Product Description The Mind of a Mnemonist is a rare phenomenon―a scientific study that transcends its data and, in the manner of the best fictional literature, fashions a portrait of an unforgettable human being. Review A distinguished Soviet psychologist's study…[of a] young man who was discovered to have a literally limitless memory and eventually became a professional mnemonist. Experiments and interviews over the years showed that his memory was based on synesthesia (turning sounds into vivid visual imagery), that he could forget anything only by an act of will, that he solved problems in a peculiar crablike fashion that worked, and that he was handicapped intellectually because he could not make discriminations, and because every abstraction and idea immediately dissolved into an image for him. It is all fascinating and delightful. ( New Yorker) Luria's essay is a model of lucid presentation and is an altogether convincing description of a man whose whole personality and fate was conditioned by an intellectual idiosyncrasy. ( Times Literary Supplement) [A] compassionate and vivid portrait. ( Los Angeles Times Book Review) A welcome re-issue of an English translation of Alexander Luria's famous case-history of hypermnestic man. The study remains the classic paradigm of what Luria called 'romantic science,' a genre characterized by individual portraiture based on an assessment of operative psychological processes. The opening section analyses in some detail the subject's extraordinary capacity for recall and demonstrates the association between the persistence of iconic memory and a highly developed synaesthesia. The remainder of the book deals with the subject's construction of the world, his mental strengths and weaknesses, his control of behaviour and his personality. The result is a contribution to literature as well as to science. ( Psychological Medicine) About the Author A. R. Luria was Professor of Psychology at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Jerome Bruner is University Professor at New York University.

This book talks about music. It incorporates modal and tonal music. It talks about Arnold Schoenberg, the founder of contempoary music, Alban Berg and how the past plays on contemporary music and Anton Webern and the future of contemporary music. As well as the structure of contemporary musical speech. René Leibowitz was a French composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher born in Warsaw, Poland. During the early 1930s, Leibowitz studied composition and orchestration with Ravel in Paris, where he was introduced to Schoenberg's Twelve-note technique by the German pianist and composer Erich Itor Kahn. He subsequently studied with Schoenberg's pupil Webern. Many of the works of the Second Viennese School were first heard in France at the International Festival of Chamber Music established by Leibowitz in Paris in 1947. Leibowitz was highly influential in establishing the reputation of the Second Viennese School, both through activity as a teacher in Paris after WWII and through his book Schoenberg et son ecole, published in 1947 and translated by Dika Newlin as Schoenberg and his School (US and UK editions 1949). This was among the earliest theoretical treatises written on Schoenberg's 12-tone method of composition. Leibowitz's advocacy of the Schoenberg school was taken further by his two most gifted pupils, each taking different paths in promoting the musics of Schoenberg, Webern and the development of serialism, namely Pierre Boulez and Jacques-Louis Monod. His American students include the composers Will Ogdon, Janet Maguire, and the avant-garde film director-animator John Whitney. As conductor, Leibowitz was active in many recording projects. One of the most widely circulated and most notable is a set of the Beethoven symphonies made for Reader's Digest Recordings; it was apparently the first recording of the symphonies to follow Beethoven's original metronome markings. In choosing this approach, Leibowitz was influenced by his friend and colleague Rudolf Kolisch. Leibowitz likewise made many recordings for Reader's Digest in their various compilation albums. He also wrote for Les Temps modernes, applying existentialist ideas to musicology.

"A rapturous, witty, and passionate memoir ... Violin Dreams is not only the story of a man becoming an artist, it’s a history of twentieth-century music.” -- John Guare, Tony Award-winning playwright Arnold Steinhardt, for more than forty years an international soloist and the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, brings warmth, wit, and fascinating insider details to the story of his lifelong obsession with the violin, that most seductive and stunningly beautiful instrument. His story is rich with vivid scenes: the terror inflicted by his early violin teachers, the sensual pleasure involved in the pursuit of the perfect violin, the charged atmosphere of high-level competitions. Steinhardt describes Bach’s Chaconne as the holy grail for the solo violin, and he illuminates, from the perspective of an ardent owner of a great Storioni violin, the history and mysteries of the renowned Italian violinmakers. Violin Dreams includes a remarkable CD recording of Steinhardt performing Bach’s Partita in D Minor as a young violinist forty years ago and playing the same piece especially for this book. A conversation between the author and Alan Alda on the differences between the two performances is included in the liner notes.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a definitive biography of the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck by one of the foremost musicologists of the twentieth century. Alfred Einstein provides a detailed analysis of Gluck's life and works, including his most famous operas such as Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste. This book is an essential resource for anyone interested in the history and development of opera. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

(Vocal Collection). Four songs on texts by Toni Morrison. Composed for Jessye Norman.

""Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner"" ist ein Buch aus dem Jahr 1907 von Angelo Neumann. Es handelt sich um eine Sammlung von Erinnerungen und Eindr�����cken des Autors �����ber den ber�����hmten deutschen Komponisten Richard Wagner, mit dem er eng befreundet war. Neumann beschreibt Wagners Pers������nlichkeit, seine Arbeitsweise und seine Musik, sowie seine Beziehungen zu anderen K�����nstlern und Pers������nlichkeiten seiner Zeit. Das Buch bietet einen einzigartigen Einblick in das Leben und Werk von Richard Wagner und ist ein wertvolles Dokument der Musikgeschichte.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Meyerbeerâ (TM)s third Italian opera, Emma di Resburgo (Emma of Roxburgh) was premiered at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice on 26 June 1819 only three months after Semiramide had appeared at Turin, and scored a success that far surpassed that of both of its predecessors. It was indeed the work that established Meyerbeer's reputation in Italy, and extended it even beyond the Alps into Germany. It was also the opera that brought him into close contact with Rossini, the most important figure of the second decade of the century, whose work was a major influence on all his contemporaries, Meyerbeer included. Rossiniâ (TM)s Eduardo e Cristina was given on 24 April and Emma on 26 June. Both operas triumphed, and the two composers became very good friends, a relationship that was to continue later in Paris. Meyerbeerâ (TM)s opera went on to be staged in Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence and Padua. Translated into German, it was given in Vienna, Dresden, Frankfurt, Berlin and Stuttgart, and even reached Warsaw in 1821. The story of Emma di Resburgo concerns dynastic rivalry in Lowland Scotland at the time of the Norman conquest; its libretto was the third written for Meyerbeer by Gaetano Rossi. The text covers the same material as that of one of MÃ(c)hul's operas HÃ(c)lÃ(c)na (1803). Mayr had also set this plot as Elena as recently as 1814, as an opera-semiseria, re-adapted for La Scala in the autumn of 1816, where Meyerbeer may well have heard it. The action of Emma, transferred from Provence to Scotland, takes place in the Castle of Tura and in Glasgow, and predates by three months Rossini's Walter Scott opera, La donna del lago (Naples, San Carlo, 24 September 1819), which is set in the Scottish Highlands. With its focus on a wild and violent Scotland, and with its themes of kidnap and usurpation, disguise and impersonation, lost relationships and restored fortunes, condemnation and rescue, Emma makes its own contribution to Italian Romantic opera. Meyerbeerâ (TM)s fluent and beautiful appropriation of the Rossinian idiom is given a further dimension by the composerâ (TM)s technical mastery and richness of invention, particularly evident in relation to the treatment of the Romantic subject. The new musical colours, appearing here even before similar developments in Rossiniâ (TM)s La donna del lago, are not used in the depiction of nature, but in the realistic situational transposition of the drama. This is particularly forward-looking in the big tableaux: the Chorus of Judges, rightly admired in its day, through-composed as an integral part of the action, and the graduated act 1 finale, dramatic in its contrasts. The sombre Death March in the act 2 finale, with its writing for the bassoons, looks forward to Meyerbeerâ (TM)s French operas. The lieto fine, or happy ending of the opera, looking back to the eighteenth century, is still infused with the old ideals of the Enlightenment, typified in the clemency shown in the end by the tyrant. However, Meyerbeer had learned to infuse this Utopian spirit, so characteristic of a past epoch, with the vibrant new sensibility so characteristic of Romanticism. Emma di Resburgo marked a milestone in Meyerbeerâ (TM)s career and brought him the greatest honour any composer could aspire to in Italyâ "a commission from La Scala Milan that would result in his next work, Margherita dâ (TM)Anjou (1820).