Long ago and without fail, three characters brought delight to audiences: the pantalooned Pierrot; Columbine, ever saucy and adroit; and Harlequin her lover, full of good natured drolleries and amusing tricks. From the legacy left by French pantomime and the Italian commedia dell'arte, this original story in pictures has been fashioned, with a special kind of ending to transcend time. The words, as in all mime, are in the eyes of the listener.

Simple Pierrot dreams of his saucy sweetheart Columbine in this original story featuring the traditional comic characters.

Develop music appreciation among your students with folk songs, rhythmic poems, stories with musical themes, and picture books with strong musical links. Designed for teaching flexibility, these lessons can be adapted according to a teacher's level of musical proficiency and time limitations. Sections cover rhythm, melody, form, instruments, music history, and dance forms, with lively activities that involve singing, playing instruments, chanting, and movement. These are perfect for the nonmusician who is teaching music as well as the seasoned music specialist.

Memoir of Bethany Beardslee, the iconic American soprano known as the composer's singer.

While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European–Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.

Mellers (composer and professor emeritus, University of York) begins with the confusion of the (unfamiliar) forest within, audible in Wagner's late and Shoenberg's early works, in Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet, and Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande. The next section, The Forest Without, examines Charles Koechlin's Le Foret Feerique and Milhaud's Le Boeuf Sur le Toit which embrace the real jungle without and the imaginative jungle within. Part 3 shows Villa-Lobos and Carlos Chavez connecting, as Mellers puts it, "the jungle within the mind and the asphalt jungle of a rapidly industrialized metropolis." Part four explores interrelationships between wilderness and machine through the work of Carl Ruggles, Varese, Partch, Reich, and the Australian, Peter Sculthorpe. Finally, the erasure of border between wilderness and civilization is the focus in works by Ellington and Gershwin. Suitable for both musicians and non-musicians. c. Book News Inc.