The challenge, in twentieth-century music, to the normative status of triadic tonality is one of the most far-reaching and extreme revolutions that the history of music has known. In his classic work, Twelve-Tone Tonality, George Perle argues that the seemingly disparate styles of post-triadic music in fact share common structural elements. According to Perle, these elements collectively imply a new tonality as "natural" and coherent as the major-minor tonality that was the basis of a common musical language in the past. His book describes the foundational assumptions of this post-diatonic tonality and illustrates its compositional functions with numerous musical examples. The second edition of Twelve-Tone Tonality is enlarged by eleven new chapters. Some of these are "postscripts" to earlier chapters, clarifying, elucidating, and expanding upon concepts discussed in the original edition. Others discuss new developments in the theory and practice of twelve-tone tonality, including voice-leading implications of the system and dissonance treatment. Errors discovered in the original edition have been corrected. - Jacket flap.
George Perle takes us into the composer's workshop as he reevaluates what we call "twentieth-century music"—a term used to refer to new or modern or contemporary music that represents a radical break from the tonal tradition, or "common practice," of the preceding three centuries. He proposes that this music, in the course of breaking with the tonal tradition, presents coherent and definable elements of a new tradition. In spite of the disparity in their styles, idioms, and compositional methods, he argues, what unites Scriabin, Stravinsky, Bartók, and the Viennese circle (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) is more important than what separates them. If we are to understand the connections among these mainstream composers, we also have to understand their connections with the past. Through an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of a single piece by Varèse, Density 21.5 for unaccompanied flute, Perle shows how these composers refer not only to their contemporaries but also to Wagner, Debussy, and Beethoven. Perle isolates the years 1909-10 as the moment of revolutionary transformation in the foundational premises of our musical language. He asks: What are the implications of this revolution, not only for the composer, but also for the listener? What are the consequences for the theory and teaching of music today? In his highly original answers, Perle relates the role of intuition in the listening experience to its role in the compositional process. Perle asserts that the post-Schoenbergian serialists have preoccupied themselves with secondary and superficial aspects of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method that have led it to a dead end but he also exposes the speciousness of current alternatives such as chance music, minimalism, and the so-called return to tonality. He offers a new and more comprehensive definition of "twelve-tone music" and firmly rejects the notion that accessibility to the new music is reserved for a special class of elite listeners.
George Perle has divided this collection into four parts Composers and Works (Bartïk Berg Schoenberg Scriabin and Webern Towards a New Musical Language Some Critical Appraisals of Contemporary Music Theory and On Listening to Modern Music. These 23 articles reviews lectures and speeches represent the best of 50 years of musical thought and insight by one of the keenest musical minds of this century. Sharing this particular composer's point of view leads the reader to an understanding of the linear progression(not easily apparent) from the last century to the next.
Widely recognized as the definitive work in its field ever since its original publication in 1962, Serial Composition and Atonality remains an unsurpassed introduction to the technical features of what is probably the most revolutionary body of work since the beginnings of polyphony. In the analysis of specific compositions there is first and last of all a concern with the musical surface—an attempt to trace connections and distinctions there before offering any deeper-level constructions, and to offer none where their effects are not obvious on more immediate levels of musical experience. In this sixth edition of the book, George Perle employs the new and more consistent terminology for the identification of transpositional levels of twelve-tone sets that he first proposed in Twelve-Tone Tonality (1977).
Volume 1 of Stalking the Antichrists and Their False Nuclear Prophets, Nuclear Gladiators, and Spirit Warriors,1940-1965 is essentially an enhanced memoir. It is based for the most part on my personal observations and knowledge and specialized information from my academic studies of history, political science, and literature at Grove City College and the University of Chicago,as well as my professional insights into the heart of the U. S. Navy (1953-1957, 1960-1961[OP- 09D]) as an Air Intelligence Officer in Hawaii and Japan and the Pentagon; political- military/counsellor assignments in the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer(FSO-6) at the American embassy in Paris (1962-64); and a speechwriter in the Navy Department (1965). In volume 2, the textual narrative begins with the end of my specific actions/ activities in the Navy and Foreign Service in July 1965, which I have called How I Lived in History, 1950-1965. In retrospect my entire Navy careerfrom my commissioning as Ensign USNR, 1355 AIO, in early September 1953 at Naval Station, Newport, Rhode Island, to my first honorable discharge at Treasure Island on August 27, 1957was in preparation to an understanding of World War II and the Cold War.
George Schultz recounts his years working for the Reagan administration, including foreign policy and the power struggle between the State Department and the National Security Council, in this candid reflection on his years as Secretary of State. Turmoil and Triumph isn’t just a memoir—though it is that, too—it’s a thrilling retrospective on the eight tumultuous years that Schultz worked as secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. Under Schultz’s strong leadership, America braved a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, increasingly damaging waves of terrorism abroad, scandals such as the Iran-Contra crisis, and eventually the end of the decades-long Cold War. With the strong convictions and startling candor for which Schultz is known, this personal account takes readers into the heart of the Reagan administration, revealing the behind-the-scenes talks and churning tensions that informed a transitional decade that many Americans now look back on as one of the country’s most exalted.
It is based on the inspiring "definitions" of the word "introduction" (1651): My actions of "bringing in" a "newly" weapon (since August 1945) "brought into" the world and to its "process" of the application in "war" and with an in-depth "initiation in the knowledge" of "elementary instruction" regarding "Deterrents" and "Deterrence" thereof, which "leads to the knowledge or understanding of " the impact of both fission and fusion "nuclear weapons" on war/politics/foreign policy/strategy and the fate of the Earth/Gaia/God's Creation, thanks to my insights gained "personally" at Grove City College, the University of Chicago, U.S. Navy (Air Intelligence Officer) and State Department (Foreign Service Officer) and herewith presented as my "introduction" to the formal introduction of my halting, but determined attempts to deter a thermonuclear World War III and Armageddon too (1945-2012). Modified from "Introduction" (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Third Edition, 1959, p. 1036)
Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, TheSan Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, USA Today, Time, and New York magazine. Winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award for Best Nonfiction Book on International Affairs Winner of the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq recounts how the United States set about changing the history of the Middle East and became ensnared in a guerrilla war in Iraq. It brings to life the people and ideas that created the Bush administration's war policy and led America to the Assassins' Gate—the main point of entry into the American zone in Baghdad. The Assassins' Gate also describes the place of the war in American life: the ideological battles in Washington that led to chaos in Iraq, the ordeal of a fallen soldier's family, and the political culture of a country too bitterly polarized to realize such a vast and morally complex undertaking. George Packer's best-selling first-person narrative combines the scope of an epic history with the depth and intimacy of a novel, creating a masterful account of America's most controversial foreign venture since Vietnam.
Can John D. Negroponte be described as 'The Last American Diplomat'? In a career spanning 50 years of unprecedented American global power, he was the last of a dying breed of patrician diplomats - devoted to public service, a self-effacing and ultimate insider, whose prime duty was to advise, guide and warn - a bulwark of traditional diplomatic realism against ideologue excess. Negroponte served as US ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines and Iraq; he was US Permanent Representative to the UN, Director of National Intelligence and Deputy Secretary of State to George W. Bush. His was a high-flying and seemingly conventional career but one full of surprises. Negroponte opposed Kissinger in Vietnam, supported a 'proxy war' but opposed direct American military action against Marxists in Central America - facing bitter Congress opposition in the process. He swam against the floodtide of George W. Bush's neocon-dominated administration, warning against the Iraq war as a possible new 'Vietnam' and criticising aspects of Bush's 'War on Terror'. He disconcerted the administration by arguing that the re-establishment of Iraq would take as long as five years. And he was influential in international social and economic policy - working for the successful re-settlement of millions of refugees in Southeast Asia following the Vietnam War, issuing early warnings about the scourge of AIDS in Africa and successfully launching the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). George W. Liebmann's incisive account is based on personal and shared experience but it is no hagiography; beyond the author's discussions with Negroponte, this book is deeply researched in US state papers and includes interviews with leading actors. It will provide fascinating reading for anyone interested in the inside-story of American diplomacy, showing personal and policy struggles, and the underlying fissures present even in the world's last remaining superpower.
The renowned American composer George Rochberg (1918-2005) distilled a lifetime of insights about Western music across some three hundred years in A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language. In A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language, the renowned American composer George Rochberg distilled a lifetime of insights about Western music across some three hundred years. Rochberg describes how the asymmetrical tonal language of the late eighteenth century--the era of Haydn and Mozart--evolved through the gradual incursion of symmetry into a system based on the juxtaposition of tonal and atonal, asymmetrical and symmetrical--as seen in notable composers such as Webern, Prokofiev, and Rochberg himself. A Dance of Polar Opposites takes us inside the composer's studio, reveals how he assessed his and our musicalpast, and paints a picture of what he believed our musical future may be. George Rochberg (1918-2005), one of the most respected composers and writers about music in the second half of the twentieth century, was a finalist twice for the Pulitzer Prize and longtime professor at University of Pennsylvania. His writings include The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music (which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award);the memoir Five Lines, Four Spaces; and a volume of letters. Jeremy Gill was a student of George Rochberg and is a composer, conductor, and pianist.
Bringing together proponents and opponents of the Strategic Defense Initiative, this book includes original essays by leading experts on every aspect of the issue. The collection provides a valuable introduction to the many complex questions involved in any serious consideration of the SDI. The contributors explore such issues as the strategic impl
In volume 2 of Birding and Mysticism: Enlightenment Through Bird Watching, there is no traditional table of contents; rather, there are the five main parts and their sections and subsections, which contain the substantive ideas and memes of volume 2, followed by six appendices. The main thrust of volume 2 concerns the many aspects, faces, and forms of mysticism: religious, spiritual, rational, scientific, personal, and practical.
In the whirlwind of accusations and recriminations that emerged in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq war, one man's vital testimony has been conspicuously absent. Candid and gripping, At the Center of the Storm recounts George Tenet's time at the Central Intelligence Agency, a revealing look at the inner workings of the most important intelligence organization in the world during the most challenging times in recent history. With unparalleled access to both the highest echelons of government and raw intelligence from the field, Tenet illuminates the CIA's painstaking attempts to prepare the country against new and deadly threats, disentangles the interlocking events that led to 9/11, and offers explosive new information on the deliberations and strategies that culminated in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Beginning with his appointment as Director of Central Intelligence in 1997, Tenet unfolds the momentous events that led to 9/11 as he saw and experienced them: his declaration of war on al-Qa'ida; the CIA's covert operations inside Afghanistan; the worldwide operational plan to fight terrorists; his warnings of imminent attacks against American interests to White House officials in the summer of 2001; and the plan for a coordinated and devastating counterattack against al-Qa'ida laid down just six days after the attacks. Tenet's compelling narrative then turns to the war in Iraq as he provides dramatic insight and background on the run-up to the invasion, including a firsthand account of the fallout from the inclusion of "sixteen words" in the president's 2003 State of the Union address, which claimed that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium from Africa; the true context of Tenet's own now-famous "slam dunk" comment regarding Saddam's WMD program; and the CIA's critical role in an administration predisposed to take the country to war. In doing so, he sets the record straight about CIA operations and shows readers that the truth is more complex than suggested in other versions of recent history offered thus far. Through it all, Tenet paints an unflinching self-portrait of a man caught between the warring forces of the administration's decision-making process, the reams of frightening intelligence pouring in from around the world, and his own conscience. In At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet draws on his unmatched experience within the opaque mirrors of intelligence and provides crucial information previously undisclosed to offer a moving, revelatory profile of both a man and a nation in times of crisis.
Of the greatest significance . . . . The first volume of George Perle's two volume study on the two operas of Alban Berg ... is one of those few works of scholarship and analysis you can label 'definitive'; it may in time be supplemented, but not superseded."--Richard Dyer, Boston Sunday Globe "It is difficult to see how Professor Perle's exhaustive study can ever be superseded. . . or how such future work as may appear can do anything but add new details to his exposition of the basic clements of the work's musical language. . . . After twenty years' work on the composer he brings to this study of Wozzeck not only a penetrating analytical mind, great scholarship and a comprehensive knowledge of the music but an almost uncanny insight into what seem to be the inner workings of Berg's mind."--Douglas Jarman, Music and Letters "If you have ever had any questions about Berg's opera Wozzeck, Mr. Perle probably answers them for you in The Operas of Alban Berg: Volume One/Wozzeck. . . An indispensable work on Berg's life as reflected in his work."--Donal Hcnahan, The New York Times "As with Perle's previous books, one notes with pleasure how well written is this one, how simultaneously economical and comfortable the prose, even when the subject is as complex and manifold as Wozzeck."--Mark DeVoto, Music Library Association Notes "A great and unique contribution .... [Perle] is a leading authority on Berg, and his analysis of Berg's compositional methods in the two operas is likely to be definitive."--George Martin, The Opera Quarterly "George Perle has contributed more than anyone of any nationality to a true understanding of Berg's music."--Douglass Green, Journal of Music Theory "George Perle ... possesses the kind of complete credential required for this study. [Volume I: Wozzeck] is a model of scholarly writing. Every paragraph, each quoted music example, each analysis moves the argument forward in a clear incisive manner .... Essential reading for the serious student of the music of Alban Berg."--Choice
Describes how, after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, maverick Texas congressman Charlie Wilson persuaded his colleagues to fund the CIA's efforts to arm the mujahideen and recounts the repercussions of that covert operation.
The author of four truly important novels--The Recognitions in 1955, J R in 1975, Carpenter's Gothic in 1985, and A Frolic of His Own in 1995--William Gaddis is considered by many literary scholars to be one of the most outstanding novelists of the twentieth century, to be spoken of in the same breath as James Joyce, Robert Musil, and Thomas Pynchon. Hints and Guesses: William Gaddis's Fiction of Longing is the first scholarly work to discuss all four Gaddis novels. While not dismissing the inclination of many scholars to view Gaddis's fiction as postmodern, Christopher Knight moves critical response in another direction, toward a discussion of Gaddis's significance as a satirist and social critic. Knight investigates Gaddis's predominant thematic interests, including those of contemporary aesthetics, Flemish painting, forgery, corporate America, Third World politics, and the U.S. legal system. What Knight finds is an author not only acutely sensitive to post-war social realities but also one whose critique carries with it an implied utopian dimension.
In our experience in library work we have learned that it is very difficult to find Christmas legends which have literary merit, are reverent in spirit, and are also suitable for children. This collection has been made in an endeavor to meet this need. Most of the stories and poems in this book are of the legendary type. They have been chosen from a wide variety of sources and represent the work of many writers. There are other stories also, which, although not strictly traditional, have the same reverent spirit and illustrate traditional beliefs and customs.
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.
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