The Musical Topic discusses three tropes prominently featured in Western European music: the hunt, the military, and the pastoral. Raymond Monelle provides an in-depth cultural and historical study of musical topics -- short melodic figures, harmonic or rhythmic formulae carrying literal or lexical meaning -- through consideration of their origin, thematization, manifestation, and meaning. The Musical Topic shows the connections of musical meaning to literature, social history, and the fine arts.

This alphabetical reference covers the entire spectrum of the recording of sound, from Edison's experimental cylinders to contemporary high technology. The major focus is on the recorded sound industry in the US, with additional material on Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. The coverage is particularly strong on the earliest periods of recorded sound history--1877-1948, the 78 rpm era and 1949-1982, the LP era. In addition to performers and their work, entries also cover important commercial organizations, individuals who made significant technical contributions, societies and associations, sound archives and libraries, magazines, catalogs, award winners, technical topics, special and foreign terms, copyright laws, and other areas of interest. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Excerpt from Famous Composers and Their Works In 1877 Raff left Wiesbaden to become director of the new Conservatory of Music at Frankfort. He taught composition himself, arranged the library, and conducted the institution upon such a broad-minded plan that its success was assured from the beginning. He continued his labors in com position his symphonies after the seventh, having been written at Frankfort together with other important works. Ignorant of the fact that a mortal disease had fastened upon him he worked with undiminished zeal till 1882, when on the night of June 24, heart disease ended his career. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This Companion provides an up-to-date view of the music of Franz Liszt, its contemporary context and performance practice, written by some of the leading specialists in the field of nineteenth-century music studies. Although a core of Liszt's piano music has always maintained a firm hold on the repertoire, his output was so vast, influential and multi-faceted that scholarship too has taken some time to assimilate his achievement. This book offers students and music lovers some of the latest views in an accessible form. Katharine Ellis, Alexander Rehding and James Deaville present the biographical and intellectual aspects of Liszt's legacy, Kenneth Hamilton, James Baker and Anna Celenza give a detailed account of Liszt's piano music - including approaches to performance - Monika Hennemann discusses Liszt's Lieder, and Reeves Shulstad and Dolores Pesce survey his orchestral and choral music.