The most readable and comprehensive guide to enjoying over five hundred years of classical music — from Gregorian chants, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Johannes Brahms, Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, and beyond.
The Vintage Guide to Classical Music is a lively — and opinionated — musical history and an insider’s key to the personalities, epochs, and genres of the Western classical tradition. Among its features: — chronologically arranged essays on nearly 100 composers, from Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) to Aaron Copland (1900-1990), that combine biography with detailed analyses of the major works while assessing their role in the social, cultural, and political climate of their times; — informative sidebars that clarify broader topics such as melody, polyphony, atonality, and the impact of the early-music movement; — a glossary of musical terms, from a cappella to woodwinds; — a step-by-step guide to building a great classical music library.
Written with wit and a clarity that both musical experts and beginners can appreciate, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music is an invaluable source-book for music lovers everywhere.
JAN SWAFFORD received degrees from Harvard and the Yale School of Music and is the author of Charles Ives: A Life with Music, which was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, won the PENWinship… More about Jan Swafford
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