A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was an English classical scholar and poet who had an enormous influence on many British poets and musicians. A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was both a celebrated poet and the foremost classicist of his day. His poetry was set to music by numerous composers including Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney, John Ireland and Samuel Barber. Housman's painstaking vocation, to restore classical manuscripts by correcting textual errors, took up virtually the whole of his working life. A seemingly inaccessible, aloof man, he never set out tobe a professional poet, yet poetry poured out of him and became his monument. His renowned A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems were born of an inner crisis, sparked by a profound but unreciprocated attachment fora fellow undergraduate. To be sexually different in the time of Oscar Wilde was to invite ostracism and disgust. This fact, allied with his secretiveness and penchant for irony, reinforced his reticence on personal matters. Untilnow, he has remained a hidden personality, held in the public mind as prim and grim. This biography reveals by contrast a man of many facets, one companionable in small groups, generous to a fault, and always on the lookout for humour and fun; a master of English prose; a witty and compelling after-dinner speaker; an occasional writer of nonsense verse; a frequenter of the music hall; an intrepid early traveller by air; and a connoisseur of food and wine. Drawing on Housman's published letters and on 81 significant new finds, Edgar Vincent conjures up a new Housman, created out of his reactions to the events of his life as he experienced them. It weaves together his scholarly life and the biographical elements in his poetry to examine his emotional and sexual needs with dispassion and empathy and to uncover his hidden sensibilities and creative world. EDGAR VINCENT read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford. Following Oxford he was commissioned in the Navy, spending most of his time with the Royal Marines. Subsequently he worked for Imperial Chemical Industries for thirty years. He then fulfilled a life-longambition to write his book Nelson: Love & Fame, published by Yale University Press in 2003. The book was shortlisted for the BBC 4 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, was a New York Times Notable Book and was named one ofAtlantic Monthly's Books of the Year.

Postmodernity's Musical Pasts covers topics from classical to popular and neo-traditional musics to concerns of the disciplines of musicology. These provide insights how the progression of time and history can be conceptually understood after 1945. Postmodernity's Musical Pasts relies on an extensive and varied spectrum of topics, from both the centre and the periphery of the musicological canon, that mirror the eclectic and diverse nature of the postwar era itself. The first section, 'Time and the (Post)Modern', investigates how to understand manifestations of the past in musical composition with regard to time, on the one hand, and with regard to genre, style, and idiom, on the other. The second section, 'Manifestations of History', shows how time and history manifest themselves in art music. A third section, 'Receptions of the Past', takes the contrasts and transitional moments of post-1945 practices further by looking at the temporality of reception from different angles. A final part investigates questions of nostalgia and the temporalities of belonging. The volume subverts the understanding of temporality as linear progression of past, present, and future. It offers new avenues of conceptual thinking relevant for those engaged in the study of music history and culture and for the humanities at large.

This book, the first in-depth biography of Prokofiev since 1987 and the most detailed yet written, is based on fresh discoveries and new archival material. Since 1991-the year that marked both the fall of the Soviet Union and the centenary of Sergey and birth-a new assessment of the renowned composer's life and work has become both possible and necessary. In this engrossing book, David Nice draws on a remarkable range of previously unexamined sources to present that reassessment. The book follows Prokofiev's personal and musical progression from his childhood on a Ukrainian country estate to the years he spent traveling in America and Europe as an acclaimed interpreter of his own works. Nice sheds new light on Prokofiev's early years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, his departure from Russia in 1918 for what he thought would be a short tour of America, and his marriage and family relationships. He considers the music of Prokofiev's years in the west (long dismissed by Soviet musicologists as decadent work weakened by the composer's absence from the motherland), moving from the lyricism of his St. Petersburg years to the fresh simplicity of his early Soviet scores. Nice also examines the complex reasons which led Prokofiev to move his family to the Soviet Union in 1936. A second volume will cover Prokofiev's life from this period to his death in 1952.

The first book in the English language to engage with Prokofiev's operatic output in its entirety. The operas of Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) mark a significant contribution to twentieth-century music and theatre. Opera was Prokofiev's preferred genre; not counting juvenile and unfinished works, he wrote a total of eight. Yet,to date, little has been published about the context, rationale or musical and compositional processes behind this output. While systematic studies of Prokofiev's symphonies and his ballets exist, the operas have come under no such scrutiny. This book is the first in the English language to engage with the composer's operatic output in its entirety and provides a contextual, critical and musico-analytical account of all of Prokofiev's operas, including those juvenile works that are unpublished as well as the incomplete works composed towards the end of his life. It also includes synopses of the operas. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and other sources, the book provides the compelling untold story of Prokofiev the opera composer.

Displaying the broad erudition and intellectual agility that have informed a lifetime of scholarship, Wilfrid Mellers offers a set of diverse reflections on how western art music illuminates the shifting relationship between humankind and the natural world. Beginning with two turn-of-the-century operas--Frederick Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet and Claude Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande -- that present humankind as lost in a tangled wood that is at once internal and external, Mellers develops the theme of wilderness in sociological, psychological, ecological, and even geological terms. He discusses Leos Jana ek's Cunning Little Vixen ("the ultimate ecological opera") as a parable of redemption and explores the delicate yet dangerous equilibrium between civilization and the dark forest in works by Charles Koechlin and Darius Milhaud. Elements of wilderness and the city combine to infuse the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos and Carlos Chavez with a blend of primitivism and sophistication, while a creative tension between desert landscape and industrial mechanization inspires the works of Carl Ruggles, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Australia's Peter Sculthorpe. The volume culminates in a discussion of two American urban folk musicians, Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. By suggesting how the "musicking" of ecological issues articulates twinned perspectives on music and our place in the world, Mellers raises intriguing questions about the links among tradition, talent, learning, and instinct. Brimming over with fresh ideas and unexpected cross-pollinations, Singing in the Wilderness is a stimulating addition to the oeuvre of a distinguished and inventive scholar.

Sir Andrzej Panufnik used to say that he communicated in music, not words. But his literary legacy is substantial, as this book demonstrates. Its major element is Composing Myself, the autobiography he wrote in 1985, long since a collector's item and here republished in a fully annotated new edition. It provides a graphic account of an often dramatic life. Panufnik's early success in pre-World War II Poland was soon eclipsed by the horrors of the Nazi occupation. Composing Myself documents in striking detail the desperate circumstances in which Panufnik repeatedly found himself - and the personal courage with which he responded. Post-War Poland then progressed from theovert terrors of Nazism to the deadening hand of Communism, and Panufnik charts the methodical attempts of Party orthodoxy to stifle independent thought. In spite of the success he enjoyed as a conductor, Panufnik was unable to compose under such restrictions, feeling he was being suffocated. Though a patriot to his bones, he boldly decided that escape to the west was the only option, and his account of his defection - in 1954, at the height of the Cold War - reads like a le Carre thriller. Safe in England, he was able to rebuild his career, overcoming official neglect of his music to become one of Britain's best-respected composers - and to be greeted as a national hero when he finally managed to return to his beloved Poland, free at last. Composing Myself is complemented by the complete programme notes he wrote to shed light on the impulse behind, and design of, his music, complete with theoften visually striking diagrams he drew to articulate their formal logic. A third section includes his few other articles, including a 1955 report to the unsuspecting west of the true nature of Polish intellectual life under Communism, an insightful radio broadcast on Szymanowski and a brief tribute to Bartok. Finally, Part IV collects the more important of the interviews Panufnik gave over the course of his career.

Popular Musicology and Identity paves new paths for studying popular music's entwinement with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, locality, and a range of other factors. The book consists of original essays in honour of Stan Hawkins, whose work has been a major influence on the musicological study of gender and identity since the early 1990s. In the new millennium, musicological approaches have proliferated and evolved alongside major shifts in the music industry and popular culture. Reflecting this plurality, the book reaches into a range of musical contexts, eras, and idioms to critically investigate the discursive structures that govern the processes through which music is mobilised as a focal point for negotiating and assessing identity. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, Popular Musicology and Identity accounts for the state of popular musicology at the onset of the 2020s while also offering a platform for the further advancement of the critical study of popular music and identity. This collection of essays thus provides an up-to-date resource for scholars across fields such as popular music studies, musicology, gender studies, and media studies.

The displacement of Chou Wen-chung from his native China in 1948 forced him into Western-European culture. Ultimately finding his vocation as a composer, he familiarized himself with classical and contemporary techniques but interpreted these through his traditionally oriented Chinese cultural perspective. The result has been the composition of a unique body of repertoire that synthesizes the most progressive Western compositional idioms with an astonishingly traditional heritage of Asian approaches, not only from music, but also from calligraphy, landscape painting, poetry, and more. Chou's importance rests not only in his compositions, but also in his widespread influence through his extensive teaching career at Columbia University, where his many students included Bright Sheng, Zhou Long, Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Joan Tower, and many more. During his tenure at Columbia, he also founded the U.S.-China Arts Exchange, which continues to this day to be a vital stimulus for multicultural interaction. The volume will include an inventory of the Chou collection in the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland.

Pierre Boulez was appointed to the College de France in 1976, with the chair devoted to 'Invention, technique and language in Music', and he held his position until 1995. The publication of his extraordinary College de France lectures, his most significant writings from the 1970s to the 1990s, will make a major contribution to the discussion in English about Boulez's aesthetic legacy. His goal in Lecons de musique is to express his conception of musical language, laid out over the course of nearly twenty years of lecturing. He is thinking about the possible paths musical thought could take, as well as the musical legacy of the past In addition to composers, music historians, theorists, and music students, this book will be invaluable to those interested in the history and aesthetics of 20th century music, musical manifestations of artistic modernism, the history of ideas, and French intellectual and cultural history. Faber have been Pierre Boulez's publisher since 1986 - previous books include Orientations, Boulez on Music Today and Boulez on Conducting. 'Boulez's achievements in changing every part of the fabric of classical musical culture all over the world are indelible.' Tom Service, Guardian

Most classical musicians, whether in orchestral or ensemble situations, will have to face a piece by composers such as Ligeti, Messiaen, Varese or Xenakis, while improvisers face music influenced by Dave Holland, Steve Coleman, Aka Moon, Weather Report, Irakere or elements from the Balkans, India, Africa or Cuba. Rafael Reina argues that today's music demands a new approach to rhythmical training, a training that will provide musicians with the necessary tools to face, with accuracy, more varied and complex rhythmical concepts, while keeping the emotional content. Reina uses the architecture of the South Indian Karnatic rhythmical system to enhance and radically change the teaching of rhythmical solfege at a higher education level and demonstrates how this learning can influence the creation and interpretation of complex contemporary classical and jazz music. The book is designed for classical and jazz performers as well as creators, be they composers or improvisers, and is a clear and complete guide that will enable future solfege teachers and students to use these techniques and their methodology to greatly improve their rhythmical skills. An accompanying website of audio examples helps to explain each technique. For examples of composed and improvised pieces by students who have studied this book, as well as concerts by highly acclaimed karnatic musicians, please copy this link to your browser: http://www.contemporary-music-through-non-western-techniques.com/pages/1587-video-recordings

Winner of the 2022 Vincent H. Duckles Award, Music Library Association John Adams: A Research and Information Guide offers the first comprehensive guide to the musical works and literature of one of the leading American composers of our time. The research guide catalogs and summarizes materials relating to Adams's work, providing detailed annotated bibliographic entries for both primary and secondary sources. Covering writings by and interviews with Adams, books, journal articles and book chapters, newspaper articles and reviews, dissertations, video recordings, and other sources, the guide also contains a chronology of Adams's life, a discography, and a list of compositions. Robust indexes enable researchers to easily locate sources by author, composition, or subject. This volume is a major reference tool for all those interested in Adams and his music, and a valuable resource for students and researchers of minimalism, contemporary American music, and twentieth-century music more broadly.

Investigating Musical Performance considers the wide range of perspectives on musical performance made tangible by the cross-disciplinary studies of the last decades and encourages a comparison and revision of theoretical and analytical paradigms. The chapters present different approaches to this multi-layered phenomenon, including the results of significant research projects. The complex nature of musical performance is revealed within each section which either suggests aspects of dialogue and contiguity or discusses divergences between theoretical models and perspectives. Part I elaborates on the history, current trends and crucial aspects of the study of musical performance; Part II is devoted to the development of theoretical models, highlighting sharply distinguished positions; Part III explores the relationship between sign and sound in score-based performances; finally, the focus of Part IV centres on gesture considered within different traditions of musicmaking. Three extra chapters by the editors complement Parts I and III and can be accessed via the online Routledge Music Research Portal. The volume shows actual and possible connections between topics, problems, analytical methods and theories, thereby reflecting the wealth of stimuli offered by research on the musical cultures of our times.

NOMINATED FOR THE JAZZ JOURNALISTS ASSOCIATION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 WINNER OF THE PRESTO JAZZ BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 An articulate, scrupulously researched account based on first-hand information, this book presents Brubeck's contribution to music with the critical insight that it deserves - ***** BBC Music Magazine This is the writing about jazz that we've been waiting for - Mike Westbrook The sheer descriptive verve, page after page, made me want to listen to every single musical example cited. A major achievement - Stephen Hough 'Definitive . . . remarkable. Clark writes intelligently and joyously.' - Mojo In 2003, music journalist Philip Clark was granted unparalleled access to jazz legend Dave Brubeck. Over the course of ten days, he shadowed the Dave Brubeck Quartet during their extended British tour, recording an epic interview with the bandleader. Brubeck opened up as never before, disclosing his unique approach to jazz; the heady days of his 'classic' quartet in the 1950s-60s; hanging out with Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis; and the many controversies that had dogged his 66-year-long career. Alongside beloved figures like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, Brubeck's music has achieved name recognition beyond jazz. But finding a convincing fit for Brubeck's legacy, one that reconciles his mass popularity with his advanced musical technique, has proved largely elusive. In Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time, Clark provides us with a thoughtful, thorough, and long-overdue biography of an extraordinary man whose influence continues to inform and inspire musicians today. Structured around Clark's extended interview and intensive new research, this book tells one of the last untold stories of jazz, unearthing the secret history of 'Take Five' and many hitherto unknown aspects of Brubeck's early career - and about his creative relationship with his star saxophonist Paul Desmond. Woven throughout are cameo appearances from a host of unlikely figures from Sting, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, and Keith Emerson, to John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varese. Each chapter explores a different theme or aspect of Brubeck's life and music, illuminating the core of his artistry and genius.

By common consent the leading British composer of the twentieth-century's middle decades, Britten continues to create significant contexts for the work of those who survived and succeeded him. This collection of revised reprints of essays, reviews and analyses first published between 1995 and 2018 surveys a cross-section of contemporary classical composition in the UK. The governing perspective is the impact of the life and work of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) on British composers who, with the exception of Michael Tippett and Robert Simpson, were born between the 1930s and the 1980s. Despite obvious and considerable differences in character and style, British composers like Harrison Birtwistle and Thomas Ades, Robin Holloway and James Dillon, have continued, like Britten himself, to seek personal perspectives on the still prominent procedures and personalities of more distant baroque, classical and romantic eras. Most if not all of these composers would deny being influenced by Britten, and many have reservations about his music. Yet, in light of the fact that British musical life and the institutions that support it have not changed radically since Britten's own time - the pace of technological change notwithstanding - to speak of 'British music after Britten' inevitably involves something more than mere chronology. As by common consent the leading British composer of the twentieth-century's middle decades, Britten continues to create significant contexts for the work of those who survived and succeeded him.

A singer in an evening dress, a grand piano. A modest-sized audience, mostly well-dressed and silver-haired, equipped with translation booklets. A program consisting entirely of songs by one or two composers. This is the way of the Lieder recital these days. While it might seem that this style of performance is a long-standing tradition, German Song Onstage demonstrates that it is not. For much of the 19th century, the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were heard in the home, salon, and, no less significantly, on the concert platform alongside orchestral and choral works. A dedicated program was rare, a dedicated audience even more so. The Lied was a genre with both more private and more public associations than is commonly recalled. The contributors to this volume explore a broad range of venues, singers, and audiences in distinct places and time periods-including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany-from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century. These historical case studies are set alongside reflections from a selection of today's leading musicians, offering insights on current Lied practices that will inform future generations of performers, scholars, and connoisseurs. Together these case studies unsettle narrow and elitist assumptions about what it meant and still means to present German song onstage by providing a transnational picture of historical Lieder performance, and opening up discussions about the relationship between history and performance today.

Drawing on newly available archival material, key works, and correspondence of the era, Australian Music and Modernism defines "Australian Music" as an idea that emerged through the lens of the modernist discourse of the 1960s and 70s. At the same time that the new "Australian Music" was distinctive of the nation, it was also thoroughly connected to practices from Europe and shaped by a new engagement with the music of Southeast Asia. This book examines the intersection of nationalism and modernism at this formative time. During the early stages of "Australian Music" there was disagreement about what the idea itself ought to represent and, indeed, whether the idea ought to apply at all. Michael Hooper considers various perspectives offered by such composers as Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale, and Nigel Butterley and analyzes some of the era's significant works to articulate a complex understanding of "Australian Music" at its inception.

This collection brings together for the first time essays on postmodernism and music and covers a wide range of musical styles including concert music, jazz, film music, and popular music. Topics include:
* the importance of technology and marketing in postmodern music
* the appropriation and reworking of Western music by non-Western bands
* postmodern characteristics in the music of Gorecki, Rochberg, Zorn and Bolcom as well as Bjork and Wu Tang Clan
* issues of music and race
* comparisons of postmodern architecture to postmodern music.

This Companion provides a comprehensive analysis and appraisal of all of Scott's available (published and unpublished) music and a broad picture of his entire output in literary, dramatic and philosophical genres. Cyril Scott (1879-1970) was an English composer, writer and poet. He was a prolific composer-pianist writing over 400 works including four symphonies, three operas and concerti for piano, violin, cello, oboe and harpsichord. Oftenperforming his own compositions he became a pioneer of British piano music, and his music was admired by composers as diverse as Debussy, Strauss, Stravinsky and Percy Grainger, the last a lifelong friend. A true polymath, Scottwas also the author of forty-one books, including two autobiographies and one unpublished memoir, on subjects ranging from music, alternative medicine and humour to occultism, theosophy and Christianity. In addition, he wrote poems and plays and painted watercolours. This Companion explores the life and work of this remarkably creative man. It provides a comprehensive analysis and appraisal of all the available music and includes a complete catalogue of his musical works, along with a discography. Several works completely unknown to the musical world, both music and literary (such as the memoir 'Near the End of Life'), are here newly catalogued and discussed. Altogether, thevolume gives a broad picture of Scott's entire output in literary, dramatic and philosophical genres. LEWIS FOREMAN has published many books and articles on music. His Boydell titles include Bax: A Composer and hisTimes (2007), The John Ireland Companion (2011) and with Susan Foreman Felix Aprahamian (2015). DESMOND SCOTT is the son of Cyril Scott. He was an actor, theatre director and TV writer. He is also a sculptor and past-President of the Sculptors Society of Canada. He has contributed to The New Percy Grainger Companion (Boydell Press, 2010) and has published articles in musical journals on Cyril Scott. LESLIE DE'ATH isProfessor, Faculty of Music, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Singing, a pianist, conductor and opera director. He has recorded Scott's complete solo piano music for Dutton. Contributors: PETER ATKINSON, MARTYN BRABBINS, LESLIE DE'ATH, PETER DICKINSON, LEWIS FOREMAN, KATHERINE HUDSON, VALERIE LANGFIELD , KURT LELAND, STEPHEN LLOYD, STEVEN MARTIN, ROHINTEN DADDY MAZDA, RICHARD PRICE, EDMUND RUBBRA, DESMOND SCOTT, MARTIN YATES

Brian Eno's seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports continues to fascinate and charm audiences, not only as a masterpiece of ambient music, but as a powerful and transformative work of art. Author John T. Lysaker situates this album in the context of twentieth-century art music, where its ambitions and contributions to avant garde music practice become even more apparent. To appreciate the album's multifaceted character, Lysaker advocates for "prismatic listening," an attentiveness that continually shifts registers in the knowledge that no single approach can grasp the work as a whole. Exploring each of the album's four tracks and their unique sonic arrangements, Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports argues that the album must be approached from at least three angles: as an ambient contribution to lived environments that draws upon cybernetics and the experiments of Erik Satie, as an exploration of what John Cage has termed the "activity of sounds," and as a work of conceptual art that asks us to think freshly about artistic creativity, listening, and the broad ecology of interactions that not only make art possible, but the full range of human meaning. If one listens in this way, Music for Airports becomes a sonic image that blurs the nature-culture distinction and rescues the most interesting concerns of avant-garde music from the social isolation of concert halls and performance spaces.

A woman wearing a ballgown singing in the snow for returning ski troops; a technician's tears ruining a master recording of a new wartime song; fresh recruits spontaneously standing and doffing their caps to a new song, thereby creating the new wartime anthem. This well researched, multi-faceted book depicts the relationship between song and society during WWII in the USSR. Chapter topics range from the creation and distribution of the songs to how the public received and shaped them. The body of song that came out of that era created a true cultural legacy which reflected both the hearts of the individuals fighting as well as the narrative of the party and state in bringing the nation to victory.

The works of twenty composers from the golden age of English romantic song, major figures - Parry, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Quilter, Ireland, Gurney, Warlock and Finzi - studied alongside the lesser-known. Constantly illuminating. JOHN STEANE, GRAMOPHONE The composers in this book represent the outstanding songwriters from what we can now see as the golden age of English romantic song. As well as the major figures - Parry, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Quilter, Ireland, Gurney, Warlock and Finzi - there are chapters on lesser-known composers, such as Denis Browne and Charles Orr. Detailed consideration is given to three songwriters who have sufferedunaccountable neglect, Arthur Somervell, Armstrong Gibbs and Herbert Howells, and there are chapters on Elgar, Delius and Holst, whose reputations were made in other fields but whose contribution to English song is nevertheless important. Also taking their rightful places in the book are Frank Bridge, Arnold Bax, George Butterworth and E.J. Moeran. Each chapter begins with a discussion of its composer's song-output and of the poets and poetry he sets, and goes on to give an account of the influences on him and the hallmarks of his style; the songs are then discussed in detail, focusing on the major works. The text is illustrated with musical examples and there is a comprehensive bibliography and index. TREVOR HOLD was a composer and poet who wrote extensively on English song. His setting of Laurie Lee's 'Day of these Days' won the English Poetry and Song Society/English Music Society 2002 GoldenJubilee Song Competition. He died in January 2004.

Musicians frequently incorporated portions of works by other musicians into their own compositions and performances throughout the twentieth century. This book examines how this practice of "quotation" affected cultural dialogues regarding race, childhood, madness and the mass media. When a musician borrows from a piece, he or she draws upon not only a melody but also the cultural associations of the original piece. By working with and altering a melody, a musician also transforms those associations.

A groundbreaking study of the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich-and the consequences for music worldwide With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany's historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment.

As a noted composer and critic, Paul Dukas was a major figure in fin-de-siecle and early twentieth-century French music. Best known for L'Apprenti sorcier, he was internationally recognised as an artist and intellectual ofdistinction who contributed significantly to Parisian musical cultures and critical debates. As a noted composer and critic, and later an editor and composition teacher, Paul Dukas (1865-1935) was a major figure in fin-de-siecle and early twentieth-century French music. Although his catalogue of published scores was relatively modest in quantity, he was internationally recognised as an artist and intellectual of distinction who contributed significantly to Parisian musical cultures and critical debates as they evolved from the 1890s until the 1930s Moving in the same circles as Debussy and Faure, as well as networking with trailblazers such as the Ballets Russes director Sergei Diaghilev and the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, Dukas created works that reflect French sensibilities but also resonate with transnational audiences. L'Apprenti sorcier is still his best-known work, while the opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue has been revived and remains relevant for the twenty-first century. Works such as the Piano Sonata and the ballet La Peri respectively exemplify the twin attractions of tradition and progress for the composer. Intensely self-critical, however, he ended up destroying many of his scores. This book is the first full-length Anglophone study of Dukas. It perceives his critical essays as a form of creative, philosophical thought that synthesised the riches of the Parisian music scene yet also represented the formationand development of his own artistic voice. Investigating Dukas's interrelated identities as composer and critic, it seeks to explain his broad aesthetic motivations and artistic agenda. LAURA WATSON is Lecturer in Musicat Maynooth University.

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.