When considering the role music played in the major totalitarian regimes of the century it is music's usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. But as a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship both between art music and politicised mass culture, and between entertainment and propaganda. Nationality, self/other, power and ideology are the dominant themes of this book, whilst key topics include: music in totalitarian regimes; music as propaganda; music and national identity; emigre communities and composers; music's role in shaping identities of 'self' and 'other' and music as both resistance to and instrument of oppression. Taking the contributions together it becomes clear that shared experiences such as war, dictatorship, colonialism, exile and emigration produced different, yet clearly inter-related musical consequences.

Despite Messiaen's position as one of the greatest technical innovators of the twentieth century, his musical language has not been comprehensively defined and investigated. The composer's 1944 theoretical study, The Technique of My Musical Language, expounds only its initial stages, and while his posthumously published Traite de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie contains detailed explanations of selected techniques, in most cases the reader is left to define these more precisely by observing them in the context of Messiaen's analyses of his own works. Technical processes are nevertheless in many cases the primary components of a work or movement. For instance, personnages dominate 'Joie du sang des etoiles' from the TurangalA (R)la-symphonie, and in certain cases, such as 'L'echange' from the Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus, the process (asymmetric augmentation) is the only structuring element present. Given this reliance on idiosyncratic techniques, clear comprehension of the music is impossible without a detailed knowledge of Messiaen's methods. Gareth Healey charts their development and interconnections, considers their relationship with formal structures, and applies them in refined and extended form to works for which Messiaen himself left no published analysis.

First emerging in North America and Europe in the late 1920s, contemporary percussion practices have transitioned from the fringes of contemporary music to the forefront over the past 90 years. In the 1960s contemporary percussion practices reached Australian shores and a new generation of artists added their voices to this narrative. The role of Australian activity is not yet embedded in the wider narrative of international contemporary percussion, nor is the significance of developments in contemporary percussion practices fully realised in the context of Australian music history. In this monograph, political, social and cultural influences on this art form will be examined for the first time in a historical survey of contemporary percussion music in Australia over a 50-year period, from 1960 to 2010. The rise of the percussion ensemble in the twentieth century to a standard chamber music ensemble is now recognised as one of the major advances in western art music practice internationally. A focus will be placed on ensemble activity via definitive documentation and analysis of ensembles that are amongst the most pioneering and longest established of Australian contemporary music organisations, including the Australian Percussion Ensemble, Synergy Percussion, Adelaide Percussions, Nova Ensemble, Tetrafide Percussion, Taikoz, Clocked Out and Speak Percussion amongst others. Closing with a discussion of influences and identity, this historical narrative will expand our understanding of the impact of Australian contributions to the international contemporary music scene while simultaneously examining how developments in contemporary percussion have contributed to Australia's cultural identity.

Music, Art and Diplomacy shows how a vibrant field of cultural exchange between East and West was taking place during the Cold War, which contrasts with the orthodox understanding of two divided and antithetical blocs. The series of case studies on cultural exchanges, focusing on the decades following the Second World War, cover episodes involving art, classical music, theatre, dance and film. Despite the fluctuating fortunes of diplomatic relations between East and West, there was a continuous circulation of cultural producers and products. Contributors explore the interaction of arts and politics, the role of the arts in diplomacy and the part the arts played in the development of the Cold War. Art has always shunned political borders, wavering between the guidance of individual and governmental patrons, and borderless expression. While this volume provides insight into how political players tried to harness the arts to serve their own political purposes, at the same time it is clear that the arts and artists exploited the Cold War framework to reach their own individual and professional objectives. Utilizing archives available only since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the volume provides a valuable socio-cultural approach to understanding the Cold War and cultural diplomacy.

Shostakovich's music is often described as being dynamic, energetic. But what is meant by 'energy' in music? After setting out a broad conceptual framework for approaching this question, Michael Rofe proposes various potential sources of the perceived energy in Shostakovich's symphonies, describing also the historical significance of energeticist thought in Soviet Russia during the composer's formative years. The book is in two parts. In Part I, examples are drawn from across the symphonies in order to demonstrate energy streams within various musical dimensions. Three broad approaches are adopted: first, the theories of Boleslav Yavorsky are used to consider melodic-harmonic motion; second, Boris Asafiev's work, with its echoes of Ernst Kurth, is used to describe form as a dynamic process; and third, proportional analysis reveals numerous symmetries and golden sections within local and large-scale temporal structures. In Part II, the multi-dimensionality of musical energy is considered through case studies of individual movements from the symphonies. This in turn gives rise to broader contextualised perspectives on Shostakovich's work. The book ends with a detailed examination of why a piece of music might contain golden sections.

This updated second edition is an in-depth exploration of Elgar's compositions and of writings by and about the composer and his music. The past 16 years have seen a steady increase in scholarly publications and the emergence of The Elgar Society Journal, as well as further discoveries of the composer's MSS and letters, and the new edition incorporates this latest research. The compositions are examined in a work-by-work catalog, in chronological order, in which each entry gives a complete census and collation of manuscript, proof, text, biographical, printed edition and bibliographical sources for each item. The listing also includes unfinished sketches and details of much unpublished material. The bibliography section covers selected established literature as well as details of reviews and articles contained in the European periodicals at the climax of Elgar's career. Christopher Kent was nominated unanimously by the Scrutiny Panel of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Research Centres for the 2014 C.B. Oldman Prize for the most outstanding reference resource published in 2014. He received the award at their Annual Conference held at the University of Aston, Birmingham in April.

Contemplating Shostakovich marks an important new stage in the understanding of Shostakovich and his working environment. Each chapter covers aspects of the composer's output in the context of his life and cultural milieu. The contributions uncover 'outside' stimuli behind Shostakovich's works, allowing the reader to perceive the motivations behind his artistic choices; at the same time, the nature of those choices offers insights into the workings of the larger world - cultural, social, political - that he inhabited. Thus his often ostensibly quirky choices are revealed as responses - by turns sentimental, moving, sardonic and angry - to the particular conditions, with all their absurdities and contradictions, that he had to negotiate. Here we see the composer emerging from the role of tortured loner of older narratives into that of the gregarious and engaged member of his society that, for better and worse, characterized the everyday reality of his life. This invaluable collection offers remarkable new insight, in both depth and range, into the nature of Shostakovich's working circumstances and of his response to them. The collection contains the seeds for a wide range of new directions in the study of Shostakovich's works and the larger contexts of their creation and reception.

A new collection with contributions from performing musicians and Grainger scholars and a detailed Catalogue of Works. In the thirty years since his Centenary in 1982 it has become even clearer that Percy Grainger [1882-1961] - composer, pianist and revolutionary - was a man born out of his time. Many of his ideas, both musical and social, sit farmore easily in our contemporary world. Those thirty years have also seen a notable expansion of interest in Grainger's music. Innumerable recordings have been made, including the first complete Grainger recording survey by Chandos in its monumental Grainger Edition. The growth of the internet has made it possible, as never before, for Grainger's music to be heard widely. The central theme of The New Percy Grainger Companion is to give information and help from established musicians for performing and listening to this life-celebrating repertoire. The Companion's fully detailed, up-to-date Catalogue of Works - the most complete of any existing catalogue - givesinvaluable assistance. Authoritative contextual chapters in the Companion offer some surprising new background information, together with thoughtful evaluations which signal a new twenty-first century perspective in Grainger scholarship. PENELOPE THWAITES is recognised internationally as a leading Grainger exponent. Her research, performances and extensive Grainger discography over four decades reflect a unique understanding of the manand his music. Contributors: BRIAN ALLISON, TERESA BALOUGH, ROGER COVELL, KAY DREYFUS, LEWIS FOREMAN, PAUL JACKSON, JAMES JUDD, JAMES KOEHNE, ASTRID BRITT KRAUTSCHNEIDER, BARRY PETER OULD, STEWART MANVILLE, MURRAY MCLACHLAN, TIMOTHY REYNISH, BRUCE CLUNIES ROSS, DESMOND SCOTT, PETER SCULTHORPE, GEOFFREY SIMON, RONALD STEVENSON, STEPHEN VARCOE, DAVID WALKER

Australian by birth but a longtime resident of Great Britain, David Lumsdaine (b.1931) is central to both Australian and British modernism. During the early 1970s Australian musical modernism was at its height. Lumsdaine and his Australian contemporaries were engaged with practices from multiple places, producing music that displays the attributes of their disparate influences; in so doing they formed a new conception of what it meant to be an Australian composer. The period is similarly important in Britain, for it saw the rise to prominence of composers such as Birtwistle, Davies, Goehr, Gilbert, Wood, Cardew and many others who were Lumsdaine's contemporaries, colleagues and friends. Hooper presents here a series of analyses of Lumsdaine's compositions, focusing on works written between 1966 and 1980. At the early end of this period is Kelly Ground, for solo piano. One of Lumsdaine's first acknowledged works, Kelly Ground connects explicitly with the music of high modernism, employing ideas about temporality as espoused by Ligeti, Stockhausen and Boulez, to form a new ritual for the (now mythical) Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Hooper places Lumsdaine's music in the context of Australian and British avant-gardes, and reveals its elegance, lyricism and technical virtuosity.

The rehabilitation of British music began with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford. Ralph Vaughan Williams assisted in its emancipation from continental models, while Gerald Finzi, Edmund Rubbra and George Dyson flourished in its independence. Stephen Town's survey of Choral Music of the English Musical Renaissance is rooted in close examination of selected works from these composers. Town collates the substantial secondary literature on these composers, and brings to bear his own study of the autograph manuscripts. The latter form an unparalleled record of compositional process and shed new light on the compositions as they have come down to us in their published and recorded form. This close study of the sources allows Town to identify for the first time instances of similarity and imitation, continuities and connections between the works.

Of the post-war, post-serialist generation of European composers, it was Luigi Nono who succeeded not only in identifying and addressing aesthetic and technical questions of his time, but in showing a way ahead to a new condition of music in the twenty-first century. His music has found a listenership beyond the ageing constituency of 'contemporary music'. In Nono's work, the audiences of sound art, improvisation, electronic, experimental and radical musics of many kinds find common cause with those concerned with the renewal of Western art music. His work explores the individually and socially transformative role of music; its relationship with history and with language; the nature of the musical work as distributed through text, time, technology and individuals; the nature and performativity of the act of composition; and, above all, the role and nature of listening as a cultural activity. In many respects his music anticipates the new technological state of culture of the twenty-first century while radically reconnecting with our past. His work is itself a case study in the evolution of musical activity and the musical object: from the period of an apparently stable place for art music in Western culture to its manifold new states in our century. Routledge Handbook to Luigi Nono and Musical Thought seeks to trace the evolution of Nono's musical thought through detailed examination of the vast body of sketches, and to situate this narrative in its personal, cultural and political contexts.

This book appraises the contribution of Paul Dukas (1865-1935) to a wide variety of French musical practices. As a composer, critic, artistic collaborator and teacher, Dukas was central to the fin de siecle and early twentieth-century Paris musical scene (and more broadly to the French scene). Significantly, his compositional style mediated tradition through the modern language of his present, while his critical writings pioneered a new mode of musical discourse in the French press. Of further interest are Dukas's professional relationships with iconic figures such as Gabriel Faure and Claude Debussy, and his role in fostering the next generation of French composers. In addition to mentoring famous names such as Olivier Messiaen and Tony Aubin, he staunchly supported his female students, notably Elsa Barraine, Claude Arrieu and Yvonne Desportes. This unique essay collection offers a panoramic perspective on a comparatively neglected French musician. Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician traces two aspects of his work: Part I treats Dukas as a composer, thinker and artistic collaborator; Part II constructs his intellectual legacy as seen in his creative and pedagogic endeavours. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in fin de siecle and early twentieth-century French music, women in French music, music criticism and composition education in the Paris Conservatoire.

Story-like chapters profile six twentieth-century reactive composers; not the most famous pillars of the period but lesser-known, perhaps more approachable, characters whose stories span that 19002000 period from decadent fin-de-siecle Vienna (Alban Berg, Alexander Zemlinsky) to war-torn Paris (Olivier Messiaen, Arthur Honegger) to the Cold War tensions of East vs. West (Toru Takemitsu) and late-century Communism (Arvo Part). Their stories were all very different crises, and they produced very different kinds of music; each very telling of their composers life and times. Crisis Music presents each brief biography almost like a detective story looking for motives, then spotlights one particular piece of music from each composer that emerged directly out of hard times maybe a political crisis at the time of composition (Hitler marching into Paris or later Communist crack-downs); or some personal angst such as illness or scandal and how that music contains and expresses crisis. In short, the subject for discussion is how context influences content. Such troubled and especially vivid composition, crisis music, can often be most compelling and meaningful for its composer and for its time. Indeed, their music also seems to have a special resonance to share with our own crisis-prone times. And meanwhile, Western music history played-out its own story from late-romantic style to Serialism and Minimalism to the anything-goes Pluralism we hear today. Crisis Music sparks the discussion about how history, biography and music intersects. At the behest of music teachers at secondary and tertiary levels, Crisis Music contains substantive Discussion Questions geared for classroom use.

The theme of this Research Companion is 'connectivity and the global reach of electroacoustic music and sonic arts made with technology'. The possible scope of such a companion in the field of electronic music has changed radically over the last 30 years. The definitions of the field itself are now broader - there is no clear boundary between 'electronic music' and 'sound art'. Also, what was previously an apparently simple divide between 'art' and 'popular' practices is now not easy or helpful to make, and there is a rich cluster of streams of practice with many histories, including world music traditions. This leads in turn to a steady undermining of a primarily Euro-American enterprise in the second half of the twentieth century. Telecommunications technology, most importantly the development of the internet in the final years of the century, has made materials, practices and experiences ubiquitous and apparently universally available - though some contributions to this volume reassert the influence and importance of local cultural practice. Research in this field is now increasingly multi-disciplinary. Technological developments are embedded in practices which may be musical, social, individual and collective. The contributors to this companion embrace technological, scientific, aesthetic, historical and social approaches and a host of hybrids - but, most importantly, they try to show how these join up. Thus the intention has been to allow a wide variety of new practices to have voice - unified through ideas of 'reaching out' and 'connecting together' - and in effect showing that there is emerging a different kind of 'global music'.

Historic accounts and new material illuminate the creation, early history and artistic intentions of Britten's first opera. The premiere of Peter Grimes on 7 June 1945 announced the emergence of the first great composer of opera in English since Purcell. Surviving documents offer evidence of the complex interaction of differing ideas about the possible shape and content of the new work, most notably the composition draft, which these essays are particularly concerned to illuminate. They juxtapose historic material with fresh studies: three items written by members of theteam involved in the 1945 production are set alongside specially-commissioned articles, with the three-fold intention of presenting the views of some of the creators of the opera, outlining the work's early history, and offeringcontemporary perspectives on its historical context and its message.Professor PAUL BANKS is Research Development Fellow at the Royal College of Music.Contributors: PAUL BANKS, PHILIP BRETT, BENJAMIN BRITTEN, ERIC CROZIER, DONALDMITCHELL, PETER PEARS, PHILIP REED, ROSAMUND STRODE. Packed away in its pages is a very large amount of new information. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT A fitting tribute to the opera's enduring international stature, and undoubtedly [a] significant achievement in Britten studies. MUSIC AND LETTERS

In the first decade of the twentieth-century, many composers rejected the principles of tonality and regular beat. This signaled a dramatic challenge to the rationalist and linear conceptions of music that had existed in the West since the Renaissance. The 'break with tonality', Neo-Classicism, serialism, chance, minimalism and the return of the 'sacred' in music, are explored in this book for what they tell us about the condition of modernity. Modernity is here treated as a complex social and cultural formation, in which mythology, narrative, and the desire for 're-enchantment' have not completely disappeared. Through an analysis of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Boulez and Cage, 'the author shows that the twentieth century composer often adopted an artistic personality akin to Max Weber's religious types of the prophet and priest, ascetic and mystic. Twentieth Century Music and the Question of Modernity advances a cultural sociology of modernity and shows that twentieth century musical culture often involved the adoption of 'apocalyptic' temporal narratives, a commitment to 'musical revolution', a desire to explore the limits of noise and sound, and, finally, redemption through the rediscovery of tonality. This book is essential reading for those interested in cultural sociology, sociological theory, music history, and modernity/modernism studies.

First published in 1998, this volume is the first book to focus on the American symphony. Neil Butterworth surveys the development of the symphony in the United States from early European influences in the last century to the present day, and asks why American composers have shown such allegiance to a musical form which their European contemporaries appear to have discarded. An overview of the growth of musical societies in America during the eighteenth century and the establishment of the first professional orchestras during the early part of the nineteenth century is followed by chronological analyses of the works of those composers who have played important parts in the progress of symphony in the United States, from Charles Ives, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, to contemporary figures such as William Bolcom and John Harbison. Complete with a comprehensive catalogue of symphonies and an extensive discography, this book is an indispensable reference work.

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.

What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, Gyoergy Kurtag, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

A guide to the art of conducting in the twenty-first century, by the founder of the RCM's Twentieth Century Ensemble. Conducting for a New Era fills in a lacuna by offering guidance and practical advice for conducting twentieth-century and contemporary repertoire. The book begins with a look at the development of the art of conducting during the first half of the twentieth century. Distinctions are made between conductors who pursued populist careers and those who established the foundations for the new art form of the twenty-first century. The book goes on to discuss the technical resources required to negotiate the rhythmic complexity of so much music composed since 1950. Beginning with the rhythmic revolution created by Stravinsky in Le Sacre du Printemps (in which conducting unequal units within single bars was introduced), ten different categories of music are featured in an analysis of the technical and aesthetic characteristics involved. The substance of interviews with distinguished soloists,orchestral musicians, conductors and composers is examined in assessing the changing role of the conductor in the twenty-first century. In a final section the technique and artistry of the progressive repertoire is discussed through detailed analysis of specific scores. Conducting for a New Era will be of interest not only to advanced students of conducting, in particular conducting of contemporary music, but also to the music enthusiast who might wish to know 'how it is done'. The book includes a DVD with conducting examples. EDWIN ROXBURGH is a composer, conductor and oboist and visiting tutor and researcher at the BCU Birmingham Conservatoire. Recordings of hismusic are on NMC, Naxos, Warehouse, Oboe Classics and Metier labels, and his music is published by United Music Publishing, Ricordi and Maecenas. As a conductor he has premiered a vast number of works, originally with the Twentieth Century Ensemble of London, which he founded, and later with several of the principle orchestras of the UK.

Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) were contemporaries at the Royal College of Music. The three composers' careers were launched with performances in the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts in the 1930s - a time when, in Britain, as Williams noted, a woman composer was considered 'very odd indeed'. Even so, by the early 1940s all three had made remarkable advances in their work: Lutyens had become the first British composer to use 12-note technique, in her Chamber Concerto No. 1 (1939-40); Maconchy had composed four string quartets of outstanding quality and was busy rethinking the genre; and Williams had won recognition as a composer with great flair for orchestral writing with her Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1940) and Sea Sketches (1944). In the following years, Lutyens, Maconchy and Williams went on to compose music of striking quality and to attain prominent positions within the British music scene. Their respective achievements broke through the 'sound ceiling', challenging many of the traditional assumptions which accompanied music by female composers. Rhiannon Mathias traces the development of these three important composers through analysis of selected works. The book draws upon previously unexplored material as well as radio and television interviews with the composers themselves and with their contemporaries. The musical analysis and contextual material lead to a re-evaluation of the composers' positions in the context of twentieth-century British music history.

Eric Coates (1886-1957) is perhaps the most familiar name associated with British light music. Sir Charles Groves said that 'his music crackled with enthusiasm and vitality. He could write tunes and clothe them in the most attractive musical colours'. Coates won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, and from 1912 to 1919 he was principal viola of the Queen's Hall Orchestra under Sir Henry Wood. He also played under such conductors as Elgar, Delius, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and Beecham. It was, however, as a composer of orchestral music that he found his greatest success. Beginning with the Miniature Suite, written for the 1911 Promenade Concerts, he forged an enviable reputation as a composer. By the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular and highest-paid British composers, with a string of popular works flowing from his pen. Coates' music has become indelibly entwined with such popular radio programmes as the BBC's In Town Tonight, which was introduced by the 'Knightsbridge' March and Desert Island Discs whose signature tune for the past forty years has been By the Sleepy Lagoon. Perhaps his most memorable work was his march for the Dam Busters film. Michael Payne traces the changing fortunes of the career of the man who composed some of Britain's best-known music. In many ways, Coates' story is the story of British light music, and Payne's study offers a fascinating insight into the heyday and decline of the British light music tradition.

This book explores the web of pitch relations that generates the musical language of non-serialized twelve-tone music and supplies both the analytical materials and methods necessary for analyses of a vast proportion of the 20th century musical repertoire. It does so in a simple, clear, and systematic manner to promote an easily accessible and global understanding of this music. Since the chromatic scale is the primary source for the pitch materials of 20th-century music, common sub-collections of the various modes and interval cycles serve as the basis for their mutual transformation. It is precisely this peculiarity of the non-serialized twelve-tone system that allows for an array of pitch relations and modal techniques hitherto perceived difficult if not impossible to analyze. Susanni and Antokoletz present the principles, concepts, and materials employed for analysis using a unique theoretic-analytical approach to the new musical language. The book contains a large number of original analyses that explore a host of composers including Ives, Stravinsky, Bartok, Messiaen, Cage, Debussy, Copland, and many more, providing insight into the music of the tonal revolution of the twentieth century and contributing an important perspective to how music works in general.

Nikos Skalkottas is perhaps the last great 'undiscovered' composer of the twentieth century. In the 1920s he was a promising young violinist and composer in Berlin, and a student of Schoenberg, who included him among his most gifted pupils. It was only after his return to Greece in 1933 that Skalkottas became an anonymous and obscure figure, working in complete isolation until his death in 1949. Most of his works remained unpublished and unperformed during his lifetime, and although he is largely known for his folkloristic tonal pieces, Skalkottas in fact concentrated predominantly on developing an idiosyncratic dodecaphonic musical language. Eva Mantzourani provides here a comprehensive study of this fascinating yet under-researched composer. The book, lavishly illustrated with musical examples, is divided into three parts. Part I comprises a critical biography that, by drawing extensively on his letters and other writings, reappraises the image of Skalkottas with which we are often presented. The main focus of the book, however, is on Skalkottas's twelve-note compositional processes, since these characterize the majority of his output, and are neither well-known nor fully understood. Part II presents the structural and technical features of his twelve-note technique, particularly the different types of sets and their manipulation, and his approach to musical forms. Part III consists of analytical case studies of several works, presented chronologically, which thus provide a diachronic framework within which Skalkottas's dodecaphonic compositional development can be more effectively viewed. This book underlines Nikos Skalkottas's importance as a composer with a distinctive artistic personality, whose work contributed to the development of twelve-note compositional practice, and who deserves a more significant position within the Western art music canon than that to which he is often assigned.

This volume explores twentieth-century organ music through in-depth studies of the principal centers of composition, the most significant composers and their works, and the evolving role of the instrument and its music. The twentieth-century was a time of unprecedented change for organ music, not only in its composition and performance but also in the standards of instrument design and building. Organ music was anything but immune to the complex musical, intellectual, and socio-political climate of the time. Twentieth-Century Organ Music examines the organ's repertory from the entire period, contextualizing it against the background of important social and cultural trends. In a collection of twelve essays, experienced scholars survey the dominant geographic centers of organ music (France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United States, and German-speaking countries) and investigate the composers who made important contributions to the repertory (Reger in Germany, Messiaen in France, Ligeti in Eastern and Central Europe, Howells in Great Britain). Twentieth-Century Organ Music provides a fresh vantage point from which to view one of the twentieth century's most diverse and engaging musical spheres.