John Cage was among the first wave of post-war American artists and intellectuals to be influenced by Zen Buddhism and it was an influence that led him to become profoundly engaged with our current ecological crisis. In John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger asks: what did Buddhism mean to Cage? And how did his understanding of Buddhist philosophy impact on his representation of nature? Following Cage's own creative innovations in the poem-essay form and his use of the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching to shape his music and writing, this book outlines a new critical language that reconfigures writing and silence. Interrogating Cage's 'green-Zen' in the light of contemporary psychoanalysis and cultural critique as well as his own later turn towards anarchist politics, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics provides readers with a critically performative site for the Zen-inspired "nothing" which resides at the heart of Cage's poetics, and which so clearly intersects with his ecological writing.

The French composer Olivier Messiaen is one of the major figures of twentieth-century music. This collection of scholarly essays offers new cultural, historical, biographical and analytical perspectives on Messiaen??'s musical ??uvre from 1941 to 1992. The volume includes: a fascinating snapshot of Messiaen??'s life in occupied France; a study of the Surrealist poetics of Messiaen??'s song cycle Harawi; a chapter on Messiaen??'s iconoclastic path to the avant-garde heritage that he bequeathed to his pupils; discussion on Messiaen??'s place in twentieth-century music; and detailed analysis of specific works, including his opera St Fran??ois d'Assise. The chapters provide fresh insights on the origins, style and poetics of Messiaen??'s music, and therefore provide an inspiration and foundation for future scholarship. Reflecting and expanding upon the broad range of Messiaen??'s own interdisciplinary interests, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of music, art, literature and theology.

What is experimental music today? This book offers an up to date survey of this field for anyone with an interest, from seasoned practitioners to curious readers. This book takes the stance that experimental music is not a limited historical event, but is a proliferation of approaches to sound that reveals much about present-day experience. An experimental work is not identifiable by its sound alone, but by the nature of the questions it poses and its openness to the sounding event. Experimentation is a way of working. It pushes past that which is known to discover what lies beyond it, finding new knowledge, forms, and relationships, or accepting a state of uncertainty. For each of these composers and sound artists, craft is developed and transformed in response to the questions they bring to their work. Scientific, perceptual, or social phenomena become catalysts in the operation of the work. These practices are not presented according to a chronology, a set of techniques, or social groupings. Instead, they are organized according to the content areas that are their subjects, including resonance, harmony, objects, shapes, perception, language, interaction, sites, and histories. Musical materials may be subject, among other treatments, to systemization, observation, examination, magnification, fragmentation, translation, or destabilization. These restless and exploratory modes of engagement have continued to develop over recent decades, expanding the scope of both musical practice and listening.

An influential twentieth-century Spanish composer, Manuel de Falla continues to generate interest as well as controversy. This biography and guide to the available literature on Falla presents the complexities of Falla while underscoring the importance of careful investigation into the often conflicting evidence surrounding his life and his musical compositions. The author has compiled a substantial amount of biographic material, much of it from primary sources housed in the Archivo Manuel de Falla at Granada. The comprehensive bibliographical material provides valuable new musicological discoveries and previously unknown compositions. Musicologists, Falla researchers, and those with an interest in Spanish contemporary music will appreciate the wealth of information researched and presented in this one volume. Included are bibliographic material from around the globe, doctoral dissertations, expositions, and press clippings. The biography offers excerpts from Falla's contemporaries. The discography includes important performances by Falla and others, as well as the most recent recordings. Falla is presented in his varied, complex guises.

A unique, comprehensive guide to Danish music, this book furnishes an extensive annotated bibliography and a directory of all organizations, institutions, and facilities in the world pertaining to 20th century Danish music. The bibliography includes printed media of composers, music, music theories, musical developments, and general musical life in Denmark in the 20th century with an emphasis on the post-Nielsen era (1931-present). This valuable reference tool encompasses books, reference sources, bibliographies, catalogs, discographies, journals, periodicals and articles in all languages, as well as rare and out-of-print editions of historical significance. The research directory is an annotated register of all organizations connected with Danish concert music, such as information services, research facilities, music organizations, and professional associations. An up-to-date directory and bibliography, this resource on Danish music is an invaluable tool benefitting musicology, ethnomusicology, and Scandinavian studies scholars and professionals as well as musicians and students interested in Danish music. In addition to the resource information provided, the text includes an overview of Danish music and historical background on influential figures and musical developments.

French concert music and jazz often enjoyed a special creative exchange across the period 1900-65. French modernist composers were particularly receptive to early African-American jazz during the interwar years, and American jazz musicians, especially those concerned with modal jazz in the 1950s and early 1960s, exhibited a distinct affinity with French musical impressionism. However, despite a general, if contested, interest in the cultural interplay of classical music and jazz, few writers have probed the specific French music-jazz relationship in depth. In this book, Deborah Mawer sets such musical interplay within its historical-cultural and critical-analytical contexts, offering a detailed yet accessible account of both French and American perspectives. Blending intertextuality with more precise borrowing techniques, Mawer presents case studies on the musical interactions of a wide range of composers and performers, including Debussy, Satie, Milhaud, Ravel, Jack Hylton, George Russell, Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck.

This engaging book discusses the colorful personalities Land beloved music of the French romantic organist-composers. Michael Murray draws vivid portraits of Aristide Cavaille-Coll (1811-1899), the greatest and most influential organ builder of his time, and of seven oilier musicians with connections to Cavaille-Coll and to onc another: Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921), Cesar Franck (1822-1890), Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937), Louis Vicine (1870-1937), Marcel Dupre' (1886-1971), Jean Langlais (1907-1991), and Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992).

The book offers to lovers of French music and culture -- and especially to student organists -- details of these composers' lives and times and of their styles and techniques. Drawing on his personal acquaintance with Messiaen, Langlais, Dupre', and other famous contemporaries, and on period documents, original accounts, early recordings, and other primary sources, Murray examines the relationship between organ building and musical composition, the nature of romanticism and classicism, and the ever-perplexing question of composer versus interpreter.

This collection of essays offers a historical reappraisal of what musical modernism was, and what its potential for the present and future could be. It thus moves away from the binary oppositions that have beset twentieth-century music studies in the past, such as those between modernism and postmodernism, between conceptions of musical autonomy and of cultural contingency and between formalist-analytical and cultural-historical approaches. Focussing particularly on music from the 1970s to the 1990s, the volume assembles approaches from different perspectives to new music with a particular emphasis on a critical reassessment of the meaning and function of the legacy of musical modernism. The authors include scholars, musicologists and composers who combine culturally, socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways.

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.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This revised edition of the standard catalogue of the music and writings of Ralph Vaughan Williams includes all known published and unpublished works, with full details of instrumentation, revisions, and first performances. There is much new information on the location of manuscripts and sketches, and there are many corrections to the information and dates given in the existing text. The volume includes a bibliography of the literary works of Vaughan Williams compiled by Peter Starbuck, and an appendix of folk songs collected by the composer. The indexes have been completely updated.

An annotated reference guide to Barber's life, works and achievements, it will prove valuable for anyone seeking information on him.

From the Jim Crow world of 1920s Greenville, South Carolina, to Greenwich Village's Café Society in the '40s, to their 1974 Grammy-winning collaboration on "Loves Me Like a Rock," the Dixie Hummingbirds have been one of gospel's most durable and inspiring groups. Now, Jerry Zolten tells the Hummingbirds' fascinating story and with it the story of a changing music industry and a changing nation. When James Davis and his high-school friends starting singing together in a rural South Carolina church they could not have foreseen the road that was about to unfold before them. They began a ten-year jaunt of "wildcatting," traveling from town to town, working local radio stations, schools, and churches, struggling to make a name for themselves. By 1939 the a cappella singers were recording their four-part harmony spirituals on the prestigious Decca label. By 1942 they had moved north to Philadelphia and then New York where, backed by Lester Young's band, they regularly brought the house down at the city's first integrated nightclub, Café Society. From there the group rode a wave of popularity that would propel them to nation-wide tours, major record contracts, collaborations with Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon, and a career still vibrant today as they approach their seventy-fifth anniversary. Drawing generously on interviews with Hank Ballard, Otis Williams, and other artists who worked with the Hummingbirds, as well as with members James Davis, Ira Tucker, Howard Carroll, and many others, The Dixie Hummingbirds brings vividly to life the growth of a gospel group and of gospel music itself.

The Harlem Renaissance, from 1910 to 1927, was the time when Harlem came alive with theater, drama, sports, dance, and politics. Looking at events as diverse as the prizefight between Jack Johnson and Jim “White Hope” Jeffries, the choreography of Aida Walker and Ethel Waters, the writing of Zora Neale Hurston and the musicals of the period, Krasner paints a vibrant portrait of those years. This was the time when the residents of northern Manhattan were leading their downtown counterparts at the vanguard of artistic ferment while at the same time playing a pivotal role in the evolution of Black Nationalism. This is a thrilling piece of work, a classic destined to become the standard work on the Harlem Renaissance for years to come.

The essays in Ives Studies are concerned with Charles Ives (1874SH1954), an American composer of symphonic, choral, and chamber music who was an early pioneer of twentieth-century musical modernism. Ten leading scholars address issues that have been at the forefront of a recent surge in Ives scholarship, including the hotly debated chronology of his work, the nature of his compositional philosophy and style, and his place in music history.

During his lifetime, and in the course of the twentieth century, Edward Elgar and his music became sites for a remarkable variety of nostalgic impulses. These are manifested in his personal life, in the content of his works, in his critical and biographical reception, and in numerous artistic ventures based on his character and music. Today Elgar enjoys renewed popularity in Britain, and nostalgia of various forms continues to shape our responses to his music. From one viewpoint, Elgarian nostalgia might be dismissed as escapist, regressive and reactionary, and the revival in Elgar's fortunes regarded as the symptom of a pernicious 'heritage industry' in post-colonial, post-industrial Britain. While there is undeniably a grain of truth to that view, Matthew Riley's careful treatment of the topic reveals a more complex picture of nostalgia, and sheds new light on Elgar and his cultural significance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

A biography of the conductor Mitropoulos. He was an advocate of difficult modern music and an early champion of Mahler; his performances brought the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra into the first rank of American orchestras.

Most histories of American music have ignored the presence of twelve-tone music before and during the Second World War, and virtually all have ignored its presence after 1970, even though so many major composers continued (and continue) to compose serially. This book provides a comprehensive history of twelve-tone music in America, and compels a revised picture of American music since 1925 as a dynamic steady-state within which twelve-tone serialism has long been, and still remains, a persistent presence: a vigorous and unbroken tradition for more than eighty years. Straus outlines how, instead of a rigid orthodoxy, American twelve-tone music is actually a flexible, loosely-knit cultural practice. The book provides close readings of thirty-seven American twelve-tone works by composers including Copland, Babbitt, Stravinsky and Carter, among many others, who represent a typically American diversity of background and life circumstances, and strips away the many myths surrounding twelve-tone music in America.

Enrique Granados (1867-1916) was one of the first modern Spanish composers to achieve international recognition. During a 1916 visit to the United States his opera Goyescas was premiered by the Metropolitan Opera and his symphonic poem, Dante, by the Chicago Symphony. Granados was also especially admired in Paris, where he knew Saint-Saens, d'Indy, and Faure. He had composed a remarkable body of work and was also at the height of his career as a concert pianist at his untimely death while a passenger on a torpedoed British ship. The biographical study, the first in English, draws on primary sources in English, Spanish, French, Catalan, and other languages. This material is carefully documented in the extensive annotated bibliography along with contemporaneous and recent analytical studies and other sources. Granados's oeuvre presents cataloging problems due to his habit of reworking pieces, long-delayed publication, and arbitrary opus numbers. In the Works and Performances section, however, every effort has been made to offer publication dates, manuscript locations, and information on premieres. Representative arrangements of his works by other composers are also given. An appendix classifies the works by scoring. A selective discography is also provided, and all parts of the volume are fully cross-referenced and indexed. Granados is placed in the context of the international artistic scene at the turn of the century, and a chronology notes related events.

Charles Ives, perhaps the quintessential American composer of the twentieth century, drew on his childhood experiences in a small New England town in his music. Through his close relationship with his father, George, a Civil War bandmaster, Ives developed a powerful feeling for nineteenth-century rural America. This book--the first full-scale psychoanalytic biography of a major composer--examines the lives of the two men and shows how a knowledge of their relationship as father and son, teacher and pupil, is central to an understanding of Ives's work. Stuart Feder, a psychoanalyst with training in musicology, demonstrates that George exerted so pervasive an influence on Charles's creative life that Ives's music may be seen as the result of an unconscious fantasy of posthumous collaboration between father and son. The music bears George's mark, not only in its incorporation of hymn tunes, parlor ballads, Civil War marches, and other homely sources that derived from his youth, but also in its use of technical musical devices attributed to George. Moreover, the span of Ives's creative life reveals another connection to his father: Charles's musical productivity began to wane in his forties, as he approached the age at which his father died. Dr. Feder examines the influence of George's teaching and storytelling on Charles's years as a composer. Ives's later decline is traced psychologically and medically. Using Ives's music as an essential part of his data, Dr. Feder demonstrates how music can illuminate and be expressive of the inner life of its creator.

Elinor Remick Warren's distinguished career as a composer, concert pianist, and accompanist for renowned singers spanned seventy-five years of American musical history. She began writing music in 1904 at age four. Her first published composition, a song, was accepted by G. Schirmer in 1916. Thereafter, her compositions appeared regularly through 1990. Her full oeuvre is cataloged here along with performance information, discography, and review and critical commentary, all of which is carefully documented, cross-referenced, and indexed. A biographical sketch is supplemented by a long interview conducted by the author with Warren four years before the composer's death in 1991. Among the useful appendixes are textual sources for Warren's many vocal compositions.

During the century of British rule of the Indian subcontinent known as the British Raj, the rulers felt the significant influence of their exotic subjects. Resonances of the Raj examines the ramifications of the intertwined and overlapping histories of Britain and India on English music in the last fifty years of the colonial encounter, and traces the effects of the Raj on the English musical imagination. Conventional narratives depict a one-way influence of Britain on India, with the 'discovery' of Indian classical music occurring only in the post-colonial era. Drawing on new archival sources and approaches in cultural studies, author Nalini Ghuman shows that on the contrary, England was both deeply aware of and heavily influenced by India musically during the Indian-British colonial encounter. Case studies of representative figures, including composers Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst, and Maud MacCarthy, an ethnomusicologist and performer of the era, integrate music directly into the cultural history of the British Raj. Ghuman thus reveals unexpected minglings of peoples, musics and ideas that raise questions about 'Englishness', the nature of Empire, and the fixedness of identity. Richly illustrated with analytical music examples and archival photographs and documents, many of which appear here in print for the first time, Resonances of the Raj brings fresh hearings to both familiar and little-known musics of the time, and reveals a rich and complex history of cross-cultural musical imaginings which leads to a reappraisal of the accepted historiographies of both British musical culture and of Indo-Western fusion.

A seminal figure in the development of distinctively American concert music, Roy Harris created a large body of compositions in virtually all media in a career spanning more than fifty years, from the 1920s to the 1970s. His fortunes fluctuated widely with the public and critical community. Eclipsed during the 1960s, when his conservative idiom with its strong nationalistic stance was out of vogue, he and his work have gained increased scholarly, performance, and recording interest in recent decades, which have brought to the fore an entire generation of neglected American composers. Documenting and organizing Harris's complex oeuvre is the essential concern of the present book, and the catalogue of works and performances provides information on instrumentation, premieres, publication, and special aspects of each composition. Like the catalog, the discography is the most thorough ever assembled for Harris, and it also includes commentary on features of the recordings. The extensive annotated bibliography includes reference sources, scholarly works, general works, text sources, folksong sources, writings by Harris, and critical reviews. Works, recordings, and bibliography are carefully enumerated, cross-referenced, and indexed. An opening study of Harris's life, works, and style incorporates gleanings from an oral history collection recently made available. This research tool is an essential companion to any critical study of Harris and will provide a firm base on which future such studies can be developed.

With over 100 compositions in his catalog, Ross Lee Finney is a highly regarded composer whose career spans more than 50 years. This work offers contemporary music scholars, students, and enthusiasts an in-depth survey of the life, works, and writings of this important composer, theorist, and teacher. Finney is one of the first significant composers to come out of the American Midwest. He is known for blazing new trails by writing tonal music in the serialist style, developing a unique method of composition by applying physics' theory of complementarity to music, and using symmetrical hexachords to achieve an overall tonal effect. An important addition to any music library. Of special interest are excerpts from the author's interview with Finney in 1992, which provide the reader with a unique insight into the life and work of this individual and innovative composer. The book is divided into four major sections: a biography, a list of works including detailed information regarding premieres and other significant performances, a complete discography of all commercial recordings, and a comprehensive bibliography of writings by and about Finney. Two appendices provide alphabetical and chronological lists of compositions, and a comprehensive index includes all important names, institutions, places, and events mentioned throughout the text.

Roderick Chadwick and Peter Hill give a detailed account of the evolution of Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux for piano solo, from its initial conception in the Black Forest in 1953 to its completion and premiere in the Parisian 'Concerts du Domaine Musical' at the end of the decade. Through close examination of the composer's birdsong cahiers they demonstrate how Messiaen translated nature into music in a way that had a major impact on his later work. They also consider issues of performance, and Messiaen's artistic relationship with his dedicatee and wife-to-be, Yvonne Loriod, including the significance of her two recordings of the cycle. This book illuminates the Catalogue from a variety of angles: its historical significance, as a study of how mimicry of nature can be transformed into music of mesmeric originality, and as a guide that offers a wealth of fresh insights to listeners and performers.