Understanding the unique talents and training of musicians, veteran music career counselor Angela Myles Beeching presents a wealth of creative solutions for career advancement in the highly competitive music industry. Step-by-step instructions detail how to design promotional materials, book performances, network and access resources and assistance, jump start a stalled career, and expand your employment opportunities while remaining true to your music. Beeching untangles artist management and the recording industry, explains how to find and create performance opportunities, and provides guidance on grant writing and fundraising, day jobs, freelancing, and how to manage money, time, and stress. The companion website puts numerous up-to-date and useful internet resources at your fingertips. This essential handbook goes beyond the usual how-to, helping musicians tackle the core questions about career goals, and create a meaningful life as a professional musician. Beyond Talent is the ideal companion for students and professionals, emerging musicians and mid-career artists.

    In Enzo Restagno s extensive interview, Pärt gives an intimate description of his work and life in Soviet Estonia, his emigration, his artistic odyssey, and his worldview. Then, Arvo Pärt s compositional technique is the focus of a musicological essay by Leopold Brauneiss. Finally, Saale Kareda explores the spiritual aspects of the composer s approach to his works. Two acceptance speeches, delivered by Pärt on receiving major European prizes, complete this fascinating and illuminating portrait.

    Set in France & Germany from 1939 to 1941, Messiaen served in the French army, was captured at Verdun, and sent to Stalag 8A in Gorlitz, Germany, where he composed the great work, The Quartet for the End of Time. The enigmatic Messiaen, an avant-garde composer and also a devout Catholic, along with Etienne Pasquier, an agnostic cellist, Henri Akoka, a Jewish Trotskyite Clarinetist, and Jean le Boulaire, an atheistic violinist, become the famous quartet of Stalag 8A. These four very different men collaborated to create musical history in the most unlikely of places. Messiaen's Quartet, composed in a Stalag, transforms man's inhumanity to man with hope.Yet to the avant-garde, he was too traditional and too religious; to the traditionalists and religious, he was too avant-garde. As a result he will always stand somewhere outside of Time. The first performance of the Quartet for the End of Time at Stalag 8A in January 1941 has become, in the words of Paul Griffiths, "one of the great stories of twentieth-century music". - From the Publisher