The spectacular revival of serious music in England is a chief feature of the history of British culture from the turn of the twentieth century and after. For some two centuries the art form had stagnated in England, which was referred to, notoriously, by a German commentator as 'the land without music'. But then came a great renaissance. In the three linked essays that make up this book, Keith Alldritt, the most recent biographer of Vaughan Williams, examines the several phases and genres of this revival. A number of composers including Gustav Holst, Arnold Bax and William Walton contributed to the renewal. But this book presents the renaissance as centrally a continuity of enterprise, sometimes of riposte, running from Elgar to Vaughan Williams and then to Benjamin Britten. Their concern was with music at its most serious, though not unceasingly humourless. All three explored music's frontier with philosophy. They also probed the psychological impact of the unprecedently violent and destructive century in which they practised their art. Going beyond musicological comment, England Resounding essays insights into the historical, geopolitical and personal events that elicited the major works of these three great composers.

Mordechai Gebirtig was one of the most influential and popular writers of Yiddish songs and poems. Born in 1877, he became a prolific poet and song writer, using everything he saw, heard and knew about people. His legacy, therefore, is not only one of melodies and lyrics, but also a treatise on Jewish life in Poland under the benign neglect of the Austrians, the ever growing hostility of the Poles, and finally, the terror of the Germans, who destroyed the people, their culture, and, to a great measure, their memory. Schneider's book for the first time brings his work to an English-speaking audience, offering a collection of all of his major works, complete with the scores, transliterated Yiddish text, and English translation. Her book offers a rare insight into the world of Eastern European Jews, their culture, and their music.

Gebirtig's most famous song Es Brent--It's Burning--was written in response to a 1936 pogrom. It became a stirring hymn for the survivors of the Holocaust, who felt that the words suited their own situation very well. Gebirtig himself was shot in the Cracow Ghetto in June 1942. Neither he nor any of his close family survived the war. However, as this volume shows, his songs and poems remain an enduring voice for a Jewish community nearly lost to the Nazis. They constitute a precious legacy for anyone interested in the world of Eastern Europe Jews, their culture, and their music.

William Howard Schuman, a celebrated figure in 20th-century music, was a composer and a copious writer on music and music education. Early on, as a composer, he received the attention of several musicians and writers such as Nathan Broder, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein. He was the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the New York Music Critics Circle Award. After teaching at Sarah Lawrence College from 1935 to 1945 and serving as president of the Juilliard School from 1945 to 1962, Schuman assumed the presidency of Lincoln Center, where he successfully implemented that institution's artistic programs. Schuman, who composed in several genres, is perhaps best known for his orchestral compositions and choral music. This reference work provides a biography and a thorough catalog and guide to Schuman's writings and compositions and to the current research available on this gifted and multi-talented musician. An invaluable resource to music scholars interested in William Schuman's career, five sections provide accessible detailed information: a biography, works and performances, discography, bibliography, and bibliography of writings by Schuman. The biography traces Schuman's life and career with an emphasis on illustrating his compositional activity. The bibliography includes books, dissertations, articles, and reviews that chronicle Schuman's activities from his days as a young composer to his death in 1992. An author index, index of compositions, and general index complete this in-depth reference on William Schuman.

The composer Erik Satie (1866-1925) came of age in the bohemian sub-culture of Montmartre, with its artists' cabarets and cafés-concerts. These colourful milieux decisively shaped his aesthetic priorities and compositional strategies, from the esoteric Gymnopédies of the 1880s to the avant-garde ballets of the 1920s. This radical transvaluation of received artistic values makes far better sense once placed in this fascinating context.

The tenth-century Old English lament and twentieth-century blues song each speak the language of a distinct poetic tradition, yet the voices are remarkably similar in their emotive expression of loneliness. This innovative study juxtaposes the texts of each corpus to explore the features that characterize their vocal poetics. McGeachy examines how the texts evoke the dynamic of performance and explores the role of recording--in manuscript and on 78 rpm record--in establishing the distinctive formulas of each genre. Featured are a study of blues artist Robert Johnson's work and a comparison of two anthologies: the Exeter Book and the Folkways "Anthology of American Folk Music."

A pioneer of musical modernism, Igor Stravinsky marked a significant turn in compositional method. He broke free from traditional styles and contemporary trends in the early part of the twentieth century to achieve an entirely new and truly modern aesthetic. Striking a remarkable concurrence of stasis and discontinuity, Stravinsky crafted large-scale compositions out of short repeating melodies, juxtaposed these primary motives with contrasting and varying fragments, and layered on fixed ostinati which repeated at their own rates throughout the piece. Previous scholarship on Stravinsky focuses on the disparate and independent nature of such textures, conceiving them as separated and deadlocked, unable to escape their repetitions, and having no goal. This connects Stravinsky's procedures with the more radical music of subsequent composers for whom disconnection has served as a primary aesthetic. Yet, from the perspective of his later works, the static and discontinuous depictions of Stravinsky's music seem incomplete and perhaps even simplistic. The "building blocks" of his novel textures often consist of tunes with identifiable intervallic shapes, goal pitches, and defining durational patterns-organizations that engender continuity and connection. In other words, although its basic materials are combined into new, often dissonant and usually repetitive textures, those materials still originate in, and depend upon, traditional concepts of melody, harmony, and pulsation. Presenting an innovative analytical model for Stravinsky's compositions, Building Blocks seeks a fuller perspective, and enables a fresh, insightful approach to this music and the theoretical constructs behind it. Author Gretchen Horlacher portrays the whole of Stravinsky's repertoire as radical or modern not because it eschews continuity and connection, but because it places them in relation to their opposites: the music holds our interest because undeniable references toward continuity are dynamically coordinated (rather than subsumed) with stasis and discontinuity. From this vantage point, Stravinsky's music becomes a commentary on the nature of time: the music draws into relation the tension between time as it is punctuated by fixed reference and as it flows from one event to another. It is quintessentially modern because of its inherent emphasis on multiple vantage points. A sensitive and sophisticated approach to the work of this iconic composer, Building Blocks will appeal to students and scholars of Stravinsky and his music, scholars of musical modernism and twentieth century music, and to a more limited extent, to performers-particularly conductors, pianists, and orchestral instrumentalists.

Beginning from the unlikely vantage point of Venice in the aftermath of fascism and World War II, this book explores operatic production in the city's nascent postwar culture as a lens onto the relationship between opera and politics in the twentieth century. Both opera and Venice in the middle of the century are often talked about in strikingly similar terms: as museums locked in the past and blind to the future. These cliches are here overturned: perceptions of crisis were in fact remarkably productive for opera, and despite being physically locked in the past, Venice was undergoing a flourishing of avant-garde activity. Focusing on a local musical culture, Harriet Boyd-Bennett recasts some of the major composers, works, stylistic categories and narratives of twentieth-century music. The study provides fresh understandings of works by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Verdi, Britten and Nono.

This collection is a tribute to the talent, teaching, and humanism of Alfred Einstein, whose scholarship and criticisms affirm his position as one of the foremost musicologists of the twentieth century. Written by a former student of Einstein's, this portrait draws on the influences and events that shaped his life and work as a Jewish scholar in pre-Nazi Germany and that necessitated his emigration to the United States. Dower provides more than one hundred examples of his criticisms that document the music of Germany and the United States in the second quarter of this century and that demonstrate the art of music criticism at its best. Included is a chronology that is based on information provided by Einstein's daughter, Eva. Her insight into her father's personal life is combined with Catherine Dower's careful chronological documentation of Einstein's professional endeavors, provide a unique evaluation of a critic whose research produced valuable musical discoveries and whose writings always recognized the important relationship between music and its cultural background. The study affords further access to Einstein's writings by identifying the locations of Einstein collections in numerous libraries throughout the United States.

From the end of the Second World War through the U.S. Bicentennial, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation granted close to $300 million (approximately $2.3 billion in 2017 dollars) in the field of music alone. In deciding what to fund, these three grantmaking institutions decided to "ask the experts," adopting seemingly objective, scientific models of peer review and specialist evaluation. They recruited music composers at elite institutions, professors from prestigious universities, and leaders of performing arts organizations. Among the most influential expert-consultants were Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Milton Babbitt. The significance was two-fold: not only were male, Western art composers put in charge of directing large and unprecedented channels of public and private funds, but in doing so they also determined and defined what was meant by artistic excellence. They decided the fate of their peers and shaped the direction of music-making in this country. By asking the experts, the grantmaking institutions produced a concentrated and interconnected field of artists and musicians. Officers and directors utilized ostensibly objective financial tools like matching grants and endowments in an attempt to diversify and stabilize applicants' sources of funding, as well as the number of applicants they funded. Such economics-based strategies, however, relied more on personal connections among the wealthy and elite, rather than local community citizens. Ultimately, this history demonstrates how "expertise" served as an exclusionary form of cultural and social capital that prevented racial minorities and non-dominant groups from fully participating.

This generously illustrated selection of fifty reviews and essays, written between 1914 and 1962 by thirty American critics, draws together some of the best, most influential, and most interesting writing on Montemezzi, revealing for the first time the full depth of his impact in the United States, the country to which he moved in 1939.

"Francis Poulenc: A Bio-Bibliography" is a thorough presentation of the works of this often performed and critically appreciated 20th-century composer. George R. Keck traces events in Poulenc's life and offers a list of works and performances with the primary focus on those facts and influences which contributed to the development of the composer's distinctive musical style. Included in the text is a substantial discography as well as annotated entries by and about the composer which cover every phase of his career and affirm Poulenc's place in 20th-century music.

The highly selective annotated bibliography comprises the major portion of the text. Since Keck's documentation of the development of Poulenc's style covers only representative works, he includes a list of all of Poulenc's compositions, arranged both alphabetically and chronologically, in the two appendixes. A complete index of names, places, and titles concludes the book.

For many reasons Hans Pfitzner was and remains controversial. This stems partly from his difficult personality, and partly from the nationalistic context in which are set his cultural beliefs. His music has also tended to be coloured by such labels as conservative and romantic. Yet he actually has a wide reputation for his `musical legend' Palestrina, and there is much in his output which sets him as the true heir of Wagner and Schumann. This is the first study in English of Pfitzner's output. It sets his music in the context of his cultural opinions, which, though conceived as reflections on music, have acquired a more political status to which the history of Pfitzner's times has contributed. It offers a revaluation of his music, partly in order to reveal the innate value of his stage works, chamber music, and songs, and also to illustrate the historical importance of his ideas, which reflect a German conservative tradition which was taken over and nearly destroyed by the Third Reich.

Here, Holmboe discusses many issues facing the composer, performer and listener, giving especial attention to the most basic questions about musical experience. Vagn Holmboe [1909-96], was one of the most important composers of his era, and arguably the most important Danish composer after Carl Nielsen. A composer for over 60 years, and a teacher for more than 30, he wrote over 300 compositions in nearly every musical genre, music criticism, many other articles and two other books. Here, in a volume intended for the general reader, he discusses the nature of music, from the point of view of the composer, the performer and the listener. Where do musical ideas come from? What are composers' working methods, and how much are they really aware of them? What is the role of performers, and what sort of freedom do they have in interpreting music?What do listeners do in listening to music? What, essentially, is the musical experience? Professor Paul Rapoport contributes a lengthy introduction to this book, although, as he points out, `this is not a book about Vagn Holmboe nor a book addressed solely to musicians ... Holmboe's prose, like his music, is addressed to his fellow human beings, whoever and wherever they may be'.

Malcolm Arnold's music encompassed a variety of forms from opera and ballet through orchestral and chamber music to film scores. His most famous film score, for which he won an Oscar award in 1957, is The Bridge on the River Kwai. In 1953 he was commissioned to compose Homage to the Queen, a ballet to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Arnold was knighted by the Queen in 1993 in honor of his contributions to English music. As with the other volumes in the Greenwood Bio-Bibliographies in Music series, this work includes a brief biography, discography, complete list of works and performances, and an annotated bibliography. Music scholars, musicians, and those with an interest in the music of Malcolm Arnold will appreciate the extensive information gathered in this one volume. Since Malcolm Arnold has retired from composing, this book features the most complete list of his compositions, including some of his newly discovered early works. The works are listed alphabetically within genre. The author also provides a chronological listing of the works through which trends and developments in Arnold's compositions may be traced. Sir Malcolm Arnold's input with the project assures the accuracy and completeness of this bio-bibliography.

Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) was the epitome of the New England iconoclast. A composer of the American avant-garde movement, he wrote, in a very concise and dissonant style, a small body of truly unique musical works. He lived to be 95, composing to the very end of his life, but left behind a mere eight sanctioned works which he had rewritten and refined over decades. In the 1920s, he was at the focal point of ultra-modern music-making. Since there is currently a renewed interest in his work, this bio-bibliography is timely and needed, and of interest to scholars, students, and performers.

During the 1920s, had Edgard Varese or Charles Ives been asked to name America's greatest living composer, the response would have been Carl Ruggles. Forty years later, such eminent experts on American music as Nicolas Slonimsky, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland would each describe Ruggles as our most technically refined composer. Ruggles, with Varese and Ives, was the standard-bearer of the atonal movement in this century's third decade. With the rise of American realism, he slipped out of the public eye. Recent years have seen a resurgence of performances of his works and research on his music; consequently, there is a need for this timely bio-bibliography.

New York City witnessed a dazzling burst of creativity in the 1920s. In this pathbreaking study, Carol J. Oja explores this artistic renaissance from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music, who along with writers, painters, and jazz musicians, were at the heart of early modernism in America. She also illustrates how the aesthetic attitudes and institutional structures from the 1920s left a deep imprint on the arts over the 20th century.

Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, Marion Bauer, Dane Rudhyar--these were the leaders of a talented new generation of American composers whose efforts made New York City the center of new music in the country. They founded composer societies--such as the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts--to promote the performance of their music, and they nimbly negotiated cultural boundaries, aiming for recognition in Western Europe as much as at home. They showed exceptional skill at marketing their work. Drawing on extensive archival material--including interviews, correspondence, popular periodicals, and little-known music manuscripts--Oja provides a new perspective on the period and a compelling collective portrait of the figures, puncturing many longstanding myths.

American composers active in New York during the 1920s are explored in relation to the "Machine Age" and American Dada; the impact of spirituality on American dissonance; the crucial, behind-the-scenes role of women as patrons and promoters of modernist music; cross-currents between jazz and concert music; the critical reception of modernist music (especially in the writings of Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld); and the international impulse behind neoclassicism. The book also examines the persistent biases of the time, particularly anti-Semitisim, gender stereotyping, and longstanding racial attitudes.

Irwin Bazelon, one of the most original figures in American music in the second half of the 20th century, devoted his life to the art of composition. He was also well known for his musical compositions for films, television, commercials, and documentaries. His music was inspired by his experiences in the fast-paced environments of Chicago and New York. This major bibliography presents a biographical sketch, which details the influence of city life on the composer's artistic creativity, a catalogue of his compositions and performances, and a discography. A bibliography includes excerpts from the composer's lectures and other unpublished writings.

This thorough research tool will appeal to scholars of 20th-century music and to Bazelon fans. An archive of the composer's collections is included, and the separate book sections are cross-referenced throughout.

Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words is an incisive and imaginative look at the international environmental sound art movement, which emerged in the late 1960s. The term environmental sound art is generally applied to the work of sound artists who incorporate processes in which the artist actively engages with the environment. While the field of environmental sound art is diverse and includes a variety of approaches, the art form diverges from traditional contemporary music by the conscious and strategic integration of environmental impulses and natural processes. This book presents a current perspective on the environmental sound art movement through a collection of personal writings by important environmental sound artists. Dismayed by the limitations and gradual breakdown of contemporary compositional strategies, environmental sound artists have sought alternate venues, genres, technologies, and delivery methods for their creative expression. Environmental sound art is especially relevant because it addresses political, social, economic, scientific, and aesthetic issues. As a result, it has attracted the participation of artists internationally. Awareness and concern for the environment has connected and unified artists across the globe and has achieved a solidarity and clarity of purpose that is singularly unique and optimistic. The environmental sound art movement is borderless and thriving.

Claiming Diaspora explores the thriving contemporary musical culture of Asian/Chinese America. Ranging from traditional operas to modern instrumental music, from ethnic media networks to popular music, from Asian American jazz to the work of recent avant-garde composers, author Su Zheng reveals the rich and diverse musical activities among Chinese Americans and tells of the struggles and creative searches by Chinese Americans to gain a foothold in the American cultural terrain. In doing so, she not only tells their stories, but also examines the transnational and racialized experiences of this musical culture, challenging us to take a fresh look at the increasingly plural and complex nature of American cultural identity. Until recently, two intersected models have dominated studies of Asian American cultural expressions. The notion of "claiming America" has been a fundamental political strategy for the Asian American movement; while the Americanization model for European immigrants has minimized the impact of the "old country" on immigrant life and cultural expression. In Claiming Diaspora, Zheng critically analyzes the controversies surrounding these two models. She unveils the fluid and evolving nature of music in Chinese America, discussing current cultural struggles, while acknowledging an unavoidable connection to a history of Asian exclusion in the U.S. Furthermore, Zheng breaks from traditional approaches which have portrayed the music of non-Western people as rooted and immobile to examine the concept of "diaspora" in the context of Asian American experiences and cultural theories of space, place, and displacement. She calls into question the contested meaning of "Asian American" and "Asian American cultural identity" in cultural productions, and builds a comprehensive picture of community and cultural transformation in Chinese and Asian America. Zheng taps unpublished historical sources of immigrant narrative songs, extensive fieldwork in New York City and China, in-depth interviews in which musicians narrate their life stories and music experiences, and her own longstanding involvement as community member, musician, presenter, and cultural broker. The book delineates the introduction of each music genre from its homeland and its subsequent development in New York, and explains how Chinese Americans express their cultural longings and belongings. Ultimately, Zheng reveals how Chinese American musical activities both reflect and contribute to local, national, and transnational cultural politics.

In 1950, as Arnold Schoenberg anticipated the publication of a collection of 15 of his most important writings, Style and Idea, he was already at work on a second volume to be called Program Notes. Inspired by this idea, Schoenberg's Program Notes and Musical Analyses can boast the most comprehensive study of the composer's writings about his own music yet published. Schoenberg's insights emerge not only in traditional program notes, but also in letters, sketch materials, pre-concert talks, public lectures, contributions to scholarly journals, newspaper articles, interviews, pedagogical materials, and publicity fliers. The editions of the texts in this collection, based almost exclusively on Schoenberg's original manuscript sources, include many items appearing in print in English for the first time, as well as more familiar texts that preserve musical and textual information eliminated from previous editions. The book also reveals how Schoenberg, desirous to communicate with and educate an audience, took every advantage of changes in technology during his lifetime, utilizing print media, radio broadcasts, record jackets-and had he lived, television-for this purpose. In addition to four chapters in which Schoenberg illuminates 42 of his own compositions, the book begins with chapters on his development and influences, his thoughts about trends in modern music, and, in a nod to the importance of the radio in providing a venue for music analysis, a chapter about Schoenberg's radio broadcasts.

The biography of a fascinating cultural hero, Rene Blum and the Ballets Russes uncovers the events in the life of the enigmatic and brilliant writer and producer who perished in the Holocaust. Brother of Leon Blum, the first socialist prime minister of France, Rene Blum was a passionate and prominent litterateur. He was the editor of the chic literary journal Gil Blas where he met such celebrated figures as Claude Debussy, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Andre Gide, and Paul Valery. As author Judith Chazin-Bennahum's research illustrates, Blum actually arranged for the publication of Proust's Swann's Way. But Blum's accomplishments and legacy do not end there: after enlisting in World War I, he won the Croix de Guerre and became a national hero. And Blum resurrected the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo after Diaghilev's death. Tragically, he was arrested in 1941 during a roundup of Jewish intellectuals and ultimately sent to Auschwitz.
Based on a treasure trove of previously undiscovered letters and documents, this thoroughly researched narrative not only tells the poignant story of Blum's life but also illustrates Blum's central role in the development of dance in the United States. Indeed, Blum's efforts to save his ballet company eventually helped to bring many of the world's greatest dancers and choreographers--among them Fokine, Balanchine, and Nijinska--to American ballet stages, shaping the path of dance in the United States for years to come."

Leslie Bassett is a 20th-century composer, lecturer, university professor, and winner of many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He is unique among contemporary composers because he has written for many categories of music: brass, band and wind ensemble, chamber, choral, solo voice, instrumental solo, orchestra, organ, and piano. A favorite with students, he has also endeared himself as a guest composer at festivals and symposia in many states for over 30 years. This volume collects for the first time the widely scattered source materials on Bassett and thus documents his preeminence in the history and development of contemporary American music.

The biographical section of this volume first sketches Bassett's life and career and then gives an evaluative description of the progression of his musical compositions. To give a feeling for his music, illustrations of selected scores accompany some of the discussion. Next is a classified list of works arranged in alphabetical order and divided into 11 categories of performance, followed by a discography. The bibliography is annotated; there is a separate section for reviews of performances and concerts. Also included is an appendix that gives a chronological list of guest composer appearances, featuring festivals, symposia, and major educational events. Three other appendices round out the thorough coverage of source materials that have until now been difficult to see as a whole. Here they are readily accessible; thus, the book becomes a ready reference for the study of this acknowledged master of music.

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.

"This Awareness of Beauty" is the first book to consider the orchestral and wind band music of Canadian composer Healey Willan, who was known primarily for his choral work. A succinct biography accompanies historical, analytical, and critical investigations of Willan's instrumental music, asserting Willan's seminal place in Canadian music and the significance of his orchestral and wind band music both nationally and internationally.

Each composition is investigated in chronological order to illustrate the composer's evolution as a creator of instrumental music from his early years in England to his later, and more notable, accomplishments in Canada. Willan's orchestral music may be seen as both a reaction to and a stimulus for the significant improvement in Canadian orchestral performance during the 1930s and 40s, a factor in the creation of his large-scale compositions, including two symphonies and a piano concerto.

Although much has been written about Willan, most of it has centred on his choral work, with biography and/or musicology as the frame of reference; this project considers his instrumental music in terms of performance, provides historical context for many of the works included, and corrects errors that have crept into the literature.

Following the second World War, Olivier Messiaen, previously known primarily for his religious music, composed three works inspired by the medieval love story of Tristan and Iseult: "Harawi," "Turangal DEGREESD"la-symphonie," and "Cinq rechants." Though the song cycle, symphony, and choral work each consider their source story in a different way, the three compositions are tied closely together by theme and musical technique. This new study is the only full-length consideration of this most significant work, applying literary techniques of stylistic analysis and source study as well as musical analysis of Messiaen's aesthetics and form.

As Audrey Ekdahl Davidson shows, Messiaen's work was informed by more than just the mythic tale at its center. The twelve songs in "Harawi" are indebted to Peruvian melodies, and rhythmically they reveal the influence of the Hindu musical theory that the composer encountered at the Paris Conservatory. "Turangal DEGREESD"la-symphonie" continues and expands the use of these complex rhythmic structures to create a form that expresses elements of the Tristan story as filtered through Wagner's famous operatic depiction. And in "Cinq rechants," Messiaen produced a set of choral pieces that use surrealistic texts joined to music that is related structurally to the "rechants" of the sixteenth-century composer Claude le Jeune. Davidson's examination of these works reveals both their interrelatedness and their many layers of musical and textual meaning.