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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles > 20th century music
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.
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.
The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, first published in 2004, is an appraisal of the development of music in the twentieth century from the vantage-point of the twenty-first. This wide-ranging and eclectic book traces the progressive fragmentation of the European 'art' tradition, and its relocation as one tradition among many at the century's end. While the focus is on Western traditions, both 'art' and popular, these are situated within the context of world music, including a case study of the interaction of 'art' and traditional musics in post-colonial Africa. An international authorship brings a wide variety of approaches to music history, but the aim throughout is to set musical developments in the context of social, ideological, and technological change, and to understand reception and consumption as integral to the history of music.
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.
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 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.
While acknowledging that Pierre Boulez is not a philosopher, and that he is wary of the potential misuse of philosophy with regard to music, this study investigates a series of philosophically charged terms and concepts which he uses in discussion of his music. Campbell examines significant encounters which link Boulez to the work of a number of important philosophers and thinkers, including Adorno, Levi-Strauss, Eco and Deleuze. Relating Boulez's music and ideas to broader currents of thought, the book illuminates a number of affinities linking music and philosophy, and also literature and visual art. These connections facilitate enhanced understanding of post-war modernist music and Boulez's distinctive approach to composition. Drawing on a wide range of previously unpublished documentary sources and providing musical analysis of a number of key scores, the book traces the changing musical, philosophical and intellectual currents which inform Boulez's work.
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.
Pierre Boulez was appointed to the College de France in 1976, with the chair devoted to 'Invention, technique and language in Music', and he held his position until 1995. The publication of his extraordinary College de France lectures, his most significant writings from the 1970s to the 1990s, will make a major contribution to the discussion in English about Boulez's aesthetic legacy. His goal in Lecons de musique is to express his conception of musical language, laid out over the course of nearly twenty years of lecturing. He is thinking about the possible paths musical thought could take, as well as the musical legacy of the past In addition to composers, music historians, theorists, and music students, this book will be invaluable to those interested in the history and aesthetics of 20th century music, musical manifestations of artistic modernism, the history of ideas, and French intellectual and cultural history. Faber have been Pierre Boulez's publisher since 1986 - previous books include Orientations, Boulez on Music Today and Boulez on Conducting. 'Boulez's achievements in changing every part of the fabric of classical musical culture all over the world are indelible.' Tom Service, Guardian
This thematic examination of Britten's operas focuses on the way that ideology is presented on stage. To watch or listen is to engage with a vivid artistic testament to the ideological world of mid-twentieth-century Britain. But it is more than that, too, because in many ways Britten's operas continue to proffer a diagnosis of certain unresolved problems in our own time. Only rarely, as in Peter Grimes, which shows the violence inherent in all forms of social and psychological identification, does Britten unmistakably call into question fundamental precepts of his contemporary ideology. This has not, however, prevented some writers from romanticizing Britten as a quiet revolutionary. This book argues, in contrast, that his operas, and some interpretations of them, have obscured a greater social and philosophical complicity that it is timely - if at the same time uncomfortable - for his early twenty-first-century audiences to address.
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.
Stravinsky in Context offers an alternative to chronological biography. Thirty-five short, specially commissioned essays explore the eventful life-tapestry from which Stravinsky's compositions emerged. The opening chapters draw on new research into the composer's childhood in St. Petersburg. Stravinsky's early, often traumatic upbringing is examined in depth, particularly in the context of his brother Roman's death, and religious sensibilities within the family. Further essays consider Stravinsky's years in exile at the centre of dynamic and ever-evolving cultural environments, the composer constantly refining his idiom and re-defining his aesthetics against a backdrop of world events and personal tragedy. The closing chapters review new material regarding Stravinsky's complicated relationship with the Soviet Union, whilst also anticipating his legacy from the varied perspectives of publishing, research and even - in the iconic example of The Rite of Spring - space exploration. The book includes previously unpublished images of the composer and his family.
Richard Strauss in Context offers a distinctive approach to the study of a composer in that it places the emphasis on contextualizing topics rather than on biography and artistic output. One might say that it inverts the relationship between composer and context. Rather than studies of Strauss's librettists that discuss the texts themselves and his musical settings, for instance, this book offers essays on the writers themselves: their biographical circumstances, styles, landmark works, and broader positions in literary history. Likewise, Strauss's contributions to the concert hall are positioned within the broader development of the orchestra and trends in programmatic music. In short, readers will benefit from an elaboration of material that is either absent from or treated only briefly in existing publications. Through this supplemental and broader contextual approach, this book serves as a valuable and unique resource for students, scholars, and a general readership.
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.
Providing an interesting approach to developments in modernist music - from 1980 onwards - this study also presents an intriguing perspective on the larger history of modernism. Far from being supplanted by a postmodern period, argues David Metzer, modernist idioms remain vital in the contemporary scene. The vitality comes from the ways in which those idioms have extended impulses of modernist styles from the early twentieth century. Since that time, works have participated in lines of inquiry into various compositional and aesthetic topics, particularly the explorations of how to build pieces around such aesthetic ideals as purity and silence and how to deliver and manipulate expressive utterances. Metzer shows how these inquiries have played crucial roles in defining directions taken since 1980, and how, through the inquiries, we can gain a clearer idea of what makes the decades after 1980 a distinct period in the history of modernism.
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.
The song cycle was one of the most important musical genres of the nineteenth century. Famous examples by Schubert, Schumann and Mahler have received a great deal of attention. Yet many other cycles - by equally famous composers, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - have not. The Song Cycle introduces key concepts and a broad repertoire by tracing a history of the genre from Beethoven through to the present day. It explores how song cycles reflect the world around them and how national traditions and social relationships are represented in composers' choice of texts and musical styles. Tunbridge investigates how other types of music have influenced the scope of the song cycle, from operas and symphonies to popular song. A lively and engaging guide to this important topic, the book outlines how performance practices, from concert customs to new recording technologies, have changed the way we listen.
Amiri Baraka is unquestionably the most recognized leader of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the key literary and cultural figures of the postwar United States. While Baraka's political and aesthetic stances changed considerably over the course of his career, Brick City Vanguard demonstrates the continuity in his thinking about the meaning of black music in the material, psychic, and ideological development of black people. Drawing on primary texts, paratexts (including album liner notes), audio and visual recordings, and archival sources, James Smethurst takes a new look at how Baraka's writing on and performance of music envisioned the creation of an African American people or nation, as well as the growth and consolidation of a black working class within that nation, that resonates to this day. This vision also provides a way of understanding the encounter of black people with what has been called ""the urban crisis"" and a projection of a liberated black future beyond that crisis.
Richard Strauss is a composer much loved among audiences throughout the world, both in the opera house and the concert hall. Despite this popularity, Strauss was for many years ignored by scholars, who considered his commercial success and his continued reliance on the tonal system to be liabilities. However, the past two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in the composer. This Companion surveys the results, focusing on the principal genres, the social and historical context, and topics perennially controversial over the last century. Chapters cover Strauss's immense operatic output, the electrifying modernism of his tone poems, and his ever-popular Lieder. Controversial topics are explored, including Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich and the sexual dimension of his works. Reintroducing the composer and his music in light of recent research, the volume shows Strauss's artistic personality to be richer and much more complicated than has been previously acknowledged.
In this important new anthology, Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey bring together a comprehensive selection of texts from the Harlem Renaissance -- a key period in the literary and cultural history of the cultural life of the United States. The collection revolutionizes our way of viewing this era, as it redresses the ongoing emphasis on the male writers of this time. Double-Take offers a unique, balanced collection of writers -- men and women, gay and straight, familiar and obscure. The editors have also included works from a wide variety of genres -- poetry, short stories, drama, essays, music, and art -- allowing readers to understand the true interdisciplinary quality of this cultural movement. Biographical sketches of the authors are provided and most of the pieces are included in their entirety. Double-Take also includes artwork and illustrations, many of which are from periodicals and have never before been reprinted. Significantly, Double-Take is the first book to include music lyrics to illustrate the interrelation of various art forms. Arranged by author, rather than by genre, this anthology includes works from major Harlem Renaissance figures as well as often-overlooked essayists, poets, dramatists, and artists.
Arnold Schoenberg - composer, theorist, teacher, painter, and one of the most important and controversial figures in twentieth-century music. This Companion presents engaging essays by leading scholars on Schoenberg's central works, writings, and ideas over his long life in Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Challenging monolithic views of the composer as an isolated elitist, the volume demonstrates that what has kept Schoenberg and his music interesting and provocative was his profound engagement with the musical traditions he inherited and transformed, with the broad range of musical and artistic developments during his lifetime he critiqued and incorporated, and with the fundamental cultural, social, and political disruptions through which he lived. The book provides introductions to Schoenberg's most important works, and to his groundbreaking innovations including his twelve-tone compositions. Chapters also examine Schoenberg's lasting influence on other composers and writers over the last century.
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"
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. |
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