The Russian school of violin playing produced many of the twentieth century's leading violinists - from the famed disciples of Leopold Auer such as Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, and Mischa Elman to masters of the Soviet years such as David Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan. Though descendants of this school of playing are found today in every major orchestra and university, little is known about the pedagogical traditions of the Russian, and later Soviet, violin school. Following the revolution of 1917, the center of Russian violin playing and teaching shifted from St. Petersburg to Moscow, where violinists such as Lev Tseitlin, Konstantin Mostras, and Abraham Yampolsky established an influential pedagogical tradition. Founded on principles of scientific inquiry and physiology, this tradition became known as the Soviet Violin School, a component of the larger Russian Violin School. Yuri Yankelevich (1909 - 1973), a student and assistant of Abraham Yampolsky, was greatly influenced by the teachers of the Soviet School and in turn he became one of the most important pedagogues of his generation. Yankelevich taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1936 to 1973 and produced a remarkable array of superb violinists, including forty prizewinners in international competitions. Extremely interested in the methodology of violin playing and teaching, Yankelevich contributed significant texts to the pedagogical literature. Despite its importance, Yankelevich's scholarly work has been little known outside of Russia. This book includes two original texts by Yankelevich: his essay on positioning the hands and arms and his extensive research into every detail of shifting positions. Additional essays and commentaries by those close to him examine further details of his pedagogy, including tone production, intonation, vibrato, fingerings and bowings, and his general approach to methodology and selecting repertoire. An invaluable resource for any professional violinist, Yankelevich's work reveals an extremely sophisticated approach to understanding the interconnectivity of all components in playing the violin and is complete with detailed practical suggestions and broad historical context.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'A virtuosic memoir . . . elegant, frank and well-structured, that entirely resists cliche . . . The concert pianist's account of striving for musical mastery sits alongside a stirring coming of age narrative . . . readable for both diehard classical music fans and complete newcomers alike . . . A rare feat.' The Guardian A uniquely illuminating memoir of the making of a musician, in which renowned pianist Jeremy Denk explores what he learned from his teachers about classical music: its forms, its power, its meaning - and what it can teach us about ourselves. In this searching and funny memoir, based on his popular New Yorker article, renowned pianist Jeremy Denk traces an implausible journey. Life is difficult enough as a precocious, temperamental, and insufferable six-year-old piano prodigy in New Jersey. But then a family meltdown forces a move to New Mexico, far from classical music's nerve centers, and he has to please a new taskmaster while navigating cacti, and the perils of junior high school. Escaping from New Mexico at last, he meets a bewildering cast of college music teachers, ranging from boring to profound, and experiences a series of humiliations and triumphs, to find his way as one of the world's greatest living pianists, a MacArthur 'Genius,' and a frequent performer at Carnegie Hall. There are few writers working today who are willing to eloquently explore both the joys and miseries of artistic practice. Hours of daily repetition, mystifying early advice, pressure from parents and teachers who drove him on - an ongoing battle of talent against two enemies: boredom and insecurity. As we meet various teachers, with cruel and kind streaks, Denk composes a fraught love letter to the act of teaching. He brings you behind the scenes, to look at what motivates both student and teacher, locked in a complicated and psychologically perilous relationship. In Every Good Boy Does Fine, Denk explores how classical music is relevant to 'real life,' despite its distance in time. He dives into pieces and composers that have shaped him - Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms, among others - and gives unusual lessons on melody, harmony, and rhythm. Why and how do these fundamental elements have such a visceral effect on us? He tries to sum up many of the lessons he has received, to repay the debt of all his amazing teachers; to remind us that music is our creation, and that we need to keep asking questions about its purpose. 'Denk . . . has written a book that shows what it's like to be a pianist, but also what it's like to be Jeremy Denk. As if that were not enough, it is also about the elements of music, and beyond that an account of the ways in which music and life mirror each other. It is a book like none other . . . Denk weaves invisible threads connecting life and art into something very close to musical form.' Simon Callow, The New York Review of Books

Nino Rota is one of the most important composers in the history of cinema. Both popular and prolific, he wrote some of the most cherished and memorable of all film music - for The Godfather Parts I and II, The Leopard, the Zeffirelli Shakespeares, nearly all of Fellini and for more than 140 popular Italian movies. Yet his music does not quite work in the way that we have come to assume music in film works: it does not seek to draw us in and identify, nor to overwhelm and excite us. In itself, in its pretty but reticent melodies, its at once comic and touching rhythms, and in its relation to what's on screen, Rota's music is close and affectionate towards characters and events but still restrained, not detached but ironically attached. In this major new study of Rota's film career, Richard Dyer gives a detailed account of Rota's aesthetic, suggesting it offers a new approach to how we understand both film music and feeling and film more broadly. He also provides a first full account in English of Rota's life and work, linking it to notions of plagiarism and pastiche, genre and convention, irony and narrative. Rota's practice is related to some of the major ways music is used in film, including the motif, musical reference, underscoring and the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic music, revealing how Rota both conforms to and undermines standard conceptions. In addition, Dyer considers the issue of gay cultural production, Rota's favourte genre, comedy, and his productive collaboration with the director Federico Fellini.

A photographic journey, including a selection of previously unpublished images, that reveal the man 'behind the scenes' at work and play. A new and often surprising portrait of this major musical genius. Benjamin Britten was one of the most important cultural figures in England in the twentieth century. Internationally renowned as a composer, performer, and founder of the Aldeburgh Festival and English Opera Group, he had a careerspanning nearly five decades, producing a series of works such as Peter Grimes and the War Requiem that caught the public imagination, and becoming a familiar figure to worldwide concert and TV and radio audiences through his conducting and song recitals with his partner, the tenor Peter Pears. Behind this public face, however, Britten was an intensively private man, who valued perhaps more than anything the time he spent at home on the Suffolk coast, composing and enjoying a settled domestic life. Britten in Pictures celebrates the many facets of Britten's life in a major new photographic treatment timed to coincide with the composer's centenary in 2013. Using the wealth of images housed in the collections of The Britten-Pears Foundation at Aldeburgh, the book charts the curve of Britten's life, using a selection of rare and previously unpublished images to reveal him anew in all phases of his career, catching a multitude of informal glimpses of the man 'behind the scenes' at work and play as well as in more familiar formal settings. The result is a new and often surprising portrait of this major musical genius. Published in association with The Britten-Pears Foundation.

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky is the first of the celebrated series of conversation books in which Stravinsky, prompted by Robert Craft, reviewed his long and remarkable life. The composer brings the Imperial Russia of his childhood vividly into focus, at the same time scanning what were at the time the brave new horizons of Boulez and Stockhausen with extraordinary acuity.

Stravinsky answers searching questions about his musical development and recalls his association with Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet. There are sympathetic and extraordinarily illuminating reminiscences of such composers as Debussy and Ravel ('the only musicians who immediately understood "Le Sacre du Printemps'"), while mischievous squibs are directed at others, most notably perhaps against Richard Strauss, all of whose operas Stravinsky wished 'to admit ... to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality'.

The conversations are by no means confined to musical subjects, ranging uninhibitedly across all the arts: Stravinsky gives unforgettable sketches of Ibsen, Rodin, Proust, Giacometti, Dylan Thomas and T S Eliot.

'The conversations between Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft are unique in musical history. The penetration of Craft's questions and the patience and detail of Stravinsky's answers combine to produce an intimate picture of a man who has sometimes puzzled, often delighted, and always intrigued ...' "The Sunday Times"

The state of contemporary music is dizzyingly diverse in terms of style, media, traditions, and techniques. How have trends in music developed over the past decades? Music Composition in the 21st Century is a guide for composers and students that helps them navigate the often daunting complexity and abundance of resources and influences that confront them as they work to achieve a personal expression. From pop to classical, the book speaks to the creative ways that new composers mix and synthesize music, creating a music that exists along a more continuous spectrum rather than in a series of siloed practices. It pays special attention to a series of critical issues that have surfaced in recent years, including harmony, the influence of minimalism, the impact of technology, strategies of "openness," sound art, collaboration, and improvisation. Robert Carl identifies an emerging common practice that allows creators to make more informed aesthetic and technical decisions and also fosters an inherently positive approach to new methods.

British Literature and Classical Music explores literary representations of classical music in early 20th century British writing. Covering authors ranging from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence, the book examines literature produced during a period of widely proliferating philosophical, educational, and performance-oriented musical activities in both public and private settings. David Deutsch demonstrates how this proliferation caused classical music to become an increasingly vital element of British culture and a vehicle for exploring contentious issues such as social mobility, sexual freedoms, and international political rivalries. Through the use of archives of concert programs, cult novels, and letters written during the First and Second World Wars, the book examines how authors both celebrated and satirized the musicality of the lower-middle and working classes, same-sex desiring individuals, and cosmopolitan promoters of a shared European culture to depict these groups as valuable members of and - less frequently as threats to - British life.

The Process That Is the World grapples with John Cage not just as a composer, but as a philosopher advocating for an ontology of difference in keeping with the kind posited by Gilles Deleuze. Cage's philosophy is not simply a novel method for composition, but an extensive argument about the nature of reality itself, the construction of subjects within that reality, and the manner in which subjectivity and a self-creative world exist in productive tension with one another. Over the course of the study, these themes are developed in the realms of the ontology of a musical work, performance practices, ethics, and eventually a study of Cagean politics and the connection between aesthetic experience and the generation of new forms of collective becoming-together. The vision of Cage that emerges through this study is not simply that of the maverick composer or the "inventor of genius," but of a thinker and artist responding to insights about the world-as-process as it extends through the philosophical, artistic, and ethical registers: the world as potential for variance, reinvention, and permanent revolution.

At the end of WWII, themes in music shifted from soldiers' experiences at war to coming home, marrying their sweethearts, and returning to civilian life. The music itself also shifted, with crooners such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra replacing the Big Bands of years past. Country music, jazz, and gospel continued to evolve, and rhythm and blues and the new rock and roll were also popular during this Time. Music is not created without being influenced by the political events and societal changes of its time, and the Music of the Postwar Era is no exception. *includes combined musical charts for the years 1945-1959 *approximately 20 black and white images of the singers and musicians who represent the era's music

John Cage was among the first wave of post-war American artists and intellectuals to be influenced by Zen Buddhism and it was an influence that led him to become profoundly engaged with our current ecological crisis. In John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger asks: what did Buddhism mean to Cage? And how did his understanding of Buddhist philosophy impact on his representation of nature? Following Cage's own creative innovations in the poem-essay form and his use of the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching to shape his music and writing, this book outlines a new critical language that reconfigures writing and silence. Interrogating Cage's 'green-Zen' in the light of contemporary psychoanalysis and cultural critique as well as his own later turn towards anarchist politics, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics provides readers with a critically performative site for the Zen-inspired "nothing" which resides at the heart of Cage's poetics, and which so clearly intersects with his ecological writing.

What is experimental music today? This book offers an up to date survey of this field for anyone with an interest, from seasoned practitioners to curious readers. This book takes the stance that experimental music is not a limited historical event, but is a proliferation of approaches to sound that reveals much about present-day experience. An experimental work is not identifiable by its sound alone, but by the nature of the questions it poses and its openness to the sounding event. Experimentation is a way of working. It pushes past that which is known to discover what lies beyond it, finding new knowledge, forms, and relationships, or accepting a state of uncertainty. For each of these composers and sound artists, craft is developed and transformed in response to the questions they bring to their work. Scientific, perceptual, or social phenomena become catalysts in the operation of the work. These practices are not presented according to a chronology, a set of techniques, or social groupings. Instead, they are organized according to the content areas that are their subjects, including resonance, harmony, objects, shapes, perception, language, interaction, sites, and histories. Musical materials may be subject, among other treatments, to systemization, observation, examination, magnification, fragmentation, translation, or destabilization. These restless and exploratory modes of engagement have continued to develop over recent decades, expanding the scope of both musical practice and listening.

An influential twentieth-century Spanish composer, Manuel de Falla continues to generate interest as well as controversy. This biography and guide to the available literature on Falla presents the complexities of Falla while underscoring the importance of careful investigation into the often conflicting evidence surrounding his life and his musical compositions. The author has compiled a substantial amount of biographic material, much of it from primary sources housed in the Archivo Manuel de Falla at Granada. The comprehensive bibliographical material provides valuable new musicological discoveries and previously unknown compositions. Musicologists, Falla researchers, and those with an interest in Spanish contemporary music will appreciate the wealth of information researched and presented in this one volume. Included are bibliographic material from around the globe, doctoral dissertations, expositions, and press clippings. The biography offers excerpts from Falla's contemporaries. The discography includes important performances by Falla and others, as well as the most recent recordings. Falla is presented in his varied, complex guises.

A unique, comprehensive guide to Danish music, this book furnishes an extensive annotated bibliography and a directory of all organizations, institutions, and facilities in the world pertaining to 20th century Danish music. The bibliography includes printed media of composers, music, music theories, musical developments, and general musical life in Denmark in the 20th century with an emphasis on the post-Nielsen era (1931-present). This valuable reference tool encompasses books, reference sources, bibliographies, catalogs, discographies, journals, periodicals and articles in all languages, as well as rare and out-of-print editions of historical significance. The research directory is an annotated register of all organizations connected with Danish concert music, such as information services, research facilities, music organizations, and professional associations. An up-to-date directory and bibliography, this resource on Danish music is an invaluable tool benefitting musicology, ethnomusicology, and Scandinavian studies scholars and professionals as well as musicians and students interested in Danish music. In addition to the resource information provided, the text includes an overview of Danish music and historical background on influential figures and musical developments.

This engaging book discusses the colorful personalities Land beloved music of the French romantic organist-composers. Michael Murray draws vivid portraits of Aristide Cavaille-Coll (1811-1899), the greatest and most influential organ builder of his time, and of seven oilier musicians with connections to Cavaille-Coll and to onc another: Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921), Cesar Franck (1822-1890), Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937), Louis Vicine (1870-1937), Marcel Dupre' (1886-1971), Jean Langlais (1907-1991), and Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992).

The book offers to lovers of French music and culture -- and especially to student organists -- details of these composers' lives and times and of their styles and techniques. Drawing on his personal acquaintance with Messiaen, Langlais, Dupre', and other famous contemporaries, and on period documents, original accounts, early recordings, and other primary sources, Murray examines the relationship between organ building and musical composition, the nature of romanticism and classicism, and the ever-perplexing question of composer versus interpreter.

This collection of essays offers a historical reappraisal of what musical modernism was, and what its potential for the present and future could be. It thus moves away from the binary oppositions that have beset twentieth-century music studies in the past, such as those between modernism and postmodernism, between conceptions of musical autonomy and of cultural contingency and between formalist-analytical and cultural-historical approaches. Focussing particularly on music from the 1970s to the 1990s, the volume assembles approaches from different perspectives to new music with a particular emphasis on a critical reassessment of the meaning and function of the legacy of musical modernism. The authors include scholars, musicologists and composers who combine culturally, socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways.

As one of the original pioneering composers of the American experimental music movement and a well known scholar of classics, Christian Wolff has long been active as a significant thinker and elegant writer on music. With Occasional Pieces, Wolff brings together a collection of his most notable writings and interviews from 1950 to the present, shining a new light on American music of the second half of the twentieth century. The collection opens with some of his earliest writings on his craft, discussing his own proto-minimalist compositional procedures and the music and ideas that led him to develop these techniques. Organized chronologically to give a sense of the development of Wolff's thinking on music over the course of his career, some of the pieces delve into connections of music-making to social and political issues, and the concept of indeterminacy as it applies to performance, while others offer insights into the work of Wolff's notable contemporaries including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew , Dieter Schnebel, Pauline Oliveros, and Merce Cunningham. An invaluable resource for historians, composers, listeners and students alike, Occasional Pieces offers a deep dive into Christian Wolff's musical world and brings new light to the history of the American experimental movement.

Few musical genres inspire the passionate devotion of jazz. Its mystique goes far beyond the melodies and rhythms, with its key players and singers discussed by aficionados with a respect that borders on reverence. Some books on jazz offer little more than theory or dry facts, thereby relinquishing the 'essence' of the music. This book is different. One of the most influential and internationally known writers on the subject describes, through vivid personal contacts, reminiscences and zesty anecdotes, his life in jazz as a player, broadcaster and observer. Alyn Shipton recalls friendships with legendary musicians, while revealing fresh discoveries about such luminaries as Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Abbey Lincoln and Geri Allen. On Jazz powerfully evokes the atmosphere of clubs and dancehalls, and takes us behind the scenes and up onto the stage, so that this electrifying world is unforgettably spotlighted as never before.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

An annotated reference guide to Barber's life, works and achievements, it will prove valuable for anyone seeking information on him.

Believe Your Ears is the memoir of composer Kirke Mechem, whose unorthodox path to music provides a fascinating narrative. He wrote songs and played music by ear as a newspaper reporter, a touring tennis player, and a Stanford creative-writing major before studying composition and conducting at Harvard. He describes his residencies in San Francisco, Vienna, London, and Russia, and gives detailed attention to his choral music, operas, and symphonies. He writes that "the twentieth century gave us much brilliant music" but shows how atonality came to dominate the post-war period. His lyric style belongs to no particular "school," avoiding the trends, -isms, experiments, fads, and lunacies of the period. He encourages younger composers who are trying to bring back beauty, passion, and humor-even entertainment-to classical music. He asks music lovers to believe their own ears, not the lectures of "experts." Believe Your Ears is addressed to all who love classical music. Along the way, readers will meet Dimitri Shostakovich, Wallace Stegner, Billie Jean King, the Grateful Dead, Richard Rodgers, Benjamin Britten, Bill Tilden, and Aaron Copland-a who's who in Mechem's storied career.

Experimentations provides a detailed historical and theoretical analysis of the first three decades of experimental composer John Cage's aesthetic production (ca. 1940-1972). Paying particular attention to Cage's inter- and cross-disciplinary engagements with the visual arts and architecture during this period, the book sheds new light on some of Cage's most controversial and influential innovations, such as the use of noise, chance techniques, indeterminacy, electronic technologies, and computerization, as well as upon lesser known but important ideas and strategies such as transparency, multiplicity, virtuality, and actualization. Ultimately, it traces the development of Cage's avant-garde aesthetic and political project as it transformed from the emulation of historical avant-garde precedents such as futurism and the Bauhaus, to the development of important precedents for the post-World War II movements of happenings and Fluxus, to its ultimate abandonment in the aftermath of problems encountered in the vast, multimedia composition HPSCHD (1967-69).

Enrique Granados (1867-1916) was one of the first modern Spanish composers to achieve international recognition. During a 1916 visit to the United States his opera Goyescas was premiered by the Metropolitan Opera and his symphonic poem, Dante, by the Chicago Symphony. Granados was also especially admired in Paris, where he knew Saint-Saens, d'Indy, and Faure. He had composed a remarkable body of work and was also at the height of his career as a concert pianist at his untimely death while a passenger on a torpedoed British ship. The biographical study, the first in English, draws on primary sources in English, Spanish, French, Catalan, and other languages. This material is carefully documented in the extensive annotated bibliography along with contemporaneous and recent analytical studies and other sources. Granados's oeuvre presents cataloging problems due to his habit of reworking pieces, long-delayed publication, and arbitrary opus numbers. In the Works and Performances section, however, every effort has been made to offer publication dates, manuscript locations, and information on premieres. Representative arrangements of his works by other composers are also given. An appendix classifies the works by scoring. A selective discography is also provided, and all parts of the volume are fully cross-referenced and indexed. Granados is placed in the context of the international artistic scene at the turn of the century, and a chronology notes related events.

Charles Ives, perhaps the quintessential American composer of the twentieth century, drew on his childhood experiences in a small New England town in his music. Through his close relationship with his father, George, a Civil War bandmaster, Ives developed a powerful feeling for nineteenth-century rural America. This book--the first full-scale psychoanalytic biography of a major composer--examines the lives of the two men and shows how a knowledge of their relationship as father and son, teacher and pupil, is central to an understanding of Ives's work. Stuart Feder, a psychoanalyst with training in musicology, demonstrates that George exerted so pervasive an influence on Charles's creative life that Ives's music may be seen as the result of an unconscious fantasy of posthumous collaboration between father and son. The music bears George's mark, not only in its incorporation of hymn tunes, parlor ballads, Civil War marches, and other homely sources that derived from his youth, but also in its use of technical musical devices attributed to George. Moreover, the span of Ives's creative life reveals another connection to his father: Charles's musical productivity began to wane in his forties, as he approached the age at which his father died. Dr. Feder examines the influence of George's teaching and storytelling on Charles's years as a composer. Ives's later decline is traced psychologically and medically. Using Ives's music as an essential part of his data, Dr. Feder demonstrates how music can illuminate and be expressive of the inner life of its creator.

During the century of British rule of the Indian subcontinent known as the British Raj, the rulers felt the significant influence of their exotic subjects. Resonances of the Raj examines the ramifications of the intertwined and overlapping histories of Britain and India on English music in the last fifty years of the colonial encounter, and traces the effects of the Raj on the English musical imagination. Conventional narratives depict a one-way influence of Britain on India, with the 'discovery' of Indian classical music occurring only in the post-colonial era. Drawing on new archival sources and approaches in cultural studies, author Nalini Ghuman shows that on the contrary, England was both deeply aware of and heavily influenced by India musically during the Indian-British colonial encounter. Case studies of representative figures, including composers Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst, and Maud MacCarthy, an ethnomusicologist and performer of the era, integrate music directly into the cultural history of the British Raj. Ghuman thus reveals unexpected minglings of peoples, musics and ideas that raise questions about 'Englishness', the nature of Empire, and the fixedness of identity. Richly illustrated with analytical music examples and archival photographs and documents, many of which appear here in print for the first time, Resonances of the Raj brings fresh hearings to both familiar and little-known musics of the time, and reveals a rich and complex history of cross-cultural musical imaginings which leads to a reappraisal of the accepted historiographies of both British musical culture and of Indo-Western fusion.

Elinor Remick Warren's distinguished career as a composer, concert pianist, and accompanist for renowned singers spanned seventy-five years of American musical history. She began writing music in 1904 at age four. Her first published composition, a song, was accepted by G. Schirmer in 1916. Thereafter, her compositions appeared regularly through 1990. Her full oeuvre is cataloged here along with performance information, discography, and review and critical commentary, all of which is carefully documented, cross-referenced, and indexed. A biographical sketch is supplemented by a long interview conducted by the author with Warren four years before the composer's death in 1991. Among the useful appendixes are textual sources for Warren's many vocal compositions.