Author: Steve Reich File Type: epub In the mid-1960s, Steve Reich radically renewed the musical landscape with a back-to-basics sound that came to be called Minimalism. These early works, characterized by a relentless pulse and static harmony, focused single-mindedly on the process of gradual rhythmic change. Throughout his career, Reich has continued to reinvigorate the music world, drawing from a wide array of classical, popular, sacred, and non-western idioms. His works reflect the steady evolution of an original musical mind.Writings on Music documents the creative journey of this thoughtful, groundbreaking composer. These 64 short pieces include Reichs 1968 essay Music as a Gradual Process, widely considered one of the most influential pieces of music theory in the second half of the 20th century. Subsequent essays, articles, and interviews treat Reichs early work with tape and phase shifting, showing its development into more recent work with speech melody and instrumental music. Other essays recount his exposure to non-western music African drumming, Balinese gamelan, Hebrew cantillation and the influence of these musics as structures and not as sounds. The writings include Reichs reactions to and appreciations of the works of his contemporaries (John Cage, Luciano Berio, Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti) and older influences (Kurt Weill, Schoenberg). Each major work of the composers career is also explored through notes written for performances and recordings.Paul Hillier, himself a respected figure in the early music and new music worlds, has revisited these texts, working with the author to clarify their central narrative the aesthetic and intellectual development of an influential composer. For long-time listeners and young musicians recently introduced to his work, this book provides an opportunity to get to know Reichs music in greater depth and perspective.

Author: Robert Eisenman File Type: pdf This is the follow-up work to Prof. Eisenmans Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians, and Qumran A New Hypothesis of Qumran Origins, in which he attempts to prove in a case-by-case manner some of the hypotheses he suggested in that original ground-breaking work. Both works turn out to be, surprisingly enough, just about exactly the same number of pages and what Prof. Eisenman does in this short volume is to go through what is known by scholars as The Habakkuk Pesher and laymen, The Habakkuk Commentary Pesher in Hebrew having the same sense as Commentary in English in a line-by-line, passage-by-passage fashion and meticulously set forth just how they can relate to known events, ideas, and happenstances known from and associated with the life of James or as all Early Christian accounts would have it James the Just (the cognomen, the Just One of course, being at all times all-important) or James the Zaddik.. As everyone knows, he has expanded this in two 1000+ page books since James the Brother of Jesus The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1997-98) and The New Testament Code The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ (2006) and two shorter ones James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls I and II (2012 and 2013) but these two initial volumes represent his first forays into this territory. Once again, despite the impression by a few critics, who try make light of or marginalize his theories or scholarship (as if they could produce anything better) as in MZCQ, he absolutely distinguishes between the Spouter of Lies or Lying (the so-called Liar or Scoffer for Eisenman, a more accurate translation of this last being the Jester) and the Wicked Priest and this dichotomy has withstood the test of time and initiated a host of imitators. Not only does he make it clear despite some simplistic Consensus theorizing that these two are utterly different but, in doing so, he absolutely confirms through internal analysis a First Century CE date for principal Qumran original Documents (called by so-called consensus scholars, Sectarian), a position he already basically set forth in MZCQ. The first, of course, is an internal ideological Adversary of the hero of the Scrolls, the Righteous Teacher the Liar who denied the Law in the midst of their entire Congregation the second, the present Establishment High Priest and this, definitively not a Maccabean but the reigning Herodian one. It is he who is responsible for the death or destruction of the Righteous Teacher and some of those with him called revealingly the Poor the Ebionim in the Hebrew of the Scrolls and very probably equivalent to the Ebionites of Early Church History about whom Eusebius in the 4th Century is so contemptuous and scathing of. These and many other things are meticulously delineated in this, Eisenmans first foray into a line-by-line decipherment of the Habakkuk Pesher having already dealt definitively and in detail with the twin issues of Archaeology and Paleography in MZCQ preceding it. Both of these very-hard-to-acquire books will not, it is hoped, disappoint, Prof. Eisenmans many admirers. **About the Author Robert Eisenman is the author of The New Testament Code The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ (2006), James the Brother of Jesus The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1998), The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians (1996), Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel A History of the Survival of Tanzimat and Shariah (1978), and co-editor of The Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1989), The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (1992), and James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls Volumes I and II (2012). Robert is an Emeritus Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology and the former Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach and Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford. He holds a B.A. from Cornell University in Philosophy and Engineering Physics (1958), an M.A. from New York University in Near Eastern Studies (1966), and a Ph.D from Columbia University in Middle East Languages and Cultures and Islamic Law (1971). He was a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and an American Endowment for the Humanities Fellow-in-Residence at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were first examined. In 1991-92, he was the Consultant to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California on its decision to open its archives and allow free access for all scholars to the previously unpublished Scrolls. In 2002, he was the first to publicly announce that the so-called James Ossuary, which so suddenly and miraculously appeared, was fraudulent and he did this on the very same day it was made public on the basis of the actual inscription itself and what it said without any scientific or pseudoscientific aids.