'Clear and matter-of-fact, adopting the cool objectivity that is advisable when dealing with such extraordinary and chilling material, this book is needed to make us reflect on an essential part of the history of twentieth-century music.' - Peter Franklin;In this authoritative study, one of the first to appear in English, Erik Levi explores the ambiguous relationship between music and politics during one of the darkest periods of recent cultural history. Utilising material drawn from contemporary documents, journals and newspapers, he traces the evolution of reactionary musical attitudes which were exploited by the Nazis in the final years of the Weimar Republic, chronicles the mechanisms that were established after 1933 to regiment musical life throughout Germany and the occupied territories, and examines the degree to which the climate of xenophobia, racism and anti-modernism affected the dissemination of music either in the opera house and concert hall, or on the radio and in the media.

The third and final volume of Prokofiev's Diaries covers the years 1924 to 1933 when he was living in Paris. Intimate accounts of the successes and disappointments of a great creative artist at the heart of the European arts world between the two world wars jostle with witty and trenchant commentaries on the personalities who made up this world. The Diaries document the complex emotional inner world of a Russian exile uncomfortably aware of the nature of life in Stalin's Russia yet increasingly persuaded that his creative gifts would never achieve full maturity separated from the culture, people and land of his birthplace. Since even Prokofiev knew that the USSR was hardly the place to commit inner reflections to paper, the Diaries come to an end after June 1933 although it would be another three years before he, together with his wife and children, finally exchanged the free if materially uncertain life of a cosmopolitan Parisian celebrity for Soviet citizenship and the credo of Socialist Realism within which the regime struggled to strait-jacket its artists. Volume Three continues the kaleidoscopic impressions and the stylish language - Prokofiev was almost as gifted and idiosyncratic a writer as a composer - of its predecessors.

Again and again people turn to music in order to assist them make sense of traumatic life events. Music can help process emotions, interpret memories, and create a sense of collective identity. While the last decade has seen a surge in academic studies on trauma and loss in both the humanities and social sciences, how music engages suffering has not often been explored. Performing Pain uncovers music's relationships to trauma and grief by focusing upon the late 20th century in Eastern Europe. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a cultural preoccupation with the meanings of historical suffering, particularly surrounding the Second World War and the Stalinist era. Journalists, historians, writers, artists, and filmmakers repeatedly negotiated themes related to pain and memory, truth and history, morality and spirituality both during glasnost and the years prior. In the copious amount of scholarship devoted to cultural politics during this era, the activities of avant-garde composers stands largely silent. Performing Pain considers how works by Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Part, and Henryk Gorecki musically address contemporary concerns regarding history and suffering through composition, performance, and reception. Drawing upon theories from psychology, sociology, literary and cultural studies, this book offers a set of hermeneutic essays that demonstrate the ways in which people employ music in order to make sense of historical traumas and losses. Seemingly postmodern compositional choices-such as quotation, fragmentation, and stasis-provide musical analogies to psychological and emotional responses to trauma and grief. The physical realities of embodied performance focus attention on the ethics of pain and representation while these works' inclusion as film music interprets contemporary debates regarding memory and trauma. Performing Pain promises to garner wide attention from academic professionals in music studies as well as an interdisciplinary audience interested in Eastern Europe and aesthetic articulations of suffering.

From the Romantic era onwards, music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and recurrence of events, music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history. Time, as philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define. Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought. The Melody of Time examines the multiple ways in which music relates to, and may provide insight into, the problematics of human time. Each chapter explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music: the purported timelessness of Beethoven's late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert's music; the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as a medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time; and, a reflection of a particular culture's sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history itself. Moving fluidly between cultural context and historical reception, competing philosophical theories of time and close reading of the repertoire, Benedict Taylor argues for the continued importance of engaging with music's temporality in understanding the significance of music within society and human experience. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, The Melody of Time provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

This collection of original essays is in tribute to the work of Derek Scott on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As one of the leading lights in Critical Musicology, Scott has helped shape the epistemological direction for music research since the late 1980s. There is no doubt that the path taken by the critical musicologist has been a tricky one, leading to new conceptions, interactions, and heated debates during the past two decades. Changes in musicology during the closing decades of the twentieth century prompted the establishment of new sets of theoretical methods that probed at the social and cultural relevance of music, as much as its self-referentiality. All the scholars contributing to this book have played a role in the general paradigmatic shift that ensued in the wake of Kerman's call for change in the 1980s. Setting out to address a range of approaches to theorizing music and promulgating modes of analysis across a wide range of repertories, the essays in this collection can be read as a coming of age of critical musicology through its active dialogue with other disciplines such as sociology, feminism, ethnomusicology, history, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, aesthetics, media studies, film music studies, and gender studies. The volume provides music researchers and graduate students with an up-to-date authoritative reference to all matters dealing with the state of critical musicology today.

In this engaging work Vaughan Williams takes advantage of the expressive possibilities of the cello, ranging from wistful and melancholic to lively and jovial. It 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'. Materials for the orchestral accompaniment are available on hire.

for SSATB & piano or string orchestra The Shipping Forecast is in 3 movements: 'Donegal', 'They that go down to the sea in ships', and 'Naming'. The first and last movement are settings of poems by the poet, broadcaster, and academic, Sean Street. In 'Donegal' snatches of the shipping forecast (spoken) are woven into the atmospheric texture of the poem. The second movement is a setting of the Psalm 107: 23-26 | 28-29: 'They that go down to the sea in ships'. The setting has the feel of a Celtic lullaby, moving from a simple statement to a centre of turmoil then back to overlapping phrases, melting into tranquillity at the end. In the final movement, 'Naming', the text becomes 'a meditation on the fortunes of the sea as reflected in other names, gathered from coastal maps of Newfoundland'. Energetic, in perpetual motion and rhythmic, 'Naming' drives the whole work to an upbeat finish.

A brief, detailed biography of the composer/architect, student and protege of Honegger, Milhaud, Messiaen, Le Corbusier. Xenakis himself is a major proponent of advancing the boundaries of musical possibilities.

Although Berg decided immediately after seeing Buchner's play Woyzeck in May 1914 to set it to music, he did not complete his opera until 1922, with the Berlin premiere taking place in 1925. Berg's Wozzeck traces the composer's slow but determined progress. Using compositional sketches, diaries, notebooks and other archival material, author Patricia Hall reveals the challenges Berg faced--from his induction as a soldier in World War I, to the hyperinflation of the twenties. In addition to the precise chronology of the opera, the sketches show how Berg derived large-scale form from the Buchner text, and how his compositional style evolved during the nine years in which he composed the opera. A comprehensive visual database on the book's companion website of the extant sketches from seven archives in the United States, Germany and Austria allows the reader to examine, for the first time, Berg's sketches in high resolution color scans.

Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music offers a range of approaches central to the performance of French piano music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors include scholars and active performers who see performance not as an independent activity but as a practice enriched by a wealth of historical and analytical approaches. To underline the usefulness of contextual understanding for performance, each author highlights the choices performers must confront with examples drawn from particular repertoires and composers. Topics explored include editorial practice, the use of early recordings, emergent disciplines such as analysis-and-performance, and traditions passed down from teacher to student. Themes that emerge demonstrate the importance of editions as a form of communication, the challenges of notation, the significance of detail and of deeper continuity, the importance of performing and teaching traditions, and the influence of cross disciplinary frameworks. A link to a set of performed examples on the frenchpianomusic.com website allows readers to hear and compare performances and interpretations of the music discussed. The volume will appeal to musicologists and analysts interested in performance, performers, students, and piano teachers.

The analytic-theoretical approach to Stravinsky’s music introduced in the opening four chapters of this volume became the standard in theoretical and musicological circles during the past several decades. The features of the approach were adopted and expanded upon by numerous scholars: see Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Period (1996); Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (1998); and Stephen Walsh. Working independently from an historical perspective, Richard Taruskin came to many of the same conclusions regarding Stravinsky’s musical language. Entirely unique is the discussion of the rhythmic emphasis of Stravinsky’s music, the metrical displacement of repeated themes and chords, and the disruptive effect of displacement on the listener. Brought into play is the evolutionary history of meter and its entrainment by the listener; the concept of "sensorimotor synchronization" as advanced by the psychologist Bruno Repp, and that in turn of the "contrametric" nature of Stravinsky’s music as introduced by David Huron. Explored is the relationship between African polyrhythm, as discussed by Kofi Agawu, David Locke, and Steve Reich, to the polyrhythmic stratifications in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Of major concern are the critical and aesthetic issues arising from the interpretation and performance of Stravinsky’s music. The aesthetic views not only of Stravinsky himself but also of critics such as Theodor Adorno, Richard Taruskin, and Robert Craft are discussed at length. Accompanying the essays are over 100 musical illustrations and analytical designs, set and processed with consummate skill by Andre Mount. The essays are prefaced by a newly composed Introduction and then concluded with a lengthy unpublished chapter on the individual work and its classification; "Reflections on the Post-War years of Babbitt, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky". Interactions between the three composers are discussed, as is the relocation, by the early 1940s, of the Paris-Vienna split between Stravinsky and Schoenberg to Los Angeles, California. Even in the twilight years of their respective careers, Stravinsky and Schoenberg remained at a distance from one another.

Arnold Schoenberg was a polarizing figure in twentieth century music, and his works and ideas have had considerable and lasting impact on Western musical life. A refugee from Nazi Europe, he spent an important part of his creative life in the United States (1933-1951), where he produced a rich variety of works and distinguished himself as an influential teacher. However, while his European career has received much scholarly attention, surprisingly little has been written about the genesis and context of his works composed in America, his interactions with Americans and other emigres, and the substantial, complex, and fascinating performance and reception history of his music in this country.
Author Sabine Feisst illuminates Schoenberg's legacy and sheds a corrective light on a variety of myths about his sojourn. Looking at the first American performances of his works and the dissemination of his ideas among American composers in the 1910s, 1920s and early 1930s, she convincingly debunks the myths surrounding Schoenberg's alleged isolation in the US. Whereas most previous accounts of his time in the US have portrayed him as unwilling to adapt to American culture, this book presents a more nuanced picture, revealing a Schoenberg who came to terms with his various national identities in his life and work. Feisst dispels lingering negative impressions about Schoenberg's teaching style by focusing on his methods themselves as well as on his powerful influence on such well-known students as John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Dika Newlin. Schoenberg's influence is not limited to those who followed immediately in his footsteps-a wide range of composers, from Stravinsky adherents to experimentalists to jazz and film composers, were equally indebted to Schoenberg, as were key figures in music theory like Milton Babbitt and David Lewin. In sum, Schoenberg's New World contributes to a new understanding of one of the most important pioneers of musical modernism."

Cello and piano reduction of Walton's Cello Concerto, based on the edition published in the Walton Edition Violin and Cello Concertos volume. Dating from 1956, the work was commissioned by Gregor Piatigorsky and premiered by him the following year. Walton regarded this work as the best of his three solo concertos. Orchestral material is available on hire.

In-depth case-studies of significant aspects of early twentieth-century English music-theatre, which engage with notions of Englishness and the idea of a 'musical renaissance' Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas comprises a sequence of in-depth case-studies of significant aspects of early twentieth-century English music-theatre. Vaughan Williams forms a central thread in this discussion, and Stratford-upon-Avon serves as a geographical focus-point for mediating conflicting visions of an English musical tradition. But the reach of the book is much wider, shedding new light on English Wagnerism (at Glastonbury especially) andon the reception of Wagner's ideas as a point of emulation and resistance. No less significant is the discussion of Purcell and the seventeenth-century masque - one of the primary sources for re-imagining an English dramatic tradition - and the more familiar images of the May festival, the Mummers' play and the pageant play, which are tellingly re-contextualised. The book also looks at the associations between Vaughan Williams, the theatre artist Edward Gordon Craig and the impresario Serge Diaghilev. The sequence is framed by the image of the pilgrim-vagabond Vaughan Williams's setting of the poetry of Matthew Arnold and Robert Louis Stevenson as a metaphor and paradigm for his creative career and personal progress. The book not only sheds light on the activities and ambitions of principal agents but also illuminates a particularly dynamic moment in the re-emergence of a distinctively English music-theatrical practice: one especially concerned with calling on aspects of the past to help to secure a worthwhile future. Notions of Englishness turn out to be less insular than sometimes thought and the idea of a 'musical renaissance' more complex when the case-studies are understood in their proper historical context. Scholars and students of twentieth-century English music, theatre and opera will find this volume indispensable. Roger Savage isHonorary Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on theatre and its interface with music from the baroque to the twentieth century in leading journals and books.

The Passacaglia for solo Cello, one of Walton's last works, was commissioned by Mstislav Rostropovich and first performed in 1982. The short Tema, published for the first time, was written in 1970 as part of a collective composition for the Prince of Wales.

for SAA and piano The quirky style of The Look perfectly complements the nature of Sara Teasdale's poem, which reminisces on past romances. The melody is catchy and colourful, with a stylistic ornament that gives the piece a carefree feel, and there are effective contrasts of tonality and texture. The voices are accompanied by a jazzy, characterful piano part with driving syncopations.

Unquestionably the founding work of minimalism in musical composition, Terry Riley's In C (1964) challenges the standards of imagination, intellect, and musical ingenuity to which "classical" music is held. Only one page of score in length, it contains neither specified instrumentation nor parts. Its fifty-three motives are compact, presented without any counterpoint or evident form. The composer gave only spare instructions and no tempo. And he assigned the work a title that's laconic in the extreme. At the same moment of its composition, Elliott Carter was working on his Concerto for Piano, a work Stravinsky was to hail as a masterpiece. Having almost completed Laborinthus II, Luciano Berio would soon start the Sinfonia. Karlheinz Stockhausen had just finished Momente. In context of these other works, and of the myriad of compositional styles and trends which preceded them, In C stands the whole idea of musical "progress" on its head.
Forty years later, In C continues to receive regular performances every year by professionals, students, and amateurs, and has had numerous recordings since its 1968 LP premiere. Welcoming performers from a vast range of practices and traditions, from classical to rock to jazz to non-Western, these recordings range from the Chinese Film Orchestra of Shanghai -- on traditional Chinese instruments -- to the Hungarian 'European Music Project' group, joined by two electronica DJs manipulating the Pulse. In C rouses audiences while all the while projecting an inner serenity that suggests Cage's definition of music's purpose -- "to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influence."
Setting the stage for a most intriguing journey into the world of minimalism, Robert Carl's Terry Riley's In C argues that the work holds its place in the canon because of the very challenges it presents to "classical" music. He examines In C in the context of its era, its grounding in aesthetic practices and assumptions, its process of composition, presentation, recording, and dissemination. By examining the work's significance through discussion with performers, composers, theorists, and critics, Robert Carl explores how the work's emerging performance practice has influenced our very ideas of what constitutes art music in the 21st century.

Despite having been composed in the years 1938-43 when Europe was ravaged by war, this work radiates peace and serenity. It marks the peak of the lyrical modalism of works such as the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), Flos Campi (1925), and Job (1931). Although it is not a programme symphony, it draws heavily on John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress for inspiration, featuring several themes that were sketched for (and eventually used in) Vaughan Williamsas 1951 opera. In addition, Bunyan's words 'He hath given me rest by his sorrow and life by his death' were originally inscribed over the third movement. This idea of strength drawn from religion must have been especially potent when Vaughan Williams conducted the premiere of the work at the Proms in 1943, during the dark days of the Second World War. The ending in particular has a sense of rising above all worldly concerns into a higher spiritual plane. This edition contains a preface on the history of the work by Michael Kennedy. Orchestral parts are available on hire.