For the Love of Music Invitations to Listening

by Steinberg, Michael; Rothe, Larry

• ISBN13: 9780195162165
• ISBN10: 0195162161
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-05-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The power of music, the way it works on the mind and heart, remains an enticing mystery. Now two noted writers on classical music, Michael Steinberg and Larry Rothe, explore the allure of this melodious art--not in the clinical terms of social scientists--but through stories drawn from theirown experience. In For the Love of Music, Steinberg and Rothe draw on a lifetime of listening to, living with, and writing about music, sharing the delights and revelatory encounters they have had with Mozart, Brahms, Stravinsky, and a host of other great (and almost-great) composers. At once highly personaland immediately accessible, their writings shed light on those who make music and those who listen to it--drawing readers into the beautiful and dangerous terrain that has meant so much to the authors. In recounting how they themselves came to love music, Steinberg and Rothe offer keys forlistening. Here you will find the story of a boy discovering a lifelong passion as he huddled in an alley behind a movie theater in World War II England, listening to the Fantasia soundtrack. You will meet the man who created the sound of Hollywood's Golden Age. You will learn how composers haveaddressed issues as contemporary as AIDS and the terrorist attacks of September 11. You will sit in on strange and enlightening listening sessions with one of America's quirkiest music critics. And you will enter a world of mind- and soul-nourishing pleasures. Articulate and impassioned, sophisticated but never esoteric, Steinberg and Rothe offer invigorating reflections on music that will delight both the beginning and the seasoned listener.

Author Biography

Michael Steinberg has taught at several universities and conservatories, was music critic of The Boston Globe, has contributed to numerous periodicals, and served as program annotator for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic. His program notes have been collected in three Listener's Guides on The Symphony, The Concerto, and Choral Masterworks. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Larry Rothe has been publications editor of the San Francisco Symphony since 1984. His articles have appeared in Symphony magazine, Playbill, and Stagebill, and he is co-editor of American Mavericks: Visionaries, Pioneers, Iconoclasts. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Table of Contents

Beginnings
How I fell in love with music	p. 3
Preliminary : the professor's legacy	p. 11
Creators
Another word for Mozart	p. 19
Thinking of Robert Schumann	p. 25
The sacred, the profane, and the gritty affirmations of music	p. 33
Franz Schubert, "a rich possession"	p. 39
Encountering Brahms	p. 47
Schoenberg, Brahms, and the great tradition	p. 57
First-rate second-class composer	p. 63
Sibelius and Mahler : what more could there be?	p. 69
Remembering Rachmaninoff	p. 77
Erich Wolfgang Korngold : a meditation	p. 83
Tchaikovsky's Mozart (and others')	p. 93
On the trial of W. A. Mozart	p. 99
What they saw	p. 107
A short life of J. S. Bach	p. 117
Stravinsky's ear-stretching, joy-giving legacy	p. 127
The recent scene
A visit with Lou Harrison	p. 137
George Perle : composing a way of life	p. 143
A quintet for American music	p. 151
Three American composers in pursuit of the white whale	p. 159
A century set to music	p. 169
Missionaries
Making America musical : a salute to Theodore Thomas	p. 179
Sigmund Spaeth, someone you should know	p. 187
Isaac Stern - on music and life	p. 199
B. H. Haggin the contrarian	p. 205
Affairs to remember
Loving memories of movie music	p. 217
Vienna trilogy : vignettes from the city of music	p. 223
Music, true or false	p. 231
Why we are here	p. 237
Postlude
The sounds we make	p. 245
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