Reading Elgar’s The Music Makers

Elgar’s The Music Makers, for contralto solo, choir and large orchestra, has experienced a chequered reputation since its 1912 premiere at the Birmingham Festival. The work faced significant adverse criticism which re-emerged over time. Criticism targeted the poem Elgar chose for his setting – Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s ode, whose reputation was later tarnished by T.S. Eliot’s infamous critique ‘What is Minor Poetry?’. Misunderstanding of Elgar’s innovatory compositional procedure was another main reason behind the negative responses. Elgar integrated the poetic language with musical self-borrowings, transforming the words and offering perceptive listeners enhanced emotion at the highest artistic level. All aspects of Elgar’s musical language combine to produce one of his greatest, yet least understood, masterworks.

Reading Elgar’s The Music Makers brings to the fore a prime example of how first musical performances can be misunderstood and reception can shift over time. The work remains as relevant today as ever. The book’s multi-faceted approach will be invaluable not only for conductors, singers and music students, but for concert goers and music lovers generally.

Bridge Hunt

Bridge Hunt chronicles a young man’s unforgettable quest to discover the 42 revolutionary bridges designed by Robert Maillart, a pioneering Swiss engineer and architectural luminary, between 1899 to 1940. Many of these graceful structures still hide along remote back roads and alpine valleys, while a few iconic landmarks endure in Bern, Geneva, and Zurich.Maillart’s breathtaking Salginatobel Bridge was recently designated as a Swiss heritage site for its national significance. It has also been named an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers.This visually rich travelogue presents the only complete published collection of photos and descriptions of all Maillart’s extant European bridges, capturing his unique engineering artistry. It will appeal to civil engineers, architects, and students, as well as travellers, adventure-seekers and anyone fascinated by treasures that unite rather than divide our world.More than a precious record of a unique chapter in infrastructure history, the book is at heart a human story. Through one young man’s eyes, we rediscover Maillart’s timeless bridges, which embody the soaring of imagination transformed into structures that bring people together.

The Steinway That Wouldn't Budge (Confessions of a Piano Tuner)

Peter Tryon's Confessions of a Piano Tuner is a charming, autobiographical tale of life spent travelling around rural East Anglia tuning pianos. But this is also a personal account from boyhood of how music and more specifically the mechanics of that wonderful instrument, fired early imagination and gave rise to a lifelong fascination and involvement with the piano.As much a social commentary on people, the anecdotes about different characters are filled with humour and the text is light and easy to read. The unspoiled beauty and charm of East Anglia provides a perfect backdrop to Peter Tryon's account, all combining together to make this a book that you won't want to put down.

How To Photograph Garden Plants and Wildlife Through Four Seasons

Arnold Wilson is a professional biologist and an award-winning photographer, and both these skills are shown to their best advantage in How to Photograph Garden Plants and Wildlife through Four Seasons.As the title suggests, this book is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of garden photography throughout the year. Its early chapters discuss the technical intricacies of the camera and the many models currently available, before giving an impressively practical overview of the vital, but often misunderstood, subject of photographic composition.The next four chapters cover each of the seasons in turn, explaining what techniques to use to get the best out of flowers and other plants and how to produce appealing and unusual action shots of garden wildlife.Throughout, Arnold Wilson very much practises what he preaches. The book is illustrated with over 200 of his magnificent photographs – becoming, in effect, a showcase for the glories to be found in a British garden.How to Photograph Garden Plants and Wildlife through Four Seasons is an indispensable guide for every nature photographer, from aspiring to accomplished.

Doof Doof: My Life in Music

‘I have always loved the lines from Rudyard Kipling: If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd treat those two impostors just the same... Career-wise, I guess I've experienced a 50/50 mix of the two, and I have always tried to turn a 'No' into a 'Yes'!' Simon May is one of the most successful and celebrated composers for television the UK has ever produced. Best known for writing the ‘EastEnders' theme - whose evocative drum beat gives this book its title - Simon's long and impressive list of TV themes includes the 1980s smash-hit drama series ‘Howards' Way', as well as such perennial favourites as ‘Holiday' and ‘Animal Park'. In Doof Doof: My Life in Music, Simon describes the creation of these works, his lifelong vocation as a teacher and even his short-lived pop career, with self-deprecating humour and the sharp eye of the true professional. With a wealth of music and TV anecdotes from Simon's more than 40 years in the business, Doof Doof is a vivid and engaging self-portrait of a successful composer, entrepreneurial businessman, earnest educator and committed family man.  

You Can Have Any Colour You Like, As Long As It's Black

Producing artworks of our colourful world using black ink is a challenge. Using only lines and dots, the artist has to make the viewer believe that the white spaces left after the ink has been applied represent recognisable forms.

I have assembled in this book a selection of my own ink drawings along with tips which might assist anyone who works or who would like to work in this dark art. There are no rules as such, but there certainly are things to avoid and techniques to employ.

Whatever your age or ability, if you wish to develop your drawing skills then you will find something here to inspire you.

The Professional Approach to Sculpting the Human Figure

The Professional Approach to Sculpting The Human Figure is the first book by Andrew Sinclair MRSS SWAC, recognised as a master of world-class figurative sculpture.
It is based on Andrew’s ground-breaking Sinclair Method, as taught at The Sculpture School, which completely transforms the building and creation of Contemporary Realist sculpture. This method is revolutionising the approach to sculpture, also acting as a powerful source of knowledge, enabling students searching for excellence to become professional masters of their art.
This book deals with the foundations of good figurative sculpture and offers a profound understanding of measurement, anatomy, design and composition in an easy to understand format that will inspire established sculptors and beginners alike.
So if you want to raise your game and lift your sculpture talents to a professional level – this book is dynamite! Consider it food for the sculptural soul.

The Most Advanced Clarinet Book

There are 50 short studies with explanations covering many new approaches to technical problems. Followed by 27 full page studies making use of these techniques, as well as covering almost every possible technical problem regarding the clarinet

Sir Hubert von Herkomer RA 1849-1914

In 1848 Europe was in turmoil. People were starving, work was scarce. Hubert Herkomer’s father, a Bavarian woodcarver, emigrated to the United States with his wife, a musician, and their two-year-old son. But the settled future they hoped for did not materialize – after struggling for six years, the family borrowed money and settled in Southampton. They were almost penniless.

With his father’s encouragement, he picked up the paintbrush. At 13 he could paint in oils. Though art school was a disastrous experience, he sold his first painting at 19. His creative mind would end up contributing to multiple fields from photography to car racing.

But fame is a roller coaster. Hubert’s loyalty to Germany (and Britain) during the lead up to World War 1 resulted in personal and artistic unpopularity. He died just before the war.

However, his vivid and evocative work regained its value in the second half of the twentieth century, restoring his reputation as an artistic paragon and visual chronicler of the Victorian and Edwardian age.

This is the story of an artist and his art-filled life.

Putting Art to Work

With Putting Art to Work, we want to show how artwork with pictures can be used as a tool to support the development of individuals, groups and organizations.With our tailor-made workshops, we invite all professionals working with learning and development: from educators at all levels, management and organizational consultants, psychologists, coaches, therapists, social workers, and health educators to use our art-based workshops, since a more exciting and enjoyable way of promoting health and supporting change and development in work life, we think, is hard to imagine.

Past Sounds

This is a book about classical music – for people who say they love music “but don’t understand how it works”, as well as for performers and music students of all ages.
Proposing that deeper enjoyment begins with an understanding of music’s basic structures, the book describes how the simple template of earlier dance-songs was adapted by composers writing music for instruments. The instrumental sonata became one of the great formal frameworks of western music: in symphonies, concertos, chamber music and solo sonatas, it dominated concert music for some 250 years – yet it is little understood by many music lovers. To simplify this vast field, Past Sounds singles out for study “sonatas” for piano trio – piano, violin and ’cello. These instruments have well-contrasted and easily identifiable sounds, and as the story unfolds the reader is introduced to many rarely heard but beautiful works for piano trio.
This is a lively, clearly-written narrative as well as a handbook for subsequent listening. The book has two distinctive features. Firstly, technical terms are carefully explained, and for those not familiar with music notation, audio clips in an accompanying website reproduce the actual sound of the music described. Secondly, in a broad historical sweep from mid-18th to 20th centuries, the development of the sonata is followed in its context of contemporary arts and literature – demonstrating how the sonata idea of classical music well deserves to be understood and valued as a western cultural archetype alongside other great artistic and literary forms.

New Realism in Contemporary Israeli Painting

Art today can be whatever one wants it to be: a rotting cadaver, a photograph of someone else’s photograph, a banana… In this post-modern age of post-truth, of social media and the selfie, when everyone has a high-resolution digital camera at their fingertips, one wonders what would possess a talented artist to sit for days, weeks, often months, to paint a portrait of a friend or a landscape of home. Today, a group of 20 or so remarkable painters have revived a fascinating style of realistic painting, and in Israel of all places, where realistic art has never played any significant role. Their brand of realism is not mundane photographic realism, but rather it is an intensified sort of realism, a kind of hyper-realism. This book offers an initial explanation as to what these artists are doing, and how they are doing it.