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Praised as "brilliantly revelatory...a masterful work of critical journalism" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), The Holy or the Broken is the fascinating account of one of the most-performed rock songs in history--Leonard Cohen's heartrending "Hallelujah." How did one obscure song become an international anthem for human triumph and tragedy, a song each successive generation seems to feel they have discovered and claimed as uniquely their own? Celebrated music journalist Alan Light follows the improbable journey of "Hallelujah" straight to the heart of popular culture.
' Sometimes I liken the creative act to that of being a good gardener. The musical material itself, the harmonies, rhythms, the timbres and tempi, are seeds you have planted. Composing, bringing forth the final formal arrangement of these elements, is often a business of watching them grow, knowing when to nourish and water them and when to prune and weed.' A book unlike anything ever written by a composer, part memoir and part description of the creative process, Hallelujah Junction is an absorbing journey through the musical landscape of John Adams, one of today's most admired and frequently performed composers. A musician of enormous range and technical command, Adams has built a huge audience worldwide through the immediacy and sincerity of his music, such as his Pulitzer prize-winning memorial for the September 11 attack On The Transmigration of Souls. Hallelujah Junction isn't so much an autobiography as a fascinating journey through the musical landscape of his life and times, centred around the three highly controversial operas based on social and political issues he has written in the past twenty-five years - Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and, most recently, Dr Atomic.
This book studies the working efficacy of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in the context of today's network culture. Especially as recorded on YouTube, k.d. lang's interpretation(s) of Cohen's Hallelujah, embody acoustically and visually/viscerally, what Nietzsche named the 'spirit of music'. Today, the working of music is magnified and transformed by recording dynamics and mediated via Facebook exchanges, blog postings and video sites. Given the sexual/religious core of Cohen's Hallelujah, this study poses a phenomenological reading of the objectification of both men and women, raising the question of desire, including gender issues and both homosexual and heterosexual desire. A review of critical thinking about musical performance as 'currency' and consumed commodity takes up Adorno's reading of Benjamin's analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction as applied to music/radio/sound and the persistent role of 'recording consciousness'. Ultimately, the question of what Nietzsche called the becoming-human-of-dissonance is explored in terms of both ancient tragedy and Beethoven's striking deployment of dissonance as Nietzsche analyses both as playing with suffering, discontent, and pain itself, a playing for the sake not of language or sense but musically, as joy.
This is a compelling and inspiring look at spiritual beliefs that influenced some of the world's greatest composers, now revised and expanded with eight additional composers.
A revealing study of the physical presence of the musician in musical performance Fingers slipping over guitar strings, the tap of a bow against the body of a cello, a pianist humming along to the music: contemporary composers often work with parasitic, non-conventional sounds such as these. Are they to be perceived as musical elements or do they shift attention to the physical effort of music-making, contact between a body and an instrument? Composer Paul Craenen explores ways in which the musician’s body is revealed in musical performance. He leads us from Cage, Lachenmann, Kagel and their contemporaries to a discussion of how today's generation of young composers is writing a body paradigm into composition itself. Micro-temporal physical gestures and instrumental timbre provide the key to unveiling the physical presence of both a musician and a ‘composing body’. The author's concept of ‘intercorporeality’, along with the idea of an alternating linear and non-linear relationship of the composing body to time, casts new light on the relationship between musicians, composers, and music consumers.
Acclaimed music journalist Alan Light follows the improbable journey of Cohen's "Hallelujah" straight to the heart of popular culture and gives insight into how great songs come to be, how they come to be listened to, and how they can be forever reinterpreted.
Bálint András Varga is perhaps the world's most respected interviewer of living composers. For The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste: Reflections on New Music, Varga has confronted thirty-three composers with quotations carefully chosen to elicit their thoughts about an issue that is crucial for any serious creative artist: How can one find courage to deal with the sometimes tyrannical expectations of the outside world? The result is an imaginary roundtable at which we encounter fresh, revealing, previously unpublished statements from such world-renowned composers as John Adams, Friedrich Cerha, George Crumb, Sofia Gubaïdulina, Georg Friedrich Haas, Giya Kancheli, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, Libby Larsen, Robert Morris, and Wolfgang Rihm. Also represented are composers who are becoming more prominent with the passing years -- Chaya Czernowin, Pascal Dusapin, and Rebecca Saunders -- as well as conductor-composer Michael Gielen, festival director Nicholas Kenyon, and music critics Paul Griffiths and Arnold Whittall. In The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste, composers and other insightful individuals comment on choices made, traps avoided, unforeseen consequences, proud accomplishments, occasional regrets: the whole range of experiences central to artistic creativity. Bálint András Varga isthe acclaimed author of György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages; Three Questions for 65 Composers; and From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir (all available from University of Rochester Press).
A very comprehensive book that answers many frequently asked questions about song composition. It starts at the very beginning the basic concept, and takes you step-by-step to the final completion and production of a song.