Important new ebook on Romanticism in the 20thC

[Alan Howe]

Downloadable for free here:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/books/Pauls_two_centuries_in_one.pdf

[sdtom]

downloaded it and will have a nice read about a topic I'm interested in.
Tom

[Balapoel]

Thanks Alan. I look forward to reading it.

[Richard Moss]

Alan,

Thanks for the link - look forward to at least a browse, hopefully more. 

Be interested in his take on what is romanticism.  At the risk of being a cynic, I'vbe found most so called 20thC romantic music NOT! - 20th C romantic music is almost, but not quite, an oxymoron.  The number of Naxos CDs I've bought because of a misleading 'romantic' blurb, but then you come across such as Andre Mathieu (and I'm sure many others) to make you eat your words!  Even old Richard Addinsell meets the cut, even if film music is a bit corny,  that doesn't make is non-romantic or unenjoyable.  Taste is personal and classification, in something like this is bound, to have fuzzy borders (as per your friendly note to Eric yesterday, even though he had a very valid point worth making).

Other members comments, once they've had a chance to browse this work, would be most enlightening.

Cheers

Richard

[Gauk]

I have started reading this, and considering that it is a PhD thesis submitted to a German university, it is very readable. I can recommend it to all regulars here. He makes some very interesting points; I will mention one: for composers born before 1850, if you took a poll of ordinary concert-goers as to which were the most important, and then repeated the exercise with academics in university music departments, the results would tally almost entirely. For composers born after 1850 they would have almost nothing in common.

[Amphissa]

I really hate e-books. I have a Kindle and read a little in it, but for serious reading (esp. non-fiction) I really detest e-books. Add to that the tediousness of dissertations. Grrrr ....

However, this topic interests me, so I'm curious enough that I'll try to dig into it. Thanks for the link!

[adriano]

After perusing the book and reading its highly interesting chapter 2 in full (my night was sleepless, so I could find the time), I must say to be looking for more, although I am generally asking myself who is really going to read such books or to buy them. It's one of those volumes for library shelves or for other musicologists, which makes us "practical" composers/muscians think - with relief - that we are still there too and do not necessarly need to spend months and years discussing and guessing on definitions within our art. We just play and create, no matter in which chapter or shelve our choices may land; we do this for the enjoyment of music lovers - and for our own. Still, the book's theme is just about definition, but needing 500 pages! A digest or a concised article of about 1/10 or less could help to get also "normal" music lovers acquainted with this problematic - which I still find to be discussable.

[Herbert Pauls]

Hello to the Unsung Composers forum and a big thanks to administrator Alan Howe for pointing out the Musicweb link to my book! I am absolutely delighted and gratified that a few of you have already had a look, and hope that you will find it interesting and even useful. Of course, I happily welcome any and all comments, both good and bad!

My ultimate goal has been to find ways to defend a very large body of music that was long criticized for being too regressive to merit proper scholarly respect and attention but at the same time had always been a big part of my own life, right from my earliest musical memories. As a would-be pianist, I was raised on the standard romantics and very soon became enamoured by the forgotten ones as well when I discovered the local library's Henselt, Scharwenka and Rubinstein LPs of Lewenthal and Wild, not to mention its huge number of Ponti and Rosand Vox recordings.

It did not take long to figure out that there was a long 20th C extension to this wonderful romantic musical tradition, via Rachmaninoff, Busoni, Godowsky, Kreisler, Furtwängler, Casals and too many others to count. When I started university several years later, I, (no doubt like many other music students) slowly began to wonder why such later figures were absent in historical writing even when they were so important in the daily musical world. There was no question that such music occupied a firm place in the hearts of a multitude of music lovers and performers.

It did not take long for the owners of many of the largest independent record labels to capitalize on this fact (especially since they are dedicated music lovers themselves).  And because recordings have made so much of this music (both sung and unsung) easily available to us is of untold value to all (including so many of you who participate in this forum) who are interested in a kind of modern-era music that was composed more in the tradition of what Ralph Couzens of Chandos called the "romantic side" of the 20th century.

Cheers from the Canadian Prairies!

[Alan Howe]

I found it an exhilarating read. I must now return to it in greater detail.

[sdtom]

I need to figure out how to download it into a Kindle someone was kind enough to give to me. I'm resisting calling Amazon but I think that this is the next step.
Tom

[Ilja]

Sdtom, you can easily convert it from .epub to the Kindle-supported .mobi format with the free application Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/download). If that is a problem, message me privately and I'll do it for you.

[Herbert Pauls]

Hello Ilya and Tom,

It is only a pdf and is not in epub yet (I did try making an epub but it did not turn out very well because I did not have enough skill editing epub files). However, I did a quick search and found this link which should hopefully help

http://www.wikihow.com/Add-a-PDF-to-a-Kindle

Best, Herb

[sdtom]

I'm going to give this a try Herb and will let you know how it goes.
Tom

[John H White]

Many thanks, Alan, for providing the link and to you, Herbert, for making your Magnum Opus freely available to download from the Internet. So far I've just skimmed through the abstract. From this, it appears to be essential reading to those who, like myself, are interested in the continuing of the 19th Century traditions of western music into the 20th Century and beyond.
  Cheers,
       John.

[sdtom]

I found out what my problem is. I couldn't find my cord but have another, charged up the unit fine but I fear it is not allowing any transfer to take place. I know I have the cord but where is a mystery. For the present I'll keep it on my computer.
Tom