These letters cover all aspects of Warlock's music, and give a vivid glimpse of the early 20th-century musical and artistic world. The composer Philip Heseltine (1894-1930), better known by his pseudonym 'Peter Warlock', is one of the most fascinating characters in twentieth-century English music. Educated at Eton and Oxford, yet musically largely self-taught, he is considered by many to be one of the great English song-writers. But besides being a composer, he was also an important pioneer editor of early music as well as the author of a number of books and numerous articles for newspapers and journals. His eccentric life-style, his outspoken comments and writings about music, as well as the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, have all ensured that the 'Warlock legend' has not lost its fascinationover the years. During his short life he was a prolific and highly articulate letter writer and some thousand of his letters have survived. These the Warlock scholar and authority Barry Smith has edited with copious annotations and footnotes as well as generous background material.

Best remembered for his operas and his War Requiem, Benjamin Britten's radical politics and his sexuality have also ensured that he remains a controversial public figure. Journeying Boy is a selection of his diaries that offer the reader an unseen insight into this complex man. Encompassing the years 1928-1938, they explore some key periods of Britten's life - his early compositions, his education first under composer Frank Bridge and then at the Royal College of Music, an unhappy but productive period studying under John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and his reluctant and often painful process of parting from the warm, safe environment of his family home and his beloved mother. The diaries cast light on an often misrepresented musician whose technique, originality and musical prowess have entranced audiences for generations and who continues to inspire composers and musicians around the world.

Acceleration, deceleration, and the inconsistent nature of time are at the heart Piano Trio "The Chronophage" by Tom Coult. Throughout the 17-minute work, cello and piano lines constantly speed up or slow down relative to one another, whilst the violin has only one role - to accelerate throughout. The listener feels clunky gear changes, as previously reliable demarcations of time seem unsteady - even unsafe. The trio's subtitle comes from The Corpus Clock in Cambridge, a clock that plays with exactly this perception. Completely accurate every five minutes, the clock lurches unevenly from second to second, the grinding mechanism driven by the terrifying metal insect escapement known as the 'Chronophage' (from the Greek meaning 'time-eater').

NOMINATED FOR THE JAZZ JOURNALISTS ASSOCIATION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 WINNER OF THE PRESTO JAZZ BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 An articulate, scrupulously researched account based on first-hand information, this book presents Brubeck's contribution to music with the critical insight that it deserves - ***** BBC Music Magazine This is the writing about jazz that we've been waiting for - Mike Westbrook The sheer descriptive verve, page after page, made me want to listen to every single musical example cited. A major achievement - Stephen Hough 'Definitive . . . remarkable. Clark writes intelligently and joyously.' - Mojo In 2003, music journalist Philip Clark was granted unparalleled access to jazz legend Dave Brubeck. Over the course of ten days, he shadowed the Dave Brubeck Quartet during their extended British tour, recording an epic interview with the bandleader. Brubeck opened up as never before, disclosing his unique approach to jazz; the heady days of his 'classic' quartet in the 1950s-60s; hanging out with Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis; and the many controversies that had dogged his 66-year-long career. Alongside beloved figures like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, Brubeck's music has achieved name recognition beyond jazz. But finding a convincing fit for Brubeck's legacy, one that reconciles his mass popularity with his advanced musical technique, has proved largely elusive. In Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time, Clark provides us with a thoughtful, thorough, and long-overdue biography of an extraordinary man whose influence continues to inform and inspire musicians today. Structured around Clark's extended interview and intensive new research, this book tells one of the last untold stories of jazz, unearthing the secret history of 'Take Five' and many hitherto unknown aspects of Brubeck's early career - and about his creative relationship with his star saxophonist Paul Desmond. Woven throughout are cameo appearances from a host of unlikely figures from Sting, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, and Keith Emerson, to John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varese. Each chapter explores a different theme or aspect of Brubeck's life and music, illuminating the core of his artistry and genius.

Biographical insights into two outstanding musical personalities and commentary on the vitality of the British musical scene of the period. The letters that passed, on an almost daily basis, between the composers Howard Ferguson and Gerald Finzi provide not only a fascinating commentary on the British musical scene of the period 1926-1956, but also what amounts to a unique dual-biography of two remarkable, though very different, personalities. Their lives, their loves, their enthusiasms and their prejudices are laid bare with a rare degree of candour, so that we learn not only what it was liketo be witness to an art that was enjoying an unprecedented explosion of creative vitality, but also how they came to explore and consolidate their own exceptional talents. Biographical background narratives provide links that make clear what intimate correspondents inevitably take for granted, and explanations are given for references that the passage of time has made obscure. Their lives are thus revealed in all their diversity - tragedy and comedy, achievement and frustration, justifiable pride and unreasoning prejudice playing equal parts in this absorbing tale of two outstanding musical personalities of the twentieth century.

Glasgow has always been known for its live music, and at the heart of any music community it is the live venues and buildings that are important, and play host to local and touring acts. One of the main reasons for Glasgow's continued blossoming as a cultural capital is the infrastructure of clubs and buildings available for live performances. This book in glorious colour throughout tells the history of the city's music through Glasgow's famous landmark buildings by people best placed to tell those stories - music writers and journalists and historians. This book is a collection of memories and stories about the buildings that hosted stars such as Michael Jackson, Joan Armatrading, Joy Division, among many thousands more - ranging from the Apollo to the Pavilion, Piping Centre, Sub Club and King Tut's.

Amiri Baraka is unquestionably the most recognized leader of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the key literary and cultural figures of the postwar United States. While Baraka's political and aesthetic stances changed considerably over the course of his career, Brick City Vanguard demonstrates the continuity in his thinking about the meaning of black music in the material, psychic, and ideological development of black people. Drawing on primary texts, paratexts (including album liner notes), audio and visual recordings, and archival sources, James Smethurst takes a new look at how Baraka's writing on and performance of music envisioned the creation of an African American people or nation, as well as the growth and consolidation of a black working class within that nation, that resonates to this day. This vision also provides a way of understanding the encounter of black people with what has been called ""the urban crisis"" and a projection of a liberated black future beyond that crisis.

Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer - now in paperback Benjamin Britten was Britain's greatest twentieth-century composer, who broke decisively with figures such as Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. Paul Kildea's biography has been acclaimed as the definitive account of Britten's extraordinary life, exploring his deeply held and controversial pacifism; his complex forty-year relationship with Peter Pears; and his creation of an artistic community in Aldeburgh. Above all, however, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into its unique alchemy as we are ever likely to go. PAUL KILDEA is a writer and conductor who has performed many of the Britten works he writes about, in opera houses and concert halls from Sydney to Hamburg. His previous books include Selling Britten (2002) and (as editor) Britten on Music (2003). He was Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival between 1999 and 2002 and subsequently Artistic Director of the Wigmore Hall in London, and lives in Berlin. 'Must now rank as the standard work' Financial Times 'Indispensable ... This is a masterly, highly readable account and the most comprehensive to date of the life and work of one of the 20th century's great musical figures' Barry Millington, Evening Standard '[A] wise, cautious, challenging book ... Kildea's verbal explorations of the music are done with level-headed sensitivity leavened by a quirky lightness of touch' Alexandra Harris, New Statesman

Carlos Chavez (1899-1978) is the central figure in Mexican music of the twentieth century and among the most eminent of all Latin American modernist composers. An enfant terrible in his own country, Chavez was an integral part of the emerging music scene in the United States in the 1920s. His highly individual style--diatonic, dissonant, contrapuntal--addressed both modernity and Mexico's indigenous past. Chavez was also a governmental arts administrator, founder of major Mexican cultural institutions, and conductor and founder of the Orquesta Sinfonica de Mexico. Carlos Chavez and His World brings together an international roster of leading scholars to delve into not only Chavez's music but also the history, art, and politics surrounding his life and work. Contributors explore Chavez's vast body of compositions, including his piano music, symphonies, violin concerto, late compositions, and Indianist music. They look at his connections with such artistic greats as Aaron Copland, Miguel Covarrubias, Henry Cowell, Silvestre Revueltas, and Paul Strand. The essays examine New York's modernist scene, Mexican symphonic music, portraits of Chavez by major Mexican artists of the period, including Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo, and Chavez's impact on El Colegio Nacional. A quantum leap in understanding Carlos Chavez and his milieu, this collection will stimulate further work in Latin American music and culture. The contributors are Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Amy Bauer, Leon Botstein, David Brodbeck, Helen Delpar, Christina Taylor Gibson, Susana Gonzalez Aktories, Anna Indych-Lopez, Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus, James Krippner, Rebecca Levi, Ricardo Miranda, Julian Orbon, Howard Pollack, Leonora Saavedra, Antonio Saborit, Stephanie Stallings, and Luisa Vilar Paya. Bard Music Festival 2015: Carlos Chavez and His World Bard College August 7-9 and August 14-16, 2015

"Alban Berg and His World" is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese musical tradition and a love of lyric utterance, the emotional intensity of opera, and the expressive nuance of late-Romantic tonal practice.

The essays in this collection explore the specific qualities of Berg's brand of musical modernism, and present newly translated letters and documents that illuminate his relationship to the politics and culture of his era. Of particular significance are the first translations of Berg's newly discovered stage work "Night (Nocturne)," Hermann Watznauer's intimate account of Berg's early years, and the famous memorial issue of the music periodical 23. Contributors consider Berg's fascination with palindromes and mirror images and their relationship to notions of time and identity; the Viennese roots of his distinctive orchestral style; his links to such Viennese contemporaries as Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; and his attempts to maneuver through the perilous shoals of gender, race, and fascist politics.

The contributors are Antony Beaumont, Leon Botstein, Regina Busch, Nicholas Chadwick, Mark DeVoto, Douglas Jarman, Sherry Lee, and Margaret Notley.

Bard Music Festival:

Berg and His World
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
August 13-15, 2010 and August 20-22, 2010

A woman wearing a ballgown singing in the snow for returning ski troops; a technician's tears ruining a master recording of a new wartime song; fresh recruits spontaneously standing and doffing their caps to a new song, thereby creating the new wartime anthem. This well researched, multi-faceted book depicts the relationship between song and society during WWII in the USSR. Chapter topics range from the creation and distribution of the songs to how the public received and shaped them. The body of song that came out of that era created a true cultural legacy which reflected both the hearts of the individuals fighting as well as the narrative of the party and state in bringing the nation to victory.

Those whose thoughts of musical theatre are dominated by the Broadway musical will find this book a revelation. From the 1850s to the early 1930s, when urban theatres sought to mount glamorous musical entertainment, it was to operetta that they turned. It was a form of musical theatre that crossed national borders with ease and was adored by audiences around the world. This collection of essays by an array of international scholars examines the key figures in operetta in many different countries. It offers a critical and historical study of the widespread production of operetta and of the enthusiasm with which it was welcomed. Furthermore, it challenges nationalistic views of music and approaches operetta as a cosmopolitan genre. This Cambridge Companion contributes to a widening appreciation of the music of operetta and a deepening knowledge of the cultural importance of operetta around the world.

This volume shows Charles Ives in the context of his world in a number of revealing ways. Five new essays examine Ives's relationships to European music and to American music, politics, business, and landscape. J. Peter Burkholder shows Ives as a composer well versed in four distinctive musical traditions who blended them in his mature music. Leon Botstein explores the paradox of how, in the works of Ives and Mahler, musical modernism emerges from profoundly antimodern sensibilities. David Michael Hertz reveals unsuspected parallels between one of Ives's most famous pieces, the Concord Piano Sonata, and the piano sonatas of Liszt and Scriabin. Michael Broyles sheds new light on Ives's political orientation and on his career in the insurance business, and Mark Tucker shows the importance for Ives of his vacations in the Adirondacks and the representation of that landscape in his music.

The remainder of the book presents documents that illuminate Ives's personal life. A selection of some sixty letters to and from Ives and his family, edited and annotated by Tom C. Owens, is the first substantial collection of Ives correspondence to be published. Two sections of reviews and longer profiles published during his lifetime highlight the important stages in the reception of Ives's music, from his early works through the premieres of his most important compositions to his elevation as an almost mythic figure with a reputation among some critics as America's greatest composer.

This thematic examination of Britten's operas focuses on the way that ideology is presented on stage. To watch or listen is to engage with a vivid artistic testament to the ideological world of mid-twentieth-century Britain. But it is more than that, too, because in many ways Britten's operas continue to proffer a diagnosis of certain unresolved problems in our own time. Only rarely, as in Peter Grimes, which shows the violence inherent in all forms of social and psychological identification, does Britten unmistakably call into question fundamental precepts of his contemporary ideology. This has not, however, prevented some writers from romanticizing Britten as a quiet revolutionary. This book argues, in contrast, that his operas, and some interpretations of them, have obscured a greater social and philosophical complicity that it is timely - if at the same time uncomfortable - for his early twenty-first-century audiences to address.

Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky is an analytical and historical study of the twentieth century's most influential figures, by Milton Babbitt, Arthur Berger, Edward T. Cone, Robert Craft, Claudio Spies, and others; with new bibliographic and discographic studies prepared especially for this revised edition. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In the aftermath of World War I, a sense of impasse and thwarted promise shaped the political and cultural spheres in Britain. Writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Hilda Doolittle, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis were among the literary figures who responded by pursuing vividness, autonomy and impersonality in their work. Yet the extent to which these practices were reflected in ideas about music from within the same milieu has remained unrecognised. Uncovering the work of composer-critics who worked alongside these figures - including Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), Cecil Gray and Kaikhosru Sorabji - Sarah Collins traces the shared tendencies of literary and musical modernisms in interwar Britain. Collins explores the political investments underpinning these tendencies, as well as the influence of English Nietzscheanism and related intellectual currents, arguing that a particular conception of the self, history, and the public characterised an ethos of 'lateness' within this milieu.

Visionary composer, theorist, and creator of musical instruments, Harry Partch (1901-1974) was a leading figure in the development of an indigenously American contemporary music. A pioneer in his explorations of new instruments and new tunings, Partch created multimedia theater works that combine sight and sound in a compelling synthesis. He is acknowledged as a major inspiration to postwar experimental composers as diverse as Gyoergy Ligeti, Lou Harrison, Philip Glass, and Laurie Anderson, and his book Genesis of a Music, first published in 1949, is now considered a classic. This book is the first to tell the complete story of Partch's life and work. Drawing on interviews with many of Partch's associates and on the complete archives of the Harry Partch Estate, Bob Gilmore provides a full and sympathetic portrait of this extraordinary creative artist. He describes Partch's complicated relationships with friends, patrons, the musical establishment, and the world at large. He traces Partch's upbringing in the remote desert towns of the Southwest, his explosive encounter with formal music education in Los Angeles, and his revolutionary course as a composer that began with an interest in the musicality of speech patterns. After immersing himself in hobo subculture during the Depression, Partch came to occupy a lonely and uncompromising position as a cultural outsider. Richly fascinating in themselves, Partch's compositions, writings, and life also have much to reveal about American society and the creative impulses of the artistic avant-garde.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has a reputation as one of the leading composers of the twentieth century. But the story of his controversial role in history is still being told, and his full measure as a musician still being taken. This collection of essays goes far in expanding the traditional purview of Shostakovich's world, exploring the composer's creativity and art in terms of the expectations--historical, cultural, and political--that forged them.

The collection contains documents that appear for the first time in English. Letters that young "Miti" wrote to his mother offer a glimpse into his dreams and ambitions at the outset of his career. Shostakovich's answers to a 1927 questionnaire reveal much about his formative tastes in the arts and the way he experienced the creative process. His previously unknown letters to Stalin shed new light on Shostakovich's position within the Soviet artistic elite.

The essays delve into neglected aspects of Shostakovich's formidable legacy. Simon Morrison provides an in-depth examination of the choreography, costumes, decor, and music of his ballet "The Bolt" and Gerard McBurney of the musical references, parodies, and quotations in his operetta "Moscow, Cheryomushki." David Fanning looks at Shostakovich's activities as a pedagogue and the mark they left on his students' and his own music. Peter J. Schmelz explores the composer's late-period adoption of twelve-tone writing in the context of the distinctively "Soviet" practice of serialism. Other contributors include Caryl Emerson, Christopher H. Gibbs, Levon Hakobian, Leonid Maximenkov, and Rosa Sadykhova. In a provocative concluding essay, Leon Botstein reflects on the different ways listeners approach the music of Shostakovich."

Once thought to be a provincial composer of only passing interest to eccentrics, Leos Janacek (1854-1928) is now widely acknowledged as one of the most powerful and original creative figures of his time. Banned for all purposes from the Prague stage until the age of 62, and unable to make it even out of the provincial capital of Brno, his operas are now performed in dynamic productions throughout the globe. This volume brings together some of the world's foremost Janacek scholars to look closely at a broad range of issues surrounding his life and work. Representing the latest in Janacek scholarship, the essays are accompanied by newly translated writings by the composer himself.

The collection opens with an essay by Leon Botstein who clarifies and amplifies how Max Brod contributed to Janacek 's international success by serving as "point man" between Czechs and Germans, Jews and non-Jews. John Tyrrell, the dean of Janacek scholars, distills more than thirty years of research in "How Janacek Composed Operas," while Diane Paige considers Janacek's liason with a married woman and the question of the artist's muse. Geoffrey Chew places the idea of the adulterous muse in the larger context of Czech fin de siecle decadence in his thoroughgoing consideration of Janacek's problematic opera Osud. Derek Katz examines the problems encountered by Janacek's satirically patriotic "Excursions of Mr. Broucek" in the post-World War I era of Czechoslovak nationalism, while Paul Wingfield mounts a defense of Janacek against allegations of cruelty in his wife's memoirs. In the final essay, Michael Beckerman asks how much true history can be culled from one of Janacek's business cards.

The book then turns to writings by Janacek previously unpublished in English. These not only include fascinating essays on Naturalism, opera direction, and Tristan and Isolde, but four impressionistic chronicles of the "speech melodies" of daily life. They provide insight into Janacek's revolutionary method of composition, and give us the closest thing we will ever have to the "heard" record of a Czech pre-war past-or any past, for that matter."

This is a comprehensive guide to Britten's work, aimed both at the nonspecialist and the music student. It sheds light on both the composer's stylistic and personal development, offering new interpretations of his operatic works and discussing his characteristic working methods. A distinguished team of contributors include some who worked with the composer during his lifetime, as well as leading representatives of the younger generation of Britten scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.

Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky is an analytical and historical study of the twentieth century's most influential figures, by Milton Babbitt, Arthur Berger, Edward T. Cone, Robert Craft, Claudio Spies, and others; with new bibliographic and discographic studies prepared especially for this revised edition. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Dmitry Shostakovich was one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century - a musician who adapted as no other to the unique pressures of his age. By turns vilified and feted by Stalin during the Great Purge, Shostakovich twice came close to the whirlwind of political repression and he remained under political surveillance all his life, despite the many privileges and awards heaped upon him in old age. Yet Shostakovich had a remarkable ability to work with, rather than against, prevailing ideological demands, and it was this quality that ensured both his survival and his posterity. Pauline Fairclough's absorbing new biography offers a vivid portrait that goes well beyond the habitual cliches of repression and suffering. Featuring quotations from previously unpublished letters as well as rarely-seen photographs, Fairclough provides a fresh insight into the music and life of a composer whose legacy, above all, was to have written some of the greatest and most cherished music of the last century.