Sounding the Gallery explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music. Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images in a quick and easy manner. But video not only provided artists and composers with the opportunity to produce unprecedented forms of audiovisuality; it also allowed them to create interactive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. Early video's audiovisual synergy could be projected, manipulated and processed live. The closed-circuit video feed drew audience members into the heart of the audiovisual experience, from where they could influence the flow, structure and sound of the video performance. Such activated spectatorship resulted in improvisatory and performative events in which the space between artists, composers, performers and visitors collapsed into a single, yet expansive, intermedial experience. Many believed that such audiovisual video work signalled a brand-new art form that only began in 1965. Using early video work as an example, this book suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatializing their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. Pioneering video work allowed these two disciplines to come together, acting as a conduit that facilitated the fusion and manipulation of pre-existing elements. Shifting the focus from object to spatial process, Sounding the Gallery uses theories of intermedia, film, architecture, drama and performance practice to create an interdisciplinary history of music and art that culminates in the rise of video art-music in the late 1960s.

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

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

This Is Our Music Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture Iain Anderson "An excellent study of the heyday of one of the most problematic bodies of work in the history of jazz music. . . . Essential."--"Choice" ""This Is Our Music" takes us back to that moment between the fifties and the sixties when a new music called free jazz took root in the coffeehouses and nightclubs of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In this rich and evocative book, Iain Anderson meets the challenge posed by the music and follows its lead into the complex political realignments, shifting racial dynamics, and redefinition of art and entertainment that characterized the subsequent decade."--John Szwed, author of "So What: The Life of Miles Davis" "Historian Iain Anderson tracks the political and social meanings of jazz as the music changed hands around the world. . . . The crooked line Anderson draws from the maverick Cecil] Taylor (a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient) to the conservative Wynton] Marsalis (arbiter of "What Is--and Isn't--Jazz") is the real contribution of "This Is Our Music.""--"Bookforum" "Anderson's evenhanded, archive-driven book is consistently instructive--a fine guide to the debates that raged around free jazz and to the music's unexpected current place in the American arts canon."--"Journal of American History" "This Is Our Music," declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on what basis, taking as its example the impact of 1960s free improvisation on the changing status of jazz. By examining the production, presentation, and reception of experimental music by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and others, Iain Anderson traces the strange, unexpected, and at times deeply ironic intersections between free jazz, avant-garde artistic movements, Sixties politics, and patronage networks. Anderson emphasizes free improvisation's enormous impact on jazz music's institutional standing, despite ongoing resistance from some of its biggest beneficiaries. He concludes that attempts by African American artists and intellectuals to define a place for themselves in American life, structural changes in the music industry, and the rise of nonprofit sponsorship portended a significant transformation of established cultural standards. At the same time, free improvisation's growing prestige depended in part upon traditional highbrow criteria: increasingly esoteric styles, changing venues and audience behavior, European sanction, withdrawal from the marketplace, and the professionalization of criticism. Thus jazz music's performers and supporters--and potentially those in other arts--have both challenged and accommodated themselves to an ongoing process of cultural stratification. Iain Anderson teaches History at Nebraska Wesleyan University. The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America 2006 264 pages 6 x 9 23 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-2003-2 Paper $24.95s 16.50 World Rights American History, Music Short copy: "Takes us back to that moment between the fifties and the sixties when a new music called free jazz took root in the coffeehouses and nightclubs of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles."--John Szwed, author of "So What: The Life of Miles Davis"

A study in contrasts, the career of Sergey Prokofiev spanned the globe, leaving him witness to the most significant political and historical events of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1918, after completing a program of studies at the St. Petersburg conservatory, Prokofiev escaped Russia for the United States and later France where, like most emigre artists of the time, he made Paris his home. During these hectic years, he composed three ballets and three operas, fulfilled recording contracts, and played recitals of tempestuous music. Scores were stored in suitcases, scenarios and librettos drafted on hotel letterhead. The constant uprooting and transience fatigued him, but he regarded himself as a person of action who, personally and professionally, traveled against rather that with the current. Thus, in 1936, as political anxieties increased in Western Europe, Prokofiev escaped back to Russia. Though at first pampered by the totalitarian regime, Prokofiev soon suffered official correction and censorship. He wrote and revised his late ballets and operas to appease his bureaucratic overseers but, more often than not, his labors came to naught. Following his official condemnation in 1948, many of his compositions were withdrawn from performance. Physical illness and mental exhaustion characterized his last years. Housebound, he journeyed inward, creating a series of works on the theme of youth whose music sounds despondently optimistic.
The reasons for Prokofiev's return to Russia and the specifics of his dealings with the Stalinist regime have long been mysterious. Owing to their sensitive political and personal nature, over half of the Prokofiev documents at the RussianState Archive have been sealed since their deposit there in 1955, two years after Prokofiev's premature death. The disintegration of the Soviet Union did not lead to the rescinding of this prohibition. Author Simon Morrison is the first scholar, non-Russian or Russian, to receive the privilege to study them. Alongside wholly or partly unknown score materials, Morrison has studied Prokofiev's never-seen journals and diaries, the original, unexpurgated versions of his official speeches, and the bulk of his correspondence. This new information makes possible for the first time an accurate study of the tragic second phase of Prokofiev's career. Moving chronologically, Morrison alternates biographical details with discussions of Prokofiev's major works, furnishing dramatic new insights into Prokofiev's engagement with the Stalinist regime and the consequences that it had for his family and his health.

Benjamin Britten was a most reluctant public speaker. Yet his contributions were without doubt a major factor in the transformation during his lifetime of the structure of the art-music industry. This book, by bringing together all his published articles, unpublished speeches, drafts, and transcriptions of numerous radio interviews, explores the paradox of a reluctant yet influential cultural commentator, artist, and humanist. Whether talking about his own music, about the role of the artist in society, about music criticism, or wading into a debate on soviet ideology at the height of the cold war, Britten always gave a performance which reinforced the notion of a private man who nonetheless saw the importance of public disclosure.

for SSA and piano Alice is a quirky, light-hearted celebration of the Alice books by Lewis Carroll. The singers' tale of an encounter with the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, and the Hatter is underpinned by a lively and characterful piano part. Spirited, fun, and with great potential for dramatic performance, this piece will be a memorable addition to any concert. A version for SATB and piano is available from the composer's website.

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

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

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

American composers are at the forefront of a renaissance in concert music, in the process expanding the very definition of the category. The impact of digital technology on the creative process and the unprecedented diversity of contemporary composers are arguably among the catalysts driving the rebirth. In this series of personal interviews with some of the most prominent composers of art music currently working on the American music scene, composer and educator Robert Raines leads the intimate conversations through subjects ranging from the source of inspiration to work habits, the realities of the business of music, and the impact of technology on music and life in the 21st century. The musicians who participated in these conversations are as different from one another as might be imagined, both in styles of music and approaches to life and art, resulting in a series of stories that offer a kaleidoscopic view of the many paths to creativity, yet a common thread that runs through the interviews is the passionate artistic drive that is shared by all. The inspirational stories of struggles and successes, told in the artists' own words and distinctively framed by their individual personalities - humorous, curmudgeonly, serious, serene, and playful by turns - is a delightful and thought-provoking journey full of personal insights, advice, and sharp observations on composing music in a changing, technology-driven world. A loving homage to the artistic spirit, this book is a must-read for students of composition, professors and scholars of music, composers and aspiring composers, and anyone interested in the subjective process of writing music. This rich and entertaining collection provides a unique glimpse into the workings of the creative spirit in the digital age.

The first volume of its kind, Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture draws together three significant areas of inquiry: Jewish music, German culture, and the legacy of the Holocaust. Jewish music-a highly debated topic-encompasses a multiplicity of musics and cultures, reflecting an inherent and evolving hybridity and transnationalism. German culture refers to an equally diverse concept that, in this volume, includes the various cultures of prewar Germany, occupied Germany, the divided and reunified Germany, and even "German (Jewish) memory," which is not necessarily physically bound to Germany. In the context of these perspectives, the volume makes powerful arguments on about the impact of the Holocaust and its aftermath in changing contexts of musical performance and composition. In doing so, the essays in Dislocated Memories cover a wide spectrum of topics from the immediate postwar period with music in the Displaced Persons camps to the later twentieth century with compositions conceived in response to the Holocaust and the klezmer revival at the turn of this century. Dislocated Memories builds on a wide range of recent and critical scholarship in Cold War studies, cultural history, German studies, Holocaust studies, Jewish studies, and memory studies. What binds these distinct fields tightly together are the contributors' specific theoretical inquiries that reflect separate yet interrelated themes such as displacement and memory. While these concepts link the multi-faceted essays on a micro-level, they are also largely connected in their conceptual query by focus, on the macro-level, on the presence and the absence of Jewish music in Germany after 1945. Filled with original research by scholars at the forefront of music, history, and Jewish studies, Dislocated Memories will prove an essential text for scholars and students alike.

This is the third volume of de La Grange's monumental study of the life and music of Gustav Mahler, one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Forty years of research and a vast array of documentary material are here co-ordinated into the definitive study of this supremely gifted musician. This volume, covering the years 1904-1907, shows Mahler in his final years at the Hofoper coping with the rival demands on his energy and creative powers of the Opera on the one hand and his continuing struggle for recognition as composer in his own right. It describes the tragic events of 1907, Mahlers last year in Vienna: the death of his daughter Putzi, the crisis which led him to leave the Opera, and the alarming medical diagnosis which made him cut down on much loved physical activities, at least for a time.

Classical composers seeking to create an American sound enjoyed unprecedented success during the 1930s and 1940s. Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Howard Hanson and others brought national and international attention to American composers for the first time in history. In the years after World War II, however, something changed. The prestige of musical Americanism waned rapidly as anti-Communists made accusations against leading Americanist composers. Meanwhile a method of harmonic organization that some considered more Cold War-appropriate-serialism-began to rise in status. For many composers and historians, the Cold War had effectively "killed off" musical Americanism. In The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War, Emily Abrams Ansari offers a fuller, more nuanced picture of the effect of the Cold War on Americanist composers. The ideological conflict brought both challenges and opportunities. Some Americanist composers struggled greatly in this new artistic and political environment. Those with leftist politics sensed a growing gap between the United States that their music imagined and the aggressive global superpower that their nation seemed to be becoming. But these same composers would find unique opportunities to ensure the survival of musical Americanism thanks to the federal government, which wanted to use American music as a Cold War propaganda tool. By serving as advisors to cultural diplomacy programs and touring as artistic ambassadors, the Americanists could bring their now government-backed music to new global audiences. Some with more right-wing politics, meanwhile, would actually flourish in the new ideological environment, by aligning their music with Cold War conceptions of American identity. The Americanists' efforts to safeguard the reputation of their style would have significant consequences. Ultimately, Ansari shows, they effected a rebranding of musical Americanism, with consequences that remain with us today.

Edward Elgar (1857-1934) is among the greatest of all English composers, and this major biography, the culmination of twenty years' work, is probably the most complete and perceptive study of the composer to date. Drawing on the vast amount of source material, much of it previously unpublished, Jerrold Northrop Moore presents Elgar's life and works as inseparable parts of a single creative career. This classic study, for many years unavailable, is here reissued as a Clarendon Paperback.

This acclaimed biography of Percy Grainger gives the first circumstantial account of one of the strangest figures in twentieth-century music. Behind the glittering public image lay a tragic and chaotic personal life -- mother-domination, sexual unorthodoxy, eccentric athleticism, a demonic spiritual drive, and a wildly inconsistent personal philosophy. This book beautifully balances the brilliance with the turbulence. First published in 1976 but long unavailable, this new edition has been very extensively revised, updated, and reset. A list of published compositions, a current discography of performances by Grainger, and a selection of his seminal writings complete what has already proved to be a standard work.

Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine) is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic of twentieth-century British composers. He was by turns a sensitive songwriter of remarkable genius, a witty and caustic critic, a rare scholar of early music, and a friend of some of the leading figures of the day - including William Walton, Jacob Epstein, and D. H. Lawrence. This is a complete account of this mercurial musician. Barry Smith uses new and often controversial material in telling his real, and frequently outrageous story. Here is the man, the composer, writer, and scholar, from his dangerous involvement in the occult to his long-lasting loves and hates - all of which ended by his own hand in a gas-filled London flat on a cold winter's morning in 1930.

Early Modernism is a uniquely integrated introduction to the great avant-garde movements in European literature, music, and painting at the beginning of this century, from the advent of Fauvism to the development of Dada. Accessible and wide-ranging, the book is lavishly illustrated with over 60 illustrations, many in colour.

The public image of Elgar as patriotic country squire was established in his lifetime, but, in reality, it concealed a highly complex, sometimes baffling, private individual. Although acquaintances found him a man of endless curiosity and good humour, his family and close friends knew him to be rather different: a prey to despair, neurotically mistrustful both of himself and of those who loved him and so damaged by the condescension and neglect of his early years that emotionally he never recovered.
This is a reissue of the third edition of Michael Kenedy's portrait of this complexman - not an analytical survey of the music but a faithful likeness of the composer, recognizable, but at the same time a thoroughly individual interpretation of the subject.

Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century seeks to understand recent German history and contemporary German culture through its sounds and musics, noises and silences, using the means and modes of the emerging field of Sound Studies. German soundscapes present a particularly fertile field for investigation and understanding, Feiereisen and Hill argue, due to such unique factors in Germany's history as its early and especially cacophonous industrialization, the sheer loudness of its wars, and the possibilities of shared noises in its division and reunification. Organized largely but not strictly chronologically, chapters use the unique contours of the German aural experience to examine how these soundscapes - the sonic environments, the ever-present arrays of noises with which everyone lives - ultimately reveal the possibility of "national" sounds. Together the chapters consider the acoustic national identity of Germany, or the cultural significance of sounds and silence, since the development and rise of sound-recording and sound-disseminating technologies in the early 1900s Chapters draw examples from a remarkably broad range of contexts and historical periods, from the noisy urban spaces at the turn of the twentieth century to battlefields and concert halls to radio and television broadcasting to the hip hop soundscapes of today. As a whole, the book makes a compelling case for the scholarly utility of listening to them. An online "Bonus Track" of teaching materials offers instructors practical tips for classroom use.

Much has been written about Leonard Bernstein, a musician of extraordinary talent who was legendary for his passionate love of life and many relationships. In this work, Mari Yoshihara reveals the deeply emotional connections Bernstein formed with two little-known Japanese individuals, which she narrates through their personal letters that have never been seen before. Dearest Lenny interweaves an intimate story of love and art with a history of Bernstein's transformation from an American icon to a world maestro during the second half of the twentieth century. The articulate, moving letters of Kazuko Amano-a woman who began writing fan letters to Bernstein in 1947 and became a close family friend-and Kunihiko Hashimoto-a young man who fell in love with the maestro in 1979 and later became his business representative-convey the meaning Bernstein and his music had at various stages of their lives. The letters also shed light on how Bernstein's compositions, recordings, and performances touched his audiences around the world. The book further traces the making of a global Bernstein amidst the shifting landscape of classical music that made this American celebrity turn increasingly to Europe and Japan. The dramatic change in Japan's place in the world and its relationship to the United States during the postwar decades shaped Bernstein's connection to the country. Ultimately,Dearest Lenny is a story of relationships-between the two individuals and Bernstein, the United States and the world, art and commerce, artists and the state, private and public, conventions and transgressions, dreams and realities-that were at the core of Bernstein's greatest achievements and challenges and that made him truly a maestro of the world. Dearest Lenny paints a poignant portrait of individuals connected across cultures, languages, age, and status through correspondence and music-and the world that shaped their relationships.

A study in contrasts, the career of Sergey Prokofiev spanned the globe, leaving him witness to the most significant political and historical events of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1918, after completing a program of studies at the St. Petersburg conservatory, Prokofiev escaped Russia for the United States and later France where, like most emigre artists of the time, he made Paris his home. During these hectic years, he composed three ballets and three operas, fulfilled recording contracts, and played recitals of tempestuous music. Scores were stored in suitcases, scenarios and librettos drafted on hotel letterhead. The constant uprooting and transience fatigued him, but he regarded himself as a person of action who, personally and professionally, traveled against rather that with the current. Thus, in 1936, as political anxieties increased in Western Europe, Prokofiev escaped back to Russia. Though at first pampered by the totalitarian regime, Prokofiev soon suffered official correction and censorship. He wrote and revised his late ballets and operas to appease his bureaucratic overseers but, more often than not, his labors came to naught. Following his official condemnation in 1948, many of his compositions were withdrawn from performance. Physical illness and mental exhaustion characterized his last years. Housebound, he journeyed inward, creating a series of works on the theme of youth whose music sounds despondently optimistic. The reasons for Prokofiev's return to Russia and the specifics of his dealings with the Stalinist regime have long been mysterious. Owing to their sensitive political and personal nature, over half of the Prokofiev documents at the Russian State Archive have been sealed since their deposit there in 1955, two years after Prokofiev's premature death. The disintegration of the Soviet Union did not lead to the rescinding of this prohibition. Author Simon Morrison is the first scholar, non-Russian or Russian, to receive the privilege to study them. Alongside wholly or partly unknown score materials, Morrison has studied Prokofiev's never-seen journals and diaries, the original, unexpurgated versions of his official speeches, and the bulk of his correspondence. This new information makes possible for the first time an accurate study of the tragic second phase of Prokofiev's career. Moving chronologically, Morrison alternates biographical details with discussions of Prokofiev's major works, furnishing dramatic new insights into Prokofiev's engagement with the Stalinist regime and the consequences that it had for his family and his health.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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