Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media

Book Description

Framed offers a lively introduction to disability portrayal in film and television, raising questions of whose images, views, and voices reach the screen. Disabled actors and producers talk about the barriers that still exist for those who want to work in the industry; critiques from within the disability arts movement are linked to the potential for creating new images.

Book Description

Details the musical, psychological, and metaphysical secrets in twenty-seven of Beethoven's greatest works.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent account of Beethoven's journey towards greatness.......2007-07-15

Tame has captured Beethoven's inner life and creativity, his struggles and desires in an unprecedented way. The book is a masterpiece: it does not get fixated with the technicalitities of classical music, but sheds light on the spiritual source and path underpinning the composition of such beauty. Explaining Beethoven in technical terms may be an easy way of interpreting classical music, but it is simple and mediocre. To shed light on its spiritual dimension - a dimension that enveloped Beethovens' entire being and life requires much depth and sensitivity. Tame has managed this in an extraordinary way. Beethoven was more than a musician and composer. He was a great soul. This books shows how undiversal truths - as opposed to technical skills - inspired and guided Beethoven to produce the greatest music that has ever been.

INSPIRES YOU TO LISTEN TO THE WORKS.......2000-01-20

Disregard most of what the intellectualising and somewhat pompous reviewers write below. Read this book and be inspired to delve deeper into the music and genius of Beethoven. With the exception of one 5 page chapter (that those below get stuck on!) it is an easy read, and adds an appreciation of the music that other books on Beethoven fail to do well. Whether you are a fan or a beginner this book will bring pleasure.

Fails in its purpose, but recommended otherwise.......1999-07-05

This is a curious work, a treatment of two subjects together which few general readers would have thought to be compatible. Unfortunately, it is a most unsatisfactory and weak book as far as its purpose is concerned. The book may be read without loss by neglecting the 'numerological' and 'esoterological' parts altogether. This way it makes for a non-technical discussion of Beethoven's works, much in the spirit of Sullivan's book, which the author often quotes. That, however, is not how the author intends it to be read; if one tries to go along with him, most general readers will find that much of the substance is indeed 'esoteric drivel' as a previous reviewer here has said. It is impossible to give the author or the book any credit at all, if it is seen in the said light of its own purpose - namely, to reveal the 'esoteric' aspects of Beethoven's greatest works - since there are very few readers among the public, I should suppose, who both have had an exposure to the ideas of esotericism, as well as have a capacity to appreciate Beethoven's music. In fact, the number of people in each of these categories (the former in general, and the latter in America) is very small. In fact, one does not even here get a beginner's introduction to the ideas of numerology and esoteric knowledge, if it is to be taken that the author purports to make the general public aware of these. The reader is straightaway exposed to looking at the Master's greatest works through the eyes of an esoteric seeker. However, one may grant the book this much: that it may possibly induce in some Beethoven lovers the desire to find out more about the ideas mentioned. Also, as mentioned, a general reader may well read the book completely omitting the references to them. Read this way (which is the only way the present reviewer can recommend to the general public), the book serves well to exalt Beethoven and place his music where it belongs: in the loftiest planes that one can imagine. For ardent lovers of Beethoven, this work makes for satisying reading, if only because of this glorification of the Master and of his greatest works, and the brief discussions about these, in which they will find echoes of some of their own thoughts and feelings. Not the work of a musicologist, this author presents a faithful view of the essentially spiritual nature of Beethoven's works, and of the sublime metaphysical nature of the late quartets.

Inspiring book about Beethoven and music.......1999-04-20

This book gives a spiritual interpretation of Beethoven the man, and his music.There are various spiritual paths one can take, and I think that Tame tries a bit too hard to fit Beethoven into a particular pattern. Nevertheless,one does not have to accept completely Tame's Theosophical approach to get something out of this book.(I note in passing that there are no diatribes involving yin and yang in the book.Tame discusses these issues but does not bitterly criticise.)Tame does not mention Beethoven's moon sign.In fact it was Sagittarius, thus emphasising his Sagittarian qualities.If we knew the exact time of his birth further insight into his character could be obtained with an accurate birth chart. I must confess that I cannot understand why Tame allocates masculine zodiacal signs to "feminine" symphonies, and vice-versa.I find Tame's argument plausible that Beethoven did not marry because he had a higher calling, that is ,to lift up humankind with his music.This book has increased my understanding of Beethoven and made me itch to get into some serious listening of his works.

Esoteric Drivel About a Great Genius.......1998-09-27

I have concluded that it is not by accident that this book in support of its sweeping conclusions about one event or another in Beethoven's life offers no credentials or background on their origins. The very title misleads the reader into thinking that the spirituality of the man in an era when western church values were the norm in Europe would prevail. The reader finds complete confusion in ramblings involving the spiritual path of Beethoven. [The very title of the book!] The text jumps from diatribes involving the 'Yin and the yang' of Beethoven's symphonies to an in-depth astrological sun and moon sign analysis of his music and it's impact on Beethoven's psyche at one time or another. Couple that with lengthy discussions of Beethoven's karma along with Biblical quotations supporting Beethoven's belief in God and Jesus Christ, and you have a totally confused mass of psychic drivel, a readers nightmare.

The only saving grace to some of the topics discussed in the book come from the incorporation of lengthy key passages and critical analysis from such Beethoven authorities as Thayer, von Lenz, Schindler, Ries, Eichoff et al. In these areas, a credible argument for the various conclusions drawn by the author is evident. The conclusions drawn from analysis of Beethoven's circumstances, his friends, their politics, affiliations, and influences of the day seem reasoned and supportable. Drawing on the influences of Freemasonry and the Illuminati in Beethoven's life were insightful and well articulated.

Unfortunately, just when one got a sense of how these influences could have affected the compositions being written or sketched at that moment, one was confronted with some diversion or another - like a discussion of the astrological polarity of one symphony over another! Garbage!

The final straw broke for this reader near the end of the book. It was at this point that the analysis of major individual works of Beethoven began. It was here that one reads of the reflections of the final string quartets written just before Beethoven's death in terms of their numerology. Pages were devoted to explaining the masculine, positive polarity - yang - with the feminine, negative - yin - of each movement. Further expansion on the 'talisman of the secret rays', the five-pointed star, and true meditation borne in the last of Beethoven's great works was offered.

This book should be read only after the prospective reader has done exhaustive reading and studying of Beethoven from highly respected musicological sources. To accept or even consider this book as a definitive study on his life or consider any conclusions drawn in this book, without a prior historical musicological basis of evaluating the esoteric minutia presented; would be an insult to the greatness of Beethoven's genius.

He is rolling in his grave on this one - folks!

Book Description

The concept of genius intrigues us. Artistic geniuses have something other people don't have. In some cases that something seems to be a remarkable kind of inspiration that permits the artist to exceed his own abilities. It is as if the artist is suddenly possessed, as if some outside force flows through him at the moment of creation. In other cases genius seems best explained as a natural gift. The artist is the possessor of an extra talent that enables the production of masterpiece after masterpiece. This book explores the concept of artistic genius and how it came to be symbolized by three great composers of the modern era: Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. Peter Kivy, a leading thinker in musical aesthetics, delineates the two concepts of genius that were already well formed in the ancient world. Kivy then develops the argument that these concepts have alternately held sway in Western thought since the beginning of the eighteenth century. He explores why this pendulum swing from the concept of the possessor to the concept of the possessed has occurred and how the concepts were given philosophical reformulations as views toward Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven as geniuses changed in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Customer Reviews:

An Absolutely Excellent Book!.......2007-07-29

So what is genius? Sure, we all have an idea. But sometimes that word is thrown around quite carelessly. What it is really?

I loved this book. It is extremely well written, intelligent, enlightening, and thought provoking.

Regarding Beethoven, even I, with a very limited understanding of music, could tell something extraordinary was happening the very first time I heard the Ninth Symphony and none of Beethoven's music has disappointed me since. I have CDs where Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Zander talk about Beethoven's genius in their own words. But now I have a much greater understanding of the concept of musical genius as well as a profound appreciation of its rarity.

I highly recommend this book. It will remain on my bookshelves for a very long time.

Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven

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Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven
Mark Evan Bonds
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0691126593

Book Description

Before the nineteenth century, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Kant described wordless music as "more pleasure than culture," and Rousseau dismissed it for its inability to convey concepts. But by the early 1800s, a dramatic shift was under way. Purely instrumental music was now being hailed as a means to knowledge and embraced precisely because of its independence from the limits of language. What had once been perceived as entertainment was heard increasingly as a vehicle of thought. Listening had become a way of knowing.

Music as Thought traces the roots of this fundamental shift in attitudes toward listening in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on responses to the symphony in the age of Beethoven, Mark Evan Bonds draws on contemporary accounts and a range of sources--philosophical, literary, political, and musical--to reveal how this music was experienced by those who heard it first.

Music as Thought is a fascinating reinterpretation of the causes and effects of a revolution in listening.

Music As Philosophy: Adorno And Beethoven's Late Style (Musical Meaning and Interpretation)

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Music As Philosophy: Adorno And Beethoven's Late Style (Musical Meaning and Interpretation)
Michael Spitzer
Manufacturer: Indiana University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0253347246

Book Description

Beethoven's late style is epitomized by his ninth symphony, the Missa Solemnis, as well as five piano sonatas, five string quartets, a mass, and several smaller piano works. Historically, these works are seen as forging a bridge between the Classical and Romantic traditions; in terms of their musical structure, they continue to be regarded as revolutionary. Spitzer's book examines these late works in light of the musical and philosophical writings of the German intellectual Theodor Adorno, and in so doing, attempts to reconcile the conflicting approaches of musical semiotics and critical theory. He draws from various approaches to musical, linguistic, and aesthetic meaning from Adorno to Derrida and Foucault, as well as contemporary music theorists. Through analyses of Beethoven's use of specific musical techniques (including neo-Baroque fugues and counterpoint), Spitzer suggests that the composer's last works offer a philosophical and musical critique of the Enlightenment, and in doing so created the musical language of premodernism.

The Pianist As Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style

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The Pianist As Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style
George Barth
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

Concentrating on Beethoven's solo and chamber keyboard works, Barth builds his evaluation of Beethoven's keyboard style on a critique of musical timekeeping and eighteenth-century descriptions of music's character, focusing especially on the controversies between Beethoven's interpreters Anton Schindler and Carl Czerny.

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Adorno returns Beethoven,as if the ink never dried

Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music
Theodor W. Adorno
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Customer Reviews:

Adorno returns Beethoven,as if the ink never dried.......1999-08-14

Of all the composers Adorno has thought about intensely, writing essays which merged into book lengths on Mahler,Berg, or Wagner, as well as countless articles and essays on music, Beethoven seems to be a high special preserve within his body of work. This is a work of fragments, and notes,incomplete thoughts collected into notebooks throughout Adorno's life which never was able to solidify under one leaf,or merge into a completed work. But if you've read his brilliant and overwhelming intellectual discourses in his "Philosophy of Modern Music" or "Negative Dialectics" or lastly, his posthumous "Aesthetic Theory" this is more a threshold unto perhaps Adorno's working methods, unformed thoughts and frequent postponments of thoughts, concepts and directions to be takened up later,perhaps for the reader to fulfill. Beethoven was the consummate artist, one committed to the musical subject,the continuation of time, a composer who sought to break rules as well as follow them. And in following them there is a liberation for what this allows,sometimes new forms,a breakage of the tonal scheme or creating a piano sound almost provincial yet innovative,as the "Waldstein Sonata". Adorno frequently draws on Beethoven the craftman, the manipulator and purveyor of materials, on tonality,motives,variations, and form in a state of becoming, and makes us aware once again, that the process of music is a time-bound one, one of an incessant durational frame. Beethoven dealt with first and foremost with reprisals, with materials, themes and harmonic schemes we have heard and will hear again. He dealt with something which is already in the world, and his music simply deals with the inevitability of those moments and their fate redemption or demise. Late Beethoven as well we learn was not a state of increased polyphonic complexity, "Missa Solemnis" was a retrogressive act,not one of innovation as his "Piano Sonatas" frequently were. Adorno reminds us of the dimensions of Beethoven's art we seem to forget,as the simplified moments, the economy of means reduced to pure power as the "Ninth Symphony" or reduction of subjectivity as the late "Sonatas" proclaims. The Late Music "Spatstil" was a music of reduction of harmonic schemes beginning too soon as the late "Quartets" the "C# minor". The editor here Rolf Tiedemann long an Adorno executor trys to make the fragmentariness of this incomplete work cohere with copious notes placed at the end, even interjecting excerpts from completed essays and entire works, as "Aesthetic Theory". Although useful I found this distracting and not all that absorbing.It seems we've never understood Beethoven or that the dimensions of his creativity have been layered,Adorno returns him back to a composer status, a contemporary or visitor of the postmodern field as if the ink never dried.

The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism)

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The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism)
Richard Will
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521802016

Book Description

Characteristic symphonies have texts associating them with literature, politics, religion, and other aspects of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European culture. Examining both the music and its aesthetic and social contexts, this first full-length study of the genre demonstrates how symphonies constructed individual and collective identities through their subjects, representing emotion, human bodily movement, and the passage of time. Examples discussed include the Pastoral and Eroica symphonies of Beethoven and works by Haydn, Dittersdorf, and other composers of the era. An Appendix provides a thematic index of the entire repertory.

Download Description

Associated through descriptive texts with literature, politics, religion, and other subjects, 'characteristic' symphonies offer an opportunity to study instrumental music as it engages important social and political debates of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This first full-length study of the genre illuminates the relationship between symphonies and their aesthetic and social contexts by focussing on the musical representation of feeling, human physical movement, and the passage of time. The works discussed include Beethoven's Pastoral and Eroica Symphonies, Haydn's Seven Last Words of our Savior on the Cross, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf's symphonies on Ovid's Metamorphoses, and orchestral battle reenactments of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. A separate chapter details the aesthetic context within which characteristic symphonies were conceived, as well as their subsequent reception, and a series of appendixes summarises bibliographic information for over 225 relevant examples.

Beethoven's Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire

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Charming and witty
Beethoven Rocks
MANY APPETIZERS... NO MAIN COURSE.

Beethoven's Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire
Kevin Kopelson
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

A vivid (and startling) example of the “new musicology,” this book is an interdisciplinary study of romantic pianism in relation to gender and sexuality. Discussing erotic anxieties of musical amateurs, sexual myths concerning child prodigies, prurient interests in virtuosos, castrating figurations of “maiden” piano teachers, and the phenomenon of Liberace, the author underscores the extent to which the piano resonates with homosexuality and mortality.

Customer Reviews:

Charming and witty.......2003-02-18

Kopelson's sense of humor is very entertaining. I am quite new to the field of musicology, and this "New Musicology" is a mystery to me. I feel that this book helped to shed a little light on that. Yes, this book is a sort-of self-help manual. But, it is more than that. It is simultaneously a study of amateurism and its relationship to sexual repugnance and an equating of virtuosity with sexiness.

The title of the book belies its subject. The word "Beethoven" is thrown in, undoubtedly, to boost sales. The book focuses more on Liszt and Chopin. He explains the attraction of Liszt due to his "manliness" and his expert pianism, while Chopin is attractive due to his better skills at composition. Thus, the two composers, in what I think is Kopelson's divine moment, are musically equal in their differences.

The style is smart, witty and simple -- meaning Kopelson seems to write like he would speak. But, I don't know for sure; I've never met the guy. But, if this is so, then he must be incredibly interesting.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book. The only reason I took away a star is because the queer humour was often over my head, and too often, through fault of my own, I did not know of a musicologist or pianist to whom Kopelson was referring. But I'm sure I will continue increasingly to appreciate this book as I advance in my studies.

Beethoven Rocks.......1999-12-14

The three-star Amazon.com review I have just read misses the point of the book. The book's autobiographical elements are in fact secondary to the cultural critique, serving simply to establish why Kopelson would be drawn to the subject in the first place. The heart of the book explores various forms of musical/sexual performance anxiety as well as the eroticism of playing the piano and of performance itself. The book is cogently argued and beautifully written. Lastly, "Beethoven's Kiss" is funny and moving and is also a kind of very original self-help manual for readers (and amatuer pianists) who suffer from feelings of inferiority.

MANY APPETIZERS... NO MAIN COURSE........1996-07-11

Reading Beethoven's Kiss, one enters the parlour of an erudite and witty host. He will tell us both of his own dense life and the way in which famous musicians relate to nineteenth century piano music. Imagine that you have come hungry but Kopelson keeps on feeding you little bitesized canapes throughout his non-traditional piece of scholarship. It is his piecemeal use of an interweaving of personal detail and analysis that makes his arguments hard to follow. The chronology of Kopelson's life suffers less from this (often ad nauseum) fragmentary approach than his ideas about the way in which pianists embody the composers they play. It is initially exciting to muse on the hypothetical, to follow the witticisms of Kopelson and learn more about this charming amateur pianist. However, the threads of his analysis soon blur amidst the personal asides. The necessity for a suspension of disbelief is equally straining. Yes. Perhaps Glenn Gould was gay. Perhaps Andre Gide was musically inept.And that Barthes was terrible in bed. A hundred clues don't make a proof (Doestoevsky) and I am not convinced by some of the foundational assumptions of Kopelson's argument. The monograph does offer a perspectival shift in looking at the relationship between the pianist and his (rarely her in Kopelson) music and provides a memorable glimpse into the sometimes self satisfied, sometimes moving life of the author. The onus too often rests on the reader to bring together all of Kopelson's offerings and with them, make a meal.

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Beethoven: Filosofia De La Musica
Theodor W. Adorno
Manufacturer: Akal Ediciones
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik : Fragmente und Texte (Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung I, Fragment gebliebene Schriften / Theodor W. Adorno)

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Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik : Fragmente und Texte (Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung I, Fragment gebliebene Schriften / Theodor W. Adorno)
Theodor W Adorno
Manufacturer: Suhrkamp
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 351858166X

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