This book encourages eighteenth-century ways of listening to J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor and Christmas Oratorio. It explores the concept of musical style, suggests ways to listen to works created by the re-use of music for new words, and shows how modern performances are stamped with audible consequences of our place in the twenty-first century.
The second in a series of five short books about Shakespeare's most significant characters: Falstaff, Cleopatra, Lear, Iago and Macbeth.
Celebrated American literary critic Harold Bloom turns his attention to the writers of his own national literary tradition, from Walt Whitman and Herman Melville to William Faulkner and Hart Crane. The distillation of a lifetime of criticism, it is one of Bloom's most profoundly personal books to date.
Featuring extended analyses of the author's most cherished poets - Shakespeare, Whitman, and Crane - as well as inspired appreciations of Emerson, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Ashbery, and others, this title adapts his classic work The Anxiety of Influence to show us what great literature is, how it comes to be, and why it matters.
Daniel Melamed offers a study of Bach's passion settings seeking to familiarise readers with some of the intriguing issues in the study and performance of older music. He explores what it means to listen to this music today.
A companion volume to The Anxiety of Influence, this book offers instructions in how to read a poem. It considers the map of misreading drawn by contemporary poets such as Ann Carson and Henri Cole, and shows how modern texts relate to previous texts, and contribute to the literary legacy of their predecessors.
Uncovers the mystery of both Prince Hamlet and the play, how both prince and drama are able to break through the conventions of theatrical mimesis and the representation of character, making us question the very nature of theatrical illusion.
A new book by America's leading literary critic on the uses of deep reading. Practical, inspirational and learned, How to Read and Why is Bloom's manifesto for the preponderance of written culture.
Subjects covered include bibliographic tools of Bach research and sources of literature; Bach's family; Bach biographies; places Bach lived and worked; Bach's teaching; the liturgy; Bach source studies and the transmission of his music; repertory and editions; genres and individual vocal and instrumental works; performance practice; the reception and analysis of Bach's music; and many others.
An exploration of Bach's motets in the context of the German motet tradition.