New Music at Darmstadt explores the rise and fall of the so-called 'Darmstadt School, ' through a wealth of primary sources and analytical commentary. Martin Iddon's book examines the creation of the Darmstadt New Music Courses and the slow development and subsequent collapse of the idea of the Darmstadt School, showing how participants in the West German new music scene, including Herbert Eimert and a range of journalistic commentators, created an image of a coherent entity, despite the very diverse range of compositional practices on display at the courses. The book also explores the collapse of the seeming collegiality of the Darmstadt composers, which crystallised around the arrival there in 1958 of the most famous, and notorious, of all post-war composers, John Cage, an event Carl Dahlhaus opined 'swept across the European avant-garde like a natural disaster.

This book is the first to be devoted to the music of Stravinsky's last compositional period. In the early 1950s, Stravinsky's compositional style began to change and evolve with astonishing rapidity. He abandoned the musical neoclassicism to which he had been committed for the preceding three decades and, with the stimulus provided by his newly gained knowledge of the music of Schoenberg and Webern, launched himself on a remarkable voyage of compositional discovery. The book focuses on five historical, analytical, and interpretive issues: Stravinsky's relationship to his serial predecessors and contemporaries; his compositional process; the problem of creating formal continuity in a repertoire so obviously discontinuous in so many ways; the problem of writing serial harmony; and the problem of expression and meaning. Challenging conventional interpretations, the book shows that Stravinsky's serial music is not only of great historical significance, but also of astonishing structural originality and emotional power.

Often considered the father of twentieth-century music, Debussy was a visionary whose influence is still felt. This Companion offers new insights into Debussy's character, his environment and his music, including challenging views of the roles of nature and eroticism in his life and music. While works in all genres are discussed, they are considered through the themes of sonority, rhythm, tonality and form, with closing chapters considering the performance and reception of his music in the first years of the new century.

This study of the music of a group of important composers of the twentieth century includes Debussy, Webern, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Janácek, Britten, Carter, Birtwistle, Andriessen and Adams. Arnold Whittall explores the cultural contexts and critical perspectives which shed light on certain works by these composers. In particular, he reveals the continuum between the progressive and the conservative underlying the great variety of styles and musical genres in twentieth-century composition.

In 2008 Paul Robertson, the renowned violinist and leader of the Medici Quartet, suffered a ruptured aorta. After dying for a lengthy period on the operating table, he remained in a coma for many weeks. During this time, he experienced visions which afforded him profound insights and when he awoke, he found his understanding of the world fundamentally altered. This surprising and rewarding memoir offers a fascinating perspective on creative endeavour: the rigours of learning, the challenges of performance and the spiritual nourishment that drives us on. It is a poignant and wise book that draws on a lifetime of experiences, in both life and death.

The vibrant world of jazz may be viewed from many angles, from social and cultural history to music analysis, from economics to ethnography. It is challenging and exciting territory. This volume of nineteen specially commissioned essays offers informed and accessible guidance to the challenge, taking the reader through a series of five basic subject areas--locating jazz historically and geographically; defining jazz as musical and cultural practice; jazz in performance; the uses of jazz for audiences, markets, education and for other art forms; and the study of jazz.

Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky is an analytical and historical study of the twentieth century's most influential figures, by Milton Babbitt, Arthur Berger, Edward T. Cone, Robert Craft, Claudio Spies, and others; with new bibliographic and discographic studies prepared especially for this revised edition. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) played a leading role in American music and culture in the twentieth century. Celebrated for his arrangements of spirituals, Burleigh was also the first African American composer to create a significant body of art song. An international roster of opera and recital singers performed his works and praised them as among the best of their time. Jean E. Snyder traces Burleigh's life from his Pennsylvania childhood through his fifty-year tenure as soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. As a composer, Burleigh's pioneering work preserved and transformed the African American spiritual; as a music editor, he facilitated the work of other black composers; as a role model, vocal coach, and mentor, he profoundly influenced American song; and in private life he was friends with AntonAn DvoA (TM)A!k, Marian Anderson, Will Marion Cook, and other America luminaries. Snyder provides rich historical, social, and political contexts that explore Burleigh's professional and personal life within an era complicated by changes in race relations, class expectations, and musical tastes.

This book proposes a new theory about the neo-classical style in music. The Danish emeritus professor Finn Egeland Hansen has chosen three different composers - the French Camille Saint-Saens and Charles Gounod and the Danish Niels W. Gade - to discuss his thesis that the classical-romantic main current in classical music in fact represents two sub-currents. One sub-current focusing on the romantic aspects, the other focusing on the classical aspects of its musical style. In close readings of the works by these three composers, Finn Egeland Hansen demonstrates how in different aspects they were harbingers of the neo-classical style - a style that is usually exemplified through later composers like Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith and the members of the French group Les Six. Finn Egeland Hansen labels these harbingers' style as retro-classicism. Finn Egeland Hansen's dissertation was about The Grammar of Gregorian Tonality (1979), and his most recent book is Layers of Musical Meaning (2006). Since 1990 he has been Chairman of the Foundation for the Publication of the Works of Niels W. Gade.

Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century builds on the foundations of Music since the First World War (first published 1977, revised edition 1988). It updates and reshapes the original text and places it in the wider context of twentieth-century serious music before 1918 and after 1975, surveying the immense variety of technical developments in twentieth-century serious music. Sections of detailed analysis, with particular emphasis on such major figures as Stravinsky, Bartók, Messiaen, Tippett, and Ligeti, are framed by more concise sketches of a range of significant composers from Fauré, to Wolfgang Rihm. Extensive music examples reinforce this technical focus.

'Sometimes I liken the creative act to that of being a good gardener. The musical material itself, the harmonies, rhythms, the timbres and tempi, are seeds you have planted. Composing, bringing forth the final formal arrangement of these elements, is often a business of watching them grow, knowing when to nourish and water them and when to prune and weed.' A book unlike anything ever written by a composer, part memoir and part description of the creative process, Hallelujah Junction is an absorbing journey through the musical landscape of John Adams, one of today's most admired and frequently performed composers. A musician of enormous range and technical command, Adams has built a huge audience worldwide through the immediacy and sincerity of his music, such as his Pulitzer prize-winning memorial for the September 11 attack On The Transmigration of Souls. Hallelujah Junction isn't so much an autobiography as a fascinating journey through the musical landscape of his life and times, centred around the three highly controversial operas based on social and political issues he has written in the past twenty-five years - Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and, most recently, Dr Atomic.

Was Richard Strauss the most incandescent composer of the twentieth century or merely a bourgeoisie artist and Nazi sympathizer? For the fifty years since his death on September 8, 1949, Richard Strauss has remained dogmatically elusive in the wider body of musical and historical criticism. Lauded as nothing less than the "greatest musical figure" of his time by Canadian musician, Glenn Gould, in 1962, Strauss also has attracted his share of posthumous epithets: in summary, an artist who lived off his own fat during his later years. As recently as 1995, the English critic Rodney Milnes wrote, "the court of posterity is still reserving judgment." In Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma, biographer Michael Kennedy demonstrates that the many varying shades of criticism that have painted this figure in the past half century resemble the similar understandings and misunderstandings held by his contemporaries--perceptions that touched almost every aspect of Strauss' life and career. Introducing his detailed work more as a broad explication than a firm answer to the Straussian riddle, Kennedy's scope includes the exuberant, extroverted Strauss of young adulthood as well as the phlegmatic and aloof middle-aged man who resembled a "prosperous bank manager;" the arch-fiend of modernism and the composer who redefined the term; a man who professed to lack all spiritual curiosity and a musician who penned the touching ballet Der Kometentanz; an at times almost humble family man and an artist who claimed to be as interesting as Napoleon and Alexander the Great. Kennedy clearly elucidates his enigmatic subject by building his analysis around the few constants in Strauss' life: his profound admiration for German culture, his dependence on his own family for guidance, and his "Nietzschean total absorption in art." This frame offers everyone from Straussian scholars to general readers an insightful and easy-to-follow biographical narrative. Kennedy also deals at length with Strauss' problematic relationship with Nazi authorities, detailing his incompatible roles as the father-in-law of a Jewish woman and as one of the country's leading composers. Michael Kennedy is the chief music critic of the (London) Sunday Telegraph and the author of many books about music.

Over three decades, Paul Griffiths's survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage's development of zen music; in Milton Babbitt's settling of the serial system and in Dmitry Shostakovich's unsettling symphonies; in Karl Stockhausen's development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono's pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis's view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio's consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that haven't yet stopped unfolding. This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no singular history of music; Griffiths's study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how and why they converge and diverge. This new edition of Modern Music and After discusses not only the music of the fifteen years that have passed since the previous edition, but also the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. In particular, the third section of the book, 1980-1990, is expanded to incorporate the variety of responses to the modernist impasse experienced by composers of the time. In addition, a new fourth part, "After Postmodernism: the 1990s and 2000s," examines highly influential composers like Philip Glass and Pierre Boulez as well as such topics as "Modernist Continuation" and "Music and the Internet." For its breadth, wealth of detail, and characteristic wit and clarity, the third edition of Modern Music and After is required reading for the student and the enquiring listener.

On September 15, 1945 the composer Anton Webern was shot in confusing circumstances in a small mountain village near Salzburg. The world lost a composer of extreme originality whose mature music was still almost unknown. When Webern's works did come to light, he immediately became one of the most influential figures in music of the second half of this century. This book focuses on several aspects of Webern's life that have been treated only briefly in earlier accounts: his youthful instability, his often embarrassing dependence on Schoenberg, his naive nationalism and his absolute belief in the value of the brief moments of music he produced.

An indispensable aid to singers, teachers, and composers of vocal music, written by a singer with more than 30 years' international experience. Following the success of the first volume New Vocal Repertory, Jane Manning provides a further selection of over 60 contemporary vocal works of all styles. Each is given a detailed performance and teaching guide, and is graded according to vocal and musical difficulty. Volume 2 contains over 100 music examples, as well as practical information and programming dvice.

The Polish composer Henryk Górecki (born 1933) achieved world-wide renown in 1992 when his Third Symphony, written in 1976, was recorded on CD and became an international bestseller. It is now one of the best-known musical compositions of recent years, yet Górecki's other music is still relatively little known. This study, the first detailed account of his works in any language, provides biographical information as background to the music, and is by a leading enthusiast for Górecki's music.

World-famous, Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt is a unique voice in today's music. From his own extensive experience of working with Pärt, Paul Hiller here provides the first full-length study of the composer's music.

In Irving Berlin: The Formative Years, Charles Hamm traces the early years (1907-1914) of this most famous and distinctive American songwriter - author of such classics as `Always', `Cheek to Cheek', and `White Christmas'. The book shows how Berlin progressed from the kind of ethnic and vaudeville songs that reflected his immigrant background to being a writer of Broadway musical shows. Hamm brilliantly describes how Berlin emerged from the vital and complex social and cultural scene of New York to begin his rise as America's foremost songwriter.

Alec Wilder wrote songs and lyrics of unsurpassed beauty and originality, and his work won the respect and admiration of such important musical figures as Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Mitch Miller, Gunther Schuller, and many others. Yet Wilder seemed almost to court obscurity. Both in the music he composed and in the way he lived his life, Wilder valued the unique and eccentric over the established and easily acceptable. And though he authored the definitive American Popular Song--which critics praised as "singular" (Studs Terkel), "pioneering" (Whitney Balliett), "rewarding" (Milton Babbitt), and "a joy to anyone who really cares about American popular music" (Max Morath)--his own contribution to that music has remained, until now, too little known and far too little appreciated.
Desmond Stone's engaging and lively biography brings Alec Wilder's life and music into the spotlight where it belongs. Ranging from Wilder's childhood in Rochester, New York, to his rise as a major writer of popular songs in the 1940s, to his relationships with Frank Sinatra and the cabaret singer Mabel Mercer, Stone gives us rich insight into the creative process and profound influence of this highly unorthodox composer. We see the impulses and musical concerns that led to such standards as "I'll Be Around" and "It's So Peaceful in the Country." We also get an inside view of how he wrote his monumental American Popular Song, which remains the most significant study of America's great songwriters. More important, we get a vivid sense of a haunting, incorruptible melodist whose unique personality was mirrored in his music. Man and composer dared to be different. When Wilder in the late 1930s wrote his famous Octets, the music world did not know what to make of these irreverent, highly original pieces. Yet they had a seminal influence on jazz chamber music in America. Wilder would go on to compose hundreds of instrumental numbers. Whether he was writing concert pieces for an unprecedented and highly unusual group of instruments, or mixing jazz, classical, and popular idioms in a single song, or dashing off a sonata for a friend, Wilder followed the dictates of his own creativity rather than the expectations of the musical establishment. Such independence and unpredictability earned him the hostility of many critics but the enduring respect of the musicians he wrote for.
Here then is a fascinating private portrait of a man who lived a nomad's life, who loved riding trains so much he kept a timetable in his pocket at all times, a man whose only home was a small room he maintained at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan (where he often held court in the lobby), a man with a serious drinking problem as well as the kindest and most generous of friends. Essential reading for anyone interested in American popular music, Alec Wilder in Spite of Himself provides a much needed account of this complex, colorful, and highly original life.

An intelligent survey of Poulenc's music, based on a careful selection of works, and written by an authoritative guide. Adopting a broadly chronological approach, Mellers is able to trace Poulenc's development as a composer from enfant terrible to mature `society' composer.

This major new collection combines essays and articles from Tippett's two earlier books--Moving into Aquarius and Music of the Angels with a substantial amount of new material to distill the opinions and experiences of one of the century's most celebrated composers. Published to coincide with the composer's 90th birthday, the pieces focus particularly on the work of other twentieth-century composers as well as Tippett's own, from his early success A Child of Our Time, to the recent opera New Year and the orchestral piece The Rose Lake. Other essays deal with aesthetics, the role of the artist in society, and interpretation and performance, making the book of compelling interest not only to students and scholars, but to performers, conductors, and opera directors as well.

Percy Grainger was one of the most colourful of this century's cultural figures. As a pianist and largely self-taught composer he was feted in the 1910s and 1920s, and is probably still best known for the work he `dished up' in many different guises, Country Gardens. But Grainger aspired to the role of `the all-round man' and nourished ideas, some brilliant, others ludicrous, across the full range of human endeavour: race, nationality, sex, language, life-style, food, clothes, technology, ecology. The All-Round Man depicts that scrambling diversity through seventy-six uninhibited letters from Grainger's `American' years, 1914-61. These letters are fascinating to read: they are cultivated `rambles' (as Grainger actually called several of his compositions), not dissimilar to today's telephone conversations. Often written in Grainger's crunchy `Blue-eyed English', they explore uninhibitedly every corner of his public and private life. They reflect the magnificent attempts of a great but flawed mind to encompass the world. From the letters: `Personally I do not feel like a modern person at all. I feel quite at home in South Sea Island music, in Maori legends, in the Icelandic Sagas, in the Anglo-Saxon `Battle of Brunnanburh', feel very close to Negroes in various countries, but hardly understand modern folk at all.' `Music seems almost to have a "surface", a smooth surface, a grained surface, a prickly surface to the ear. All these distinguishing characteristics (roughly hinted at in the above silly similes) are to me the "body of music" are to music what "looks", skin, hair are in a person, the actual stuff and manifestation whereby we know it and recognize it' `You said that too much such treatment annoyed, nerveteased you. Then let me thus tease you while you punish me for the annoyance I give you: Let me lay my weight upon, momi-ing at yr heavenbringing uma, while you thrash my bottom, back & legs in rising annoyance'

This is the first comprehensive study of the artist's life and his distinguished career. The work is so full of detail and solid history that it stands as a model biography of an important musical figure. This book provides the social context in which a major composer grew, how he learned his craft and built his career, the evolving musical tastes of American audiences, and his relationship to musical giants like Arturo Toscanini and Serge Koussevitsky.

This survey of the most significant modern composers and their techniques has become a standard work on the constantly shifting musical developments during the greater part of the twentieth century. In a concise and accessible narrative, Whittall examines the continued but declining commitment to tonality, twelve-note serialism, and the gradual emergence of new aesthetic attitudes and concepts of musical form.