David Francis Urrows

This book reveals the story of François Ravary, Jesuit missionary, musician, and organ builder. The mastermind behind the construction of the bamboo organs of nineteenth-century Shanghai, Ravary’s unpublished letters from China present a vivid picture of the excitement and crises surrounding the Roman Catholic mission in the often-violent integration of global space of this time. Focusing on an individual life, this study adds needed perspective to histories of the treaty-port era. By shifting the inquiry towards a nuanced, empirical, and refocused evaluation of the landscape, Ravary is revealed as a humanist in the Christian tradition, curious about Chinese society and culture, as well as the force behind China’s first brass band, first school orchestra, and other landmarks of Sino-European musical convergence. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in nineteenth-century China studies, cultural histories, and the diffusion of Western art practices.

François Ravary SJ and a Sino-European Musical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Shanghai

Walter Bernhart

By focusing on discussions of artistic works that show relationships between three individual communicative media, this volume adopts an innovative, trifocal interdisciplinary perspective: the traditional field of Word and Music Studies is here extended to include research on film and other forms of moving visualizations.

Varieties of Plurimedial Interrelations

Music, Narrative and the Moving Image

Caroline Cepin Benser

This is the first major reference work on this important choral composer. As is usual for volumes in this valuable series, the book is clearly printed and well bound, and it is highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate music collections as well as for public libraries serving communities with active choral societies. Choice When Randall Thompson died in 1984, America lost one of its most distinguished musicians. At the time of his death, it was already apparent that an assessment of his varied contributions to our musical life in the context of his contemporary generation was sorely needed. Randall Thompson: A Bio-Bibliography is the first comprehensive study of Thompson's oeuvre since his death. The volume is organized into five parts, beginning with a substantial biography written by David Francis Urrows, Thompson's final student and amanuensis. Urrows presents new information on Thompson's youth, his study in Italy and the influence of Malipiero on his work, his educational and compositional philosophy, and his role in the emergence of American music from the influence of European models. Benser's most complete catalog of works compiled to date follows. This vital list includes previously unpublished compositions, particularly those newly made available by Thompson's longtime publisher, E. C. Schirmer, and new recordings made by Bay Cities Music. A sampling of prose writings by Thompson offers a eclectic overview. The complete, extensively annotated bibliography, discography, and two appendixes that list Thompson's compositions chronologically and alphabetically complete this study. Music libraries will want to add this volume to their collections. It will also be an invaluable reference for choral directors, program note annotators, and American music enthusiasts.

A Bio-bibliography

Randall Thompson

Suzanne M. Lodato

The nine interdisciplinary essays in this volume were presented in 2003 in Berlin at the Fourth International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was sponsored by The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The nine articles in this volume cover two areas: “Surveying the Field” and “Music and the Spoken Word”. Topics include postmodernism, philosophy, German literary modernism, opera, film, theLied, radio plays, and “verbal counterpoint”. They cover the works of such philosophers, critics, literary figures, and composers as Argento, Beckett, Deleuze, Guattari, Feldman, Glenn Gould, Nietzsche, Schubert, Strauss, Wagner, and Wolfram. Three films are discussed: Casablanca, The Fisher King, and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.

David Francis Urrows

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