Baroque Music Today: Music As Speech : Ways to a New Understanding of Music

Rating:
Summary: The Aesthetics of Articulation
Review: This book succeeds in breaking down the popular image of the baroque music by the investigation of a lot of musical treatises written in the 18th century. Although the author seems to depend on the writings by Hans-Peter Schmitz, his own indications about music are very useful not only for the players of classical music but also for the modern composers (including also the rock'n roll, electro-acoustic, techno or musique-concrete creators). He insists on "Music as Speech". This concept has broken out at first from the dialogic culture of the ancient Greece through the Italian composers Caccini, Monteverdi and the American composer Harry Partch and finally to the Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt. He released "Four Seasons" by Antonio Vivaldi in 70's, which is undoubtedly one of the most important recordings of the 20th century and has articulatively proposed how to let a music be in our days. This golden disc represents with fineness the complicated and highly distorted aesthetics of the italian baroque, which stands in strong contrast to the Ball Conception (Kugelvorstellung) idealized politically in the Romantic era.

Rating:
Summary: Music as Speech
Review: This is a very easy to read and informative book. I highly reccomend it to any musician or music lover. He gives lots of interesting information and backs up his claims.