The War on Music
Reclaiming the Twentieth Century
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Narrated by:
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Malcolm Hillgartner
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By:
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John Mauceri
About this listen
A prominent conductor explores how aesthetic criteria masked the political goals of countries during the three great wars of the past century.
This book offers a major reassessment of classical music in the 20th century. John Mauceri argues that the history of music during this span was shaped by three major wars of that century: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War.
Probing why so few works have been added to the canon since 1930, Mauceri examines the trajectories of great composers who, following World War I, created voices that were unique and versatile, but superficially simpler. He contends that the fate of composers during World War II is inextricably linked to the political goals of their respective governments, resulting in the silencing of experimental music in Germany, Italy, and Russia; the exodus of composers to America; and the sudden return of experimental music—what he calls “the institutional avant-garde”—as the lingua franca of classical music in the West during the Cold War.
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The iconic image of Beethoven is of him as a lone genius: hair wild, fists clenched, and brow furrowed. Beethoven may well have shaped the music of the future, but he was also a product of his time, influenced by the people, politics, and culture around him. Oxford scholar Laura Tunbridge offers an alternative history of Beethoven's career, placing his music in contexts that shed light on why particular pieces are valued more than others, and what this tells us about his larger-than-life reputation.
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Engaging, interesting, nice format
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Incarnations
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- Length: 16 hrs and 51 mins
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For all of India's myths, its sea of stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, recapturing the human dimension of how the world's largest democracy came to be. His trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, film stars, and corporate titans - some famous, some unjustly forgotten - bring feeling, wry humor, and uncommon insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.
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Great listen, the author is biased
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At the Existentialist Café
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
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Looking for Lorraine
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Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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Radiant
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With Amusement for All
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With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States, covering everything from the penny press to Playboy, the NBA to NASCAR, big band to hip hop, and other topics including film, comics, television, sports, and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race, gender, class, economics, and politics, LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms American culture.
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So Much Fun!
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Music
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Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact, and disguised their sources. In Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs. Gioia tells a 4,000-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval.
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Squeezing cherry-picked facts into a simplistic narrative
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Confronting the Classics
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One of the world's leading historians provides a revolutionary tour of the Ancient World, dusting off the classics for the twenty-first century. Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writing about Greek and Roman history, provides a panoramic portrait of the classical world, a book in which we encounter not only Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, but also the common people - the millions of inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the slaves, soldiers, and women.
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Annoying narrator
- By Chris E on 02-27-15
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Rites of Spring
- The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
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Dazzling in its originality, Rites of Spring probes the origins, impact, and aftermath of World War I from the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring" in 1913 to the death of Hitler in 1945. "The Great War", as Modris Eksteins writes, "was the psychological turning point...for modernism as a whole. The urge to create and the urge to destroy had changed places."
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Fantastic
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-17
By: Modris Eksteins
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Fracture
- Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938
- By: Philipp Blom
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 17 hrs
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When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell-shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: The old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief.
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Lots of good trivia information
- By Jean on 07-23-15
By: Philipp Blom
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Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does - humans are a musical species.
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What listeners say about The War on Music
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Harmon
- 12-22-23
Hang on till the second half
The first part of this is rather platitudinous, so an older person like myself probably will know it all. But the second half is quite informative.
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- Poncho
- 01-22-23
I learn to appreciate classical music from the XX century
Thanks for the review of the WSJ I bought this book both in audible and written , It’s like a musical trip , while reading it i stopped to hear the music the author was talking about and appreciate it so much , it’s a extremely good book.
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- Beethoven, Too
- 05-19-22
The most important book on music in a century!
Superbly well researched and brilliantly stated! EVERY composer & conductor in the world needs to read (or listen to) this book. With enlightening detail, Maestro Mauceri sums up perfectly what has been stated up to date on the tragedy of what we still call "The Twentieth Century," providing scintillating new insight and information I have never seen anywhere else. He addresses a situation that I personally witnessed in a concert hall, believing it to be unique -- indicating to me that it may be a universal experience -- where a patron, just as he describes in this book, became visibly agitated, panicky, and had to crawl from the center of an aisle, excusing himself as he rushed from the hall. When he later returned, he explained that the "music" was creating such an uncomfortable feeling to his psyche, he had to get as far away from it as possible for fear of losing his mind. As an American composer visiting Germany, I felt intimidation -- being in the land of the great composers -- until musicians of high renown approached me, stating: "We [all] hate the music being written by students from the conservatories and universities here." Mr. Mauceri perfectly explains the logical reason for this. There is no connection between the composers from the great land of composers to their predecessors. Indeed, they were forced into exile. Most importantly, EVERY sincere composer alive today needs to read this priceless work, in order to gain the permission needed to ignore the false conditions forced (by symphony orchestras and institutions of learning alike) requiring all composers -- to be called such -- to follow meaningless "rules" forbidding them to compose music in the way it was composed by all great composers before the 20th Century. When Arnold Schönberg sought to emancipate the dissonance he did NOT -- ever -- intend to imprison, murder or destroy the consonance, or any other form of music. Maestro Mauceri masterfully explains the fallacy of the current and far too extended mistaken turn classical music fell into, over a hundred years ago, and gives the best argument to date for ending the war. It is a war against ourselves and the casualties are pointless. Having read other books cited along with hearing countless lectures as well as multiple journeys through Leonard Bernstein's Norton Lectures, this book is the most intelligent and penetrative elucidation on the subject at hand. It should be translated into every. language as it has the power to redeem a great art that has been under attack far too long. It is, in my opinion, the most important book about music for our times.
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