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For anyone who has been intimidated, overwhelmed, or just plain confused by what they think opera is, WHO'S AFRAID OF OPERA? offers a lively, readable guide to what author Michael Walsh describes as "the greatest art form yet invented by humankind." From opera's origins in Renaissance Italy to The Who's rock odyssey "Tommy" and Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods," Walsh explores what opera is and what it's not, what makes a great singer, and why it...
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In this fascinating analysis of how to listen to both contemporary and classical music analytically, eminent American composer Aaron Copland offers provocative suggestions that will bring listeners a deeper appreciation of the most viscerally rewarding of all art forms.
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A.S. Byatt's books shimmer with all the hues of her critically acclaimed talent and imagination. In The Matisse Stories, this Booker Prize-winning author offers three elegant tales that explore the subtle interplays between mind and eye, heart and hand. In the first, Medusa's Ankles, a fashionable woman watches her life take on darker, more ominous shades in the mirror of a beauty salon. In the next, Art Work, an eccentric housekeeper's alarming eye...
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For many of us, classical music is something serious-something we study in school, something played by cultivated musicians at fancy gatherings. In Language of the Spirit, renowned music scholar Jan Swafford argues that we have it all wrong: classical music has something for everyone and is accessible to all. Ranging from Gregorian chant to Handel's Messiah, from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons to the postmodern work of Philip Glass, Swafford is an affable...
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Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go. Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love -- with a place, or a painting, or a person -- and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss -- from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light...
6) The museum
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A young girl tours and twirls through museum galleries experiencing different emotions evoked by different styles of art, and then expresses her energy and inspiration when she finds an empty canvas.
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"Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical? In [this book], Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, marvels at their unflagging inventiveness, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he invites us to fall in love all over again by showing us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate...
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"Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve. Some still exist today; some are lost, like those of Herculaneum and Alexandria; some have been sold or dispersed; and some never existed, such as those libraries imagined by J.R.R Tolkien, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. Ancient libraries, grand baroque libraries,...
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Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. He has written more than 20 books of literary criticism. From a lifetime of writing and teaching about literature, this great scholar exhorts readers to consider the pleasures and benefits of reading well. Beginning with a basic question, "Why read?" Bloom offers his thoughts...
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"A Pulitzer Prize- winning critic reflects on the meaning and emotional impact of a Bach masterwork. As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began listening to the music of Bach obsessively, and spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer's greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with memories of...
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How does art work? How does it move us, inform us, challenge us? Internationally renowned painter David Salle's incisive essay collection illuminates the work of many of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Engaging with a wide range of Salle's friends and contemporaries-from painters to conceptual artists such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alex Katz, among others- 'How to See' explores not only the multilayered...
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A sublime comedy of contemporary manners, this is the novel Jane Austen might well have written had she lived in twenty-first- century California.
Nothing ever moves in a straight line in Karen Joy Fowler's fiction, and in her latest, the complex dance of modern love has never been so devious or so much fun. Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements...
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"Effortlessly blending biography, criticism, and memoir, National Book Award-winning poet and best- selling memoirist Mark Doty explores his personal quest for Walt Whitman. Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman's bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty-a poet, a lover of men, a New Yorker, and an American-keeps company with Whitman and his...
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1893 is a tough year in Montana, and any job is a good job. When Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer sign on as ranch hands at the secretive Bar-VR cattle spread, they're not expecting much more than hard work, bad pay, and a comfortable campfire around which they can enjoy their favorite pastime: scouring Harper's Weekly for stories about the famous Sherlock Holmes.When another ranch hand turns up in an outhouse with a bullet in his brain, Old Red sees...
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24 audio discs (approximately 1080 min.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in. + 3 course guidebooks (22 cm)
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Professor Greenberg combines perceptive analysis of extensive musical excerpts with historical anecdotes, metaphors, and humor to show what goes on inside a musical composition: how it came to be written, how it works, and how, as is often the case with Beethoven, it may break all former rules to achieve a completely new and powerful effect. This course is somewhat technical and although musical knowledge is helpful, it is not a necessity.
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When Martin Grace enters the hip Philadelphia coffee shop Cornelia Brown manages, her life changes forever. But little does she know that her newfound love is only the harbinger of greater changes to come. Meanwhile, across town, Clare Hobbs-eleven years old and abandoned by her erratic mother-goes looking for her lost father. She crosses paths with Cornelia while meeting with him at the cafe, and the two women form an improbable friendship that carries...
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In 1970s South Wales, Petra and Sharon live for David Cassidy and take the Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz thinking that David's letters are all his own work. Over two decades later, bruised by grief, Petra is living with her thirteen-year-old daughter and meets the reluctant pop journalist who compiled the quiz.
20) The rule of four
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Two Princeton University seniors are struggling to solve the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a cryptic text that has baffled scholars for 500 years. When a long-lost clue surfaces, they have a chance to decipher the final secret. But when a fellow scholar of the text is murdered for knowing too much, they realize that they know even more.
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