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.

A musical composer who dabbled in the Dada movement, a Bohemian gymnopediste of fin-de-siecle Montmartre, and a legendary dresser known as The Velvet Gentleman for his sartorial choices, Erik Satie was nearly unprecedented in technique, style and philosophy among European composers in the early twentieth century. Yet his legacy has largely languished in the shadows of Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel. Mary E. Davis now brings Satie to life in this fascinating new biography that demonstrates that his musical innovations reached as far as his influence. Satie redefined the boundaries of the composer's art, devising new methods of artistic expression that melded ordinary elements and rarefied genres of words, visual art and music. Davis argues that Satie's modernist aesthetic was grounded in the contradictions apparent in his life such as enrolling in the conservative Schola Cantorum after working as a cabaret performer and is reflected in his irreverent essays, drawings and music." Erik Satie" explores how the composer was embraced by both the avant-garde and Parisian elite, an experience that immersed him in the worlds of high fashion and cutting-edge modernist art, and subsequently gave him the aesthetic impetus to create the new musical style of Neoclassicism. Satie also crucially employed the power of the image through his infamous fashion statements, Davis contends, to establish his place in the art world, and in this connection between couture and culture, Satie was at the heart of a nascent celebrity culture. A fascinating and informative portrait, with numerous illustrations that include art by Satie himself, "Erik Satie" reassesses the accepted history of modernist music and restores the composer to his rightful pioneering status.

The works of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) had a major impact on the music of the 20th century, influencing a range of figures from Ravel and Stravinsky to Henri Dutilleux and Toru Takemitsu. Less well known is Debussy's influence on the popular culture of the period. Matthew Brown shows how Debussy's music has surfaced in an array of contexts from the film music of the 1940s to the dance music of the 1990s. It is easy to see how Debussy's impressionist soundscapes for orchestra such as La Mer and Iberia could be perfect models for accompaniments to film scenes, but as Brown makes clear Debussy's music and influence cannot by reduced to dreamy imitations of Clair de Lune. As he traces the trajectory of Debussy's stylistic evolution, Brown shows how facets of this style were reinterpreted in a surprising variety of popular musical contexts.

'To Richter (no first name necessary), warm greetings to the best pianist in the Soviet Union - indeed in the whole world.' Prokofiev Throughout a life dedicated to music, Richter maintained a stubborn silence about his own ideals and aspirations. Here at last he opens up his heart in these exceptional interviews with Bruno Monsaingeon, who became close to Richter not long before the pianist's death in 1995. These conversations take us on a journey which begins with Richter's childhood memories, follows his early career and his development into 'an artist of the people', and finally charts his rise to international acclaim. Richter's personal notebooks, kept for nearly thirty years, constitute an unparalleled witness to the music of our time. The pianist writes with precision, humour and clarity and is uninhibitedly himself. These are the private thoughts of a nonconformist, one of the greatest performers of the century, yet one whose life was inextricably bound to the history of the USSR.

NOMINATED FOR THE JAZZ JOURNALISTS ASSOCIATION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 WINNER OF THE PRESTO JAZZ BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 An articulate, scrupulously researched account based on first-hand information, this book presents Brubeck's contribution to music with the critical insight that it deserves - ***** BBC Music Magazine This is the writing about jazz that we've been waiting for - Mike Westbrook The sheer descriptive verve, page after page, made me want to listen to every single musical example cited. A major achievement - Stephen Hough 'Definitive . . . remarkable. Clark writes intelligently and joyously.' - Mojo In 2003, music journalist Philip Clark was granted unparalleled access to jazz legend Dave Brubeck. Over the course of ten days, he shadowed the Dave Brubeck Quartet during their extended British tour, recording an epic interview with the bandleader. Brubeck opened up as never before, disclosing his unique approach to jazz; the heady days of his 'classic' quartet in the 1950s-60s; hanging out with Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis; and the many controversies that had dogged his 66-year-long career. Alongside beloved figures like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, Brubeck's music has achieved name recognition beyond jazz. But finding a convincing fit for Brubeck's legacy, one that reconciles his mass popularity with his advanced musical technique, has proved largely elusive. In Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time, Clark provides us with a thoughtful, thorough, and long-overdue biography of an extraordinary man whose influence continues to inform and inspire musicians today. Structured around Clark's extended interview and intensive new research, this book tells one of the last untold stories of jazz, unearthing the secret history of 'Take Five' and many hitherto unknown aspects of Brubeck's early career - and about his creative relationship with his star saxophonist Paul Desmond. Woven throughout are cameo appearances from a host of unlikely figures from Sting, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, and Keith Emerson, to John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varese. Each chapter explores a different theme or aspect of Brubeck's life and music, illuminating the core of his artistry and genius.

Like all fields of creative endeavour, music has long been caught up - voluntarily and otherwise - in matters political. Music has been used and abused, claimed and disowned, for propaganda purposes, as a vehicle for protest, as a means of articulating national, racial and sexual identities, and in the name of religious, courtly, party political and commercial imperatives. Scholarly interest in the political dimensions of music and music making has increased greatly in recent decades to the point where a consolidated overview has become indispensable to furthering our understanding of the forces at play. This timely four volume series brings together classic essays addressing the intersection of music and politics, in the broad sense of the word, written by leading international scholars over the past few decades. The essays, which encompass art and vernacular musics in western and non-western cultures, ancient and modern, are grouped together under the headings of patronage, ideology, protest and identity politics. Each volume is edited by a recognized authority in their field and includes a select bibliography and an introduction which offers an authoritative overview of research in the area. This four-volume series offers a significant benefit to students, lecturers and libraries as it brings together leading articles in the field from disparate journals which are often difficult to locate and of limited access. Students are thus able to study leading articles side by side for comparison whilst lecturers are provided with an invaluable 'one-stop' teaching resource.

In this new edition of the classic text on the history and evolution of electronic music, Peter Manning extends the definitive account of the medium from its birth to include key developments from the dawn of the 21st century to the present day. After explaining the antecedents of electronic music from the turn of the 20th century to the Second World War, Manning discusses the emergence of the early 'classical' studios of the 1950s, and the subsequent evolution of more advanced analogue technologies during the 1960s and '70s, leading in turn to the birth and development of the MIDI synthesizer. Attention then turns to the characteristics of the digital revolution, from the pioneering work of Max Mathews at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1950s to the wealth of resources available today, facilitated by the development of the personal computer and allied digital technologies. The scope and extent of the technical and creative developments that have taken place since the late 1990s are considered in an extended series of new and updated chapters. These include topics such as the development of the digital audio workstation, laptop music, the Internet, and the emergence of new performance interfaces. Manning offers a critical perspective of the medium in terms of the philosophical and technical features that have shaped its growth. Emphasizing the functional characteristics of emerging technologies and their influence on the creative development of the medium, Manning covers key developments in both commercial and the non-commercial sectors to provide readers with the most comprehensive resource available on the evolution of this ever-expanding area of creativity.

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.

Facsimile of the composition draft of Peter Grimes, showing Britten's compositional method; companion volume containing essays on its history and significance. Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten's first opera, established his stature as a composer, marked a turning point in the fortunes of English opera, and conquered operatic stages around the world. Though its setting and music reflect Britten's greatlove for his native East Anglia, the inspiration for the work was a chance encounter with the poetry of George Crabbe while Britten and the tenor Peter Pears (who eventually created the title role) were stayingin California in 1941; they made a number of draft scenarios while they waited for a passage to England, and after their return Montagu Slater was asked to write the libretto. The full score was completed by February 1945. The single document that reveals most about the work's creative history is the composition draft in which the composer wrestled with text and music, gradually fashioning the opera into its final version. The colour facsimile of this fascinating manuscript is published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its first production. It is accompanied by a commentary volume containing a series of essays on the work's history and its contemporary significance by leading Britten scholars, together with a brief note on the work by PETER PEARS(apparently never before published) and an account of the first production by the late ERIC CROZIER, who directed it. The volume is illustrated with colour reproductions of some of the original costume designs by Kenneth Green, his portrait of BenjaminBritten, and contemporary black and white photographs.

"["Western Music and Its Others] will be taken as an important book signalling a new turn within the field. It takes the best features of traditional, rigorous scholarship and brings these to bear upon contemporary, more speculative questions. The level of theoretical sophistication is high. The studies within it are polemical and timely and of lasting scholarly value."--Will Straw, co-editor of "Theory Rules: Art as Theory/ Theory and Art

"The great value of this collection lies in the wealth of questions that it raises--questions that together crystallize the recent concerns of musicology with force and clarity. But it also lies in the authors' resistance to the easy 'postmodernist' answers that threaten to turn new musicology prematurely grey. The editors' comprehensive, intellectually adventurous introduction exemplifies the sort of eager yet properly skeptical receptivity to scholarly innovation that fosters lasting disciplinary reform. It alone is worth the price of the book." --Richard Taruskin, author of "Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through" Mavra"

"When cultural-studies methods first appeared in musicology 15 years ago, they triggered a storm of polemics that sometimes overshadowed the important issues being raised. As the canon wars recede, however, scholars are finding it possible to focus on the concerns that led them to cultural criticism in the first place: the study of music and its political meanings. "Western Music and Its Others brings together leading musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and specialists in film and popular music to explore the ways European and North American musicians have drawn on or identified themselves intension with the musical practices of Others. In a series of essays ranging from examination of the Orientalist tropes of early 20th-century Modernists to the tangled claims for ownership in today's World Music, the authors in this collection greatly advance both our knowledge of specific case studies and our intellectual awareness of the complexity and urgency of these problems. A timely intervention that should help push music studies to the next level." --Susan McClary, author of "Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000)

"This collection provides a sophisticated model for using theory to interrogate music and music to interrogate theory. The essays both take up and challenge the dominance of notions of representation in cultural theory as they explore the relevance of the concepts of hybridity and otherness for contemporary art music. Sophisticated theory, erudite scholarship and a very real appreciation for the specificities of music make this a powerful and important addition to our understanding of both culture and music." --Lawrence Grossberg, author of "Dancing in Spite of Myself

In this lively collection of interviews, storied music writer Jas Obrecht presents a celebration of the world's most popular instrument as seen through the words, lives, and artistry of some of its most beloved players. Readers will read--and hear--accounts of the first guitarists on record, pioneering bluesmen, gospel greats, jazz innovators, country pickers, rocking rebels, psychedelic shape-shifters, singer-songwriters, and other movers and shakers. In their own words, these guitar players reveal how they found their inspirations, mastered their instruments, crafted classic songs, and created enduring solos. Also included is a CD of never-before-heard moments from Obrecht's insightful interviews with these guitar greats. Highlights include Nick Lucas's recollections of waxing the first noteworthy guitar records; Ry Cooder's exploration of prewar blues musicians; Carole Kaye and Ricky Nelson on the early years of rock and roll; Stevie Ray Vaughan on Jimi Hendrix; Gregg Allman on his brother, Duane Allman; Carlos Santana, Eric Johnson, and Pops Staples on spirituality in music; Jerry Garcia, Neil Young, and Tom Petty on songwriting and creativity; and early interviews with Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani, and Ben Harper.

A River Out Of Eden is Howard Goodall's vibrant choral anthem for SATB voices and piano, composed to celebrate the service of Sid and Cindy Davis at St Luke's United Methodist Church, Houston. The music sets two distinct accounts of creation: William Tyndale's translation from The Book of Genesis and an excerpt from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Intertwined through Goodall's contemporary musical style, the disorder underlying Dillard's text erupts into Tyndale's joyous refrain: 'And there spronge a rever out of Eden', the music a reflection upon our dependence on the natural world. An optional organ part is also available to download from fabermusic.com.

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

A fresh appreciation of the great musical figure that gives him his due as composer as well as conductor Leonard Bernstein stood at the epicenter of twentieth-century American musical life. His creative gifts knew no boundaries as he moved easily from the podium, to the piano, to television with his nationally celebrated Young People's Concerts, which introduced an entire generation to the joy of classical music. In this fascinating new biography, the breadth of Bernstein's musical composition is explored, through the spectacular range of music he composed-from West Side Story to Kaddish to A Quiet Place and beyond-and through his intensely public role as an internationally celebrated conductor. For the first time, the composer's life and work receive a fully integrated analysis, offering a comprehensive appreciation of a multi-faceted musician who continued to grow as an artist well into his final days.

Among major 20th-century composers whose music is poorly understood, Sergei Prokofiev stands out conspicuously. The turbulent times in which Prokofiev lived and the chronology of his travels-he left Russia in the wake of Revolution, and returned at the height of the Stalinist purges-have caused unusually polarized appraisals of his music. While individual, distinctive, and instantly recognizable, Prokofiev's music was also idiosyncratically tonal in an age when tonality was largely passe. Prokofiev's output therefore has been largely elusive and difficult to assess against contemporary trends. More than sixty years after the composer's death, editors Rita McAllister and Christina Guillaumier offer Rethinking Prokofiev as an assessment that redresses this enigmatic composer's legacy. Often more political than artistic, these appraisals have depended not only upon the date of publication but also the geographical location of the writer. Commissioned from some of the most distinguished and rising scholars in the field, this collection highlights the background and context of Prokofiev's work. Contributors delve into the composer's relationship to nineteenth-century Russian traditions, Silver-Age and Symbolist composers and poets, the culture of Paris in the 1920s and '30s, and to his later Soviet colleagues and younger contemporaries. They also investigate his reception in the West, his return to Russia, and the effect of his music on contemporary popular culture. Still, the main focus of the book is on the music itself: his early, experimental piano and vocal works, as well as his piano concertos, operas, film scores, early ballets, and late symphonies. Through an empirical examination of his characteristic harmonies, melodies, cadences, and musical gestures-and through an analysis of the newly uncovered contents of his sketch-books-contributors reveal much of what makes Prokofiev an idiosyncratic genius and his music intriguing, often dramatic, and almost always beguiling.

Bela Bartok, who died in New York fifty years ago this September, is one of the most frequently performed twentieth-century composers. He is also the subject of a rapidly growing critical and analytical literature. Bartok was born in Hungary and made his home there for all but his last five years, when he resided in the United States. As a result, many aspects of his life and work have been accessible only to readers of Hungarian. The main goal of this volume is to provide English-speaking audiences with new insights into the life and reception of this musician, especially in Hungary.

Part I begins with an essay by Leon Botstein that places Bartok in a large historical and cultural context. Laszlo Somfai reports on the catalog of Bartok's works that is currently in progress. Peter Laki shows the extremes of the composer's reception in Hungary, while Tibor Tallian surveys the often mixed reviews from the American years. The essays of Carl Leafstedt and Vera Lampert deal with his librettists Bela Balazs and Melchior Lengyel respectively. David Schneider addresses the artistic relationship between Bartok and Stravinsky.

Most of the letters and interviews in Part II concern Bartok's travels and emigration as they reflected on his personal life and artistic evolution. Part III presents early critical assessments of Bartok's work as well as literary and poetic responses to his music and personality."

As one of the original pioneering composers of the American experimental music movement and a well known scholar of classics, Christian Wolff has long been active as a significant thinker and elegant writer on music. With Occasional Pieces, Wolff brings together a collection of his most notable writings and interviews from 1950 to the present, shining a new light on American music of the second half of the twentieth century. The collection opens with some of his earliest writings on his craft, discussing his own proto-minimalist compositional procedures and the music and ideas that led him to develop these techniques. Organized chronologically to give a sense of the development of Wolff's thinking on music over the course of his career, some of the pieces delve into connections of music-making to social and political issues, and the concept of indeterminacy as it applies to performance, while others offer insights into the work of Wolff's notable contemporaries including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew , Dieter Schnebel, Pauline Oliveros, and Merce Cunningham. An invaluable resource for historians, composers, listeners and students alike, Occasional Pieces offers a deep dive into Christian Wolff's musical world and brings new light to the history of the American experimental movement.

Strongly influencing European musical life from the 1880s through the First World War and remaining highly productive into the 1940s, Richard Strauss enjoyed a remarkable career in a constantly changing artistic and political climate. This volume presents six original essays on Strauss's musical works--including tone poems, lieder, and operas--and brings together letters, memoirs, and criticism from various periods of the composer's life. Many of these materials appear in English for the first time. In the essays Leon Botstein contradicts the notion of the composer's stylistic "about face" after Elektra; Derrick Puffett reinforces the argument for Strauss's artistic consistency by tracing in the tone poems and operas the phenomenon of pitch specificity; James Hepokoski establishes Strauss as an early modernist in an examination of Macbeth; Michael Steinberg probes the composer's political sensibility as expressed in the 1930s through his music and use of such texts as Friedenstag and Daphne; Bryan Gilliam discusses the genesis of both the text and the music in the final scene of Daphne; Timothy Jackson in his thorough source study argues for a new addition to the so-called Four Last Songs. Among the correspondence are previously untranslated letters between Strauss and his post-Hofmannsthal librettist, Joseph Gregor. The memoirs range from early biographical sketches to Rudolf Hartmann's moving account of his last visit with Strauss shortly before the composer's death. Critical reviews include recently translated essays by Theodor Adorno, Guido Adler, Paul Bekker, and Julius Korngold.

Igor Stravinsky lived the life of a celebrity composer in an increasingly celebrity-obsessed age. He was a true modern, a man of his time. In Paris he dined with Joyce, Picasso and Proust, and by the end of his life was being feted by both the White House and the Kremlin as a prime piece of Cold War capital. But his colourful life would be mean little to us were it not for the brilliant and original music he produced, music that reflected and shaped his own times, and which continues to speak today.Born in Russia, Stravinsky spent most of his long life in exile. While he swiftly became a cosmopolitan composer, speaking the international language of modernist 'Western' music, the sting of his estrangement never left him. The sense of distance, loss and nostalgia, the wistful looking back evident in so much of Stravinsky's music, is not only a response to personal tragedy, but also a powerful expression of the deep anxiety and alienation of his age. Igor Stravinsky offers an in-depth critical overview of the life and work of this extraordinary citizen of the 20th Century. Jonathan Cross's accessible and engaging biography offers a new understanding of how Stravinsky's life lived in exile can be understood through his creative work, and gives a fresh portrait of a milieu stretching from St Petersburg, to Paris and Los Angeles, all seen through the eyes of this fascinating composer.

What is music, and why does it move us? From Pythagoras to the present, writers have struggled to isolate the essence of "pure" or "absolute" music in ways that also account for its profound effect. In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds traces the history of these efforts across more than two millennia, paying special attention to the relationship between music's essence and its qualities of form, expression, beauty, autonomy, as well as its perceived capacity to disclose philosophical truths. The core of this book focuses on the period between 1850 and 1945. Although the idea of pure music is as old as antiquity, the term "absolute music" is itself relatively recent. It was Richard Wagner who coined the term, in 1846, and he used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For Wagner, music that was "absolute" was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. His contemporary, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, embraced this quality of isolation as a guarantor of purity. Only pure, absolute music, he argued, could realize the highest potential of the art. Bonds reveals how and why perceptions of absolute music changed so radically between the 1850s and 1920s. When it first appeared, "absolute music" was a new term applied to old music, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had become-paradoxically-an old term associated with the new music of modernists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Bonds argues that the key developments in this shift lay not in discourse about music but rather the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century-line and color, as opposed to object-helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism. By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to the twentieth-century, Bonds not only provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept but also provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how essence has been used to explain music's effect. A long awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field, Absolute Music will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history, theory, and aesthetics of music.