In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Steve Reich was considered a fringe experimentalist. His work consisted largely of repeating, slowly changing patterns unlike either the serialism or the aleatory that predominated at that time. Today, however, Reich is one of the most prominent and celebrated contemporary composers, one about whom the scholarly and popular literature offers an assortment of critical, historical, and analytical perspectives. Author D.J. Hoek's bio-bibliography serves as an essential guide to this literature, comprehensively surveying Reich's life and work.

Included are details of all of Reich's compositions: dates, instrumentation, premiere performances, and publishers; a discography listing all commercial recordings of the composer's oeuvre; and an annotated bibliography of publications in English, French, German, and Italian. The Reich scholar or aficionado could not find a more thorough encapsulation of his brilliant career.

This is a comprehensive biography of perhaps the first important American woman composer, Amy Marcy Beach. She enjoyed an international reputation in the early 20th century, especially for her symphonies. In recent years there has been a great revival of interest in her work, and many of her compositions have been performed and recorded.

The first English-language book on Czerny, and the broadest survey of his activity in any language. Within the history of European music, Carl Czerny (1791-1857) is simultaneously all too familiar and virtually invisible. During his lifetime, he was a highly successful composer of popular piano music, and his pedagogical works remain fundamental to the training of pianists. But Czerny's reputation in these areas has obscured the remarkable breadth of his activity, and especially his work as a composer of serious music, which recent performances and recordings have shown to hold real musical interest. Beyond "The Art of Finger Dexterity" explores Czerny's multifaceted career and its legacy and provides the first broad assessment of his work as a composer. Prominent North American and European musicians and scholars explore topics including Czerny's life and its context; his autobiographical writings and efforts to promote his teacher, Beethoven; his activity as a pedagogue, both as teacher of Liszt and as the authority held up to innumerable amateur women pianists; his role in shaping performance traditions of classical music; the development of his image during and after his lifetime; and his work in genres including the Mass, the symphony, the string quartet, and the piano fantasy. This is the first English-language book on Czerny, and the broadest survey of his activity in any language. Contributors: George Barth, Otto Biba, Attilio Bottegal, Deanna C. Davis, James Deaville, Ingrid Fuchs, David Gramit, Alice M. Hanson, Anton Kuerti, Marie Sumner Lott, James Parakilas, Michael Saffle, Franz A. J. Szabo, Douglas Townsend, and John Wiebe. DavidGramit [University of Alberta] is the author of Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848.

Nadia Boulanger - composer, critic, impresario and the most famous composition teacher of the twentieth century - was also a performer of international repute. Her concerts and recordings with her vocal ensemble introduced audiences on both sides of the Atlantic to unfamiliar historical works and new compositions. This book considers how gender shaped the possibilities that marked Boulanger's performing career, tracing her meteoric rise as a conductor in the 1930s to origins in the classroom and the salon. Brooks investigates Boulanger's promotion of structurally motivated performance styles, showing how her ideas on performance of historical repertory and new music relate to her teaching of music analysis and music history. The book explores the way in which Boulanger's musical practice relied upon her understanding of the historically transcendent masterwork, in which musical form and meaning are ideally joined, and shows how her ideas relate to broader currents in French aesthetics and culture.

Sir Michael Tippett is widely considered to be one of the most individual composers of the twentieth century, whose music continues to be performed to critical acclaim throughout the world. Written by a team of international scholars, this Companion provides a wide ranging and accessible study of Tippett and his works. It discusses the contexts and concepts of modernism, tradition, politics, sexuality and creativity that shaped Tippett's music and ideas, engaging with archive materials, relevant literature and models of interpretation. Chapters explore the genres in which Tippett composed, including opera, symphony, string quartet, concerto and piano sonata, to shed new light on his major works and draw attention to those that have not yet received the attention they deserve. Directing knowledge and expertise towards a wide readership, this book will enrich the listening experience and broaden understanding of the music of this endlessly fascinating and challenging composer.

Peter Kivy presents a selection of his new and recent writings on the philosophy of music, a subject to which he has for many years been one of the most eminent contributors. In his distinctively elegant and informal style, Kivy explores such topics as musicology and its history, the nature of musical works, and the role of emotion in music, in a way that will attract the interest of philosophical and musical readers alike.

The German-Jewish emigre composer Stefan Wolpe was a vital figure in the history of modernism, with affiliations ranging from the Bauhaus, Berlin agitprop and the kibbutz movement to bebop, Abstract Expressionism and Black Mountain College. This is the first full-length study of this often overlooked composer, launched from the standpoint of the mass migrations that have defined recent times. Drawing on over 2000 pages of unpublished documents, Cohen explores how avant-garde communities across three continents adapted to situations of extreme cultural and physical dislocation. A conjurer of unexpected cultural connections, Wolpe serves as an entry-point to the utopian art worlds of Weimar-era Germany, pacifist movements in 1930s Palestine and vibrant art and music scenes in early Cold War America. The book takes advantage of Wolpe's role as a mediator, bringing together perspectives from music scholarship, art history, comparative literature, postcolonial studies and recent theories of cosmopolitanism and diaspora.

For much of his career, the internationally known and still active Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has been understood as an iconoclast who challenged and resisted the musical establishment. This book explores his compositions as a case study for exploring the social and aesthetic implications of new music. Everett chronicles the evolution of Andriessen's music over the course of five decades: the formative years in which he experimented with serialism and collage techniques; his political activism in the late 1960s; 'concept' works from the 1970s that provide musical commentary on philosophical writings by Plato, St Augustine and others; theatrical and operatic collaborations with Robert Wilson and Peter Greenaway in the 1980s and 1990s; and recent works that explore contemplative themes on death and madness. Everett's analysis of Andriessen's music draws on theories of parody, narrativity, and intertextuality that have gained currency in musicological discourse in recent years.

Arvo Part is one of the most influential and widely performed contemporary composers. Around 1976 he developed an innovative new compositional technique called 'tintinnabuli' (Latin for 'sounding bells'), which has had an extraordinary degree of success. It is frequently performed around the world, has been used in award-winning films, and pieces such as Fur Alina and Spiegel im Siegel have become standard repertoire. This collection of essays, written by a distinguished international group of scholars and performers, is the essential guide to Arvo Part and his music. The book begins with a general introduction to Part's life and works, covering important biographical details and outlining his most significant compositions. Two chapters analyze the tintinnabuli style and are complemented by essays which discuss Part's creative process. The book also examines the spiritual aspect of Part's music and contextualizes him in the cultural milieu of the twenty-first century and in the marketplace.

Van den Toorn and McGinness take a fresh look at the dynamics of Stravinsky's musical style from a variety of analytical, critical and aesthetic angles. Starting with processes of juxtaposition and stratification, the book offers an in-depth analysis of works such as The Rite of Spring, Les Noces and Renard. Characteristic features of style, melody and harmony are traced to rhythmic forces, including those of metrical displacement. Along with Stravinsky's formalist aesthetics, the strict performing style he favoured is also traced to rhythmic factors, thus reversing the direction of the traditional causal relationship. Here, aesthetic belief and performance practice are seen as flowing directly from the musical invention. The book provides a counter-argument to the criticism and aesthetics of T. W. Adorno and Richard Taruskin, and will appeal to composers, critics and performers as well as scholars of Stravinsky's music.

A unique treatment of the key influences on the life of this important Australian composer, consisting of oral histories by people who knew Grainger, as well as reflections from his own writings. Percy Grainger [1882-1961] was a pianist, composer, ethnographer, essayist, and much more. The Australian-American musician aspired to the condition of a polymath, with strong interests in language, culture, ecology and technology. In an age of increasing specialisation Grainger held to a breathless all-roundedness. This book looks at the scrabbling diversity of Grainger's life through the eyes of others. Family and friends, pupils, musical associatesand chance acquaintances recall their experiences of Percy Grainger from his boyhood in colonial Australia, through his conservatorium years in Germany, on to his early professional years in London, and further to the zenith of his career and then years of decline in the United States. In the final chapter, Grainger himself explains the driving passions of his life. Fifty illustrations, including architectural drawings, scores and machine plans, vividly depict the enthusiasms described in over ninety recollections of Grainger. A composer of over four hundred compositions and virtuoso performer in some three thousand concerts, Grainger left a large legacy. He was an importantinfluence upon the folk-song movement in Britain, and, through such masterworks as Lincolnshire Posy, he was enduringly popular with the band movement in America. On a personal level, his development of the language of "blue-eyed English" was stillborn, and his muscular style of pianism found few adherents among the next generation of performers. His frankly expressed views on sexual licence were also many decades ahead of their time. Today, however, Grainger the musician is again in the ascendant. His more innovative works are gaining a belated hearing, while his standards, such as Country Gardens, remain firm favorites. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear areco-editors of Grainger on Music and 'The All-Round Man': Selected Letters of Percy Grainger, 1914-1961

The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak About the Creative Process is a collection of interviews with 25 various American composers, born between 1930 and 1960, who explain how they think in sound, mould musical ideas, and ultimately transfer sonic creations to the printed page.

Language, education, science, and song come together in surprising ways in Katherine Bergeron's new history of music in the Belle Epoque. Voice Lessons examines the modern musical art known as la melodie francaise and its rise to prominence in the years around 1900-a period when France was pouring resources into national literacy and French scholars were beginning to grasp the nuances of the spoken tongue. Bergeron explores the relationship between the free, secular, and compulsory school system of the Third Republic, and the experimental sciences of language that grew alongside it, to observe the ways in which both science and school redefined the verbal arts in France at century's end.
The music of Faure, Debussy, and Ravel; the writings of Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Verlaine; the performances of Maggie Teyte, Reynaldo Hahn, and Sarah Bernhardt; the linguistic studies of Paul Passy and Abbe Rousselot: all these sources offer evidence of the new ideas of expression that proliferated during one of the most idealistic moments in French musical history, when poets, composers, actors, singers, and scientists all learned to imagine-and to speak-their language in new ways. Through close readings of songs, poems, sound recordings, and other historical records, Voice Lessons narrates the development of a rare musical art, seeking to explain why this art emerged, why it mattered, and why it eventually disappeared."

This virtuosic sonata, first published in 1934, exploits the viola's technical capabilities to create an expressive and dramatic work in the late Romantic/early twentieth-century idiom. The sonata comprises four movements: the first is flowing yet intense, the second dark and mournful, the third alternates between lively tunes and passages of dazzling virtuosity, and the final movement is measured and contemplative.

The growth of African immigration to France at the end of the Twentieth Century wrought cultural change in this epicenter of the avant-garde in European art and music. If one visits the record stores, clubs, and restaurants of contemporary Paris, one would find the influence of France's former colonies at work. James Winders presents the story of African immigrants to France as a unique chapter in the long history of the reception accorded expatriate artists in Paris. Paris Africain demonstrates that France's newest immigrants are making marks in French culture that will not be erased.

2009 marks the 75th birthday of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, an occasion that presents an opportunity for reflection upon, and appreciation of, a period of compositional achievement that extends from the 1950s to the present. This book forms part of that reflection through a statement of the current condition of research on Maxwell Davies's music. Detailed analytical discussions of individual works, such as the opera Taverner and the First Symphony, coexist with broader issues and perspectives, including Davies's own writings about music, his engagement with sonata form, the compositional source, problems of text, and the situating of this music within and in relation to 'modern times'. The book describes selected works from all periods of Davies's rich and diverse career, resulting in a portrait of the music that, while it may be incomplete, reveals the essence of this remarkable composer and his music.

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.

Thea Musgrave ranks among the world's foremost living composers, and is widely known for the warmth, humor, and theatrical qualities of her music. Donald L. Hixon has prepared the first and only substantial bibliographical treatment of the composer, and the only complete listing of her works, with the assistance of Musgrave herself. The volume includes a brief biography; a complete list of her works and premieres, together with other notable selected performances, classified by genre and arranged alphabetically by title; a discography of commercially produced recordings; and an annotated bibliography of writings by and about Musgrave and her music. In addition, appendixes provide alphabetical and chronological access to the composer's music. An index of names and titles completes the volume.

American composer Morton Feldman is increasingly seen to have been one of the key figures in late-twentieth-century music, with his work exerting a powerful influence into the twenty-first century. At the same time, much about his music remains enigmatic, largely due to long-standing myths about supposedly intuitive or aleatoric working practices. In Composing Ambiguity, Alistair Noble reveals key aspects of Feldman's musical language as it developed during a crucial period in the early 1950s. Drawing models from primary sources, including Feldman's musical sketches, he shows that Feldman worked deliberately within a two-dimensional frame, allowing a focus upon the fundamental materials of sounding pitch in time. Beyond this, Feldman's work is revealed to be essentially concerned with the 12-tone chromatic field, and with the delineation of complexes of simple proportions in 'crystalline' forms. Through close reading of several important works from the early 1950s, Noble shows that there is a remarkable consistency of compositional method, despite the varied experimental notations used by Feldman at this time. Not only are there direct relations to be found between staff-notated works and grid scores, but much of the language developed by Feldman in this period was still in use even in his late works of the 1980s.

Compulsively readable interviews with the great American composer and his friends and colleagues, including Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Leontyne Price. Samuel Barber is one of America's most popular classical composers. His widely beloved works include "Adagio for Strings" and Knoxville: Summer of 1915 . The main source for Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute is a panoply of vivid and eminently readable interviews by Peter Dickinson for a BBC Radio 3 documentary in 1981. The interviewees include Barber's friends, fellow composers, and performers, notably Gian Carlo Menotti, Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Virgil Thomson, soprano Leontyne Price, and pianist John Browning. The book also includes three of the very few interviews extant with Barber himself. Dickinson contributes substantial chapters on Barber's early life and on Barber's reception in England. The book has a foreword by the distinguished composer and admirer of Barber, John Corigliano. Peter Dickinson, British composer and pianist, has written or editednumerous books about twentieth-century music, including CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage (University of Rochester Press) and three books published by Boydell Press: The Music of Lennox Berkeley; Copland Connotations; and Lord Berners: Composer, Writer, Painter.

A colourful and attractive suite for solo harp, in the words of the composer, "directly inspired by a working visit to Santa Fe-a city beautifully set in an area of New Mexico suffused over many centuries by the culture and rhythms of Spain. The opening Landscape calls on the harp's sense of atmosphere, the central Nocturne on its power of sonorous line, and the finale, Sun Dance, on its rhythmic capacity.

This book, first published in 2000, examines the BBC's campaign to raise cultural awareness of British mass audiences in the early days of radio. As a specific case, it focuses on policies and plans behind transmissions of music by composers associated with Arnold Schoenberg's circle between 1922, when the BBC was founded, and spring 1936, when Edward Clark, a former Schoenberg pupil and central figure in BBC music, resigned from the Corporation. This study traces and analyses the BBC's attempts to manipulate critical and public responses to this repertory. The book investigates three interrelated aspects of early BBC history. Policy decisions relating to contemporary music transmissions are examined to determine why precious broadcast time was devoted to this repertory. Early personnel structures are reconstructed to investigate the responsibilities, attitudes and interests of those who influenced music broadcasting. Finally, broadcasts of Second Viennese School works are examined in detail.

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.

The principal purpose of topics in musicology has been to identify meaning-bearing units within a musical composition that would have been understood by contemporary audiences and therefore also by later receivers, albeit in a different context and with a need for historically aware listening. Since Leonard Ratner (1980) introduced the idea of topics, his relatively simple ideas have been expanded and developed by a number of distinguished authors. Topic theory has now become a well-established branch of musicology, often embracing semiotics, but its relationship to performance has received less attention. Musical Topics and Musical Performance thus focuses on the interface of theory and practice, and investigates how an appreciation of topical presence in a work may prompt interpretative thoughts for a potential performer as well as how performers have responded to such a presence in practice. The chapters focus on music from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries with case studies drawn from composers as diverse as Beethoven, Scriabin and Peter Eoetvoes. Using both scores and recordings, the book presents a variety of original and innovative perspectives on the subject from a range of distinguished authors, and addresses a neglected area of musicology and musical performance.