpiece of world literature and takes the measure of the flawed and brilliant man who transformed the material of his life into a transcendent work of art.

Packed with rich and fascinating detail, the third volume of the magisterial biography of Igor Stravinsky casts a brilliant new light on the greatest composer of the twentieth century. • “Among the best musical biographies of the last half-century, patiently disentangling fact and myth.” ―Minneapolis Star Tribune This volume begins in 1934, when Stravinsky is fifty-two and living in France. Already regarded by many as the most important composer of his generation, Stravinsky is nevertheless at this point a fairly unhappy expatriate, all too aware of the war clouds beginning to gather. Though he still maintains a family life with his wife and children, much of his time is spent with his mistress, Vera Sudeykina, while traveling around Europe giving concerts in order to earn the money to support his dependents–which include a number of relatives. Composing, of course, remains the center of his existence. But changes are imminent: within only a few years his wife, Katya, will be dead, his family scattered, and Stravinsky himself, together with Vera, starting over again in America. Stravinsky: The Second Exile follows the composer through the remainder of his long life, years during which he produces such masterworks as The Rake’s Progress and Symphony in C, and achieves a new level of fame as a conductor and raconteur in his own right. With a dazzling command of sources in several languages and a keen feeling for accuracy in situations where truth and falsehood have become blurred, Walsh traces and illuminates Stravinsky’s increasingly complex and often agonized family relationships along with his crucially important connection with his associate Robert Craft. Walsh is also, as a musicologist and critic, able to speak with knowledge and wit about Stravinsky’s work, expertly describing and assessing the composer’s musical journey from the neoclassicism of his late French and early American periods, through his early essays in serial technique, and on finally to the astonishing intricacies of his final compositions. The first volume of this biography, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, was received with glowing praise for its insight, narrative skills, and readability. The period covered here, beset as it is with myths and misconceptions, is handled with even greater authority.

In 1929 Nadia Boulanger accepted Igor Stravinsky's younger son, Soulima, as her student. Within two years, Stravinsky and Boulanger merged their artistic spheres, each influencing and enhancing the cultural work of the other until the composer's death in 1971. Teaching Stravinsky tells Boulanger's story of the ever-changing nature of her fractious relationship with Stravinksy. Author Kimberly A. Francis explores how Boulanger's own professional activity during the turbulent twentieth-century intersected with her efforts on behalf of Stravinsky, and how this facilitated her own influential conversations with the composer about his works while also drawing her into close contact with his family. Through the theoretical lens of Bourdieu, and drawing upon over one thousand pages of letters and scores, many published here for the first time, Francis examines the extent to which Boulanger played a foundational role in defining, defending, and ultimately consecrating Stravinsky's canonical identity. She considers how the quotidian events in the lives of these two icons of modernism informed both their art and their professional decisions, and convincingly argues for a reevaluation of the influence of women on cultural production during the twentieth century. At once a story of one woman's vibrant friendship with an iconic modernist composer, and a case study in how gendered polemics informed professional negotiations of the artistic-political fields of the twentieth-century, Teaching Stravinsky sheds new light not only on how Boulanger taught Stravinsky, but also how, in doing so, she managed to influence the course of modernism itself.

A rare look at the life and music of renowned Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov During his lifetime, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) was a composer whose work had great influence not only in his native Russia but also internationally. While he remains well-known in Russia—where many of his fifteen operas and various orchestral pieces are still in the standard repertoire—very little of his work is performed in the West today beyond Scheherezade and arrangements of The Flight of the Bumblebee. In Western writings, he appears mainly in the context of the Mighty Handful, a group of five Russian composers to which he belonged at the outset of his career. Rimsky-Korsakov and His World finally gives the composer center stage and due attention. In this collection, Rimsky-Korsakov’s major operas, The Snow Maiden, Mozart and Salieri, and The Golden Cockerel, receive multifaceted exploration and are carefully contextualized within the wider Russian culture of the era. The discussion of these operas is accompanied and enriched by the composer’s letters to Nadezhda Zabela, the distinguished soprano for whom he wrote several leading roles. Other essays look at more general aspects of Rimsky-Korsakov’s work and examine his far-reaching legacy as a professor of composition and orchestration, including his impact on his most famous pupil Igor Stravinsky. The contributors are Lidia Ader, Leon Botstein, Emily Frey, Marina Frolova-Walker, Adalyat Issiyeva, Simon Morrison, Anna Nisnevich, Olga Panteleeva, and Yaroslav Timofeev. The Bard Music Festival Bard Music Festival 2018 Rimsky-Korsakov and His World Bard College August 10–12 and August 17–19, 2018

Studie over het werk van de Russische componist (1882-1971).

The first book to be devoted to the music of Stravinsky's last compositional period.

Context and composition -- Concerto as catalyst -- Analytical tools and recurring elements -- Counterpoint and tonality in the first movement -- Tetrachords and tritones in the largo -- Points of imitation in the finale

Popularly known during his lifetime as “The World’s Greatest Living Composer,” Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) not only wrote some of the twentieth century’s most influential music, he also assumed the role of cultural icon. This book reveals Stravinsky’s two sides—the public persona, preoccupied with his own image and place in history, and the private composer, whose views and beliefs were often purposely suppressed. Charles M. Joseph draws a richer and more human portrait of Stravinsky than anyone has done before, using an array of unpublished materials and unreleased film trims from the composer’s huge archive at the Paul Sacher Institute in Switzerland. Focusing on Stravinsky’s place in the culture of the twentieth century, Joseph situates the composer among the giants of his age. He discusses Stravinsky’s first American commission, his complicated relationship with his son, his professional relationships with celebrities ranging from T. S. Eliot to Orson Welles, his flirtations with Hollywood and television, and his love-hate attitude toward the critics and the media. In a close look at Stravinsky’s efforts to mold a public image, Joseph explores the complex dance between the composer and his artistic collaborator, Robert Craft, who orchestrated controversial efforts to protect Stravinsky and edit materials about him, both during the composer’s lifetime and after his death.