David Schroeder – författare

Audiences as well as other artists have responded to Franz Schubert's music with passion, both during his time and in the past two centuries. Musicians, painters, writers, and filmmakers have all found a connection with him, integrating his music into their own works in ways that have given their works greater depth. Our Schubert: His Enduring Legacy examines Schubert and the ways audiences and artists—both his contemporaries and their descendents—relate to him, analyzing some of the uses of Schubert's music and providing an intimate portrait of the man.Divided into two parts, part one focuses on Schubert's own time, discussing many aspects of Schubert's life and the effects they had on his compositions, such as the special importance and personal function Schubert's songs held for the composer and their effect on his other works; his association with his contemporaries; and the subtleties of his political activism. Part two considers Schubert's legacy, investigating the composer's ability to arouse passion in other artists through the intervening years to the present. This fascinating study includes several photos as well as a select bibliography and discography that include the works discussed.

Titles in the Listener’s Companion Series provide readers with a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers. Aimed at nonspecialists, each volume clearly explains how to listen to works from particular artists, composers, and genres. Examining both the context in which the music appeared and its form, authors provide the environments in which key musical works were written and performed—from a 1950s bebop concert at the Village Vanguard to a performance of Handel’s Messiah in eighteenth-century Dublin.Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–1791) remains as popular today as ever. His recordings fill iTunes playlists, and annual Mozart festivals are performed worldwide. His eminence as a musician has supported overseas guided tours, served as the subject of a cartoon series (Little Amadeus: twenty-nine episodes from 2006 to 2008), inspired movies and documentaries, and launched a French rock opera.In Experiencing Mozart: A Listener’s Companion, music historian David Schroeder illustrates how the issues Mozart cared about so deeply remain important to modern listeners. His views on politics, women, authority, and religion are provided, along with compelling analysis of selected great symphonies and sonatas, moving concertos and innovative keyboard works, and groundbreaking operas. Schroeder merges his vast knowledge of the great artist’s personal and professional life, late eighteenth-century European culture and society, and remarkable musicianship to guide listeners in the art of listening to Mozart. This work is an ideal introduction to readers and listeners at any level.

From the Minds of Jazz Musicians, Volume II: Conversations with the Creative and Inspired is a follow-up to Volume I’s celebration of contemporary jazz artists who have toiled, struggled, and succeeded in finding their creative space. Volume II was developed through transcribing and editing selected interviews with 29 jazz artists, conducted by the author since 2011, along with a historical essay on each artist. The interviews feature musicians from a broad range of musical styles and experiences, with their beginnings ranging from the ’50s to the early ’80s. Topics range from biographical life histories to descriptions of mentor relationships, revealing the important life lessons they learned along the way. With the goal to discover the person behind the persona, the author elicits conversations that speak of the creative process, mining the individualistic perspectives of seminal artists who witnessed history in the making. By comparing and contrasting each artist’s perspective to discover similarities in their career paths, these volumes are an important research tool for students and academics, offering direct information from leading figures in the jazz world.

From the Minds of Jazz Musicians, Volume II: Conversations with the Creative and Inspired is a follow-up to Volume I’s celebration of contemporary jazz artists who have toiled, struggled, and succeeded in finding their creative space. Volume II was developed through transcribing and editing selected interviews with 29 jazz artists, conducted by the author since 2011, along with a historical essay on each artist. The interviews feature musicians from a broad range of musical styles and experiences, with their beginnings ranging from the ’50s to the early ’80s. Topics range from biographical life histories to descriptions of mentor relationships, revealing the important life lessons they learned along the way. With the goal to discover the person behind the persona, the author elicits conversations that speak of the creative process, mining the individualistic perspectives of seminal artists who witnessed history in the making. By comparing and contrasting each artist’s perspective to discover similarities in their career paths, these volumes are an important research tool for students and academics, offering direct information from leading figures in the jazz world.

From the Minds of Jazz Musicians: Conversations with the Creative and Inspired celebrates contemporary jazz artists who have toiled, struggled and succeeded in finding their creative space. The volume was developed through transcribing and editing selected interviews with 35 jazz artists, conducted by the author between 2009 and 2012 in New York City, with a historical essay on each artist to provide context. The interviews feature musicians from a broad range of musical styles and experiences, ranging from Gerald Wilson, born in 1918, to Chris Potter, born in 1971. Topics range from biographical life histories to artists’ descriptions of mentor relationships, revealing the important life lessons they learned along the way.With the goal to discover the person behind the persona, the author elicits conversations that speak volumes on the creative process, mining the individualistic perspectives of seminal artists who witnessed history in the making. The interviews present the artists’ candid and direct opinions on music and how they have succeeded in pursuing their unique and creative lives.

From the Minds of Jazz Musicians: Conversations with the Creative and Inspired celebrates contemporary jazz artists who have toiled, struggled and succeeded in finding their creative space. The volume was developed through transcribing and editing selected interviews with 35 jazz artists, conducted by the author between 2009 and 2012 in New York City, with a historical essay on each artist to provide context. The interviews feature musicians from a broad range of musical styles and experiences, ranging from Gerald Wilson, born in 1918, to Chris Potter, born in 1971. Topics range from biographical life histories to artists’ descriptions of mentor relationships, revealing the important life lessons they learned along the way.With the goal to discover the person behind the persona, the author elicits conversations that speak volumes on the creative process, mining the individualistic perspectives of seminal artists who witnessed history in the making. The interviews present the artists’ candid and direct opinions on music and how they have succeeded in pursuing their unique and creative lives.

The author focuses on the way that music has infiltrated Hitchcock's thinking as a director, from his earliest silent films to his last works. Music is an underexplored dimension in Hitchcock's works. Taking a different view from most works on Hitchcock, David Schroeder focuses on how an expanded definition of music influences Hitchcock's conception of cinema. The structure and rhythm of his films is an important addition to the critical literature on Hitchcock and our understanding of his films and approach to filmmaking. Alfred Hitchcock liked to describe his work as a director in musical terms; for some of his films, it appears that he started with an underlying musical conception, and transformed that sense of music into visual images. The director's favorite scenes lacked dialogue, and they made their impact through a combination of non-verbal actions and music. For example, the waltz and the piano are used as powerful images in silent films, and this approach carries over into sound films. Looking at such films as "Vertigo", "Rear Window", and "Shadow of a Doubt", Schroeder provides a unique look at the way that Hitchcock thought about cinema in musical terms.

The author focuses on the way that music has infiltrated Hitchcock's thinking as a director, from his earliest silent films to his last works. Music is an underexplored dimension in Hitchcock's works. Taking a different view from most works on Hitchcock, David Schroeder focuses on how an expanded definition of music influences Hitchcock's conception of cinema. The structure and rhythm of his films is an important addition to the critical literature on Hitchcock and our understanding of his films and approach to filmmaking. Alfred Hitchcock liked to describe his work as a director in musical terms; for some of his films, it appears that he started with an underlying musical conception, and transformed that sense of music into visual images. The director's favorite scenes lacked dialogue, and they made their impact through a combination of non-verbal actions and music. For example, the waltz and the piano are used as powerful images in silent films, and this approach carries over into sound films. Looking at such films as "Vertigo", "Rear Window", and "Shadow of a Doubt", Schroeder provides a unique look at the way that Hitchcock thought about cinema in musical terms.

The music of Tchaikovsky remains as much loved in the twenty-first century as it was a hundred years ago. But it has so much more to offer than luscious orchestration and tuneful melodies. In Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listener’s Companion, historian and scholar David Schroeder looks beyond traditional views of Tchaikovsky to explore the dramatic impact of his music by walking readers through the remarkable range of works by this great Russian composer.Drawing on a select, but highly representative, group of compositions from Tchaikovsky’s vast output, from his groundbreaking ballet Swan Lake to his great opera Eugene Onegin, Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listener’s Companion offers in-depth explorations without technical jargon. In addition to looking at his ballets and some of his operas, Schroeder probes the many other genres in which Tchaikovsky worked, from his chamber music pieces and symphonies to his other orchestral works and concertos. Throughout, Schroeder draws connections among the works, painting a fuller, more coherent picture of Tchaikovsky through his thematic interests, musical techniques, sonic signatures, and literary and cultural focuses. For context, Schroeder describes the works of personal significance for the composer through such contemporary literature as Tchaikovsky’s letters to Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy patroness whom he never met. Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listener’s Companion is for anyone who left a ballet performance whistling themes from Swan Lake or humming melodies from The Nutcracker. It is the ideal work for concertgoers, music students, opera buffs, ballet enthusiasts, and anyone who appreciates this musical master.

The invention of cinema was ingenious, so much so that virtually no-one quite knew what to do with it. In its earliest stages, especially with the advent of the feature film, it needed models, and opera proved to be especially useful in that regard. The allure of opera to cinema early in the twentieth century held up through the silent era, into sound films, through the golden age of movies, and beyond. This book explores the numerous ways – some predictable, some unexpected, and some bizarre – in which this has happened. The influence of Richard Wagner on filmmakers has been especially striking, and some have even devised visual images that seem to emerge from a kind of non-verbal Wagnerian essence – a formative, musical urge that can underlie a cinematic idea, defying explanation and remaining purely sensory. Directors like Griffith, DeMille, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Bunuel or Hitchcock have intuited this possibility. Schroeder provides a fascinating, well-researched and always entertaining account of the influence of one medium on another, and shows that opera can often be found lurking in the background (or booming in the foreground) of an impressive range of films.