Elliott Carter (1908-2012) was the foremost composer of classical music in America during the second half of the 20th century. Over the course of a career that spanned seven decades, he consistently produced works that critics hailed as creatively daring, intellectually demanding, and emotionally complex. Distancing himself from the various "schools" and movements that grew and waned in popularity during the postwar era, Carter cultivated a deeply personal musical style that he developed and refined up until the very end of his life. This book springs from author David Schiff's life-long interest in Elliott Carter's music and his close personal connection with the composer which spanned over forty years. This critical overview of Carter's life and work explores aspects of the composer's life about which he was usually reticent-and occasionally misleading-such as his complicated relationships with Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Nicolas Nabokov, and his own parents. Schiff's study of Carter's complete oeuvre-from his politically charged Depression-era ballets to the deeply personal and reflective late works-is based on extensive study of the composer's personal sketches and letters. Featuring an in-depth look at the legacy project of Carter's final decade, seven settings of American modernist poetry by E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, this newest addition to the Master Musicians Series paints with a fine brush the story of America's foremost composer of the second half of the twentieth century.

From the Pavane pour une Infante defunte to Bolero, much of the music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) is among the most accessible of any written during the last 100 years. The man himself, on the other hand, was notoriously difficult to get to know, partly because of his natural modesty and inherent reserve, but partly also because there were aspects of his character which he preferred to conceal even from his closest friends. It is Gerlad Larner's aim in this biography to trace the development of the composer's personality not only through events in his life and in the society around him, but also through his music, which is more revealing in this respect than is generally believed.

Is music removed from politics? To what ends, beneficent or malevolent, can music and musicians be put? In short, when human rights are grossly abused and politics turned to fascist demagoguery, can art and artists be innocent?
These questions and their implications are explored in Michael Kater's broad survey of musicians and the music they composed and performed during the Third Reich. Great and small--from Valentin Grimm, a struggling clarinetist, to Richard Strauss, renowned composer--are examined by Kater, sometimes in intimate detail, and the lives and decisions of Nazi Germany's professional musicians are laid out before the reader.
Kater tackles the issue of whether the Nazi regime, because it held music in crassly utilitarian regard, acted on musicians in such a way as to consolidate or atomize the profession. Kater's examination of the value of music for the regime and the degree to which the regime attained a positive propaganda and palliative effect through the manner in which it manipulated its musicians, and by extension, German music, is of importance for understanding culture in totalitarian systems.
This work, with its emphasis on the social and political nature of music and the political attitude of musicians during the Nazi regime, will be the first of its kind. It will be of interest to scholars and general readers eager to understand Nazi Germany, to music lovers, and to anyone interested in the interchange of music and politics, culture and ideology.

The consistent wit and charm of Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) has often led to an underestimation of its value, yet there is now a growing recognition of his stature to which this biography will add. Admired for his fine songs and relgious works, he is perhaps best known for his humorous, insouciant pieces. From the freshness of his ballet Les Biches, composed for Diaghilev in 1924, to his ambitious 1956 opera, Dialogues des Carmelites, the author discusses Poulenc's work in the context of his homosexuality and against the colourful background of Paris in the first half of the century. His friendships with such key figures of the time as Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinksy and Darius Milhaud were complex, but always artistically enriching. For 25 years he toured as an accompanist to the great French baritone, Pierre Barnac, for whom he wrote many of his works, and also performed as piano soloist in some of his own compositions.

This biography of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (b.1934) presents a fascinating portrait of a man whose musical output is inextricably linked to the strictures of life in the former Soviet Union. For most of his adult life in Russia Schnittke's music was powerfully shaped by the frustrations of the Soviet period and he reacted strongly against the ideology of the era. His symphonies lie arguably at the end of the Germanic symphonic tradition, yet each represents a new concept of the genre for the twentieth century. His works reveal the influence of Shostakovich among others, but remain strongly original. Each of his compositions can be understood primarily to offer a unique synthesis of many different influences and styles.The author gives a detailed discussion of Schnittke's music and theories, arguing that the various stylistic elements in his works - his polystylism - may be perceived as part of a new, more universal language.

This book examines two notable forms of chamber music involving piano and strings. Smallman surveys the development of these genres from their origins in the mid-eighteenth century to the present day.

This is the story of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), who bridged the worlds of serious music, operetta and film scores. The son of Vienna's most powerful turn-of-the-century music critic, he achieved legendary status as a child-prodigy composer with the operas Violanta and Die Tote Stadt. Pressures of adult life steered him into arranging the operettas of Johann Strauss, his contemporaries and then Hollywood. Korngold became a highly regarded composer of incidental music for films such as Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood. He ignored the changing tides of musical fashion, and continued to write in his own romantic idiom, creating scores which establish him - within the film-music genres - as one of this century's most influential composers. This study offers a reappraisal of his life and works.

Elektra was the fourth of fifteen operas by Strauss and opened his successful partnership with the librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is one of the most important operas of the early twentieth century and it solidified Strauss's status as the leading German opera-composer of his day. Bryan Gilliam's study of this major work examines its musical-historical context and also provides a detailed analysis of some of its musical features. He establishes a chronology of the evolution of the opera and places it in the larger framework of German opera of the time. His detailed examination of the sketch-books enables him to offer fresh insight into Strauss's use of motifs and overall tonal structure. In so doing he shows how the work's arresting dissonance and chromaticism has hidden its similarities to his later, seemingly more tonally conservative opera, Der Rosenkavalier - not only does Strauss in both operas exploit a variety of musical styles to express irony, parody, and other emotions, but both are in fact thoroughly tonal.

Popular music may be viewed as primary documents of society, and "America's Musical Pulse" documents the American experience as recorded in popular sound. Whether jazz, blues, swing, country, or rock, the music, the impulse behind it, and the reaction to it reveal the attitudes of an era or generation. Always a major preoccupation of students, music is often ignored by teaching professionals, who might profitably channel this interest to further understandings of American social history and such diverse fields as sociology, political science, literature, communications, and business as well as music.

In this interdisciplinary collection, scholars, educators, and writers from a variety of fields and perspectives relate topics concerning twentieth-century popular music to issues of politics, class, economics, race, gender, and the social context. The focus throughout is to place music in societal perspective and encourage investigation of the complex issues behind the popular tunes, rhythms, and lyrics.

The most compelling art form to emerge from the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, rock & roll stands in an edgy relationship with its own mythology, its own musicological history and the broader culture in which it plays a part. In Present Tense, Anthony DeCurtis brings together writers from a wide variety of fields to explore how rock & roll is made, consumed, and experienced in our time.
In this collection, Greil Marcus creates a collage of words and pictures that evokes and explores Elvis Presley's grisly fate as an American cultural image, while Robert Palmer tells the gripping tale of the origins and meanings of the electric guitar. Rap music, MTV, and the issue of gender identity in the work of Bruce Springsteen all undergo thorough examination; rock & roll's complex relationship with the forces of censorship gets a remarkably fresh reading; and the mainstreaming of rock & roll in the 1980s is detailed and analyzed. And, in an interview with Laurie Anderson and an essay by Atlanta musician Jeff Calder, the artists speak for themselves.
Contributors. Jeff Calder, Anthony DeCurtis, Mark Dery, Paul Evans, Glenn Gass, Trent Hill, Michael Jarrett, Alan Light, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, Robert B. Ray, Dan Rubey, David R. Shumway, Martha Nell Smith, Paul Smith

Carl Nielsen is generally considered to be Denmark's greatest composer. His works cover the full range of musical genres: symphonies and operas, chamber music, pieces for piano, and songs. Whereas in Denmark Carl Nielsen is especially loved for his Danish songs and the opera Maskarade, internationally he is primarily known for his instrumental music. Collecting, cataloguing and organising the musical manuscripts of this composer has been carried out for the benefit of the Danish and international music community.

This book provides a convenient starting point for information about over 13,500 composers living today, deceased since 1950, or born since 1900, regardless of date of death. The new Volume III indexes 98 reference works in numerous languages (almost all of them published since the appearance of Volume II).

"The Angel and the Serpent is a book which combines scholarship andliterary grace, and which recreates for us both the world of the Rappites and theOwenites." -- Henry Steele Commager, The New York Times BookReview

Here is the story of George Rapp's German Harmonists andRobert Owen's Idealists -- the two vastly different communities that shaped thehistory of New Harmony, Indiana Both the Rappites and the Owenites came to NewHarmony to conduct communal living experiments -- Rapp expecting the millennium;Owen believing he had brought the millennium with him.

Described by music critic Alex Ross as "the most original musical thinker of our time" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourteen tightly focused and multifarious essays on various aspects of Reich's work-ranging from analytical, aesthetic, and archival studies to sociocultural, philosophical, and ethnomusicological reflections-this edited volume reveals new insights, including those enabled by access to the growing Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation archive, the premier institution for primary research on twentieth-century and contemporary classical music. This volume takes on the timely task of challenging the hegemony of Reich's own articulate and convincing discourses on his music, as found in his Writings on Music (OUP, 2002), and breaks new ground in the broader field of minimalism studies.

Stone is undoubtedly one of the world's leading authorities on contemporary music notation and its problems. As head of the Index of New Musical Notation, he collected and categorized the myriad new devices appearing in published music of this century. In collaboration with professional performers and conductors, he evaluated these devices in order to determine their effectiveness in practical application. At the International Conference on New Music Notation 1974, a consensus was sought from the eighty participating musicians from eighteen different countries. The results have been incorporated into this volume in the clearest and most direct way. Traditional notation is given detailed treatment, constituting, as it does, the basis for many of the innovative devices. The book is organized to facilitate the location of specific information and for easy reference. A minutely detailed index is provided as an additional and indispensable tool.

Breaking down walls between genres that are usually discussed separately - classical, jazz, and popular - this highly engaging book offers a compelling new integrated view of twentieth-century music. Placing Duke Ellington (1899-1974) at the center of the story, David Schiff explores music written during the composer's lifetime in terms of broad ideas such as rhythm, melody, and harmony. He shows how composers and performers across genres shared the common pursuit of representing the rapidly changing conditions of modern life. "The Ellington Century" demonstrates how Duke Ellington's music is as vital to musical modernism as anything by Stravinsky, more influential than anything by Schoenberg, and has had a lasting impact on jazz and pop that reaches from Gershwin to contemporary R&B.

Award-winning author Jack Boss returns with the 'prequel' to Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music (Cambridge, 2014) demonstrating that the term 'atonal' is meaningful in describing Schoenberg's music from 1908 to 1921. This book shows how Schoenberg's atonal music can be understood in terms of successions of pitch and rhythmic motives and pitch-class sets that flesh out the large frameworks of 'musical idea' and 'basic image'. It also explains how tonality, after losing its structural role in Schoenberg's music after 1908, begins to re-appear not long after as an occasional expressive device. Like its predecessor, Schoenberg's Atonal Music contains close readings of representative works, including the Op. 11 and Op. 19 Piano Pieces, the Op. 15 George-Lieder, the monodrama Erwartung, and Pierrot lunaire. These analyses are illustrated by richly detailed musical examples, revealing the underlying logic of some of Schoenberg's most difficult pieces of music.

Pierre Boulez is acknowledged as one of the most important composers in contemporary musical life. This collection explores his works, influence, reception and legacy, shedding new light on Boulez's music and its historical and cultural contexts. In two sections that focus firstly on the context of the 1940s and 1950s, and secondly on the development of the composer's style, the contributors address recurring themes such as Boulez's approach to the serial principle and the related issues of form and large-scale structure. Featuring excerpts from Boulez's correspondence with a range of his contemporaries here published for the first time, the book illuminates both Boulez's relationship with them and his thinking concerning the challenges which confronted both him and other leading figures of the European avant-garde. In the final section, three chapters examine Boulez's relationship with audiences in the United Kingdom, and the development of the appreciation of his music.

A History of the Harpsichord brings together for the first time more than 200 photographs, illustrations, and drawings of harpsichords in public museums and private collections throughout Europe and the United States. Edward L. Kottick draws on his extensive technical knowledge and experience as a harpsichord builder to detail the changing design, structure, and acoustics of the instrument over six centuries.

Modernism in music still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a postmodern persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the 'new musicology'. Yet these critiques have failed to dampen its ongoing resilience. The picture of modernism has considerably broadened and diversified, and has remained a pivotal focus of debate well into the twenty-first century. This Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be. At the same time, it resists any dilution of the term that would see its indiscriminate application to practically any and all music of a certain period. In addition to addressing issues already well established in modernist studies such as aesthetics, history, institutions, place, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, production and performance, communication technologies and the interface with postmodernism, this volume also explores topics that are less established; among them: modernism and affect, modernism and comedy, modernism versus the 'contemporary', and the crucial distinction between modernism in popular culture and a 'popular modernism', a modernism of the people. In doing so, this text seeks to define modernism in music by probing its margins as much as by restating its supposed essence.

'A delight to read' Philip Pullman 'Essential reading ... a genuine landmark publication' Tom Service A BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' The music of the British composer Michael Tippett - including the oratorio A Child of Our Time, five operas, and four symphonies - is among the most visionary of the twentieth century. But little has been written about his extraordinary life. In this long-awaited first biography, Oliver Soden weaves a century-spanning narrative of epic scope and penetrating insight. His achievement is to have enriched our understanding not only of Tippett but of the twentieth century. Figures such as T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Barbara Hepworth, and W.H. Auden jostle in the cast list. An Edwardian world of gaslight and empire cedes to turmoil and warfare and his operas' game-changing attitudes to gay and civil rights, against a backdrop of the Cold War and the Space Race. The result is a landmark in the study of twentieth-century culture, simultaneously an astonishing feat of scholarship and a story as enthralling as in any great novel.

A source book incorporating all the most important unpublished writings of America's great composer.

Here are most of the previously unpublished writings of Charles E. Ives: a primary source book on this unique American composer.

These "Memos," as Ives called them, were on separate leaves and dealt with his music, composition, criticism, autobiography, biography, and many other topics. During his lifetime Ives rearranged them, lent them out, mislaid and tucked them away in books so that, in the late 1940s, only about three-fifths of the leaves were available to his biographer.

After his death in 1954, Ives's papers were gradually put in order, and in time most of the remaining leaves came to light. These two "batches" are here dovetailed into a three-part form by John Kirkpatrick, who has devotedly arranged, edited, and annotated them. Part One, "Pretext," sets forth Ives's aims, his views on music, critics, and criticism. In Part Two, "Scrapbook," Ives discusses his music. Part Three, "Memories," is devoted to biogrpahical and autobiographical remembrances.

The appendix consists of lists of Ives's music, other writings of Ives that round out the Memos, material clarifying Ives's relationship with people who influenced him, a play and a story Ives thought had operatic possibilities. There are three indices: a chronology of dates, an index to the music of Ives, and an index of names.

A vibrant portrait of the importance, influence, and impact of John Cage's iconic piece 4'33" by a leading modern music critic First performed at the midpoint of the twentieth century, John Cage's 4'33", a composition conceived of without a single musical note,is among the most celebrated and ballyhooed cultural gestures in the history of modern music. A meditation on the act of listening and the nature of performance, Cage's controversial piece became the iconic statement of the meaning of silence in art and is a landmark work of American music. In this book, Kyle Gann, one of the nation's leading music critics, explains 4'33" as a unique moment in American culture and musical composition. Finding resemblances and resonances of 4'33" in artworks as wide-ranging as the paintings of the Hudson River School and the music of John Lennon and Yoko Ono,he provides much-needed cultural context for this fundamentally challenging and often misunderstood piece. Gann also explores Cage's craft, describing in illuminating detail the musical, philosophical, and even environmental influences that informed this groundbreaking piece of music. Having performed 4'33" himself and as a composer in his own right, Gann offers the reader both an expert's analysis and a highly personal interpretation of Cage's most divisive work.

Schoenberg's quartets and trio, composed over a nearly forty-year period, occupy a central position among twentieth-century chamber music. This volume, based on papers presented at a conference in honor of David Lewin, collects a wide range of approaches to Schoenberg's pieces.

The first part of the book provides a historical context to these works, examining Viennese quartet culture and traditions, Webern's reception of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, Schoenberg's view of the Beethoven quartets, and the early reception of Schoenberg's First Quartet. The second part examines musical issues of motive, text setting, meter, imitative counterpoint, and closure within Schoenberg's quartets and trio.