Visionary composer, theorist, and creator of musical instruments, Harry Partch (1901-1974) was a leading figure in the development of an indigenously American contemporary music. A pioneer in his explorations of new instruments and new tunings, Partch created multimedia theater works that combine sight and sound in a compelling synthesis. He is acknowledged as a major inspiration to postwar experimental composers as diverse as Gyoergy Ligeti, Lou Harrison, Philip Glass, and Laurie Anderson, and his book Genesis of a Music, first published in 1949, is now considered a classic. This book is the first to tell the complete story of Partch's life and work. Drawing on interviews with many of Partch's associates and on the complete archives of the Harry Partch Estate, Bob Gilmore provides a full and sympathetic portrait of this extraordinary creative artist. He describes Partch's complicated relationships with friends, patrons, the musical establishment, and the world at large. He traces Partch's upbringing in the remote desert towns of the Southwest, his explosive encounter with formal music education in Los Angeles, and his revolutionary course as a composer that began with an interest in the musicality of speech patterns. After immersing himself in hobo subculture during the Depression, Partch came to occupy a lonely and uncompromising position as a cultural outsider. Richly fascinating in themselves, Partch's compositions, writings, and life also have much to reveal about American society and the creative impulses of the artistic avant-garde.

George Gershwin is at once one of America's most popular and least appreciated composers. In this important new work, some of America's leading experts on popular music have contributed articles about Gershwin and the rediscovery of both his songs and his concert music.

This beautiful setting of a text by Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrates the universal presence of song, which can be found in places of beauty but also darkness. With memorable melodies and a flowing supportive accompaniment, this piece will leave a warm feeling in both the singers and listeners alike. Originally published in The Oxford Book of Flexible Choral Songs for flexible voices and also available separately in a version for SATB and piano.

This beautiful setting of a text by Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrates the universal presence of song, which can be found in places of beauty but also darkness. With memorable melodies and a flowing supportive accompaniment, this piece will leave a warm feeling in both the singers and listeners alike. Originally published in The Oxford Book of Flexible Choral Songs for flexible voices and also available separately in a version for two part and piano.

The first book to deal exclusively with British musical flops, Must Close Saturday presents a rolling panorama of the good, the bad and the ugly, reassessing their place in theatrical history. The ominous announcement "Must Close Saturday" too often heralded the demise of British musicals. Looking forward from the vantage point of Lionel Bart's spectacularly successful Oliver! in 1960, Adrian Wright's authoritative chronicle of the commercially unsuccessful British musical of the last half a century uncovers a wealth of fascinating material. In the wake of the resurgence that briefly blew through the British musical at the end of the 1950s with verismo works such as Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be and Expresso Bongo, the British musical was shaken by Bart's adaptation of Dickens, but was quickly left floundering in the face of constant critical complaint and financial failure. The first book to deal exclusively with British musical flops, Must Close Saturday presents a rolling panorama of the good, the bad and the ugly, reassessing their place in theatrical history.Wright reveals a consistent striving at invention, with subjects including the electric chair, the Holocaust, the Virgin Mary, social inequality and Trade Unionism, sexual problems and murder, as well as biographical treatments of Hollywood stars, French painters, tragic novelists, royalty, and the Rector of Stiffkey. Discursive and provoking, Must Close Saturday at last prises open the neglected history of the British musical flop up to 2016. ADRIAN WRIGHT is the author of Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley (1996), John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure (1998), The Innumerable Dance: The Life and Work of William Alwyn (Boydell & Brewer, 2008), the novel Maroon (2010) and The Voice of Doom (2016). His previous books on British musical theatre are A Tanner's Worth of Tune: Rediscovering the Post-War British Musical (Boydell & Brewer, 2010) and West End Broadway: The Golden Age of the American Musical in London (Boydell & Brewer, 2012). He lives in Norfolk.

This anthology of writings about the American experimental composer Harry Partch is the most comprehensive collection of commentaries about the composer and his work ever assembled. Eleven major figures of contemporary music voice their views on Partch (1901-1974) and his radical contributions to twentieth-century music. These include composers and theorists who worked closely with him and important comments from his contemporaries and musical inheritors.

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.

This is an alphabetical reference work for all aspects of music in the 20th century. It covers the major musical genres Concert, Jazz, Pop, Rock, and World; and also examines key styles such as opera, orchestral, bebop, blues, reggae, and country. Articles on individuals provide biographical information and explore contributions they have made in their respective fields. This encyclopedia also gives advice on suggested listening and further reading, and is fully cross-referenced.

The first extended study of seven beloved French symphonic masterpieces, from Saint-Saens and Franck to d'Indy and Dukas. In this first full-length study of the symphony in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, Andrew Deruchie provides extended critical discussion of seven of the most influential and frequently performed works of the era, by Camille Saint-Saens, Cesar Franck, Edouard Lalo, Vincent d'Indy, and Paul Dukas. The volume explores how these symphonists modernized the art form yet preserved many of the formal and rhetorical conventions of the canon, reconciling, in particular, Beethoven's symphonic legacy with the musical culture, intellectual environment, and political milieu of fin-de-siecle France. Drawing on contemporary criticism, music histories, composers' prose, and unpublished sketches, Deruchie's readings offer fresh insights on issues of musical form and technique, and also move beyond the notes to consider questions of meaning. Andrew Deruchie is a lecturer in musicology at the University of Otago (New Zealand).

Georges Barrere (1876-1944) holds a preeminent place in the history of American flute playing. Best known for two of the landmark works that were written for him--the Poem of Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Density 21.5 by Edgard Varese--he was the most prominent early exemplar of the Paris Conservatoire tradition in the United States and set a new standard for American woodwind performance.
Barrere's story is a musical tale of two cities, and this book uses his life as a window onto musical life in Belle Epoque Paris and twentieth-century New York. Recurrent themes are the interactions of composers and performers; the promotion of new music; the management, personnel, and repertoire of symphony orchestras; the economic and social status of the orchestral and solo musician, including the increasing power of musicians' unions; the role of patronage, particularly women patrons; and the growth of chamber music as a professional performance medium.
A student of Paul Taffanel at the Paris Conservatoire, by age eighteen Barrere premiered the landmark Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. He went on to become solo flutist of the Concerts Colonne and to found the Societe Moderne d'Instruments a Vent, a pioneering woodwind ensemble that premiered 61 works for 40 composers in its first ten years. Invited by Walter Damrosch to become principal flute of the New York Symphony in 1905, he founded the woodwind department at the Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard). His many ensembles toured the United States, building new audiences for chamber music and promoting French repertoire as well as new American music. Toff narrates Barrere's relationships with the finest musicians and artists ofhis day, among them Isadora Duncan, Yvette Guilbert, Andre Caplet, Paul Hindemith, Albert Roussel, Wallingford Riegger, and Henry Brant. The appendices of the book, which list his 170 premieres and the 50 works dedicated to Barrere, are a resource for a new generation of performers.
Based on extensive archival research and oral histories in both France and the United States, this is the first biography of Barrere. It is being published in conjunction with the centennial of his arrival in the United States in May 1905.

In this newly revised book On Sonic Art, Trevor Wishart takes a wide-ranging look at the new developments in music-making and musical aesthetics made possible by the advent of the computer and digital information processing. His emphasis is on musical rather than technical matters. Beginning with a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying the Western musical tradition and the traditional acoustic theories of Pythagoras and Helmholtz, he goes on to look in detail at such topics as the musical organization of complex sound-objects, using and manipulating representational sounds and the various dimensions of human and non-human utterance. In so doing, he seeks to learn lessons from areas (poetry and sound-poetry, film, sound effects and animal communication) not traditionally associated with the field of music.
About the Author
Trevor Wishart is a composer, living and working in the North of England. His musical works cover a wide range, from environmental music events staged in spe

Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) was one of the leading international composers of the post-war period as well as one of the most productive. Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) was one of the leading international composers of the post-war period as well as one of the most productive. This book provides a global view of his music, integrating a number of resonant themes in the composer's work while covering a representative cross-section of his vast output - his work list encompasses nearly 550 compositions in every established genre. Each chapter focuses on specific major works and offers generaldiscussion of other selected works connected to the main themes. These themes include compositional technique and process; genre; form and architecture; tonality and texture; allusion, quotation and musical critique; and place and landscape. Throughout, the book contends that Davies's works are not created in a vacuum but are intimately connected to, and are a reflection of, 'the past'. This deep engagement occurs on a number of levels, fluctuating and interacting with the composer's own predominantly modernist idiom and evoking a chain of historical resonances. Making sustained reference to Davies's own words, articles and programme notes as well as privileged access to primary source material from his estate, the book illuminates the composer's practices and approaches while shaping a discourse around his music.

Elegy, with its warmly expressive tenor-range melodies, is highly suitable for use at funerals, while the cascading joy of Festive Bells makes it perfect as a wedding recessional. The finely wrought sonorities will sound to maximum effect on a large organ in a spacious acoustic, but will nonetheless be convincing on even the most modest of instruments. Both pieces have that warm sense of Englishness that makes them very accessible to the first-time listener.

This is the first major reference work on this important choral composer. As is usual for volumes in this valuable series, the book is clearly printed and well bound, and it is highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate music collections as well as for public libraries serving communities with active choral societies. Choice When Randall Thompson died in 1984, America lost one of its most distinguished musicians. At the time of his death, it was already apparent that an assessment of his varied contributions to our musical life in the context of his contemporary generation was sorely needed. Randall Thompson: A Bio-Bibliography is the first comprehensive study of Thompson's oeuvre since his death. The volume is organized into five parts, beginning with a substantial biography written by David Francis Urrows, Thompson's final student and amanuensis. Urrows presents new information on Thompson's youth, his study in Italy and the influence of Malipiero on his work, his educational and compositional philosophy, and his role in the emergence of American music from the influence of European models. Benser's most complete catalog of works compiled to date follows. This vital list includes previously unpublished compositions, particularly those newly made available by Thompson's longtime publisher, E. C. Schirmer, and new recordings made by Bay Cities Music. A sampling of prose writings by Thompson offers a eclectic overview. The complete, extensively annotated bibliography, discography, and two appendixes that list Thompson's compositions chronologically and alphabetically complete this study. Music libraries will want to add this volume to their collections. It will also be an invaluable reference for choral directors, program note annotators, and American music enthusiasts.

One of the few American composers to earn an international reputation in both classical and popular music, Alec Wilder (1907-1980) was a true innovator in every phase of composition he chose to pursue. In addition, his life and associations in the world of music, theatre, literature, and the arts make for fascinating reading, and his own writings in these areas are witty and insightful. His many hundreds of musical compositions, ranging from chamber and orchestral music, to opera and ballet, theatre and film, and art songs and popular songs, are documented and annotated here in an exhaustive catalog of works. Included are detailed performance information and cross references to recordings in a discography section and reviews and commentary in a fully annotated bibliography of writings by and about the composer. The book also includes a lively biographical sketch capturing the sense and style of the composer and his times, a summary of archival materials held at the Eastman School of Music, an appendix of awards, a directory of music publishers, a chronological list of compositions, and an index. It is hoped that this thorough compendium to aid in the growing scholarly and musical interest in Wilder will serve to expose his work to wider audiences, while also helping to ferret out missing or unknown manuscripts given away to friends and performers by the composer.

This volume, part of Greenwood's continuing series of Bio-Bibliographies in Music, provides a concise bibliographic guide to the life and career of Otto Luening. While the music of this American composer, educator, conductor, and flutist has been performed throughout the northeastern United States, his work has received little attention outside of this region. With its extensive treatment of his life and career, this book will help to bring Luening's important compositions and his contributions to American music to the attention of a much wider audience. Ralph Hartsock divides Luening's work into four main sections, each covering a specific aspect of Luening's career. The volume begins with a brief biography of the subject and is followed by a complete listing of Luening's works and performances through 1989. Prepared with the assistance of Luening himself, this section arranges its information in chronological order, and includes basic bibliographical data as well as information on the premiere of each piece and selected performances. A comprehensive discography, arranged alphabetically by title, cites both commercially produced and selected privately released recordings. Also included is a pair of annotated bibliographies, covering the years from 1921 to 1989. One contains citations of material written by Luening, while the other details the hundreds of articles written about him. The work concludes with a pair of appendixes that catalog Luening's compositions alphabetically by title and according to genre. This work will be a valuable reference source for courses in contemporary music and American music, and a worthwhile addition to the collections of public, college, and university libraries.

In addition, "The Tone Clock" contains a broad selection of Peter Schat's polemical writings, embracing historical, political, aesthetic and environmental perspectives. His book is not just of interest to composers, but it also provides a valuable insight for anyone interested in the development of twentieth-century music.
Peter Schat, a former pupil of Pierre Boulez, exposes more than a new theory of music in "The Tone Clock." Although he is a long-experienced serialist composer, in devising and using his tone clock system he has reached the clarity and simplicity which comprise two of his major compositional aims. His book, profusely illustrated with clearly analysed musical examples, will enable other composers to achieve similar aims in their own way, while remaining faithful to their own musical personalities.
A former pupil of Pierre Boulez, Peter Schat is a well-known Dutch contemporary serialist composer.

for violin and mixed choir This innovative and imaginative choral arrangement of The Lark Ascending has the original solo violin part accompanied by mixed choir. It sensitively sets George Meredith's poem (on which the original orchestration is based) and combines this with wordless vocal lines and vocal solos, preserving the texture and timeless effect of the original. Commissioned and premiered by the Swedish Chamber Choir, the work has also been recorded by the choir under the direction of Simon Phipps.

The anti-fascist cantata Il canto sospeso, the string quartet Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima and the 'Tragedy of Listening' Prometeo cemented Luigi Nono's place in music history. In this study, Carola Nielinger-Vakil examines these major works in the context of Nono's amalgamation of avant-garde composition with Communist political engagement. Part I discusses Il canto sospeso in the context of all of Nono's anti-fascist pieces, from the unfinished Fucik project (1951) to Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (1966). Nielinger-Vakil explores Nono's position at the Darmstadt Music Courses, the evolution of his compositional technique, his penchant for music theatre and his use of spatial and electronic techniques to set the composer and his works against the diverging circumstances in Italy and Germany after 1945. Part II further examines these concerns and shows how they live on in Nono's work after 1975, culminating in a thorough analysis of Prometeo.

This engaging work was composed in 1929 and premiered the following year by its dedicatee, the legendary Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. The five folk songs on which the work is founded are 'Salisbury Plain', 'The Long Whip', 'Low down in the broom', 'Bristol Town', and 'I've been to France'. This arrangement for solo viola and orchestra is compatible with the original orchestral accompaniment, materials for which are available on hire.

The "New Grove Dictionary of Music" has said of John Cage that he "had a greater impact on world music than any other American composer in the twentieth century," and his musical thinking forms a whole with his writing. "For the Birds" is a book, a dialogue and an event all at once. The initial conversations were recorded in France between 1968 and 1978 and were then reconstructed, reedited and commented upon by Cage. The final text, with footnotes and asides added over the years, is prefaced by a typographical celebration of his ideas compiled by Cage himself.
This ebullient collection of questions and answers covers a wide variety of topics. Cage's great wit and intelligence are allowed to range across such subjects as his own music and texts, mushrooms, chess, James Joyce, Mao, Thoreau, Satie, electronic music, the prepared piano, Zen, the environment, technology, politics and economics.
John Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. He studied music with Adolf Weiss, Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, and he has shared ideas with Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro and Max Ernst, as well as such prophets as Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. He was music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for decades and held a number of academic posts. Cage was a composer, poet, graphic artist, teacher and critic. He died in New York in 1992.
"He is not a composer, he's an inventor -- of genius."--Arnold Schoenberg

O Antiphon Sequence was conceived as a recital piece, although each of its individual movements would also work in a liturgical context. Each movement is a response to a short extract of liturgical text taken from the 'O Antiphons', which are the Magnificat antiphons used at Vespers during the last seven days of Advent in Western Christian traditions. The work was commissioned by the American Guild of Organists for performance at the 2018 AGO National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

Described by Walton as the 'greatest symphony since Beethoven', Vaughan Williams's fourth symphony was composed in 1935 and is noted for its abrasively dissonant harmonic language, unlike much of the composer's other work. This new, scholarly edition, edited by David Matthews, will replace the existing OUP edition from 1935 and the Eulenburg edition from 1983. The preliminary text will include a preface, sources and editorial method, and detailed textual notes.