Born in 1885 in Porto, Portugal, to a middle-class musical family, Guilhermina Suggia began playing cello at the age of five. A child prodigy, she was already a seasoned performer when she won a scholarship to study with Julius Klengel in Leipzig at the age of sixteen. Suggia lived in Paris with fellow cellist Pablo Casals for several years before World War I, in a professional and personal partnership that was as stormy as it was unconventional. When they separated Suggia moved to London, where she built a spectacularly successful solo career. Suggia's virtuosity and musicianship, along with the magnificent style and stage presence famously captured in Augustus John's portrait, made her one of the most sought-after concert artists of her day. In 1927 she married Dr Jose Casimiro Carteado Mena and settled down to a comfortable life divided between Portugal and England. Throughout the 1930s, Suggia remained one of the most respected musicians in Europe. She partnered on stage with many famous instrumentalists and conductors and completed numerous BBC broadcasts. The war years kept her at home in Portugal, where she focused on teaching, but she returned to England directly after the war and resumed performing. When Suggia died in 1950, her will provided for the establishment of several scholarship funds for young cellists, including England's prestigious Suggia Gift. Mercier's study of Suggia's letters and other writings reveal an intelligent, warm and generous character; an artist who was enormously dedicated, knowledgeable and self-disciplined. Suggia was one of the first women to make a career of playing the cello at a time when prejudice against women playing this traditionally 'masculine' instrument was still strong. A role model for many other musicians, she was herself a fearless pioneer.

Music in the Women's Institute has become stereotyped by the ritualistic singing of Jerusalem at monthly meetings. Indeed, Jerusalem has had an important role within the organization, and provides a valuable means within which to assess the organization's relationship with women's suffrage and the importance of rurality in the Women's Institute's identity. However, this book looks beyond Jerusalem by examining the full range of music making within the organization and locates its significance within a wider historical-cultural context. The Institute's promotion of conducting - a regular part of its musical activity since the 1930s - is discussed within the context of embodying overtly feminist sentiments. Lorna Gibson concludes that a redefinition of the term 'feminism' is needed and the concept of 'gendered spheres' of conducting provides a useful means of understanding the Institute's policy. The organization's promotion of folk song is also examined and reveals the Institute's contribution to the Folk Revival, as well as providing a valuable context within which to understand the National Federation's first music commission, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Folk Songs of the Four Seasons (1950). This work, and the Institute's second commission, Malcolm Williamson's The Brilliant and the Dark (1969), are examined with the context of the organization's music policy. In addition to discussing the background to the works, issues of critical reception are addressed. The book concludes with an Epilogue about the National Society Choir (later known as the Avalon Singers), which tested the organization's commitment to amateur music making. The book is the result of meticulous work undertaken in the archives of the National Federation, the BBC Written Archives Centre, the V&A archives, the Britten-Pears Library, the Ralph Vaughan Williams Library, the Women's Library and the Newspaper Library.

Edward Elgar rose from obscurity to become the most popular English composer of his day. Elgar's music is known world-wide and works such as the 'Enigma Variations' and 'The Dream of Gerontius' together with the two symphonies and the two concertos have established him as one of the greatest British composers of all time. The Elgar Society was founded in 1951 to further the cause of Elgar's music and the present volume of essays has been compiled as an expression of gratitude for the work that it has done. These essays reflect the variety and richness of Elgar's music and the debate that this music continues to encourage. The book is not simply for academics however; lovers of music in general will find much to entertain them and it will add greatly to our appreciation of Elgar.

Nyman's rise to international prominence during the last three decades has made him one of the world's most successful living composers. His music has nevertheless been criticized for its parasitic borrowing of other composers' ideas and for its relentless self-borrowing. In this first book-length study in English, Pwyll ap SiAn places Nyman's writings within the general context of Anglo-American experimentalism, minimalism and post-minimalism, and provides a series of useful contexts from which controversial aspects of Nyman's musical language can be more clearly understood and appreciated. Drawing upon terms informed by intertextual theory in general, appropriation and borrowing are first introduced within the context of twentieth-century art music and theory. Intertextual concepts are explained and their terms defined before Nyman's musical language is considered in relation to a series of intertextual classifications and types. These types then form the basis of a more in-depth study of his works during the second half of the book, ranging from opera and chamber music to film. Rather than restricting style and technique, Nyman's intertextual approach, on the contrary, is shown to provide his music with an almost infinite amount of variety, flexibility and diversity, and this has been used to illustrate a wide range of technical, aesthetic and expressive forms. He composes with his ear towards the past as if it were a rich quarry to mine, working like a musical archaeologist, uncovering artefacts and chiselling fresh and vibrant sonic edifices out of them.

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) was arguably the most important Russian composer since Shostakovich, and his music has generated a great deal of academic interest in the years since his death. Schnittke Studies provides a variety of perspectives on the composer and his music. The field is currently diverse and vibrant, and this book demonstrates the range of academic approaches being applied to Schnittke's work and the insights they provide, covering: polystylism, for which Schnittke is best known, the significance of the composer's Christian faith, and detailed formal analyses of key works, with connections drawn between the apparently divergent periods of the composer's career. This book has been prepared as a memorial to Professor Alexander Ivashkin, a leading scholar in the field, who died in 2014, and will be of interest not only to those studying Schnittke's music, but also those with an interest in late Soviet-era music in general.

How does one go about writing the history of musical composition in the late twentieth century when, on the one hand, so much of it seems impossibly fractured and disassociated, and, on the other, there has been so little certainty about what the notion of 'music history' might entail under the critiques of post-modernism? One of the most productive ways forward is to pursue case studies involving single composers whose music reflects several aspects of recent activity. This enables the discussion of broad issues in a relatively focussed way whilst avoiding the pitfalls of traditional narrative histories and the centrifugal tendencies of the relativistic approach that some have called for. The music of the English-born (1943) and Australia-domiciled composer Roger Smalley is ideal material for such a study, because of his involvement with and response to an unusually large number of the myriad concerns and practices of post-1950s composition, including post-serial constructivism; parody; electro-acoustic composition and the electronic modification of conventionally-produced sound; Moment Form; aleatorism; minimalism; the use of non-Western resources (Aboriginal and South-East Asian sonorities); neo-Romanticism; and, arguably, the 'new classicism', as well as a brief flirtation with rock music in the late '60s. Employing an interview with the composer as a kind of cantus firmus, the book - the first extended single-author study of Smalley's music to be published - incorporates critical commentary on the composer's major works in a chronological narrative that engages with broad issues of central relevance to Smalley's generation, such as the process of learning the craft of composition in the early '60s; the motivation behind the adoption of certain technical and aesthetic positions; the effects on technical and aesthetic orientation of both the changing relationships between composer, performer, and audience and technological change; and the distinction betwe

Pioneers in their fields and two of the best-known women in music in the twentieth century, Nadia and Lili Boulanger have previously been considered in isolation from one another. Yet, as Caroline Potter's new book demonstrates, their careers were closely linked during Lili Boulanger's short life (1893-1918) and there are several intriguing connections between their musical works. This biography also provides the first full analysis of the Boulanger sisters' musical styles, placing them within the context of French musical history. Their lives are also a case study in the issues of gender which surround music making even to the present day. Despite an unusually privileged upbringing, Nadia and Lili Boulanger exemplify the struggle women experienced when attempting to enter the professional music world. Lili became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome in 1913, and Nadia gained second place in 1908. Yet in spite of this initial success, Nadia Boulanger was to give up composing in her thirties and devoted the remainder of her long life to teaching. Her pupils included several of the great composers of the century, including Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter. This book, focusing on their musical careers, is essential reading for anyone interested in French music of the twentieth century.

Mauricio Kagel was undoubtedly one of the major figures in the new music of the last fifty years. Growing up in the rich cultural atmosphere of Buenos Aires in the 1940s and '50s, where the writer Jorge Luis Borges was one of his teachers, he became a member of avant-garde circles as well as receiving a rigorous musical education. By 1957 Kagel had acted on the advice of Pierre Boulez to move to Europe to pursue a career as a composer. He quickly established himself at Cologne, the rallying point for young composers at the time, and became one of the leading, if controversial, figures at the famous Darmstadt summer courses. He embraced multiple serialism, aleatory technique and electronics, but he is best known for his pioneering explorations in music theatre, radio play, film and mixed media. BjArn Heile charts Kagel's compositional development, considering the aesthetic and ideological issues the composer raises in his work. Focusing on Kagel's use of music as a means of intellectual inquiry, Heile shows Kagel to constantly question the nature of music and its role in society. Kagel's broadening of the concept of music to include theatre, film and other media, his disdain for purism as well as his subversive humour and sense of the absurd have challenged reified notions of music and art. Heile considers Kagel's background as Argentine immigrant to Europe (born to Russian-Jewish immigrants to Argentina) to situate the composer's aesthetic. What emerges is the breadth of Kagel's imagination and the multiplicity of contexts he drew from, which were both distinctive and, in the age of pluralist multiculturalism and globalization, exemplary. As Heile demonstrates, it was Kagel's enlarged notion of music as inherently multimedial that may be his most important contribution to new music, and on which his reputation ultimately rests.

Musicology, having been transmitted as a compilation of disparate events and disciplines, has long necessitated a 'magic bullet', a 'unified field theory' so to speak, that can interpret the steady metamorphosis of Western art music from late medieval modality to twentieth-century atonality within a single theoretical construct. Without that magic bullet, discussions of this kind are increasingly complicated and, to make matters worse, the validity of any transformational models and ideas of the natural evolution of styles is questioned and even frowned upon today as epitomizing a grotesque teleological bigotry. Going against current thinking, Henry Burnett and Roy Nitzberg claim that the teleological approach to observing stylistic change is still valid when considered from the purely compositional perspective. The authors challenge the traditional understanding of development, and advance a new theory of eleven-pitch tonality as it relates to the corpus of Western composition. The book plots the evolution of tonality and its bearing on style and the compositional process itself. The theory is not based on the diatonic aspect of the various tonal systems exploited by composers; rather, the theory is chromatically based - the chromatically inflected octave being the source not only of a highly ingenious developmental dialectic, but also encompassing the moment-to-moment progression of the musical narrative itself. Even the most profound teachings of Schenker, and the often startlingly original and worthwhile speculations of Riemann, Tovey, Dahlhaus and others, still provide no theory of development and so are ultimately unable to unite the various tendrils of the compositional organism into a unified whole. Burnett and Nitzberg move beyond existing theory and analysis to base their theory from the standpoint of chromatic 'pitch fields'. These fields are the specific chromatic pitch choices that a composer uses to inform and design a complete composition, utilizing specific chromatic inflections to control a large-scale working out process that is the very essence of 'development'. In short, the authors claim that a chromatic background that coexists with a diatonic contrapuntal background may define the process of compositional development. These chromatic and diatonic events are the two genus expressions of slowly unfolding tonic octaves.

When Olivier Messiaen died in 1992, the prevailing image was of a man apart; a deeply religious man whose only sources of inspiration were God and Nature and a composer whose music progressed along an entirely individual path, artistically impervious to contemporaneous events and the whims both of his contemporaries and the critics. Whilst such a view contains a large element of truth, the past ten years has seen an explosion of interest in the composer, and the work of a diverse range of scholars has painted a much richer, more complex picture of Messiaen. This volume presents some of the fruits of this research for the first time, concentrating on three broad, interrelated areas: Messiaen's relationship with fellow artists; key developments in the composer's musical language and technique; and his influences, both sacred and secular. The volume assesses Messiaen's position as a creative artist of the twentieth century in the light of the latest research. In the process, it identifies some of the key myths, confusions and exaggerations surrounding the composer which often mask equally remarkable truths. In attempting to reveal some of those truths, the essays elucidate a little of the mystery surrounding Messiaen as a man, an artist, a believer and a musician. Specifically, the volume covers Messiaen's attitudes and associations to Cocteau, Stravinsky's Les Noces, Dutilleux and Toesca, as well as exploring his teaching techniques, the Traite de rythme, de couleur et d'ornithologie, Messiaen's harmony, performing and transcription techniques, composing for Ondes Martenot, his association with ballet, Saint FranAois d'Assise and the influence of his faith. Messiaen himself contributes directly in the form of a speech that he gave about the tapestry-maker Jean LurAat, and the collection also includes the first literary translation of L'Acme en bourgeon; the garland of poems written by Messiaen's mother, Cecile Sauvage, when she was expecting him. The composer described these poems as 'the only influence' in his life, making L'Acme en bourgeon a fascinating centrepiece to a rich and rewarding collection of essays.

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

Born into the famous family of piano makers, Lucy Broadwood (1858-1929) became one of the chief collectors and scholars of the first English folk music revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Privately educated and trained as a classical musician and singer, she was inspired by her uncle to collect local song from her native Sussex. The desire to rescue folk song from an aging population led to the foundation of the Folk Song Society, of which she was a founder member. Mentor to younger collectors such as Percy Grainger but often at loggerheads with fellow collector Cecil Sharp and the young Ralph Vaughan Williams, she eventually ventured into Ireland and Scotland, while remaining an eclectic contributor and editor of the Society's Journal, which became a flagship for scholarly publication of folksong. She also published arrangements of folk songs and her own compositions which attracted the attention of singers such as Harry Plunket Greene. Using an array of primary sources including the diaries Broadwood kept throughout her adult life, Dorothy de Val provides a lively biography which sheds new light on her early years and chronicles her later busy social, artistic and musical life while acknowledging the underlying vulnerability of single women at this time. Her account reveals an intelligent, generous though reserved woman who, with the help of her friends, emerged from the constraints of a Victorian upbringing to meet the challenges of the modern world.

Since the publication of Solomon Volkov's disputed memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer and his music has been subject to heated debate concerning how the musical meaning of his works can be understood in relationship to the composer's life within the Soviet State. While much ink has been spilled, very little work has attempted to define how Shostakovich's music has remained so arresting not only to those within the Soviet culture, but also to Western audiences - even though such audiences are often largely ignorant of the compositional context or even the biography of the composer. This book offers a useful corrective: setting aside biographically grounded and traditional analytical modes of explication, Reichardt uncovers and explores the musical ambiguities of four of the composer's middle string quartets, especially those ambiguities located in moments of rupture within the musical structure. The music is constantly collapsing, reversing, inverting and denying its own structural imperatives. Reichardt argues that such confrontation of the musical language with itself, though perhaps interpretable as Shostakovich's own unique version of double-speak, also poignantly articulates the fractured state of a more general form of modern subjectivity. Reichardt employs the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis to offer a cogent explanation of this connection between disruptive musical process and modern subjectivity. The ruptures of Shostakovich's music become symptoms of the pathologies at the core of modern subjectivity. These symptoms, in turn, relate to the Lacanian concept of the real, which is the empty kernel around which the modern subject constructs reality. This framework proves invaluable in developing a powerful, original hermeneutic understanding of the music. Read through the lens of the real, the riddles written into the quartets reveal the arbitrary and contingent state of the musical subject's constructed reality, reflecting pathologies ende

When Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin's music was performed during his lifetime, it always elicited ecstatic responses from the listeners. Wilhelm Gericke, conductor of the Vienna opera, rushed backstage after one of Scriabin's concerts and fell on his knees crying, 'It's genius, it's genius...'. After the composer's death in 1915, however, his music steadily lost the captivating appeal it once held. The main reason for this drastic change in the listeners' attitude is an enormous gap existing between the printed scores of Scriabin's music and the way the composer himself played his works. Apparently, what Scriabin's audiences heard at the time was significantly different from, and vastly superior to, modern performances that are based primarily on published scores. Scriabin recorded nineteen of his compositions on the Hupfeld and Welte-Mignon reproducing pianos in 1908 and 1910, respectively. Full score transcriptions of the piano rolls, which are included in the book, provide many substantial features of Scriabin's performance: exact pitches and their timing against each other, rhythms, tempo fluctuations, articulation, dynamics and essential pedal application. Using these transcriptions and other historical documents as the groundwork for his research, Anatole Leikin explores Scriabin's performing style within the broader context of Romantic performance practice.

Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990) is an Australian composer whose full significance has only recently been appreciated. Born in Melbourne, Australia, she transcended the gendered expectations of her upbringing and went on to become a fine composer and a highly influential figure in the vibrant musical life of New York after the Second World War. Following early composition studies with Fritz Hart in Melbourne, Glanville-Hicks moved to London where she studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams, then to Paris where she was taught by the great pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger. Her migration to the USA in 1941 shaped the musical direction of her late works. After a brief neoclassical phase, she joined the small group of American composers who were using non-Western musics as their inspirational well-spring, including Colin McPhee, Alan Hovhaness, Lou Harrison and Paul Bowles. During this period she also forged an illustrious career as a music journalist and arts administrator, working tirelessly to promote new music and the careers of young composers. In the late 1950s she retreated to Greece to write 'the big works', most notably the operas which lie at the heart of her creative output. Her compositional career ended prematurely, and tragically, in 1967 following surgery the previous year for a life-threatening brain tumour. Against all medical expectations she went on to live for a further 24 years, returning to Australia in 1975 amidst a dawning recognition that one of the country's most significant composers had returned. Glanville-Hicks's career as a composer is impressive by any measure. She produced over 70 finely-crafted works, including operas, ballets, concertos, instrumental chamber pieces, songs and choral works. The story of her life has been told in the biographies. This book traces the development of her musical language from the English pastoral style of the early works, through the neoclassicism of the middle period, to the melody-rhythm concept of the late works, at the same time locating her music within the broader context of twentieth-century art music and the problems of form, structure, content and direction that followed the breakdown of tonality at the beginning of the twentieth century.

John Ireland (1879-1962) was one of the leading composers of the English Musical Renaissance at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. Born of literary parents in Bowdon, near Manchester, he went to London at the age of fourteen to study at the newly-founded Royal College of Music where he eventually became a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford. Among his near contemporaries at the College were Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Thomas Dunhill, William Y. Hurlstone, Henry Walford Davies and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Ireland is best known for his songs (such as Sea Fever, The Bells of San Marie and the cycle of Housman settings, The Land of Lost Content), his piano and chamber music, his church music and his relatively small number of choral, orchestral and brass band works. This catalogue of Ireland's compositions, a revised and enlarged edition of the one published in 1993 by the Clarendon Press (Oxford University Press), in association with the John Ireland Trust, lists his compositions from 1895 to 1961. Full details are given of dates of composition; people or bodies responsible for a work's commission; instrumentation; first performance; publications; location of the autograph manuscript; critical comment in the bibliography from the contemporary press and music journals, and recordings on compact disc. Appended is a general bibliography and classified index of main works. A list of personalia supplies details of people connected with Ireland and his music during his lifetime.

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

Kaija Saariaho is internationally recognized as a leading figure in contemporary music, enjoying a well-deserved reputation for works that are both creatively original and of considerable appeal. Her music communicates with a refreshingly broad audience, and this special achievement deserves careful consideration. In the first symposium book in English to be dedicated exclusively to this single figure, scholars from both the UK and Saariaho's native Finland bring a range of perspectives to her richly varied output. Uncovering the compositional, historical, cultural and sociological issues that have resulted in such critical acclaim lies at the heart of this collection of essays. Saariaho's approach to composition is an interdisciplinary one; it embraces a number of art forms - visual, literary and musical - in works that explore a creative dialogue between image, continuity and time. While such diversity is readily accommodated in a multi-authored collection, the consistency of an underlying compositional identity and integrity is also an important trait. The grouping of these essays into three strands - 'visions', 'narratives' and 'dialogues' - reflects the wide range of Saariaho's creative preoccupations while subscribing to a carefully structured succession of commentaries.

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

Since 1945 the emphasis in new music has lain in a desire for progress, a concept challenged by postmodernist aesthetics. In this study, Alastair Williams identifies and explores the recurring issues and problems presented by post-war music. Part one examines the German philosopher, Theodor Adorno's portrayal of modernity and his understanding of modernism in music. This is followed by a survey of the developments in music from late Beethoven to Schoenberg, the two composers whose works provided the main anchor points for Adorno's philosophy of music. Parts two and three indicate the ways in which Adorno's aesthetics are pertinent to an understanding of new music. Part two comprises a close examination of the music of Pierre Boulez and John Cage, composers who represent extreme, though related, aspects of contemporary music thought: the primacy of structure versus dissolution. Williams' views the music of Ligeti as an exploration of the interface between these two extremes, personifying Adorno's advocation of an aesthetic which attempts to embrace all its dissimilar parts. In part three the consequences of modernism and the aesthetic approaches of Derrida and de Mann are considered, together with the music of Wolfgang Rihm. Williams concludes with a survey of contemporary music and the postmodernist desire to include a range of compositional references.

The music of the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in recent years. Despite wide recognition in his own lifetime, Szymanowski's works were somewhat overlooked in the decades following his death. Outside Poland, changing fashions militated against acceptance of his achievement, and subsequent generations of Polish composers regarded his music as too reactionary to provide a basis on which to found a national musical identity. In this full-scale study of Karol Szymanowski's life and music, Alistair Wightman explores the composer's position as a constant outsider in his own country, yet a 'good European' in the ways in which he responded positively to a diverse range of musical talents, in particular as Stravinsky, Strauss, Berg, Hindemith, Prokofiev and Ravel. The book throws light on Szymanowski's relationship to the Polish musical establishment, the reception of his works at home and abroad, his work as an educationalist, and the essentially European dimension of his art, drawing on letters, polemical writings, verse, theatrical sketches and the memoirs of family, friends and contemporaries. All of Szymanowski's significant works are discussed, illustrated with nearly 140 music examples. Evaluation is made of the close links existing between the composer's musical and literary works from the earliest stages of his career, as well as the various ideological strands that went together to form the unique, humanistic synthesis, characteristic of his mature work.

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

Wilhelm FurtwAngler left not only some of the greatest interpretations of operatic and symphonic music on record, but also expressed his views on musical issues of the moment in a number of outspoken essays and talks. His writings range from practical matters of performance and interpretation to aesthetic reflections on what he saw as the alarming direction in which music was developing in the wake of Schoenberg and the twelve-tone system of composition. Professor Ronald Taylor has here, for the first time, translated and annotated a selection of FurtwAngler's writings covering the four decades from the First World War to the conductor's death in 1954, and prefaced them with an essay on FurtwAngler's controversial career and complicated personality. The result is a collection of stimulating pieces with a claim on our attention, made all the greater for reflecting the musical and philosophical ideals of one of the great conductors of the twentieth century.

Adopting and transforming the Romantic fascination with mountains, modernism in the German-speaking lands claimed the Alps as a space both of resistance and of escape. This new 'cult of mountains' reacted to the symptoms and alienating forces associated with modern culture, defining and reinforcing models of subjectivity based on renewed wholeness and an aggressive attitude to physical and mental health. The arts were critical to this project, none more so than music, which occupied a similar space in Austro-German culture: autonomous, pure, sublime. In Modernism and the Cult of Mountains opera serves as a nexus, shedding light on the circulation of contesting ideas about politics, nature, technology and aesthetics. Morris investigates operatic representations of the high mountains in German modernism, showing how the liminal quality of the landscape forms the backdrop for opera's reflexive engagement with the identity and limits of its constituent media, not least music. This operatic reflexivity, in which the very question of music's identity is repeatedly restaged, invites consideration of musical encounters with mountains in other genres, and Morris shows how these issues resonate in Strauss's Alpine Symphony and in the Bergfilm (mountain film). By using music and the ideology of mountains to illuminate aspects of each other, Morris makes an original and valuable contribution to the critical study of modernism.

Composed in 1935-36 and intended to be his artistic 'credo', Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony was not performed publicly until 1961. Here, Dr Pauline Fairclough tackles head-on one of the most significant and least understood of Shostakovich's major works. She argues that the Fourth Symphony was radically different from its Soviet contemporaries in terms of its structure, dramaturgy, tone and even language, and therefore challenged the norms of Soviet symphonism at a crucial stage of its development. With the backing of prominent musicologists such as Ivan Sollertinsky, the composer could realistically have expected the premiere to have taken place, and may even have intended the symphony to be a model for a new kind of 'democratic' Soviet symphonism. Fairclough meticulously examines the score to inform a discussion of tonal and thematic processes, allusion, paraphrase and reference to musical types, or intonations. Such analysis is set deeply in the context of Soviet musical culture during the period 1932-36, involving Shostakovich's contemporaries Shebalin, Myaskovsky, Kabalevsky and Popov. A new method of analysis is also advanced here, where a range of Soviet and Western analytical methods are informed by the theoretical work of Shostakovich's contemporaries Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin and Ivan Sollertinsky, together with Theodor Adorno's late study of Mahler. In this way, the book will significantly increase an understanding of the symphony and its context.