Igor Stravinsky: Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (1942–) [English, Spanish]

Cover of 1956 edition

This book collects Stravinsky’s lectures written together with Alexis Roland-Manuel and Pierre Souvtchinsky and presented at Harvard University in 1939-40. Providing a wide-ranging account of Stravinsky’s music theory it discusses such subjects as Wagnerism, the operas of Verdi, musical taste, musical snobbery, the influence of political ideas on Russian music under the Soviets, musical improvisation as opposed to musical construction, the nature of melody, and the function of the critic of music.

First published in French as Poétique musicale, 1942

English edition
Translated by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl
With a Preface by Darius Milhaud
Publisher Harvard University Press, Cambridge/MA, 1947
OCLC 155726113
142 pages

Poetics of Music (English, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl, 1947, 6 MB)
Poética musical (Spanish, trans. Eduardo Grau, 1952)

Fr. Kalivoda (ed.): Telehor 1-2: Special Issue on L. Moholy-Nagy (1936) [CZ/DE/EN/FR]

Telehor was a project by Czech functionalist architect, theorist and educator, František Kalivoda, who planned it as a 64-page illustrated quarterly dedicated to visual culture. As an editor and publisher, Kalivoda had established an impressive network of collaborators across Europe, however his plans never fully took off.

Its only issue appeared as a book-length publication on the work of artist and Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy who was at the time already living in London. The magazine has, in the internationalist fashion, sections in several languages, including French, English, Czech, and German.

Contents of the English section: Foreword by Siegfried Giedion, 1935 (pp 27-29), Letter from Moholy-Nagy to Kalivoda, June 1934 (30-32), Moholy-Nagy’s essays “From Pigment to Light”, 1923-26 (32-34), “A New Instrument of Vision”, 1932 (34-36), “Problems of the Modern Film”, 1928-30 (37-40), “Supplementary Remarks on the Sound and Colour Film”, 1935 (41-42), “Once a Chicken, Always a Chicken”, a film script on a motif from Kurt Schwitter’s “Auguste Bolte”, 1925-30 (43-45), Postscript by Kalivoda, 1936 (45-46).

The reproductions run from page 49 through 112.

Publisher Fr. Kalivoda, Brno, 1936
Typography Fr. Kalivoda
Print Typia Press, Brno
138 pages, 69 ills., 29.7 × 21 cm
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky, in the Unlimited Edition

Moholy-Nagy at Monoskop wiki
Kalivoda at Monoskop wiki

PDF, PDF (variant with black cover, 149 MB)

M. T. Anderson: Strange Mr. Satie (2003)

Walking through the streets of Paris over a hundred years ago, Erik Satie could not have looked more normal in his black bowler hat and tie. But Mr. Satie was dreaming of music no one had heard before – music like ancient chants and modern circus tunes rolled into one. A friend of poets, puppeteers, magicians, great painters like Picasso, and the Surrealists, Satie was at the center of a world where sense was nonsense, and the imagination ruled supreme.

M. T. Anderson recounts the story of the irreverent French composer in a biography that is witty, accessible, and endlessly surprising, while Petra Mathers’s illustrations capture all the vibrancy that was Erik Satie’s topsy-turvy world.

Illustrated by Petra Mathers
Publisher Viking, New York, 2003
38 pages

Review (Alice Cary, BookPage, 2003)

Author

PDF (13 MB)