The Polish composer Henryk Górecki (born 1933) achieved world-wide renown in 1992 when his Third Symphony, written in 1976, was recorded on CD and became an international bestseller. It is now one of the best-known musical compositions of recent years, yet Górecki's other music is still relatively little known. This study, the first detailed account of his works in any language, provides biographical information as background to the music, and is by a leading enthusiast for Górecki's music.

In Irving Berlin: The Formative Years, Charles Hamm traces the early years (1907-1914) of this most famous and distinctive American songwriter - author of such classics as `Always', `Cheek to Cheek', and `White Christmas'. The book shows how Berlin progressed from the kind of ethnic and vaudeville songs that reflected his immigrant background to being a writer of Broadway musical shows. Hamm brilliantly describes how Berlin emerged from the vital and complex social and cultural scene of New York to begin his rise as America's foremost songwriter.

Alec Wilder wrote songs and lyrics of unsurpassed beauty and originality, and his work won the respect and admiration of such important musical figures as Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Mitch Miller, Gunther Schuller, and many others. Yet Wilder seemed almost to court obscurity. Both in the music he composed and in the way he lived his life, Wilder valued the unique and eccentric over the established and easily acceptable. And though he authored the definitive American Popular Song--which critics praised as "singular" (Studs Terkel), "pioneering" (Whitney Balliett), "rewarding" (Milton Babbitt), and "a joy to anyone who really cares about American popular music" (Max Morath)--his own contribution to that music has remained, until now, too little known and far too little appreciated.
Desmond Stone's engaging and lively biography brings Alec Wilder's life and music into the spotlight where it belongs. Ranging from Wilder's childhood in Rochester, New York, to his rise as a major writer of popular songs in the 1940s, to his relationships with Frank Sinatra and the cabaret singer Mabel Mercer, Stone gives us rich insight into the creative process and profound influence of this highly unorthodox composer. We see the impulses and musical concerns that led to such standards as "I'll Be Around" and "It's So Peaceful in the Country." We also get an inside view of how he wrote his monumental American Popular Song, which remains the most significant study of America's great songwriters. More important, we get a vivid sense of a haunting, incorruptible melodist whose unique personality was mirrored in his music. Man and composer dared to be different. When Wilder in the late 1930s wrote his famous Octets, the music world did not know what to make of these irreverent, highly original pieces. Yet they had a seminal influence on jazz chamber music in America. Wilder would go on to compose hundreds of instrumental numbers. Whether he was writing concert pieces for an unprecedented and highly unusual group of instruments, or mixing jazz, classical, and popular idioms in a single song, or dashing off a sonata for a friend, Wilder followed the dictates of his own creativity rather than the expectations of the musical establishment. Such independence and unpredictability earned him the hostility of many critics but the enduring respect of the musicians he wrote for.
Here then is a fascinating private portrait of a man who lived a nomad's life, who loved riding trains so much he kept a timetable in his pocket at all times, a man whose only home was a small room he maintained at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan (where he often held court in the lobby), a man with a serious drinking problem as well as the kindest and most generous of friends. Essential reading for anyone interested in American popular music, Alec Wilder in Spite of Himself provides a much needed account of this complex, colorful, and highly original life.

Peter Evans discusses all Britten's published compositions in subdivisions of genre and period, and devotes a separate chapter to each opera. With the help of over 300 music examples and diagrams, he demonstrates Britten's mastery of the art of composition - of tonal and harmonic structures, thematic cast and transformation, textural variety, and the imaginative deployment of voices and instruments.

For this reissue in Clarendon Paperbacks, Professor Evans has expanded the biographical note in the light of recent research, and has expanded the Postscript to take into account the numerous Britten scores that have been published since 1989.

Since its original publication in 1930, Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources has become recognized as one of the few seminal technical studies to be written by a twentieth-century composer. In 1971, Virgil Thomson hailed it as "a classic." For this new edition, David Nicholls has provided an explanatory essay and annotations to Cowell's text. The essay traces the sources for the book and attempts to place Cowell's theories in the broader context of musical modernism.

This is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It treats those forms as inextricably intertwined, and sets them in a wide variety of social and critical contexts. The book comprises four sections - Histories, Techniques and Technologies, Mediation, Identities - with 16 thematic chapters. Each of these explores a musical or cultural topic as it developed over many years, and as it appeared across a diversity of musical practices. In this way, the text introduces both key musical repertoire and critical-musicological approaches to that work. It historicises music and musical thinking, opening up debate in the present rather than offering a new but closed narrative of the past. In each chapter, an overview of the topic's chronology and main issues is illustrated by two detailed case studies.

An intelligent survey of Poulenc's music, based on a careful selection of works, and written by an authoritative guide. Adopting a broadly chronological approach, Mellers is able to trace Poulenc's development as a composer from enfant terrible to mature `society' composer.

This major new collection combines essays and articles from Tippett's two earlier books--Moving into Aquarius and Music of the Angels with a substantial amount of new material to distill the opinions and experiences of one of the century's most celebrated composers. Published to coincide with the composer's 90th birthday, the pieces focus particularly on the work of other twentieth-century composers as well as Tippett's own, from his early success A Child of Our Time, to the recent opera New Year and the orchestral piece The Rose Lake. Other essays deal with aesthetics, the role of the artist in society, and interpretation and performance, making the book of compelling interest not only to students and scholars, but to performers, conductors, and opera directors as well.

Between May 1949 and August 1954 the composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of remarkable letters that reflect on their own music and the culture of the time. This correspondence, together with other relevant documents, has been edited and annotated by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and is now available for the first time in English in a paperback edition.

Percy Grainger was one of the most colourful of this century's cultural figures. As a pianist and largely self-taught composer he was feted in the 1910s and 1920s, and is probably still best known for the work he `dished up' in many different guises, Country Gardens. But Grainger aspired to the role of `the all-round man' and nourished ideas, some brilliant, others ludicrous, across the full range of human endeavour: race, nationality, sex, language, life-style, food, clothes, technology, ecology. The All-Round Man depicts that scrambling diversity through seventy-six uninhibited letters from Grainger's `American' years, 1914-61. These letters are fascinating to read: they are cultivated `rambles' (as Grainger actually called several of his compositions), not dissimilar to today's telephone conversations. Often written in Grainger's crunchy `Blue-eyed English', they explore uninhibitedly every corner of his public and private life. They reflect the magnificent attempts of a great but flawed mind to encompass the world. From the letters: `Personally I do not feel like a modern person at all. I feel quite at home in South Sea Island music, in Maori legends, in the Icelandic Sagas, in the Anglo-Saxon `Battle of Brunnanburh', feel very close to Negroes in various countries, but hardly understand modern folk at all.' `Music seems almost to have a "surface", a smooth surface, a grained surface, a prickly surface to the ear. All these distinguishing characteristics (roughly hinted at in the above silly similes) are to me the "body of music" are to music what "looks", skin, hair are in a person, the actual stuff and manifestation whereby we know it and recognize it' `You said that too much such treatment annoyed, nerveteased you. Then let me thus tease you while you punish me for the annoyance I give you: Let me lay my weight upon, momi-ing at yr heavenbringing uma, while you thrash my bottom, back & legs in rising annoyance'

This is the first comprehensive study of the artist's life and his distinguished career. The work is so full of detail and solid history that it stands as a model biography of an important musical figure. This book provides the social context in which a major composer grew, how he learned his craft and built his career, the evolving musical tastes of American audiences, and his relationship to musical giants like Arturo Toscanini and Serge Koussevitsky.

This survey of the most significant modern composers and their techniques has become a standard work on the constantly shifting musical developments during the greater part of the twentieth century. In a concise and accessible narrative, Whittall examines the continued but declining commitment to tonality, twelve-note serialism, and the gradual emergence of new aesthetic attitudes and concepts of musical form.

The book introduces and describes 70 songs from the contemporary vocal repertoire, giving advice on performance and suggestions on programming. As such it is invaluable to young singers and singing students.

First published in 1953, Halsey Stevens's The Life and Music of Béla Bartók was hailed as a triumph of musicology and quickly established itself as the classic text. Stevens combined an authoritiative, balanced account of the Hungarian composer's life with candid insightful analyses of his numerous works. To Stevens, the high point of Bartók's genius was the chamber music, which he assessed as of a quality unrivalled by any other composer of the early twentieth century. But he evaluated Bartók's entire output with mastery, picking out the composer's strengths and weaknesses and conveying the essence of his compositional techniques. Stevens's views have greatly influenced the study of Bartók and Hungarian music over the last four decades.

Attractively priced and published in paperback, the book now appears in a third edition, prepared by the Bartók scholar, Malcolm Gillies. A comprehensive chronological list of works is added, together with a select bibliography and discography. Minor revisions to the text are suggested in a new Introduction, and the text is enhanced by eight pages of photographs, some of them little known.

Described by Aaron Copland as 'among the finest creations in the modern repertoire', Alban Berg's Violin Concerto has become a twentieth-century classic. In this authoritative and highly readable guide to the work the reader is introduced not only to the concerto itself but to all that surrounded and determined its composition. This is a book about musical culture in the 1930s, about the Second Viennese School, about tonality, atonality and serialism, about Berg's own musical development, compositional method and the private significance the Violin Concerto held for him. The book describes the genesis of the work, its performance history and critical reception and, in two detailed musical chapters, provides a section-by-section account of the book and a closer analysis of the musical language and structure. Anthony Pople's ability to combine musical anecdote with scholarly discussion makes this guide compelling reading for the amateur and the specialist alike.

From the end of the nineteenth century a national musical consciousness gradually developed in the USA as composers began to turn away from the European conventions on which their music had hitherto been modelled. It was in this period of change that experimentation was born. In this book, the composer and scholar David Nicholls considers the most influential figures in the development of American experimental music, including Charles Ives, Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford, Henry Cowell, and the young John Cage. He analyses the music and ideas of this group, explaining the compositional techniques invented and employed by them and the historical and cultural context in which they emerged.

Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices traces the meteoric rise and heretofore inexplicable disappearance of the Russian-American, futurist-anarchist, pianist-composer from his arrival in the United States in 1906 through a career that lasted nearly a century. Outliving his admirers and critics by decades Leo Ornstein passed away in 2002 at the age of 108. Frequently compared to Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, for a time Ornstein enjoyed a kind a celebrity granted few living musicians. And then he turned his back on it all. This first, full-length biographical study draws upon interviews, journals, and letters from a wide circle of Ornstein's friends and acquaintances to track the Ornstein family as it escaped the horrors of the Russian pogroms, and it situates the Russian-Jewish-American musician as he carved out an identity amidst World War I, the flu pandemic, and the Red Scare. While telling Leo Ornstein's story, the book also illuminates the stories of thousands of immigrants with similar harrowing experiences. It also explores the immeasurable impact of his unexpected marriage in 1918 to Pauline Mallet-Prevost, a Park Avenue debutante.

Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices finds Ornstein at the center of several networks that included artists John Marin, William Zorach, Leon Kroll, writers and activists Paul Rosenfeld, Waldo Frank, Edmund Wilson, and Clair Reis, the Stieglitz Circle, and a group of English composers known as the Frankfurt Five. Ornstein's story challenges directly the traditional chronology and narrative regarding musical modernism in America and its close relation to the other arts.

This book is a collection of essays, by the leading German musicologist of our day, on one of the most controversial and influential composers of our century: Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg is considered here as a historical figure, as a thinker and theoretician and as a composer whose works may be subjected to technical analysis and/or examined in relation to the history of ideas. Above all, he is considered in the context of the 'New Music', the historical and cultural movement of the first two decades of this century which embrace musicians such as Webern, Schreker and Scriabin (all of whom are allotted individual essays), as well as Schoenberg himself. In addition to historical and analytical essays there are essays of a broader cultural-historical and even sociological import which should interest all those involved with twentieth-century music and ideas.

Wilfrid Mellers is a composer, musician and author. Honorary Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. This is his classic work on Mompou.

for mixed chorus, baritone solo, and orchestra This new study-score edition of Walton's seminal cantata has been off-printed from the William Walton Edition, Vol. 4, edited by Steuart Bedford. It combines the scholarship of the Edition with the practical benefits of the smaller format. Orchestral material is available on hire/rental.

for SSAA and percussion This bewitching setting tells the story of a young girl walking in an enchanted forest, mesmerized by dreamy, ancient songs sung by a chorus of birds. An atmospheric ostinato played on finger cymbals and claves accompanies the voices, and Quartel sets a strong melodic line against the warm harmonies of the birdsong.

Twentieth-century music has been described as complex, vital, diverse, uncertain, experimental, self-conscious, innovative-the list is long and growing. Composers have been both credited with and accused of always searching for something "new," writing works that are mechanistic but romantic, meaningful but unskilled, beautiful but ugly! In The Twentieth Century, Robert P. Morgan helps us grasp the flavor of the era by presenting forty-five readings from the period, nearly all written by active participants in the musical developments of the time. Thus we tune in to the voices of some thirty composers-from Busoni to Babbitt, Ives to Xenakis, Satie to Stravinsky-and learn from performers Anderson and Landowska, philosopher-critics Adorno, Dahlhaus, and Meyer, and writers Cocteau, Barthes, and Eco.

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.