Arnold Schoenberg is widely regarded as one of the most significant and innovative composers of the twentieth century. It is commonly assumed that Schoenberg's music divides into three periods: tonal, atonal, and serial. It is also assumed that Schoenberg's atonal music made a revolutionary break with the past, particularly in terms of harmonic structure. This book challenges both these popular notions. Haimo argues that Schoenberg's 'atonal' music does not constitute a distinct unified period. He demonstrates that much of the music commonly described as 'atonal' did not make a complete break with prior practices, even in the harmonic realm, but instead transformed the past by a series of incremental changes. An important and influential contribution to the field, Haimo's findings help not only to re-evaluate Schoenberg, but also to re-date much of what has been defined as one of the most crucial turning points in music history.

During his lifetime, and in the course of the twentieth century, Edward Elgar and his music became sites for a remarkable variety of nostalgic impulses. These are manifested in his personal life, in the content of his works, in his critical and biographical reception, and in numerous artistic ventures based on his character and music. Today Elgar enjoys renewed popularity in Britain, and nostalgia of various forms continues to shape our responses to his music. From one viewpoint, Elgarian nostalgia might be dismissed as escapist, regressive and reactionary, and the revival in Elgar's fortunes regarded as the symptom of a pernicious 'heritage industry' in post-colonial, post-industrial Britain. While there is undeniably a grain of truth to that view, Matthew Riley's careful treatment of the topic reveals a more complex picture of nostalgia, and sheds light on Elgar and his cultural significance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Hundreds of the letters that Gustav Mahler addressed to his parents and siblings survive, yet they have remained virtually unknown. Now, for the first time Mahler scholar Stephen McClatchie presents over 500 of these letters in a clear, lively translation in The Mahler Family Letters . Drawn primarily from the Mahler-Rose Collection at the University of Western Ontario, the volume presents a complete, well-rounded view of the family's correspondence.
Spanning the mid 1880s through 1910, the letters record the excitement of a young man with a bourgeoning career as a conductor and provide a glimpse into his day-to-day activities rehearsing and conducting operas and concerts in Budapeast and Hamburg, and composing his first symphonies and songs. On the private side, they document his parents' illnesses and deaths and the struggles of his siblings Alois, Justine, Otto, and Emma. The letters also give Mahler's insightful impressions of contemporaries such as Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Hans von Bulow, as well as his personal feelings about significant events, such as his first big success--the completion of Carl Maria von Weber's Die drei Pintos in 1889. In the fall of 1894, the character of the letters changes when Justine and Emma come to live with Mahler in Hamburg and then Vienna, removing the need to communicate by letter about quotidian matters. At this point, the letters relay noteworthy events such as Mahler's campaign to be named Director of the Vienna Court Opera, his conducting tours throughout Europe, and his courtship of Alma Schindler. The Mahler Family Letters provides a vital, nuanced source of information about Mahler's life, his personality, and his relationships. McClatchie has generously annotated each letter, contextualizing and clarifying contemporary historical references and Mahler family acquaintances, and created an indispensable resource for all Mahlerists, 19th-century musicologists, and historians of 19th-century Germany and Austria.

Most histories of American music have ignored the presence of twelve-tone music before and during the Second World War, and virtually all have ignored its presence after 1970, even though so many major composers continued (and continue) to compose serially. This book provides a comprehensive history of twelve-tone music in America, and compels a revised picture of American music since 1925 as a dynamic steady-state within which twelve-tone serialism has long been, and still remains, a persistent presence: a vigorous and unbroken tradition for more than eighty years. Straus outlines how, instead of a rigid orthodoxy, American twelve-tone music is actually a flexible, loosely-knit cultural practice. The book provides close readings of thirty-seven American twelve-tone works by composers including Copland, Babbitt, Stravinsky and Carter, among many others, who represent a typically American diversity of background and life circumstances, and strips away the many myths surrounding twelve-tone music in America.

2009 marks the 75th birthday of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, an occasion that presents an opportunity for reflection upon, and appreciation of, a period of compositional achievement that extends from the 1950s to the present. This book forms part of that reflection through a statement of the current condition of research on Maxwell Davies's music. Detailed analytical discussions of individual works, such as the opera Taverner and the First Symphony, coexist with broader issues and perspectives, including Davies's own writings about music, his engagement with sonata form, the compositional source, problems of text, and the situating of this music within and in relation to 'modern times'. The book describes selected works from all periods of Davies's rich and diverse career, resulting in a portrait of the music that, while it may be incomplete, reveals the essence of this remarkable composer and his music.

No composer was more responsible for changes in the landscape of twentieth-century music than Arnold Schoenberg (1874 1951) and no other composer's music inspired a commensurate quantity and quality of technical description in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet there is still little understanding of the correlations between Schoenberg's musical thought and larger questions of cultural significance in and since his time: the formalistic descriptions of music theory do not generally engage larger questions in the history of ideas and scholars without understanding of the formidable musical technique are ill-equipped to understand the music with any profundity of thought. Schoenberg's Musical Imagination is intended to connect Schoenberg's music and critical writings to a larger world of ideas. While most technical studies of Schoenberg's music are limited to a single compositional period, this book traces changes in his attitudes as a composer and their impact on his ever-changing compositional style over the course of his remarkable career.

In this thought provoking study, Silvina Milstein proposes a reconstruction of Schoenberg's conception of compositional process in his twelve-tone works, which challenges the prevalent view that this music is to be appropriately understood exclusively in terms of the new method. Her claim that in Scoenberg we encounter hierarchical pitch relations operating in a twelve-tone context is supported by in-depth musical analysis and the commentary on the sketch material, which shows tonal considerations to be a primary concern and even an important criterion in the composition of the set itself. The core of the book consists of detailed analytical studies; yet its heavy reliance on factors outside the score places this work beyond the boundaries of textual analysis into the field of this history of musical ideas.

As the seat of Hitler's government, Berlin was the most frequently targeted city in Germany for Allied bombing campaigns during World War II. Air raids shelled celebrated monuments, left homes uninhabitable, and reduced much of the city to nothing but rubble. After the war's end, this apocalyptic landscape captured the imagination of artists, filmmakers, and writers, who used the ruins to engage with themes of alienation, disillusionment, and moral ambiguity. In Rubble Music, Abby Anderton explores the classical music culture of postwar Berlin, analyzing archival documents, period sources, and musical scores to identify the sound of civilian suffering after urban catastrophe. Anderton reveals how rubble functioned as a literal, figurative, psychological, and sonic element by examining the resonances of trauma heard in the German musical repertoire after 1945. With detailed explorations of reconstituted orchestral ensembles, opera companies, and radio stations, as well as analyses of performances and compositions that were beyond the reach of the Allied occupiers, Anderton demonstrates how German musicians worked through, cleared away, or built over the debris and devastation of the war.

The vocal repertoire of the twentieth century--including works by Schoenberg, Boulez, Berio, Larsen, and Vercoe--presents exciting opportunities for singers to stretch their talents and demonstrate their vocal flexibility. Contemporary composers can be very demanding of vocalists, requiring them to recite, trill, and whisper, or to read non-traditional scores. For singers just beginning to explore the novelties of the contemporary repertoire, Exploring Twentieth-Century Vocal Music is an ideal guide. Drawing on over thirty years of experience teaching and performing the twentieth century repertoire, Sharon Mabry has written a cogent and insightful book for singers and voice teachers who are just discovering the innovative music of the twentieth century. The book familiarizes readers with the new and unusual notation systems employed by some contemporary composers. It suggests rehearsal techniques and vocal exercises that help singers prepare to tackle the repertoire. And the book offers a list of the most important and intereting works to emerge in the twentieth century, along with suggested recital programs that will introduce audiences as well as singers to this under-explored body of music.

An intimate and readable account, filled with interesting and amusing anecdotes, of a highly creative period in English musical history Hubert J. Foss (1899-1953) is best known for his work as founder and first music editor for Oxford University Press. Foss promoted composers in England between the World Wars, most notably Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Constant Lambert, and Peter Warlock. The first part of this book is based on the memoirs of his wife Dora, who was herself a professional singer. The book - through the presentation of memoirs and letters - recreates a vivid picture of the musical world during the inter-war period when there was a renaissance of English music. Foss's work for OUP saw the music department expand from publishing a limited number of sheet music items to a comprehensive inventory of operas, orchestral compositions, chamber and vocal works, and piano pieces. Foss also greatly expanded the press's publication of books on music, music analysis, and music appreciation. Leaving OUP's music department in1941, Foss pursued a number of freelance musical occupations, serving as critic, reviewer, journalist, author and frequent broadcaster. The book includes letters sent to and received from such luminaries as Hamilton Harty,Constant Lambert, Edith Sitwell, Donald Tovey, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Henry J. Wood, Arthur Bliss, Benjamin Britten, Roger Quilter, Percy Scholes, Leopold Stokowski, Michael Tippett, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce andWalter de la Mare. Many of the letters presented here have never been published before. An authoritative introduction by Simon Wright (Head of Rights & Contracts, Music, OUP) provides a detailed overview of Hubert Foss and his place in music publishing. STEPHEN LLOYD is the author of William Walton: Muse of Fire and Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande (both published by Boydell). DIANA SPARKES is the daughter of Hubert and Dora Foss. BRIAN SPARKES is her husband and an Emeritus Professor of Classical Archaeology.

Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War is the first sustained attempt to understand some of Copland's best known music in the context of leftwing social, political, and cultural currents of the Great Depression and Second World War.
In the 1930s Aaron Copland began to write in an accessible style he called "imposed simplicity." Works like El Salon Mexico, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring not only brought the composer unprecedented popular success but also came to define an American sound. Yet the political alignment behind this musical idiom--the social agenda that might be heard within these familiar pieces--has been largely overlooked, even though it has long been acknowledged that Copland subscribed to leftwing ideals.
His politics never merely accorded with mainstream New Deal liberalism or wartime patriotism, however, but advanced a progressive vision of American society and culture. His music from the thirties and forties relates to the politics of radical progressivism, which affirmed a fundamental sensitivity toward those less fortunate, support of multiethnic pluralism, belief in social democracy, and faith that America's past could be put in service of a better future. Investing symbols of America--whether the West, folk song, patriotism, or the people--with progressive social ideals, Copland's music wrestles with the political complexities and cultural contradictions of the era.

This book looks at Polish music since 1937 and its interaction with political and cultural turmoil. In Part I musical developments are placed in the context of the socio-political upheavals of inter-war Poland, Nazi occupation, and the rise and fall of the Stalinist policy of socialist realism (1948-54). Part II investigates the nature of the 'thaw' between 1954 and 1959, focusing on the role of the 'Warsaw Autumn' Festival. Part III discusses how composers reacted to the onset of serialism by establishing increasingly individual voices in the 1960s. In addition to a discussion of 'sonorism' (from Penderecki to Szalonek), it considers how different generations responded to the modernist aesthetic (Bacewicz and Lutoslawski, Baird and Serocki, Gorecki and Krauze). Part IV views Polish music since the 1970s, including the issue of national identity and the arrival of a talented generation and its ironic, postmodern slant on the past.

In The Composer as Intellectual, musicologist Jane Fulcher reveals the extent to which leading French composers between the world wars were not only aware of, but engaged intellectually and creatively with the central political and ideological issues of the period. Employing recent sociological and historical insights, she demonstrates the extent to which composers, particularly those in Paris since the Dreyfus Affair, considered themselves and were considered to be intellectuals, and interacted closely with intellectuals in other fields. Their consciousness raised by the First World War and the xenophobic nationalism of official culture, some joined parties or movements, allying themselves with and propagating different sets of cultural and political-social goals.
Fulcher shows how these composers furthered their ideals through the specific language and means of their art, rejecting the dominant cultural exclusions or constraints of conservative postwar institutions and creatively translating their cultural values into terms of form and style. This was not only the case with Debussy in wartime, but with Ravel in the twenties, when he became a socialist and unequivocally rejected a narrow, exclusionary nationalism. It was also the case with the group called "Les Six," who responded culturally in the twenties and then politically in the thirties, when most of them supported the programs of the Popular Front. Others could not be enthusiastic about the latter and, largely excluded from official culture, sought out other more compatible movements or returned to the Catholic Church. Like other French Catholics, they faced the crisis of Catholicism in the thirties when the church notonly supported Franco, but Mussolini's imperialistic aggression in Ethiopia. While Poulenc embraced traditional Catholicism, Messiaen turned to more progressive Catholic movements that embraced modern art and insisted that religion must cross national and racial boundaries.
Fulcher demonstrates how closely music had become a field of clashing ideologies in this period. She shows also how certain French composers responded, and how their responses influenced specific aspects of their professional and stylistic development. She thus argues that, from this perspective, we can not only better understand specific aspects of the stylistic evolution of these composers, but also perceive the role that their art played in the ideological battles and in heightening cultural-political awareness of their time.

This second anthology of Russian writing on Russian music begins in 1880 (where the first volume concluded) and ends in 1917. It brings the thoughts of leading Russian music critics to an English-speaking readership as they react to the Russian music that is new to them, during a period when all aspects of musical life were developing rapidly. Music criticism had become more sure-footed, if no less opinionated. These reviews demonstrate greater awareness both of music history and of contemporary music abroad. The period covers the late careers of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov as well as late works by Borodin and Balakirev, and the emergence of Mussorgsky's compositions. Works by the intervening generation, including Arensky, Glazunov and Lyadov, are also reviewed and the book concludes with coverage of works by the Moscow School, including Medtner, Rachmaninoff and Skryabin and the early compositions of Stravinsky and Prokoviev.

The French composer Olivier Messiaen is one of the major figures of twentieth-century music. This collection of scholarly essays offers new cultural, historical, biographical and analytical perspectives on Messiaen??'s musical ??uvre from 1941 to 1992. The volume includes: a fascinating snapshot of Messiaen??'s life in occupied France; a study of the Surrealist poetics of Messiaen??'s song cycle Harawi; a chapter on Messiaen??'s iconoclastic path to the avant-garde heritage that he bequeathed to his pupils; discussion on Messiaen??'s place in twentieth-century music; and detailed analysis of specific works, including his opera St Fran??ois d'Assise. The chapters provide fresh insights on the origins, style and poetics of Messiaen??'s music, and therefore provide an inspiration and foundation for future scholarship. Reflecting and expanding upon the broad range of Messiaen??'s own interdisciplinary interests, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of music, art, literature and theology.

A record of a ten-year personal friendship, with letters, and insights on other contemporaries. Arthur Hartmann (1881-1956), a celebrated violinist who performed over a thousand recitals throughout Europe and the United States, met Claude Debussy in 1908, after he had transcribed 'Il pleure dans mon coeur' for violin and piano. Their relationship developed into friendship, and in February 1914 Debussy accompanied Hartmann in a performance of three of Hartmann's transcriptions of Debussy's works. The two friends saw each other for the last time on thecomposer's birthday, 22 August 1914, shortly before Hartmann and his family fled Europe to escape the Great War. With the publication of Hartmann's memoir Claude Debussy As I Knew Him, along with the twenty-twoknown letters from Claude Debussy and the thirty-nine letters from Emma Debussy to Hartmann and his wife, the richness and importance of their relationship can be appreciated for the first time. The memoir covers the years 1908-1918. Debussy's letters to Hartmann span the years 1908-1916, and Emma (Mme) Debussy's letters span the years 1910-1932. Also included are the facsimile of Debussy's Minstrels manuscript transcription for violin and piano, three previously unpublished letters from Debussy to Pierre Louys, and and correspondence between Hartmann and Bela Bartok, Nina Grieg, Alexandre Guilmant, Charles Martin Loeffler, Marian MacDowell, Hans Richter, and Anton Webern, along with Hartmann's memoirs on Loeffler, Ysaye, Joachim and Grieg. Samuel Hsu is a pianist and professor of music at Philadelphia Biblical University. Sidney Grolnic, now retired, was a librarian in the music department of the Free Library of Philadelphia, where he served as curator of the Hartmann Collection. Mark Peters is associate professor of music at Trinity Christian College.

No composer was more responsible for changes in the landscape of twentieth-century music than Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and no other composer's music inspired a commensurate quantity and quality of technical description in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet there is still little understanding of the correlations between Schoenberg's musical thought and larger questions of cultural significance in and since his time: the formalistic descriptions of music theory do not generally engage larger questions in the history of ideas and scholars without understanding of the formidable musical technique are ill-equipped to understand the music with any profundity of thought. Schoenberg's Musical Imagination is intended to connect Schoenberg's music and critical writings to a larger world of ideas. While most technical studies of Schoenberg's music are limited to a single compositional period, this book traces changes in his attitudes as a composer and their impact on his ever-changing compositional style over the course of his remarkable career.

Throughout the twentieth century, musicians frequently incorporated bits of works by other musicians into their own compositions and performances. When a musician borrows from a piece, he or she draws upon not only a melody but also the cultural associations of the original piece. By working with and altering a melody, a musician also transforms those associations. This book explores that vibrant practice, examining how musicians used quotation to participate in the cultural dialogues sustained around such areas as race, childhood, madness and the mass media. The focus of this study is broad, discussing pieces in a spectrum of musical styles (classical, experimental, jazz, and popular) as well as works in the other arts. Part of the young and quickly growing field of musical borrowing, this book takes an important step in discussing the wider cultural ramifications of quotation.

This contributory volume, the first book of its kind, provides a snapshot of the ways in which discourse about Western music and race overlapped and became intertwined during the period from Wagner??'s death to the rise of National Socialism and fascism elsewhere in Europe. At these two framing moments such overlapping was at its most explicit: Wagner??'s racially inflected ???regeneration theories??? were at one end and institutionalised cultural racism at the other. The book seeks to provide insights into the key national contexts in which such discourses circulated in the interim period, as well as to reflect a range of archival, historical, critical, and philosophical approaches to the topic. National contexts covered include Germay, France, Spain, Italy, Great Britain and North America. The contributors to the volume are leading scholars in the field, and the book contains many illustrative music examples and images which bring the subject matter to life.

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) was the best-known Japanese composer of his generation, bringing aspects of Eastern and Western traditions together, yet he remained something of an elusive figure. The composer's own commentaries about his music, poetic and philosophical in tone, have tended to deepen the mystery and much writing on Takemitsu to date has adopted a similar attitude, leaving many questions about his compositional methods unanswered. This book is the first complete study of the composer's work to appear in English. It is also the first book in this language to offer an in-depth analysis of his music. Takemitsu's works are increasingly popular with Western audiences and Peter Burt attempts for the first time to shed light on the hitherto rather secretive world of his working methods, as well as place him in context as heir to the rich tradition of Japanese composition in the twentieth century.

This book, first published in 2000, examines the BBC's campaign to raise cultural awareness of British mass audiences in the early days of radio. As a specific case, it focuses on policies and plans behind transmissions of music by composers associated with Arnold Schoenberg's circle between 1922, when the BBC was founded, and spring 1936, when Edward Clark, a former Schoenberg pupil and central figure in BBC music, resigned from the Corporation. This study traces and analyses the BBC's attempts to manipulate critical and public responses to this repertory. The book investigates three interrelated aspects of early BBC history. Policy decisions relating to contemporary music transmissions are examined to determine why precious broadcast time was devoted to this repertory. Early personnel structures are reconstructed to investigate the responsibilities, attitudes and interests of those who influenced music broadcasting. Finally, broadcasts of Second Viennese School works are examined in detail.

Blending insights from linguistic and social theories of speech, ritual and narrative with music-analytic and historical criticism, Britten's Musical Language offers interesting perspectives on the composer's fusion of verbal and musical utterance in opera and song. It provides close interpretative studies of the major scores (including Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, War Requiem, Curlew River and Death in Venice) and explores Britten's ability to fashion complex and mysterious symbolic dramas from the interplay of texted song and a wordless discourse of motives and themes. Focusing on the performative and social basis of language, Philip Rupprecht replaces traditional notions of textual 'expression' in opera with the interpretation of topics such as the role of naming and hate speech in Peter Grimes; the disturbance of ritual certainty in the War Requiem; and the codes by which childish 'innocence' is enacted in The Turn of the Screw.

Was Richard Strauss the most incandescent composer of the twentieth century or merely a bourgeoisie artist and Nazi sympathizer? For the fifty years since his death on September 8, 1949, Richard Strauss has remained dogmatically elusive in the wider body of musical and historical criticism. Lauded as nothing less than the "greatest musical figure" of his time by Canadian musician, Glenn Gould, in 1962, Strauss also has attracted his share of posthumous epithets: in summary, an artist who lived off his own fat during his later years. As recently as 1995, the English critic Rodney Milnes wrote, "the court of posterity is still reserving judgment." In Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma, biographer Michael Kennedy demonstrates that the many varying shades of criticism that have painted this figure in the past half century resemble the similar understandings and misunderstandings held by his contemporaries--perceptions that touched almost every aspect of Strauss' life and career. Introducing his detailed work more as a broad explication than a firm answer to the Straussian riddle, Kennedy's scope includes the exuberant, extroverted Strauss of young adulthood as well as the phlegmatic and aloof middle-aged man who resembled a "prosperous bank manager;" the arch-fiend of modernism and the composer who redefined the term; a man who professed to lack all spiritual curiosity and a musician who penned the touching ballet Der Kometentanz; an at times almost humble family man and an artist who claimed to be as interesting as Napoleon and Alexander the Great. Kennedy clearly elucidates his enigmatic subject by building his analysis around the few constants in Strauss' life: his profoundadmiration for German culture, his dependence on his own family for guidance, and his "Nietzschean total absorption in art." This frame offers everyone from Straussian scholars to general readers an insightful and easy-to-follow biographical narrative. Kennedy also deals at length with Strauss' problematic relationship with Nazi authorities, detailing his incompatible roles as the father-in-law of a Jewish woman and as one of the country's leading composers. Michael Kennedy is the chief music critic of the (London) Sunday Telegraph and the author of many books about music.

Arnold Schoenberg is widely regarded as one of the most significant and innovative composers of the twentieth century. It is commonly assumed that Schoenberg's music divides into three periods: tonal, atonal, and serial. It is also assumed that Schoenberg's atonal music made a revolutionary break with the past, particularly in terms of harmonic structure. This book challenges both these popular notions. Haimo argues that Schoenberg's 'atonal' music does not constitute a distinct unified period. He demonstrates that much of the music commonly described as 'atonal' did not make a complete break with prior practices, even in the harmonic realm, but instead transformed the past by a series of incremental changes. An important and influential contribution to the field, Haimo's findings help not only to re-evaluate Schoenberg, but also to re-date much of what has been defined as one of the most crucial turning points in music history.