Love it or loathe it, few would disagree that the music of Harrison Birtwistle stands amongst the most assured, original and challenging music ever to have been produced by a British composer. While for some the uncompromisingly modernist surface of his music can be an obstacle to closer acquaintance, for others, it is Birtwistle's articulation of deep aspects of the human psyche that continues to excite and fascinate. In this book, Jonathan Cross - a leading commentator on contemporary music - aims to uncover the sources of Birtwistle's thinking, and to present a critical account of his musical, dramatic and aesthetic preoccupations through an examination of such topics as theatre, myth, ritual, pastoral, pulse and line. He offers a range of contexts within which the music can be understood so that the curious and the initiated alike may be drawn towards new and enriching experiences of the extraordinarily powerful music of Harrison Birtwistle.

for SA and piano I remember sets a text reflecting on the wonder of the natural world and the people who shape our lives. The stirring melody calls to mind the folksong tradition, and is underpinned by a gently flowing piano accompaniment. The middle section brings a contrast of tonality, with the altos accompanying the sopranos' melodic line, before the beguiling melody of the opening returns to bring the setting to a poignant close.

for SSA unaccompanied Songbird sets an evocative text by the composer describing songbirds that spin tunes of gold. The catchy, colourful melody is first presented by tutti voices, and is then woven through the vocal parts, often to scat accompaniment.

for SAATBB unaccompanied This touching piece sets Yeats' beautiful words describing the love of a parent for their child. Switching between major and minor tonalities, A Cradle Song is quiet and understated, with sensitive a cappella scoring that makes the sentiments seem all the more real. This is an impressive and sophisticated debut from Swedish singer and composer Joel Nilson.

for SAATBB unaccompanied The signature tune for the award-winning Swedish a cappella group Vocado, this poignant love song is characterized by mixed messages: the lover wants to leave, but can't quite bring himself to walk out the door. The flavour of the music reflects the dilemma, with emotions ranging from muted acceptance in the verses to highly charged indecision in the passionate chorus. With classic a cappella rhythms and textures, along with melodies that will stay with you for days, this dual-language publication in the Voice Junction series is perfect for vocal groups and choirs singing in Swedish or English. Hall mig kvar has been recorded by Vocado on the CD 'Northern Lights'.

An updated edition of the first book on this subject, covering influences, key works and reception history. From the start of the English musical renaissance, British composers were preoccupied with Germanic principles of sonata writing, despite their subsequent exposure to influences outside this tradition, among them late romantic music, French impressionism, Russian nationalism, Scriabin, British folk music, African-American music and neo-classicism. Regardless of education - or the climate, fully explored here, at the Royal College and the Royal Academy - the Austro-German tradition proved inescapable. This first study of the subject offers detailed commentary on key works, with plentiful musical examples, revealing influences and techniques and demonstrating composers' attitudes towards the genre. The reception history of the piano sonata is also discussed, to build up a picture of public musical taste. The appendix contains transcripts of interviews, including one with Sir Michael Tippett; these are particularly significant, as most of the subjects are now dead. Also included is a useful reference section, cataloguing the sonatas, as well as a full discography chronicling the recording history of each sonata, updated in 2012. Lisa Hardy studied music, mathematics and education at the University of Keele and researched her PhD at Goldsmiths' College, London, under the supervision of Professor Peter Dickinson. She works as a freelance piano and flute teacher and piano accompanist in the North East of England and teaches music at Durham High School for Girls.

The Concerto for Bass Tuba and Orchestra was composed in 1953-4 to mark the 50th anniversary of the formation of the LSO and was written for the orchestra's principal tuba player, Philip Catelinet. It was the first major concerto to be written for the instrument, and remains today the outstanding work of its kind. This new edition is based on all extant sources and contains full textual notes and a discussion of the editorial method. Notable additions are the inclusion of two sets of phrasing for the Romanza-one from the first publication, largely influenced by Catelinet, and the other from Vaughan Williams's manuscript-and the original cadenza to the first movement. The arrangement for tuba and piano has been updated in light of the research carried out by David Matthews, and all orchestral parts have been revised.

for SATB (with divisions) unaccompanied This reflective setting of an evocative text by Charles Bennett uses pastoral and romantic imagery to depict the beauty of a life free from the desire for worldly possessions. The music draws on the words' dream-like character, with lilting scat rhythms and interweaving vocal lines building to a stirring climax before the piece gradually fades as the idyllic vision is enveloped in sleep. With sacred and secular resonances, Marriage to My Lady Poverty is ideal for performance in both services and concerts.

A critical edition of this major work from 1959-1960. The score has been entirely re-set, and new orchestral parts on hire produced to match the new edition. A full score is also available on sale.

for SATB (with divisions) and organ This Easter anthem sets the second part of George Herbert's poem 'Easter', famously set in full by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his Five Mystical Songs. The opening section has an almost pastoral feel, with the sopranos and altos presenting a lilting melody in thirds, underpinned by a flowing organ accompaniment. The anthem becomes progressively more expansive and reflective, with rich textures and harmonies, before drawing to a profound close.

Modernist Mysteries: Persephone is a landmark study that will move the field of musicology in important new directions. The book presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere of the melodrama Persephone at the Paris Opera on April 30th, 1934, engaging with the collaborative, transnational nature of the production. Author Tamara Levitz demonstrates how these collaborators-- Igor Stravinsky, Andre Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Ida Rubinstein, among others-used the myth of Persephone to perform and articulate their most deeply held beliefs about four topics significant to modernism: religion, sexuality, death, and historical memory in art. In investigating the aesthetic and political consequences of the artists' diverging perspectives, and the fall-out of their titanic clash on the theater stage, Levitz dismantles myths about neoclassicism as a musical style. The result is a revisionary account of modernism in music in the 1930s.
As a result of its focus on the collaborative performance, this book differs from traditional accounts of musical modernism and neoclassicism in several ways. First and foremost, it centers on the performance of modernism, highlighting the theatrical, performative, and sensual. Levitz places Christianity in the center of the discussion, and questions the national distinctions common in modernist research by involving a transnational team of collaborators. She further breaks new ground in shifting the focus from "history" to "memory" by emphasizing the commemorative nature of neoclassic listening rituals over the historicist stylization of its scores, and contends that modernists captured on stage and in philosophical argument their simultaneous need and inability to mourn the past. The book as a whole counters the common criticism that neoclassicism was a "reactionary" musical style by suggesting a more pluralistic, ambivalent, and sometimes even progressive politics, and reconnects musical neoclassicism with a queer classicist tradition extending from Winckelmann through Walter Pater to Gide. Modernist Mysteries concludes that 1930s modernists understood neoclassicism not as formalist compositional approaches but rather as a vitalist art haunted by ghosts of the past and promissory visions of the future."

for upper voices, SATB, and piano or orchestra The Seeds of Stars is a resplendent setting of a philosophical text by Charles Bennett. The rippling piano part provides a shimmering accompaniment to radiant and expressive vocal lines, and Chilcott effectively contrasts upper- and mixed-voice sections with stirring passages for all voices. Reflecting the vivid imagery of the text, the upper voices soar above the choir during climatic moments, but also bring the piece to its gentle, profound close. An orchestral accompaniment is available on hire/rental.

for SAATTB unaccompanied Setting a heart-breaking wartime text by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Pott has created a beautifully poignant piece befitting any Remembrance occasion. Written in memory of Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, a bomb disposal expert killed in 2009 during the Afghanistan conflict, Lament embodies a sense of timeless commemoration. Combining this with Pott's striking harmonic language and deftly interweaving vocal lines results in a highly compelling work, both emotionally and musically.

Volume One of these remarkable letters and diaries opens with a letter from Britten aged nine to his formidable mother, Edith. Music is already at the centre of his life, and it accompanies him through prep and public school and then to London to the Royal College of Music, where the phenomenally gifted but inexperienced young composer is plunged into metropolitan life and makes influential new friends, among them W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. This was a time of prodigious musical creativity, a growing awareness of his sexuality, and the dawning of his political convictions. Most importantly, during this period Britten met Peter Pears and established the musical and personal relationship that was to last a lifetime. Volume One comes to a close in May 1939, when Britten, accompanied by Pears, departs for North America. The letters and diaries in this illuminating first volume and its successor are supplemented by the editors' detailed commentary and by exhaustive contemporary documentation. Together they constitute a comprehensive portrait not only of the composer but of an age.

This second of two volumes of the letters and diaries of Benjamin Britten is supplemented by the editors' detailed commentary and extensive contemporary documentation. The aim is to present a portrait not only of the composer but of an age.

for SATB unaccompanied This serene and reflective setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis was commissioned to mark the 300th anniversary of the death of Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells. With expansive harmonies and arching melodic lines, this accessible setting will appeal to any cathedral, chapel, or church choir looking for fresh service material.

for SATB and piano Happy the man's gentle pace, tender harmonies, and flowing piano accompaniment perfectly capture the reflective and uplifting message of John Dryden's text: 'Happy the man...He who, secure within, can say; Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today'. Featuring stirring climaxes, expressive vocal lines, and a fluid piano part, this piece will give rise to a moving performance. Happy the man is featured on the Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir's CD of Bob Chilcott's music.

The music of the Greek-born composer, Iannis Xenakis, has been called brutal and violent. He first studied as an architect, but then turned to composition and put to musical use his knowledge of higher mathematics. In these conversations he talks about his life and music.

This edition provides the full set of letters in English translation. It is complemented by the letters' online availability in their original language. Rosa Harriet Newmarch [1857-1940] was well-known in her lifetime as the leading British authority on Russian music, yet she also enjoyed a long and close friendship with the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius [1865-1957]. This edition traces a personal and professional relationship that lasted more than three decades, as documented in more than 130 letters, notes and telegrams currently held in the National Archives of Finland. The correspondence, conducted in a mixture of French and German, reveals the intense friendship between Sibelius and Newmarch, sheds detailed light on Newmarch's contribution to the development of musical life in Britain, and provides some of Sibelius's most intimate commentary on his own works, as well as on those of other composers. This edition contains the complete extant correspondence between Newmarch and Sibelius in English translation, complemented by comprehensive commentaries on the events and personalities referred to, and is prefaced by an extensive introduction outlining Newmarch's definitive role in promoting Sibelius and his music in early twentieth-century Britain. An appendix reproduces a previously unknown programme note that Newmarch wrote for the first British performance of Sibelius's Fourth Symphony. The book's translation and publication of the letters in English is complemented by the letters' online availability in their original language. PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK is University Lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford, and Tutor and Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford.

The music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), beloved by musicians and audiences since its debut, has been a difficult topic for scholars. The traditional stylistic categories of impressionism, symbolism, and neoclassicism, while relevant, have offered too little purchase on this fascinating but enigmatic work. In Ravel the Decadent, author Michael Puri provides an innovative and productive solution by locating the aesthetic origins of this music in the French Decadence and demonstrating the extension of this influence across the length of his oeuvre. From an array of Decadent topics Puri selects three--memory, sublimation, and desire--and uses them to delineate the content of this music, pinpoint its overlap with contemporary cultural discourse, and link it to its biographical context, as well as to create new methods altogether for the analysis and interpretation of music.
Ravel the Decadent opens by defining the main concepts, giving particular attention to memory and decadence. It then stakes out contrasting modes of memory in this music: a nostalgic mode that views the past as forever lost, and a more optimistic one that imagines its resurrection and reanimation. Acknowledging Ravel's lifelong identity as a dandy--a figure that embodies the Decadence and its aspiration toward the sublime--Puri identifies possible moments of musical self-portraiture before stepping back to theorize dandyism in European musical modernism at large. He then addresses the dialectic between desire and its sublimation in the pairing of two genres--the bacchanal and the idyl--and leverages the central trio of concepts to offer provocative readings of Ravel's two waltz sets, the Valses nobles et sentimentales and La valse. Puri concludes by invoking the same terms to identify a topic of "faun music" that promises to create new common ground between Ravel and Debussy. Rife with close readings that will satisfy the musicologist, Ravel the Decadent also suits a more general reader through its broadly humanistic key concepts, immersion in contemporary art and literature, and clarity of language.

For voice and piano or guitar This volume contains newly edited versions of all Walton's songs for voice and piano, together with Anon in Love for voice and guitar and songs from radio plays. It also includes the first publication of the scores of the orchestral versions of Anon in Love and A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table. Walton wrote songs throughout his life, the first, 'Tell me where is Fancy bred?', written when he was a chorister at Christ Church, Oxford, the last, A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table, a song-cycle for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf written in the early 1960s. They all reveal his ear for word-setting, an imaginative response to the text, and an ability to conjure striking musical images from his chosen material.

Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921): A Thematic Catalogue of His Complete Works ensures an objective knowledge of the total musical creation of this extraordinary French musician. Volume 1, published in 2002, examines the instrumental works. Volume 2 explores the dramatic works.
Each catalogue entry includes such information as the title and opus number of the composition and the opening theme of each movement; date, place, and circumstances of composition; dedication; instrumentation; location and description of autographs; publisher, plate number, date and place of publication; title page; all existent versions, arrangements, and transcriptions, their authors, publishers, plate number and date of publication; date and place of premiere and significant performances with names of the performers involved; references to the work in the mainly unpublished correspondence of Saint-Saens; literature and unique details relevant to the particular work.

Again and again people turn to music in order to assist them make sense of traumatic life events. Music can help process emotions, interpret memories, and create a sense of collective identity. While the last decade has seen a surge in academic studies on trauma and loss in both the humanities and social sciences, how music engages suffering has not often been explored. Performing Pain uncovers music's relationships to trauma and grief by focusing upon the late 20th century in Eastern Europe. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a cultural preoccupation with the meanings of historical suffering, particularly surrounding the Second World War and the Stalinist era. Journalists, historians, writers, artists, and filmmakers repeatedly negotiated themes related to pain and memory, truth and history, morality and spirituality both during glasnost and the years prior. In the copious amount of scholarship devoted to cultural politics during this era, the activities of avant-garde composers stands largely silent. Performing Pain considers how works by Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Part, and Henryk Gorecki musically address contemporary concerns regarding history and suffering through composition, performance, and reception. Drawing upon theories from psychology, sociology, literary and cultural studies, this book offers a set of hermeneutic essays that demonstrate the ways in which people employ music in order to make sense of historical traumas and losses. Seemingly postmodern compositional choices-such as quotation, fragmentation, and stasis-provide musical analogies to psychological and emotional responses to trauma and grief. The physical realities of embodied performance focus attention on the ethics of pain and representation while these works' inclusion as film music interprets contemporary debates regarding memory and trauma. Performing Pain promises to garner wide attention from academic professionals in music studies as well as an interdisciplinary audience interested in Eastern Europe and aesthetic articulations of suffering.