The harp is both the oldest and the newest of instruments. It has existed in some form in nearly all cultures since man has made music. The contemporary concert instrument has been known since the mid-19th century. This work is a compendium of the biographies of many notable harpists of the modern era. The biographies make clear how these performers shaped the contrasts in style and technique of harp playing that have developed over the past 150 years, as cultural, social, and psychological forces influenced individual performance. In addition to the biographical information, the A-Z entries include critical reviews, discographies, and selected bibliographies where possible. New material from the former Soviet states is included.

Revising her classic 1989 book Harps and Harpists, Roslyn Rensch expands her authoritative history of this timeless instrument. This lavishly illustrated edition, with 137 black-and-white images and 24 color plates, surveys the progress of the harp from antiquity to the present day. The new edition includes two new chapters; an extensive bibliography and index; personal anecdotes of the author's studies under Alberto Salvi; and an appendix on the Roslyn Rensch Papers and Harp Collection, which are housed at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign.

Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography emerging from more than twenty-five years of feminist scholarship on music. This book testifies to the great variety of subjects and approaches represented in over two decades of published writings on women, their work, and the important roles that feminist outlooks have played in formerly male-oriented academic scholarship or journalistic musings on women and music.

Exploring the emotional and cultural influences on Pierre Boulez's early works as well as the role surrealism and French culture of the 1930s and 40s played in shaping his radical new musical concepts.Pierre Boulez's (1925-2016) creative output has mostly been studied from an analytical perspective in the context of serialism. While Boulez tends to be pigeonholed as a cerebral composer, his interest in structure coexisted with extreme visceral energy. This book redresses the balance and stresses the febrile cultural environment of Paris in the 1940s and the emotional side of his early works. Surrealism, in particular, had an impact on Boulez's formative years that has until now been underexplored. There are intriguing links between French music and surrealism in the 1930s and 40s, arising within a cultural context where surrealism, ethnography and the emerging discipline of ethnomusicology were closely related. Potter situates the young Boulez within this environment. As an emerging musician, he explored radical new musical concepts alongside peers including Yvette Grimaud, Serge Nigg and Yvonne Loriod, performing and exchanging ideas with them. This book argues that authors associated with surrealism, especially René Char but also Antonin Artaud and André Breton, were crucial to Boulez's musical development. It enhances our understanding of his work by connecting it with significant trends in contemporary French culture, refocusing Boulez studies away from detailed musical analysis and towards a broader and more visceral, emotional response to his work.cal new musical concepts alongside peers including Yvette Grimaud, Serge Nigg and Yvonne Loriod, performing and exchanging ideas with them. This book argues that authors associated with surrealism, especially René Char but also Antonin Artaud and André Breton, were crucial to Boulez's musical development. It enhances our understanding of his work by connecting it with significant trends in contemporary French culture, refocusing Boulez studies away from detailed musical analysis and towards a broader and more visceral, emotional response to his work.cal new musical concepts alongside peers including Yvette Grimaud, Serge Nigg and Yvonne Loriod, performing and exchanging ideas with them. This book argues that authors associated with surrealism, especially René Char but also Antonin Artaud and André Breton, were crucial to Boulez's musical development. It enhances our understanding of his work by connecting it with significant trends in contemporary French culture, refocusing Boulez studies away from detailed musical analysis and towards a broader and more visceral, emotional response to his work.cal new musical concepts alongside peers including Yvette Grimaud, Serge Nigg and Yvonne Loriod, performing and exchanging ideas with them. This book argues that authors associated with surrealism, especially René Char but also Antonin Artaud and André Breton, were crucial to Boulez's musical development. It enhances our understanding of his work by connecting it with significant trends in contemporary French culture, refocusing Boulez studies away from detailed musical analysis and towards a broader and more visceral, emotional response to his work.ed musical analysis and towards a broader and more visceral, emotional response to his work.

Do you love the harp? The French harpist Henriette Reni (18751956) asked this question of each student, and it remained her ideal throughout her life. This book explores the circumstances which surrounded the beginning of Henriette Renis career as a masterful harpist and composer. Through her celebrated performances of her Concerto en ut mineur, she gained acclaim simultaneously as a virtuosic performer and composer. In the wake of her success, several new masterpieces by respected composers appeared, including Pierns Concertstck and Ravels Introduction et Allegro. The elements of Renies virtuosity are traced through her famous Lgende, and her less-known Deux promenades matinales. Her compositional style is explored through her Scherzo-Fantaisie for harp and violin and her Concerto en ut mineur. As a teacher, Renis influence echoed throughout the world. Her profound influence has been evident through the vision of her own students, including Susann McDonald, Marcel Grandjany, Mildred Dilling, Odette Le Dentu, Odette de Montesquiou, Bertile Fournier, Emmy Hrlimann, Bertile Robet Auffray, and Marie Astrid DAuffray. The crystallization of Renis teaching practice is described through her Mthode complte de harpe (Complete Method for Harp) and her twelve volumes of harp transcriptions, Les classiques de la harpe. The amount of literature about Renis life and work is disproportionate to the deep imprint she made upon the harps history and repertoire. This book is a start to further recognizing her vast importance to the establishment of the harp.

A musical instrument that has played a vital role in Latin American music cultures--the harp--is the subject of this new work, the first study of its kind to be published in English. John Schechter presents a history of the harp in Spain, traces its introduction into colonial Latin America, and describes its modern roles in the diverse cultural centers of Mexico, Paraguay-Argentina-chile, Venezuela, and Peru. He then turns his focus to his own field research in the Quichua culture of northern highland Ecuador, an area that has receive considerably less scholarly attention than many of its Latin American neighbors. The reader will meet a community of harp maistrus on the slopes of Mt. Cotacachi and become familiar with their culture, their particular instrument and its tuning, and their performance practices. Numerous photographs, musical transcriptions, and diagrams illustrate and enliven the text. The Indispensable Harp is unique for its integration of aspects of music and cultural history, organology, and performance practice, treating in considerable depth both broadly established music-ethnographical practices. It speaks to the conclusion that the vital role of the harp in Latin American music history has now been properly acknowledged and documented.

A thematically organised overview of the musical, social and cultural contexts for the multi-faceted career of this pivotal British composer.

How did a music instrument transplated to South America by colonial Jesuit missionaries earn the official designation as Paraguay's cultural national symbol? This ethnomusicological and organological study of the Paraguayan diatonic harp in the twentieth century tells its story as an emblematic national musical instrument. First used liturgically by Jesuit missions in colonial times, the transplanted European diatonic harp was transformed and adopted into the folk music vocabulary of Paraguay and the Río de la Plata region. Following the commercial success of Paraguayan harpist Félix Pérez Cardozo in the 1930s in Argentina, the instrument's symbolic value as an icon of social, cultural, and national identity was articulated in local traditions such as popular folk music festivals. It received designation of arpa paraguaya (Paraguayan harp) and, in 2010, official recognition as simbolo de la cultura nacional (cultural national symbol). The author's fieldwork in Paraguay and continuous contact with composers, educators, festival organizers, harp performers, researchers, and festival organizers have provided unique insights into the development of the Paraguayan harp tradition as a cultural icon of the nation.

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