This Life of Sounds portrays an important and previously unexplored corner of the history of new music in America: the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo. Composers Lukas Foss (the Center's founder), Lejaren Hiller, and Morton Feldman were the music directors over the life of "the Buffalo group," during the years 1964-1980. Based on Foss's plan, the Rockefeller Foundation provided annual fellowships for young composers and virtuoso instrumentalists to live in Buffalo for up to two years, thus creating a cadre of like-minded musicians who would spend their time studying, creating, and performing difficult - often controversial - new work. The now legendary group of musicians (some would say "musical outlaws") who participated in the Buffalo group included Pulitzer Prize winner George Crumb, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, Julius Eastman, and many more. Composers John Cage, Jim Tenney, Iannis Xenakis and others all figure in the story as well. The book provides valuable accounts of the Center's influential concert series, Evenings for New Music, performed in Buffalo, New York and throughout Europe; its famous recording of Terry Riley's In C; the political activism of the time; and the intersection of academic, private, and institutional funding for the arts. Life magazine declared in an article about the 1965 Festival of the Arts Today titled, "Can This Be Buffalo?," "Buffalo exploded last month in a two-week avant garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York..." The concerts, the festivals, and the adventurous musical climate attracted filmmakers and young visual artists resulting in what one person called "one of those kinds of places the way people talk about Vienna in 1900-1910."

Since Gyoergy Ligeti's death in 2006, there has been a growing acknowledgement of how central he was to the late twentieth-century cultural landscape. This collection is the first book devoted to exploring the composer's life and music within the context of his East European roots, revealing his dual identities as both Hungarian national and cosmopolitan modernist. Contributors explore the artistic and socio-cultural contexts of Ligeti's early works, including composition and music theory, the influence of East European folk music, notions of home and identity, his ambivalent attitude to his Hungarian past and his references to his homeland in his later music. Many of the valuable insights offered profit from new research undertaken at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, while also drawing on the knowledge of long-time associates such as the composer's assistant, Louise Duchesneau. The contributions as a whole reveal Ligeti's thoroughly cosmopolitan milieu and values, and illuminate why his music continues to inspire new generations of performers, composers and listeners.

Providing an interesting approach to developments in modernist music - from 1980 onwards - this study also presents an intriguing perspective on the larger history of modernism. Far from being supplanted by a postmodern period, argues David Metzer, modernist idioms remain vital in the contemporary scene. The vitality comes from the ways in which those idioms have extended impulses of modernist styles from the early twentieth century. Since that time, works have participated in lines of inquiry into various compositional and aesthetic topics, particularly the explorations of how to build pieces around such aesthetic ideals as purity and silence and how to deliver and manipulate expressive utterances. Metzer shows how these inquiries have played crucial roles in defining directions taken since 1980, and how, through the inquiries, we can gain a clearer idea of what makes the decades after 1980 a distinct period in the history of modernism.

An innovative contribution to Scriabin studies, covering aspects of Scriabin's life, personality, beliefs, training, creative output, and interaction with contemporary Russian culture. This book is an innovative contribution to Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) studies, covering aspects of Scriabin's life, personality, beliefs, training, creative output, as well as his interaction with contemporary Russian culture. It offers new and original research from leading and upcoming Russian music scholars. Key Scriabin topics such as mysticism, philosophy, music theory, contemporary aesthetics, and composition processes are covered. Musical coverage spans the composer's early, middle and late period. All main repertoire is being discussed: the piano miniatures and sonatas as well as the symphonies. In more detail, chapters consider: Scriabin's part in early twentieth-century Russia's cultural climate; how Scriabin moved from early pastiche to a style much more original; the influence of music theory on Scriabin's idiosyncratic style; the changing contexts of Scriabin performances; new aspects of reception studies. Further chapters offer: a critical understanding of how Scriabin's writings sit within the traditions of Mysticism as well as French and Russian Symbolism; a new investigation into his creative compositional process; miniaturism and its wider context; a new reading of the composer's mysticism and synaesthesia. Analytical chapters reach out of the score to offer an interpretative framework; accepting new approaches from disability studies; investigating the complex interaction of rhythm and metre and modal interactions, the latent diatonic 'tonal function' of Scriabin's late works, as well as self-regulating structures in the composer's music.

Exploring Twentieth Century Vocal Music is a unique people centred book designed to aid singers and voice teachers to discover and decipher the innovative repertoire of the twentieth century. The book familiarizes the reader with new notation systems employed by some contemporary composers. It suggest rehearsal techniques and vocal exercises that will help singers prepare to tackle the repertoire. And the book offers a list of the most important and interesting works to emerge in the twentieth century, along with suggested recital programmes that will introduce audiences as well as singers to this under - explored body of music.

Long remembered chiefly for its modernist exhibitions on the South Bank in London, the 1951 Festival of Britain also showcased British artistic creativity in all its forms. In Tonic to the Nation, Nathaniel G. Lew tells the story of the English classical music and opera composed and revived for the Festival, and explores how these long-overlooked components of the Festival helped define English music in the post-war period. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Lew looks closely at the work of the newly chartered Arts Council of Great Britain, for whom the Festival of Britain provided the first chance to assert its authority over British culture. The Arts Council devised many musical programs for the Festival, including commissions of new concert works, a vast London Season of almost 200 concerts highlighting seven centuries of English musical creativity, and several schemes to commission and perform new operas. These projects were not merely directed at bringing audiences to hear new and old national music, but to share broader goals of framing the national repertory, negotiating between the conflicting demands of conservative and progressive tastes, and using music to forge new national definitions in a changed post-war world.

Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918 presents a range of historical case studies on the sounding worlds of the European past. The chapters in this volume explore ways of thinking about sound historically, and seek to understand how people have understood and negotiated their relationships with the sounding world in Europe from the Middle Ages through to the early twentieth century. They consider, in particular: sound and music in the later Middle Ages; the politics of sound in the early modern period; the history of the body and perception during the Ancien Regime; and the sounds of the city in the nineteenth century and sound and colonial rule at the fin de siecle. The case studies also range in geographical orientation to include considerations not only of Britain and France, the countries most considered in European historical sound studies in English-language scholarship to date, but also Bosnia-Herzegovina, British Colonial India, Germany, Italy and Portugal. Out of this diverse group of case studies emerge significant themes that recur time and again, varying according to time and place: sound, power and identity; sound as a marker of power or violence; and sound, physiology and sensory perception and technologies of sound, consumption and meaning.

A plethora of biographical accounts of some of the contemporary composers and musicians at the turn of the twentieth century.

Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974-77, revised 1996) has consolidated its position as one of the major operatic works of the twentieth century. Few operas composed since the 1970s have received such numerous productions, bringing the eclectic score to a global audience. Famously dubbed by Ligeti as an 'anti-anti-opera', the piece is a highly ambiguous, apocalyptic fable about the human condition, fear of death and the final judgement. As the first book in English solely dedicated to discussion of this work, Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque offers new perspectives on the opera's musico-dramatic identity in the context of musical postmodernism. Peter Edwards draws on a range of modernist and postmodernist theories to explore the collision of past styles and genre models in the opera, its expressive states and its engagement with the grotesque. This is ably supported by musical analysis and extensive study of Ligeti's sketch materials held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Edwards's analyses culminate in a new approach to examining the opera's rich multiplicities, the composition of the musical material and the nature of Ligeti's relationship with the musical past. This is a key reference work in the fields of musical modernism and postmodernism, opera studies and the music of Ligeti.

During the late 1890s and early 1900s, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was an important and popular British composer. Respected by such contemporaries as Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, he attracted the attention of the British music critics, who followed his career with curious interest and often placed him in a class with other noted composers. A prolific composer during his short lifetime, he received great public acclaim and became known both nationally and internationally-his setting of Longfellow's Hiawatha was just as popular as Handel's Messiah in Victorian England. Although he composed Hiawatha when he was only twenty-three, Coleridge-Taylor already had reached a published opus of twenty-nine compositions. Born of a West African doctor and a British mother, Coleridge-Taylor belonged to two decidedly different cultures. Therefore, his compositional style was affected by two underlying currents: the classical tradition that dominated his training at the Royal College of Music, and the African and African-American folk music that was introduced to him through contacts with members of his father's race. This revised second edition, equipped with both an updated and expanded discography and bibliography, traces the development of his compositional style from his final years at the Royal College of Music to the time of his death in 1912. Also included is a list of his arrangements and later editions of his music. The author uses examples from selected works to show the influence of classical texts, West African and African-American elements, and English poetical dramas. Of particular interest are eight rare and/or never-before seen articles by and about this ground-breaking composer.

The flourishing of religious or spiritually-inspired music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries remains largely unexplored. The engagement and tensions between modernism and tradition, and institutionalized religion and spirituality are inherent issues for many composers who have sought to invoke spirituality and Otherness through contemporary music. Contemporary Music and Spirituality provides a detailed exploration of the recent and current state of contemporary spiritual music in its religious, musical, cultural and conceptual-philosophical aspects. At the heart of the book are issues that consider the role of secularization, the claims of modernity concerning the status of art, and subjective responses such as faith and experience. The contributors provide a new critical lens through which it is possible to see the music and thought of Cage, Ligeti, Messiaen, Stockhausen as spiritual music. The book surrounds these composers with studies of and by other composers directly associated with the idea of spiritual music (Harvey, Gubaidulina, MacMillan, Part, Pott, and Tavener), and others (Adams, Birtwistle, Ton de Leeuw, Ferneyhough, Ustvolskaya, and Vivier) who have created original engagements with the idea of spirituality. Contemporary Music and Spirituality is essential reading for humanities scholars and students working in the areas of musicology, music theory, theology, religious studies, philosophy of culture, and the history of twentieth-century culture.

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.

The German lied, or art song, is considered one of the most intimate of all musical genres-often focused on the poetic speaker's inner world and best suited for private and semi-private performance in the home or salon. Yet, problematically, any sense of inwardness in lieder depends on outward expression through performance. With this paradox at its heart, Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century explores the relationships between early nineteenth-century theories of the inward self, the performance practices surrounding inward lyric poetry and song, and the larger conventions determining the place of intimate poetry and song in the public concert hall. Jennifer Ronyak studies the cultural practices surrounding lieder performances in northern and central Germany in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how presentations of lieder during the formative years of the genre put pressure on their sense of interiority. She examines how musicians responded to public concern that outward expression would leave the interiority of the poet, the song, or the performer unguarded and susceptible to danger. Through this rich performative paradox Ronyak reveals how a song maintains its powerful intimacy even during its inherently public performance.

In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of composers and performers, whose intentional actions either create music as notated or manifest music as significant sound, virtual agency is inferred from the implied actions of those sounds, as they move and reveal tendencies within music-stylistic contexts. From our most basic attributions of sources for perceived energies in music, to the highest realm of our engagement with musical subjectivity, Hatten explains how virtual agents arose as distinct from actual ones, how unspecified actants can take on characteristics of (virtual) human agents, and how virtual agents assume various actorial roles. Along the way, Hatten demonstrates some of the musical means by which composers and performers from different historical eras have staged and projected various levels of virtual agency, engaging listeners imaginatively and interactively within the expressive realms of their virtual and fictional musical worlds.

Pro Mundo - Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg contains new English translations of the complete writings of the Viennese composer Alban Berg (1885-1935) and extensive commentaries tracing the history of each essay and its connection to musical culture of the early twentieth century. Berg is now recognized as a classic composer of the modern period, best known for his operas Wozzeck and Lulu. Berg, Anton Webern, and their teacher Arnold Schoenberg constitute the "Second Viennese School" which played a major role in the transformation of serious music as it entered the modern period. Berg was an avid and skillful writer. His essays include analytic studies of compositions by Schoenberg, polemics on music and musicians of his day, and lectures and miscellaneous writings on a variety of topics. Throughout his considerable and diverse corpus of writings, Berg alternates between two perspectives: Pro Mundo - Pro Domo, meaning roughly "speaking for all - speaking for myself" commenting at one moment on the general state of culture and the world, and the next moment on his own works. In his early years he also tried his hand at fictional writing, using works by Ibsen and Strindberg as models. This new English edition contains 47 essays, many of which are little known and have not been previously available in English.

This annotated bibliography uncovers the wealth of resources available to prospective researchers and supports emerging scholarship and inquiry into the life and music of this Czech composer. It includes all secondary sources on Martinu and his music, as well as chronology of his life and a complete list of works.

This book tells the intriguing story of Béla Bartók's viola concerto, a work left unfinished at his death in 1945. Drawing on interviews and documents that reveal previously unavailable information, it discuesses the commission, the reconstruction by Tibór Sérly, events leading up to the premiere, its reception over the second half of the twentieth century, the revisions, and future possibilities.

The first full-length study of Bartók's 1911 opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, this book is an authoritative study of one of the twentieth century's enduring operatic works. It adopts a broad approach to the study of opera by introducing, in addition to the expected music-dramatic analysis, topics of a more interdisciplinary nature that are new to the field of Bartók studies, including a detailed literary study of the libretto and a gender-focused analysis of the opera's female character, Judith.

The memoirs of the Russian-born German composer Georg von Alberecht (born Kasan 1891, died Heidelberg 1976) are an important document of 20th-century musical history. Dictated to his son Michael von Albrecht and first published in German, von Albrecht's autobiography recounts his dramatic experiences during the 1917 Russian revolution and the Nazi terror. His reports of encounters with such other composers as Taneyev, Glazunov, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Frommel, David, and others, and his thorough discussion of tonal systems and compositional methods, reflect the approach and critical response to many procedures typical of the 20th-century music. His analyses shed light on the works of other composers and the development of modern and postmodern compositional strategies. Translated by Michael von Albrecht and Francis R. Schwartz, and edited by Elliott Antokoletz, these memoirs offer the English-speaking reader a first-hand account of some of the most dynamic political, social, and musical developments in 20th-century Europe.

A new collection with contributions from performing musicians and Grainger scholars and a detailed Catalogue of Works. In the thirty years since his Centenary in 1982 it has become even clearer that Percy Grainger [1882-1961] - composer, pianist and revolutionary - was a man born out of his time. Many of his ideas, both musical and social, sit farmore easily in our contemporary world. Those thirty years have also seen a notable expansion of interest in Grainger's music. Innumerable recordings have been made, including the first complete Grainger recording survey by Chandos in its monumental Grainger Edition. The growth of the internet has made it possible, as never before, for Grainger's music to be heard widely. The central theme of The New Percy Grainger Companion is to give information and help from established musicians for performing and listening to this life-celebrating repertoire. The Companion's fully detailed, up-to-date Catalogue of Works - the most complete of any existing catalogue - givesinvaluable assistance. Authoritative contextual chapters in the Companion offer some surprising new background information, together with thoughtful evaluations which signal a new twenty-first century perspective in Grainger scholarship. PENELOPE THWAITES is recognised internationally as a leading Grainger exponent. Her research, performances and extensive Grainger discography over four decades reflect a unique understanding of the manand his music. Contributors: BRIAN ALLISON, TERESA BALOUGH, ROGER COVELL, KAY DREYFUS, LEWIS FOREMAN, PAUL JACKSON, JAMES JUDD, JAMES KOEHNE, ASTRID BRITT KRAUTSCHNEIDER, BARRY PETER OULD, STEWART MANVILLE, MURRAY MCLACHLAN, TIMOTHY REYNISH, BRUCE CLUNIES ROSS, DESMOND SCOTT, PETER SCULTHORPE, GEOFFREY SIMON, RONALD STEVENSON, STEPHEN VARCOE, DAVID WALKER

For more than half of his long life, composer Roger Sessions was a commanding figure on the American musical scene. He enjoyed the solid respect of his peers, and as a teacher of a generation of composers and author of compelling writings on his craft, his influence on musical thought remains profound. Yet, even in his lifetime, his music endured vastly disrespectful neglect. He was a "difficult" composer. As the story is told, often in the composer's own words, the complex picture emerges of a remarkable man who, gradually learned, not very, willingly, to accept his unexpected lot.

"Everything But Bach, Beethoven and Brahms," comprises this multicultural repertoire guide for pianists, composers, music teachers and students, world music enthusiasts and scholars. It identifies pieces in the contemporary solo piano literature which show world music influences not traditionally associated with the standard repertoire of Western European art music. The resulting annotated bibliography therefore includes pieces which use or attempt to emulate non-Western scales, modes, folk tunes, rhythmic, percussive or harmonic devices and timbres. Axford highlights the music cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, India, the Far East, Indonesia, Oceania, ethnic North America, Latin America and Spain, and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Scandinavia. Separate bibliographies for each world music region show examples of contemporary solo piano pieces that demonstrate some of the traditional musical influences associated with the region.

Ernst Krenek has been described as a "one-man history of twentieth-century music." His vast compositional output encompasses many of its extremes and expresses many of its contradictions. Few have attempted, however, to contextualize Krenek's compositional output because our understanding of classical music in the first half of the twentieth century still largely remains focused on the music of a few canonical figures. Responding to renewed interest from performers in Krenek's work, particularly his operas, Peter Tregear's Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style addresses this gap in the scholarly literature and makes an important contribution to our comprehension of the ways in which his music reflected and informed broader social and political debates in Austria and Germany at the time. Focusing on Krenek's compositional path from the eclectic musical language of Jonny spielt auf to the austere twelve-tone technique of Karl V, Tregear provides an historical and critical context to this most historically significant period of Krenek's creative life. His study also enriches our understanding of many of Krenek's contemporaries, such as Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. This book should interest students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in modern opera, and contemporary classical music as well as early-20th-century German history more generally.

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

Michael Christoforidis is widely recognized as a leading expert on one of Spain's most important composers, Manuel de Falla. This volume brings together both new chapters and revised versions of previously published work, some of which is made available here in English for the first time. The introductory chapter provides a biographical outline of the composer and characterisations of both Falla and his music during his lifetime. The sections that follow explore different facets of Falla's mature works and musical identity. Part II traces the evolution of his flamenco-inspired Spanish style through contacts with Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky, while Part III explores the impact of post-World War I modernities on Falla's musical nationalism. The final part reflects on aspects of Falla's music and the politics of Spain in the 1930s and 1940s. Situating his discussion of these aspects of Falla's music within a broader context, including currents in literature and the visual arts, Christoforidis provides a distinctive and original contribution to the study of Falla as well as to the wider fields of musical modernism, exoticism, and music and politics.