Reviews for Alfred's MAX TAB Guitar Complete: Book & DVD (Sleeve)

The average rating for Alfred's MAX TAB Guitar Complete: Book & DVD (Sleeve) based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-10-05 00:00:00 Thomas Eriksen This book by Michael Downes offers a detailed analysis of two of Jonathan Harvey's settings of Indian spiritual poetry: Song Offerings for soprano and ensemble on the eponymous collection by Rabindranath Tagore (1984), and White as Jasmine for soprano and large orchestra on the Tamil ascetics Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu (1999). As the two pieces both foreground the voice and share similar spiritual preoccupations, it makes sense to examine them together. However, they were written over a decade apart in different periods of the composer's career. Downes helpfully shows how the two pieces feature similar techniques as in other works of the respective period. Thus, Song Offerings plays much with symmetrically, the music radiating outward from a central pitch, i.e. the same "the bass moves into the middle" soundworld which Harvey had introduced in his ensemble piece Bhakti some years before. White as Jasmine, on the other hand, is an extremely complex piece for all that it is only 16 minutes long, and Downes examines the role of electronics, the use of the same additive spectralist technique which Harvey had first employed in Advaya for cello, and the composer's new interest in expressing transcendent states through various means. As I write this, each of these two pieces has received only a single commercial recording (Song Offerings on the Nimbus label, White as Jasmine on NMC), and sadly these are rather poor recordings in terms of sound quality. I have tended to discount these two works because of that, but I am happy to have come across Downes' book. Armed with his detailed investigation of the pieces and suggestions on what to watch out for, I have been able to make the best of an unideal situation and come to enjoy the works, even as I do hope for superior recordings in future. Bookending the chapters analyzing the two pieces is an introduction that describes Harvey's career to date and aesthetic and spiritual concerns, and a closing chapter that quickly describes some of Harvey's pieces from the new millennium that take some of the features of White as Jasmine further.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-11-19 00:00:00 John Reske Mau bisa keyboard