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When we think of Ludwig van Beethoven images of a stormy and passionate but tortured genius are brought to mind, alongside the transformative effect of his work on musical history. All of these things are true, but no artist lives in a vacuum, and even music that opens a portal onto 'the infinite realm of the spirit' has its wider context. Illustrated with music from each period, this enlightening life history tells us about Beethoven's place in society...
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The Great Gate of Kiev resounds to the tumultuous bell rings that end Pictures an an Exhibition, one of the most magnificent and virtuosic of all piano pieces. However, to some of his contemporaries, Modest Mussorgsky was 'insane' and 'a perfect idiot'. Born into a wealthy land-owning family, what drove this tormented man and why did he suffer psychological breakdowns and alcoholism? How did he achieve his command of the realist idiom in his stage...
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Johann Sebastian Bach today has a reputation as the Godfather of Western European music, as a fountainhead of classical music theory and the creator of some of the greatest works the world has ever produced. Better known as a keyboard virtuoso, Bach was not regarded as a genius in his day, so how did this headstrong and belligerent but ambitious young musician become so extremely productive? What were his influences? How did he end up in jail and...
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Claude Debussy is regarded by many as the quintessential French composer, with music
that invited both warm applause and frosty criticism in his day. While our ears no longer
hear him as controversial, his works heralded the dawn of an artistic period founded on
innovation and experiment, and a desire to break with the past in search of new expressive
means. With never a dull moment, Debussy went from being a musical misfit at the Paris
Conservatoire...
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Famous today for his Trois Gymnopédies, Erik
Satie was an eccentric and solitary figure who
was nevertheless viewed by some as a prophet of
French musical modernism, his striking
creativity championed by Ravel and Debussy.
From tragedy and trauma in his early years,
through his time as a pianist and Parisian
provocateur at Le Chat Noir cabaret, and as
house composer to the mystical Rose+Croix cult
and beyond, Satie's eventful life is told in this
fascinating...
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Polish by birth, Fryderyk Chopin made his
name in post-Revolutionary Paris and is
often depicted as the archetypal Romantic
artist - blessed with extraordinary talent
but consumed by the flame of genius,
tormented by intense and tempestuous
relationships and doomed to an early death.
But how much of this story is based on fact?
This account of Chopin's life and times
separates myth and reality and, illustrated
with numerous musical examples,...
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The music of Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák is suffused with natural nobility, fluency and freshness, and embodies the spirit of his native land. This revealing biography portrays Dvořák as a complex and wide-ranging composer, and explores the creation and performance of his music as well as its reception on both sides of the Atlantic, tracing his art in all its richness and variety. Musical excerpts include the Cello Concerto, the 'New World'...
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Tchaikovsky declared that Mozart was 'full of divine beauty', and Schubert's wonder at the 'countless images of a brighter and better world' that Mozart was able to conjure up through his music knew no bounds. Many of us carry the image of Mozart as a transcendent genius, but what do we really know about his life and career, and indeed his music? This entertaining and informative biography takes us from Mozart's beginnings as a child prodigy to his...
31) Summer Bird Blue
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Rumi Seto plans to spend her life writing music with her younger sister, Lea. When Lea dies in a car accident, her mother sends Rumi to live with her aunt in Hawaii while she deals with her own grief. Struggling with the loss of her sister, abandoned by her mother, and without music in her life, Rumi turns to the friendship of a teenage surfer named Kai, and an eighty-year-old named George Watanabe. And Rumi is determined to write the song she and...
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Caterina Pellegrini is a native Venetian, and like so many of them, she's had to leave home to pursue her career. With a doctorate in baroque opera from Vienna, she lands in Manchester, England. Manchester, however, is no Venice. When Caterina gets word of a position back home, she jumps at the opportunity. The job is an unusual one. After nearly three centuries, two locked trunks, believed to contain the papers of a baroque composer have been discovered....
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Rich in history, color, and imagination, a remarkable novel that pairs the seductive lost world of a creative legend with the coming of age of a young girl guided by an artistry all her own
In Barbara Quick's luminous novel, eighteenth-century Venice comes to life in all its splendor and decadence. The Grand Inquisitor's spies lurk everywhere, and yet the city's inhabitants abandon themselves to the revelry and masques of Carnival for half the year....
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Simon's memoir reveals her remarkable life, beginning with her storied childhood as the third daughter of Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, her musical debut as half of The Simon Sisters performing folk songs with her sister Lucy in Greenwich Village, to a meteoric solo career that would result in 13 top-40 hits, including the #1 song "You're So Vain." She was the first artist in history to win a Grammy Award,...
35) Swing: a mystery
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Two-time Edgar Award winner Rupert Holmes–author of the critically acclaimed Where the Truth Lies and creator of the Tony Award-winning musical whodunit The Mystery of Edwin Drood–now fuses gripping suspense and evocative music in an innovative novel of intrigue set in 1940, during the very heart of the Big Band era. Swing is a multimedia experience, it contains musical tracks which give clues to the mystery.Jazz saxophonist and arranger Ray Sherwood,...
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"A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich -- Julian Barnes's first novel since his best-selling, Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending. 1936: Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), he reflects...
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Juan Garcia Esquivel was born in Mexico and grew up to the sounds of mariachi bands. He loved music and became a musical explorer. Defying convention, he created music that made people laugh and planted images in their minds. Juan's space-age lounge music popular in the fifties and sixties has found a new generation of listeners.
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"Arky Levin has reached a creative dead end. Guilty and restless after an unexpected separation from his wife, almost by chance he stumbles upon an art exhibit that will change his life. Based on a real piece of performance art, the installation that the fictional Arky Levin discovers is inexplicably powerful. Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art sit across a table from artist Marina Abramović for as short or long a period of time as they choose....
39) I'm glad I did
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"Mad Men "meets "Nashville" in this debut mystery set in 1963. It's the summer of 1963 and JJ Green is a born songwriter-which is a major problem, considering that her family considers the music business a cesspool of lowlifes and hustlers. Defying them, she takes an internship at the Brill Building, the epicenter of a new sound called rock and roll. JJ is finally living her dream. She even finds herself a writing partner in Luke Silver, a boy with...
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