Synopses & Reviews
The Ellington Century is a wonderful journey through the world of music and art. If you are already an aficionado of Ellington's music, you will enjoy the author's informative and detailed analysis of the composer's work and musical influences. If you are less familiar, this book puts Ellington's music in perspective with the great classical composers of the twentieth century. David Schiff's remarkable insight into the historical and musical parallels between these composers is a delight to read and his references are vast, from Schoenbergs
Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinskys
Agon to televisions
Sesame Street. Schiff writes with a sense of humor and an enthusiasm for Ellington's music that comes out on every page.”George Manahan, Music Director, American Composers Orchestra
David Schiff points us forward, observing that Ellingtons music asks us to see with our ears and hear with our eyes. Writing as a composer and scholar, he has a gift for making complex ideas strikingly clear. His insights move across a huge terrain of twentieth-century culture, as he builds bridges in his musical and cultural analysis where many have not seen a connection. Yet each musical work, each artist, is given his or her equal due. In this sense, he has met the spiritual and cultural challenge of Ellingtons life work.”Marty Ehrlich, Composer/Instrumentalist, Associate Professor of Improvisation and Contemporary Music, Hampshire College
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“The Ellington Century redefines the Duke's place in American music. . . . It's a must-read for music students and enthusiasts.”
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“Schiff makes you yearn to be a part of the ongoing flow of all music, not just jazz, or classical, or pop, or anything else. And that is one of the highest compliments I can pay the book.”
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“The most stimulating contribution to the Ellington literature I have encountered since Eddie Lamberts Listeners Guide.”
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“This book will be a must read for Ellingtonians and any musician interested in jazz-classical theory.”
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“An important milestone in Ellington scholarship, a one-of-a-kind substantive, in-depth study that opens possibilities for better understanding and appreciation of Duke Ellington the composer.”
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“The most stimulating contribution to the Ellington literature I have encountered since Eddie Lamberts Listeners Guide.” John Scott G - Music Industry Newswire
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“Schiff's ode to Ellington is a joy.” Theodore (Ted) Hudson - Ellingtonia
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“An invaluable contribution to music history . . . [it] opens the door to a new understanding of modernism, one that resists traditional narratives of stratification and embraces history in all its messy complexity.” Publishers Weekly
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“Schiff is ostensibly addressing classical listeners, but jazz folks will find the book equally fascinating, looking over the fence from the other side, at the harmonic refinements that would enrich jazz. . . . The Ellington Centurys expansiveness and shifting frames of reference are typically Ellingtonian. This lively kaleidoscopic narrative evokes Ellingtons inclusive spirit.” Caroline Waight - Make Magazine
Synopsis
Breaking down walls between genres that are usually discussed separatelyclassical, jazz, and popularthis highly engaging book offers a compelling new integrated view of twentieth-century music. Placing Duke Ellington (18991974) at the center of the story, David Schiff explores music written during the composers lifetime in terms of broad ideas such as rhythm, melody, and harmony. He shows how composers and performers across genres shared the common pursuit of representing the rapidly changing conditions of modern life. The Ellington Century demonstrates how Duke Ellingtons music is as vital to musical modernism as anything by Stravinsky, more influential than anything by Schoenberg, and has had a lasting impact on jazz and pop that reaches from Gershwin to contemporary R&B.
Synopsis
Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumasand#151;cultural, social, and personaland#151;associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.
About the Author
Richard Leppert is Regents Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of many books, including
The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body and
Art and the Committed Eye; he is also the editor of Adornoand#8217;s
Essays on Music and coeditor of
Beyond the Soundtrack. and#160;
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Musical Examples
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. MODERNITY AND OPERA; NATURE AND REDEMPTION
1. The Civilizing Process: Music and the Aesthetics of Time-Space Relations in The Girl of the Golden West
2. Opera, Aesthetic Violence, and the Imposition of Modernity: Fitzcarraldo
PART II. VOICING SUBJECTIVITY
EXCURSUS: OPERA, MONUMENTALITY, AND LOOKING AT LOOKING
3. Caruso, Phonography, and Operatic Fidelities: Regimes of Musical Listening, 1904and#150;1929
4. Aesthetic Meanderings of the Sonic Psyche: Three Operas, Two Notes, and One Ending at the Boundary of the Great Divide
PART III. MODERNITY, NATURE, AND DYSTOPIA
EXCURSUS: NATURAL BEAUTY / ART BEAUTY
5. Sound, Subjectivity, and Death: Days of Heaven (promesse du bonheur)
Conclusion: Acoustic Invocations of Crisis and Hope
Appendix: Chapter 5 Tables
Notes
Bibliography
Index