A composer of enormous musical innovation and influence, Marc Blitzstein remains one of the most versatile and fascinating figures in the history of American music, his creative works running the gamut from Broadway musicals and film scores to concert and chamber pieces. As an open homosexual and a prominent leftist, Blitzstein constantly pushed the boundaries of acceptability in mid-century America in both his music and his life. Award-winning music historian Howard Pollack's new biography is the first to put Blitzstein's music on equal footing with his politics, theatrical innovation, and other aspects of the composer's life. Pollack covers Blitzstein's life in full, from his childhood in Philadelphia to his violent death in Martinique at age 58. The author describes how this student of contemporary luminaries Arnold Schoenberg and Nadia Boulanger became swept up in the stormy political atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s and throughout his career walked the fine line between his formal training and his populist principles in his composition. Indeed, Blitzstein developed a unique sound that drew on everything contemporary, from the high modernism of Schoenberg to swing and jazz. Pollack captures the astonishing breadth of Blitzstein's musical language-?from politically scandalous Broadway musicals like The Cradle Will Rock and No for an Answer, to the patriotic Airborne Symphony, to lesser known early pieces, film scores, and chamber works. A fearless artist, Blitzstein translated Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera during the heyday of McCarthyism and the red scare, and, with Leonard Bernstein and Lotte Lenya, turned it into an off-Broadway sensation. Beautifully written, drawing on new interviews with friends and family of the composer, and making extensive use of new archival and secondary sources, Marc Blitzstein presents the most complete biography of this quintessentially American composer.

Unlike previous anthologizing examinations of women and musical composition, this book concentrates on the reasons why there have been, and continue to be, so few women composers. Jill Halstead focuses on the experiences of nine composers born in the twentieth century (Avril Coleridge Taylor, Grace Williams, Elizabeth Maconchy, Minna Keal, Ruth Gipps, Antoinette Kirkwood, Enid Luff, Judith Bailey and Bryony Jagger) to explore the physiological, social and political factors that have inhibited women from pursuing careers as composers. Is there a biological argument for inferior female creativity? Do social structures, such as marriage, serve to restrict potential women composers? Is the gender of a composer reflected in the music they write? If so, how would this manifest itself? The conclusions that are reached are as complex and challenging as the questions that are raised. This powerful and provocative book aims to open up debate on these issues, which have all too often be avoided by critics and musicologists whose writings have perpetuated arguments that denigrate women's ability to compose. By confronting these arguments, this study will hopefully begin a reassessment of attitudes towards women and music, so that women composers are less of a rarity by the end of the next century.

John Adams's opera, Nixon in China, is one of the most frequently performed operas in the contemporary literature. Timothy A. Johnson illuminates the opera and enhances listeners' and scholars' appreciation for this landmark work. This music-analytical guide presents a detailed, in-depth analysis of the music tied to historical and political contexts. The opera captures an important moment in history and in international relations, and a close study of it from an interdisciplinary perspective provides fresh, compelling insights about the opera. The music analysis takes a neo-Riemannian approach to harmony and to large-scale harmonic connections. Musical metaphors drawn between harmonies and their dramatic contexts enrich this approach. Motivic analysis reveals interweaving associations between the characters, based on melodic content. Analysis of rhythm and meter focuses on Adams's frequent use of grouping and displacement dissonances to propel the music forward or to illustrate the libretto. The book shows how the historical depiction in the opera is accurate, yet enriched by this operatic adaptation. The language of the opera is true to its source, but more evocative than the words spoken in 1972-due to Alice Goodman's marvelous, poetic libretto. And the music transcends its repetitive shell to become a hierarchically-rich and musically-compelling achievement.

Focusing on Messiaen's relation to history - both his own and the history he engendered - the Messiaen Perspectives volumes convey the growing understanding of his deep and varied interconnections with his cultural milieux. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences examines the genesis, sources and cultural pressures that shaped Messiaen's music. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception analyses Messiaen's compositional approach and the repercussions of his music. While each book offers a coherent collection in itself, together these complementary volumes elucidate how powerfully Messiaen was embedded in his time and place, and how his music resonates ever more today. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences presents many new primary sources, including discussion of Messiaen's birdsong cahiers, sketch and archival materials for his Prix de Rome entries and war-time Portique, along with performance practice insights and theological inspiration in works as diverse as Visions de l'Amen, Harawi, Timbres-durees and the organ Meditations. The volume places the composer within a broader historical and cultural framework than has previously been attempted, ranging from specific influences to more general contexts. As a centrepiece, the book includes an examination of the impact of one of the greatest influences upon Messiaen, Yvonne Loriod.

At this book's core is a critical edition of letters exchanged over 50 years between Anglo-Irish composer Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and the Welsh composer Grace Williams (1906-1977). These two innovative and talented women are highly regarded for their music, their professional activities and their roles in British musical life. The edition comprises around 200 letters from 1927 to 1977, none of which have been published before, along with scholarly introductions and contextualizations. Interwoven commentaries, in tandem with carefully constructed appendices, frame the letter texts. Moreover, the commentaries and introductory essays highlight and track the development of important themes and issues that characterize the study of twentieth-century British music today. This edition presents a dialogue, through both sides of a unique correspondence, offering an alternative commentary on musical and cultural developments of this period.

Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974-77, revised 1996) has consolidated its position as one of the major operatic works of the twentieth century. Few operas composed since the 1970s have received such numerous productions, bringing the eclectic score to a global audience. Famously dubbed by Ligeti as an 'anti-anti-opera', the piece is a highly ambiguous, apocalyptic fable about the human condition, fear of death and the final judgement. As the first book in English solely dedicated to discussion of this work, Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque offers new perspectives on the opera's musico-dramatic identity in the context of musical postmodernism. Peter Edwards draws on a range of modernist and postmodernist theories to explore the collision of past styles and genre models in the opera, its expressive states and its engagement with the grotesque. This is ably supported by musical analysis and extensive study of Ligeti's sketch materials held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Edwards's analyses culminate in a new approach to examining the opera's rich multiplicities, the composition of the musical material and the nature of Ligeti's relationship with the musical past. This is a key reference work in the fields of musical modernism and postmodernism, opera studies and the music of Ligeti.

Henri Dutilleux (born 1916) is one of France's leading composers, though until recently his music received more attention in the United States than in Europe. A fiercely independent composer who pursues his own musical path regardless of fashion, he has never courted the public eye, yet in this book he is revealed as a composer very much engaged with the work of other artists from all spheres. Caroline Potter's fascinating survey examines the relation of some of these artists to Dutilleux's music. In literature, the notions of memory and time found in the writings of Baudelaire and Proust have had profound effects on his compositional development, whilst the visual arts have informed his aesthetic ideas and their expression in both his music and even in his meticulously produced scores. Always a perfectionist, Dutilleux now rejects those earlier works which are not representative of his mature style. By analysing these early pieces, Dr Potter traces the evolution of his musical style, and she investigates his compositional process and use of particular referential devices in later works. Whilst his music is unequivocally of our time, Dutilleux has never lost the ability to communicate with a wide-ranging audience. Drawing on interviews with the composer, this study provides penetrating insights into this complex composer's musical world.

Long remembered chiefly for its modernist exhibitions on the South Bank in London, the 1951 Festival of Britain also showcased British artistic creativity in all its forms. In Tonic to the Nation, Nathaniel G. Lew tells the story of the English classical music and opera composed and revived for the Festival, and explores how these long-overlooked components of the Festival helped define English music in the post-war period. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Lew looks closely at the work of the newly chartered Arts Council of Great Britain, for whom the Festival of Britain provided the first chance to assert its authority over British culture. The Arts Council devised many musical programs for the Festival, including commissions of new concert works, a vast London Season of almost 200 concerts highlighting seven centuries of English musical creativity, and several schemes to commission and perform new operas. These projects were not merely directed at bringing audiences to hear new and old national music, but to share broader goals of framing the national repertory, negotiating between the conflicting demands of conservative and progressive tastes, and using music to forge new national definitions in a changed post-war world.

The conversations generated by the chapters in Music's Immanent Future grapple with some of music's paradoxes: that music of the Western art canon is viewed as timeless and universal while other kinds of music are seen as transitory and ephemeral; that in order to make sense of music we need descriptive language; that to open up the new in music we need to revisit the old; that to arrive at a figuration of music itself we need to posit its starting point in noise; that in order to justify our creative compositional works as research, we need to find critical languages and theoretical frameworks with which to discuss them; or that despite being an auditory system, we are compelled to resort to the visual metaphor as a way of thinking about musical sounds. Drawn to musical sound as a powerful form of non-verbal communication, the authors include musicologists, philosophers, music theorists, ethnomusicologists and composers. The chapters in this volume investigate and ask fundamental questions about how we think, converse, write about, compose, listen to and analyse music. The work is informed by the philosophy primarily of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and secondarily of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Jean-Luc Nancy. The chapters cover a wide range of topics focused on twentieth and twenty-first century musics, covering popular musics, art music, acousmatic music and electro-acoustic musics, and including music analysis, music's ontology, the noise/music dichotomy, intertextuality and music, listening, ethnography and the current state of music studies. The authors discuss their philosophical perspectives and methodologies of practice-led research, including their own creative work as a form of research. Music's Immanent Future brings together empirical, cultural, philosophical and creative approaches that will be of interest to musicologists, composers, music analysts and music philosophers.

The correspondence between composer John Cage and Peter Yates represents the third and final part of Cage's most significant exchanges of letters, following those with Pierre Boulez and with David Tudor. Martin Iddon's book is the first volume to collect the complete extant correspondence with his critical friend, thus completing the 'trilogy' of Cage correspondence published by Cambridge. By bringing together more than 100 letters, beginning in 1940 and continuing until 1971, Iddon reveals the dialogue within which many of Cage's ideas were first forged and informed, with particular focus on his developing attitudes to music criticism and aesthetics. The correspondence with Yates represents precisely, in alignment with Cage's fastidious neatness, the part of his letter writing in which he engages most directly with the last part of his famous tricolon, 'composing's one thing, performing's another, listening's a third'.

This ground-breaking collection of essays, which arises from a unique collaboration between leading scholars based on either side of the former Iron Curtain, is the first attempt to appraise the current state of research on the development of Russian art music since the 1917 Revolution. Part I provides a comprehensive critical overview of recent research both in Russia itself and outside it, outlining the principal changes in approach and emphasis. The remaining essays engage with topics of key importance, including: the envisionings of music's place in Soviet and post-Soviet cultural life; the effects of state controls on musical creativity and performance; musical institutions; the Russian musical diaspora; and the transition to the post-Soviet period. The contributions vividly illustrate the transformation of scholarship in the field since glasnost. In the USSR, scholarship had been seriously hindered by censorship, while in the West, Soviet music and musical life tended to be assessed from entrenched aesthetic and ideological standpoints engendered by the Cold War. The dramatically changed climate of the post-Soviet period has made possible a more objective and informed discussion of many issues, and has led scholars to question the validity of 'top-down' models of the interaction between musicians and the state that had previously been predominant. The book will be not only be a valuable resource for university courses on Russian music at undergraduate and postgraduate level, but essential reading for all those interested in Soviet and post-Soviet culture.

The story behind the scandalous first performance of one of the most influential works in the history of music, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series. On 29 May 1913, at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, a new ballet by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, received its premiere. Many of the cultural big names of Paris were there, or were rumoured to have been there: Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Picasso. When the curtain rose on a cast of frenziedly stamping dancers, a near-riot ensued, ensuring the evening would enter the folklore of modernism. While it was the dancing that triggered the mayhem, Stravinsky's score contained shocks enough, with its innovations in form, rhythm, dissonance and its sheer sonic power. The Rite of Spring would achieve recognition in its own right as a concert piece, and is now seen as one of the most influential works of the 20th century. Gillian Moore explores the cultural climate that created The Rite, tells the story of the creation of the music and the ballet and provides a guide to the music itself, showing how a scandalous novelty of 1913 became a 21st-century concert staple. As well as considering its influence on 20th-century classical composers, she probes The Rite's impact on film music (including scores for Star Wars and Jaws); its extensive influence on jazz musicians (including Charlie Parker) and by artists as diverse as Weather Report, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa and The Pet Shop Boys.

A singer in an evening dress, a grand piano. A modest-sized audience, mostly well-dressed and silver-haired, equipped with translation booklets. A program consisting entirely of songs by one or two composers. This is the way of the Lieder recital these days. While it might seem that this style of performance is a long-standing tradition, German Song Onstage demonstrates that it is not. For much of the 19th century, the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were heard in the home, salon, and, no less significantly, on the concert platform alongside orchestral and choral works. A dedicated program was rare, a dedicated audience even more so. The Lied was a genre with both more private and more public associations than is commonly recalled. The contributors to this volume explore a broad range of venues, singers, and audiences in distinct places and time periods-including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany-from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century. These historical case studies are set alongside reflections from a selection of today's leading musicians, offering insights on current Lied practices that will inform future generations of performers, scholars, and connoisseurs. Together these case studies unsettle narrow and elitist assumptions about what it meant and still means to present German song onstage by providing a transnational picture of historical Lieder performance, and opening up discussions about the relationship between history and performance today.

In Oh Joy! Oh Rapture! expert and enthusiast Ian Bradley explores the world of Gilbert and Sullivan over the last four and a half decades, looking at the way this "phenomenon" is passed from generation to generation. Taking as his starting point the expiry of copyright on the opera libretti at
the end of 1961 and using fascinating hitherto unpublished archive material, Bradley reveals the extraordinary story of the last years of the old D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, the guardian of Savoy tradition for over a hundred years, and the troubled history of its successor. He explores the rich vein
of parodies, spoofs, and spin-offs of the songs, as well as their influence on twentieth century lyricists and composers. He analyzes professional productions across the world, looks at the unique place of G&S in schools, colleges, and universities, and lovingly explores the culture of amateur
performance. He also uncovers the largely male world of the obsessive fans, those collecting memorabilia, the myriad magazines, journals, websites, and festivals devoted to G&S, and the arcane interests of some of the faithful "inner brotherhood."

for high voice and piano This beautiful collection of 14 songs for high voice offers secular pieces by some of Oxford's best-loved composers. Suitable for solo singers and unison choirs alike, each song is presented with piano accompaniment, and high-quality, downloadable backing tracks are included on a companion website. With a wonderful selection of pieces, including favourites such as Bob Chilcott's 'The Lily and the Rose' and John Rutter's 'A flower remembered', this is the perfect collection for use in recitals or for enjoying at home. Also available in a volume for low voice and piano.

The theme of this Research Companion is 'connectivity and the global reach of electroacoustic music and sonic arts made with technology'. The possible scope of such a companion in the field of electronic music has changed radically over the last 30 years. The definitions of the field itself are now broader - there is no clear boundary between 'electronic music' and 'sound art'. Also, what was previously an apparently simple divide between 'art' and 'popular' practices is now not easy or helpful to make, and there is a rich cluster of streams of practice with many histories, including world music traditions. This leads in turn to a steady undermining of a primarily Euro-American enterprise in the second half of the twentieth century. Telecommunications technology, most importantly the development of the internet in the final years of the century, has made materials, practices and experiences ubiquitous and apparently universally available - though some contributions to this volume reassert the influence and importance of local cultural practice. Research in this field is now increasingly multi-disciplinary. Technological developments are embedded in practices which may be musical, social, individual and collective. The contributors to this companion embrace technological, scientific, aesthetic, historical and social approaches and a host of hybrids - but, most importantly, they try to show how these join up. Thus the intention has been to allow a wide variety of new practices to have voice - unified through ideas of 'reaching out' and 'connecting together' - and in effect showing that there is emerging a different kind of 'global music'.

Focusing on Messiaen's relation to history - both his own and the history he engendered - the Messiaen Perspectives volumes convey the growing understanding of his deep and varied interconnections with his cultural milieux. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences examines the genesis, sources and cultural pressures that shaped Messiaen's music. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception analyses Messiaen's compositional approach and the repercussions of his music. While each book offers a coherent collection in itself, together these complementary volumes elucidate how powerfully Messiaen was embedded in his time and place, and how his music resonates ever more today. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception explores Messiaen's imprint on recent musical life. The first part scrutinizes his compositional technique in terms of counterpoint, spectralism and later piano music, while the second charts ways in which Messiaen's influence is manifest in the music and careers of Ohana, Xenakis, Murail and Quebecois composers. The third part includes case studies of Messiaen's reception in Italy, Spain and the USA. The volume also includes an ornithological catalogue of Messiaen's birds, collates information on the numerous 'tombeaux' pieces he inspired, and concludes with a Critical Catalogue of Messiaen's Musical Works.

This accessible Introduction explores both mainstream and experimental manifestations of electronic music. From early recording equipment to the most recent multimedia performances, the history of electronic music is full of interesting characters, fascinating and unusual music, and radical technology. Covering many different eras, genres and media, analyses of works appear alongside critical discussion of central ideas and themes, making this an essential guide for anyone approaching the subject for the first time. Chapters include key topics from synth pop to sound art, from electronic dance music to electrical instruments, and from the expression of pure sound to audiovisuals. Highly illustrated and with a wide selection of examples, the book provides many suggestions for further reading and listening to encourage students to begin their own experiments in this exciting field.

The Sarah Quartel Songbook brings together a selection of the composer's best-loved pieces for mixed voices, including favourites such as Sing, my Child, Voice on the Wind, and Swept Away. This is an invaluable resource both for choirs looking to explore the work of this fine choral composer for the first time and for admirers of Quartel's style hoping to find staple repertoire conveniently gathered together in one volume.

In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of composers and performers, whose intentional actions either create music as notated or manifest music as significant sound, virtual agency is inferred from the implied actions of those sounds, as they move and reveal tendencies within music-stylistic contexts. From our most basic attributions of sources for perceived energies in music, to the highest realm of our engagement with musical subjectivity, Hatten explains how virtual agents arose as distinct from actual ones, how unspecified actants can take on characteristics of (virtual) human agents, and how virtual agents assume various actorial roles. Along the way, Hatten demonstrates some of the musical means by which composers and performers from different historical eras have staged and projected various levels of virtual agency, engaging listeners imaginatively and interactively within the expressive realms of their virtual and fictional musical worlds.

While music and musical life in Nazi Germany, Vichy France, Fascist Italy, and Stalinist Russia have been widely explored, concert music in the United States during World War II has remained markedly untouched. Music in this period - whether as an instrument of propaganda or as a means of entertainment, recuperation, and uplift - pervaded homes and concert halls, army camps and government buildings, hospitals and factories. Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrew Sisters entertained civilians at home and G.I.s stationed abroad with the sounds of swing and boogie-woogie. Yet, it was the role assigned specifically to classical music that truly distinguished musical life in the wartime United States. Within U.S. spheres of influence during World War II, American and exiled European musicians alike contributed actively and self-consciously to the war effort. Indeed, on the day after Pearl Harbor, Group Theatre director Harold Clurman wrote to his cousin, Aaron Copland: "So you're back in N.Y. . . ready to defend your country in her hour of need with lectures, books, symphonies!" Copland would be one of many classical composers deeply involved in the arts as part of the war effort. Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, and Colin McPhee were all mixed up with the propaganda missions of the Office of War Information (OWI); Samuel Barber served in the US Army Air Force, writing both his Second Symphony and his Capricorn Concerto, "a rather tooting piece, with flute, oboe and trumpet chirping away" and thus fit for the times, as he assured a fellow composer. Civilian commissions for new music focused on patriotic and "martial" subjects, most famously the series of fanfares that Eugene Goossens, the chief conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, requested from American composers and from European musicians in exile: Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man is a still much performed result. Similarly, the League of Composers (financed by the Treasury Department) commissioned numerous works on patriotic themes, including Bohuslav Martin?'s Memorial to Lidice and William Grant Still's moving In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy. Classical music was heard on the radio and in film scores; it was performed in the Armed Forces; and it even played a role in the work of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS; the predecessor to the CIA), whose director, General "Wild Bill" Donovan, was known not only to support experiments about music as a cipher code, but also to involve himself in music-related affairs, including the case of smuggling Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony out of Russia. Classical music in 1940s America had a cultural relevance and ubiquitousness that is hard to imagine today, and it played an important role as a cultural counterpoint to the military effort as musicians and politicians were-in Henry Cowell's words-"shaping music for total war. No other war mobilized and instrumentalized culture in general and music in particular so totally, so consciously, and so unequivocally as World War II. Through author Annegret Fauser's in-depth, engaging, and encompassing discussion in context of this unique period in American history, Sounds of War brings to life the people and institutions that created, performed, and listened to this music. The book will have wide-ranging appeal among a general readership interested in the study of culture and war, as well as musicologists and historians studying World War II era America

Critically acclaimed biography of one of England's best loved composers, with a full discussion and evaluation of his works. Gerald Finzi is one of the best-known modern English composers. While he is especially famous as a song-writer, for his sensitive settings of poets such as Hardy and Wordsworth, he also wrote in other genres; notable works includethe exquisite cantata Dies Natalis, and his cello concerto. He also exerted a major influence in the musical world as a whole, championing the neglected Ivor Gurney and reviving eighteenth-century composers with the amateur orchestra he founded. In this lively and sensitive study of his life and works, Diana McVeagh, the renowned Elgar and Finzi scholar, has made use of interviews with the main figures in his life, correspondence with contemporaries such as Vaughan Williams, Edmund Blunden, Arthur Bliss, Edmund Rubbra, Howard Ferguson and Herbert Howells, and her access to previously unpublished material in the form of his widow, Joy's, unpublished journal. The Finzithat emerges is a multi-faceted and complex character. The author shows how he developed from a solitary, introverted youth into a man with strong views and a myriad of interests: everything from education, pacifism, vegetarianism, to the Arts and Crafts movement, the English pastoral tradition, English apple varieties, and the significance of ancestry, friendship and marriage in an artist's life. She also discusses every work within the narrative of Finzi's life, and shows what makes his output so outstanding. Diana McVeagh is the author of the highly acclaimed Elgar the Music Maker [2007]; of the entries on Elgar and Finzi for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians [1980, 2001]; and of the Finzi entry in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [2004].

A new narrative for the emergence of human music, drawing from archaeology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and developments in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. In this path-breaking book, renowned musicologist Gary Tomlinson draws from these areas to construct a new narrative for the emergence of human music. Starting at a period of human prehistory long before Homo sapiens or music existed, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that, by changing the communication and society of prehumen species, laid the foundation for musical behaviors in more recent times. He traces in Neandertals and early sapiens the accumulation and development of these capacities, and he details their coalescence into modern musical behavior across the last hundred millennia. But A Million Years of Music is not about music alone. Tomlinson builds a model of human evolution that revises our understanding of the interaction of biology and culture across evolutionary time-scales, challenging and enriching current models of our deep history. As he tells his story, he draws in other emerging human traits: language, symbolism, a metaphysical imagination and the ritual it gives rise to, complex social structure, and the use of advanced technologies. Tomlinson's model of evolution allows him to account for much of what makes us a unique species in the world today and provides a new way of understanding the appearance of humanity in its modern form.

The life of an extraordinary artist and intellect: the composer, author and socialite Alma Mahler, whose life spanned one of the most captivating and dramatic periods in history Alma Mahler was once at the epicentre of Vienna's artistic and intellectual life. A talented composer in her own right, she was open, generous, remarkably creative, curious, challenging and zealous in her pursuit of love. Artists, architects, musicians and writers jostled to join her coterie. Gustav Klimt was her first kiss; Gustav Mahler her first husband. But her life was haunted by tragedy, and the support and inspiration that Alma gave to the men she loved came at the heavy price of her own artistic fulfilment. Drawing extensively on previously unpublished diaries and letters, Cate Haste illuminates the passionate spirit of one of history's most complex and charismatic muses, a modern woman with an elemental vitality that could scarcely be contained by her century - who will live forever in the art she created and inspired.

The lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women from a stunning debut biographer. 'Magnificent.' Kate Mosse 'Riveting.' Antonia Fraser 'A breath of fresh air.' Kate Molleson 'Fascinating.' Alexandra Harris 'Wonderful.' Claire Tomalin 'Splendid.' Miranda Seymour 'Remarkable.' Fiona Maddocks 'Pioneering.' Andrew Motion Ethel Smyth (b.1858): Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette. Rebecca Clarke (b.1886): This talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty was one of the first women ever hired by a professional orchestra, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation. Dorothy Howell (b.1898): A prodigy who shot to fame at the 1919 Proms, her reputation as the 'English Strauss' never dented her modesty; on retirement, she tended Elgar's grave alone. Doreen Carwithen (b.1922): One of Britain's first woman film composers who scored Elizabeth II's coronation film, her success hid a 20-year affair with her married composition tutor. In their time, these women were celebrities. They composed some of the century's most popular music and pioneered creative careers; but today, they are ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten - until now. Leah Broad's magnificent group biography resurrects these forgotten voices, recounting lives of rebellion, heartbreak and ambition, and celebrating their musical masterpieces. Lighting up a panoramic sweep of British history over two World Wars, Quartet revolutionises the canon forever.