"Stravinsky's Ballets" by Charles M. Joseph

Stravinsky's Ballets Charles M. Joseph

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Series:: Yale Music Masterworks
Format:: Hardback
Publication date:: 30 Nov 2011
ISBN:: 9780300118728
Imprint:: Yale University Press
Dimensions:: 320 pages: 235 x 165mm
Sales territories:: World

Categories:

Arts »
Dance & Other Performing Arts »

Igor Stravinsky, a towering composer of the twentieth century, was closely linked to dance. His early commissions for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes—The Firebird, Petrouchka, and The Rite of Spring—put him on the international map and propelled both ballet and music into the modern age. Even so, these brilliant pieces were but a prelude to Stravinsky's lifelong exploration of dance and dance idioms, as Charles M. Joseph convincingly demonstrates in this penetrating survey of all of the composer's ballet music.

Joseph provides superb analyses of each of Stravinsky's ballet pieces, examining the composer's own drafts, notes, and sketches to discover how he conceived of and developed each work. The book also explores how Stravinsky's unorthodox new music energized colleagues, among them George Balanchine, and attracted a glittering array of artists including Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinski, Picasso, and Jean Cocteau. Joseph creates an intense, intimate portrait of Stravinsky and offers a fresh perspective on the musical revolutionary who changed the definition of music made for dance.

Charles M. Joseph is professor emeritus of music and the former dean and vice president of academic affairs, Skidmore College. He is the author of two previous books published by Yale University Press, Stravinsky and Balanchine, the winner of an ASCAP Award in Biography, and Stravinsky Inside Out. He lives in Saratoga Springs, NY.

"This excellent source offers a unique approach to analysis of ballet, recording its history—as seen through the life and work of Stravinsky—and reflecting the impact of Russian culture on ballet and music of the 20th century. With its 33 pages of endnotes and 4-page bibliography of primary sources, this book is a scholarly delight."—C.T. Bond, Choice