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Learn how expert data visualization designers reason about their craft In The Art of Insight: How Great Visualization Designers Think, renowned visualization designer and educator Alberto Cairo, in conversation with several leaders in the field, delivers an inspiring exploration of how they make design choices. The book is a celebration of visualization, and a personal journey that dives into subjects like: How the professional background and life experiences of every designer shape their choices of what to visualize and how to visualize it. What designers from different countries and cultures, and working in different fileds, such as data art, data analytics, or data journalism, have in common, or how they differ from each other. How designers reflect on research, ethical reasoning, and also aesthetic judgments, to make decisions such as selecting the most appropriate ways to encode data, or the most appealing visual style. Perfect for data scientists and data journalists, The Art of Insight will also inspire artists, analysts, statisticians, and any other professional who uses data visualizations.
Want a true balm for the soul? My Travels with Wagner tells the story of how author Chris McQuaid’s journey took him from young Irish soldier suffering from PTSD, to the finest opera houses in Europe and a passion for the music of Richard Wagner. The 19th-century composer produced dramatic operas and musical works that greatly influenced the course of Western music. “I was a lover of Wagner’s music long before I came to Ireland and listened for hours on the floor of my brother’s flat in Putney, in the early 1950s. Soon afterwards I went to Bayreuth – and went on going. When I came to Ireland, I joined the Wagner Society and met Ireland's supreme Wagnerian, Chris McQuaid. I left the society when he did, in deep sympathy, and sharing his unparalleled love and knowledge. It is reflected, over again, in this book, rich in passionate concern for Richard Wagner and his unique place in Music.” – Bruce Arnold, author and journalist
This book is both a telling of operatic histories 'after' Richard Wagner, and a philosophical reflection upon the writing of those histories. Historical musicology reckons with intellectual and cultural history, and vice versa. The 'after' of the title denotes chronology, but also harmony and antagonism within a Wagnerian tradition. Parsifal, in which Wagner attempted to go beyond his achievement in the Ring, to write 'after' himself, is followed by two apparent antipodes: the strenuously modernist Arnold Schoenberg and the stheticist Richard Strauss. Discussion of Strauss's Capriccio, partly in the light of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, reveals a more 'political' work than either first acqua...
'Idiosyncratic, humorous, enlightening and written by one of the finest conductors alive ... This is the book to buy if you are going to see Wagner or listen to him at home' LITERARY REVIEW Over a distinguished career conducting some of the world's finest orchestras, Christian Thielemann has earned a reputation as the leading modern interpreter of Richard Wagner. MY LIFE WITH WAGNER chronicles his ardent personal and professional engagement with the composer whose work has shaped his thinking and feeling from early childhood. Thielemann retraces his journey with Wagner - from Berlin to Bayreuth via Venice, Hamburg and Chicago. Next he takes each opera in turn, his appraisal illuminated by a deep affinity for the music, an intimate knowledge of the scores and the inside perspective of an outstanding practitioner. And yet for all the adulation Wagner's art inspires in him, Thielemann does not shy away from unpalatable truths about the man himself, explaining why today he is venerated and reviled in equal measure. The result is a richly rewarding read for admirers of a composer who continues to fascinate long after his death.
Designed as a companion volume to 2006's Inside the Ring, which focused on the four operas comprising Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, this new volume features more than a dozen original essays focusing on all of Wagner's non-Ring operas. Part One looks at the individual operas, including Der Fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, and Parsifal. Part Two reveals the connections between Wagnerian opera and other arts, including dance, filmmaking, and fiction. Finally, Part Three examines Wagner's operas in performance, featuring interviews with mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung and heldentenor Ben Heppner, both well-known for their Wagnerian performances. The book includes many photographs from current productions by the Metropolitan Opera and other opera companies, along with bibliographies and a discography of recommended performances.
Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater is the first systematic exploration of how sung forms of drama tell stories. Through examples from opera's origins to contemporary musicals, Nina Penner examines the roles of character-narrators and how they differ from those in literary and cinematic works, how music can orient spectators to characters' points of view, how being privy to characters' inner thoughts and feelings may evoke feelings of sympathy or empathy, and how performers' choices affect not only who is telling the story but what story is being told. Unique about Penner's approach is her engagement with current work in analytic philosophy. Her study reveals not only the resources thi...
Regarded by many of his contemporaries as the greatest baseball player of all time, John Peter "Honus" Wagner enjoyed a remarkable career with the Pittsburgh Pirates. His record of 17 consecutive .300-plus seasons is a mark that will probably never be broken. He led the National League eight times in hitting, six times in slugging percentage and five times in stolen bases. Known as the Flying Dutchman, he also excelled in the field, defining the shortstop position for a generation. Though one of the original inductees in the Baseball Hall of Fame, he has often been overlooked by baseball fans and historians. A humble man whose biggest passions were hunting and fishing, the Pirate shortstop lacked the flamboyance of a Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth. He rarely smoked or drank, though he sometimes indulged in a sandlot game with the neighborhood kids. Based on contemporary newspaper accounts, family scrapbooks and correspondence, and Wagner's own vest pocket notebooks, this is the story of baseball's first superstar.
Opera in Performance elucidates the performative dimension of contemporary opera productions. What are the most striking and decisive moments in a performance? Why do we respond so strongly to stagings that transform familiar scenes, to performers’ bodily presence, and to virtuosic voices as well as ill-disposed ones? Drawing on phenomenology and performance theory, Clemens Risi explains how these moments arise out of a dialogue between performers and the audience, representation and presence, the familiar and the new. He then applies these insights in critical descriptions of his own experiences of various singers, stagings, and performances at opera houses and festivals from across the German-speaking world over the last twenty years. As the first book to focus on what happens in performance as such, this study shifts our attention to moments that have eluded articulation and provides tools for describing our own experiences when we go to the opera. This book will particularly interest scholars and students in theater and performance studies, musicology, and the humanities, and may also appeal to operagoers and theater professionals.
Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg is the only comedy among Richard Wagner's mature works. Unusually for Wagner, it is set in a historically specific time and place, sixteenth-century Nuremberg, and tells of a song contest among the town's guildsmen. It nevertheless explores the same themes of renewal, renunciation and human love as Wagner's other great music dramas. The finely drawn humanity of its principal characters and the brilliance of its musical invention make it one of the most rewarding operas in the repertory.The guide contains articles on the complex historical and political background to the opera, a detailed examination of its musical structure and a survey of its sometimes conten...
This is the third in a series of genealogical studies of German families that emigrated to the Kingdom of Hungary in the early 18th century and settled in Somogy County. Kötcse is the oldest of the three major German Lutheran parishes that evolved and numerous families from Kötcse were instrumental in the establishment of the other two. The family histories of those who settled in the parish of Somogydöröcske are included in the volume: Dörnberg: In the Shadow of the Josefsberg; and those from the parish of Ecsény in From Toleration to Expulsion that both preceded this publication. In addition to the genealogical information the author provides the historical context and other information vital to an understanding of the lifestyle, traditions and ultimate destiny of their sojourn in Hungary and beyond.