This book is about how music "in a key" is composed. Further, it is about how such music was composed when it was no longer compulsory to do so, starting a few years before the First World War. In an eclectic journey through the history of compositional technique, Daniel Harrison contends that the tonal system did not simply die out with the dawn of twentieth century, but continued to supplement newer techniques as a compelling means of musical organization, even into current times. Well-known art music composers such as Bartok, Hindemith, Prokofiev, and Messiaen are represented alongside composers whose work moves outside the standard boundaries of art music: Leonard Bernstein, Murice Durufle, Frank Martin, Xiaoyong Chen. Along the way, the book attends to military bugle calls, a trailer before a movie feature, a recomposition of a famous piece by Arnold Schoenberg, and the music of Neil Diamond, David Shire, and Brian Wilson. A celebration of the awesome variety of musical expressions encompassed in what is called tonal music, Pieces of Tradition is a book for composers seeking ideas and effects, music theorists interested in its innovations, and all those who practice the analysis of composition in all its modern and traditional variations.

This revised edition of the standard catalogue of the music and writings of Ralph Vaughan Williams includes all known published and unpublished works, with full details of instrumentation, revisions, and first performances. There is much new information on the location of manuscripts and sketches, and there are many corrections to the information and dates given in the existing text. The volume includes a bibliography of the literary works of Vaughan Williams compiled by Peter Starbuck, and an appendix of folk songs collected by the composer. The indexes have been completely updated.

From the Jim Crow world of 1920s Greenville, South Carolina, to Greenwich Village's Café Society in the '40s, to their 1974 Grammy-winning collaboration on "Loves Me Like a Rock," the Dixie Hummingbirds have been one of gospel's most durable and inspiring groups. Now, Jerry Zolten tells the Hummingbirds' fascinating story and with it the story of a changing music industry and a changing nation. When James Davis and his high-school friends starting singing together in a rural South Carolina church they could not have foreseen the road that was about to unfold before them. They began a ten-year jaunt of "wildcatting," traveling from town to town, working local radio stations, schools, and churches, struggling to make a name for themselves. By 1939 the a cappella singers were recording their four-part harmony spirituals on the prestigious Decca label. By 1942 they had moved north to Philadelphia and then New York where, backed by Lester Young's band, they regularly brought the house down at the city's first integrated nightclub, Café Society. From there the group rode a wave of popularity that would propel them to nation-wide tours, major record contracts, collaborations with Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon, and a career still vibrant today as they approach their seventy-fifth anniversary. Drawing generously on interviews with Hank Ballard, Otis Williams, and other artists who worked with the Hummingbirds, as well as with members James Davis, Ira Tucker, Howard Carroll, and many others, The Dixie Hummingbirds brings vividly to life the growth of a gospel group and of gospel music itself.

Enrique Granados (1867-1916) is one of the most compelling figures of the late-Romantic period in music. During his return voyage to Spain after the premiere of his opera Goyescas at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1916, a German submarine torpedoed the ship on which he and his wife were sailing, and they perished in the waters of the English Channel. His death was mourned on both sides of the Atlantic as a stunning loss to the music world, for he had died at the pinnacle of his career, and his late works held the promise of greater things to come.
Granados was among the leading pianists of his time, and his eloquence at the keyboard inspired critics to dub him the "poet of the piano." In Enrique Granados: Poet of the Piano, Walter Aaron Clark offers the first substantive study in English of this virtuoso pianist, composer, and music pedagogue. While providing detailed analyses of his major works for voice, piano, and the stage, Clark argues that Granados's art represented a unifying presence on the cultural landscape of Spain during a period of imperial decline, political unrest, and economic transformation. Drawing on newly discovered documents, Clark explores the cultural spheres in which Granados moved, particularly of Castile and Catalonia. Granados's best-known music was inspired by the art of Francisco Goya, especially the Goyescas suite for solo piano that became the basis for the opera. These pieces evoked the colorful and dramatic world that Goya inhabited and depicted in his art. Granados's fascination with Goya's Madrid set him apart from fellow nationalists Albeniz and Falla, who drew their principal inspiration from Andalusia. Though he was resolutely apolitical, Granados's attraction to Castile antagonized some Catalan nationalists, who resented Castilian domination. Yet Granados also made important contributions to Catalan musical theater and was a prominent figure in the modernist movement in Barcelona.
Clark also explores the personal pressures that shaped Granados's music. His passionate affair with a wealthy socialite created domestic tensions, but it was also a source of inspiration for Goyescas. Persistent financial difficulties forced him to devote time to teaching at the expense of composition, though as a result Granados made considerable contributions to piano pedagogy and music education in Barcelona through the music academy he founded there.
While Granados's tragic and early demise casts a pall over his life story, Clark ultimately reveals an artist of remarkable versatility and individuality and sheds new light on his enduring significance.

A biography of the conductor Mitropoulos. He was an advocate of difficult modern music and an early champion of Mahler; his performances brought the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra into the first rank of American orchestras.

American director Robert Altman (1925-2006) first came to national attention with the surprise blockbuster M*A*S*H (1970), and he directed more than thirty feature films in the subsequent decades. Critics and scholars have noted that music is central to Altman's films, and in addition to his feature films, Altman worked in theater, opera, and the emerging field of cable television. His treatment of sound is a hallmark of his films, alongside overlapping dialogue, improvisation, and large ensemble casts. Several of his best-known films integrate musical performances into the central plot, including Nashville (1975), Popeye (1980), Short Cuts (1993), Kansas City (1996), The Company (2003) and A Prairie Home Companion (2006), his final film. Even such non-musicals as McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) have been described as, in fellow director and protege Paul Thomas Anderson's evocative phrase, as "musicals without people singing." Robert Altman's Soundtracks considers Altman's celebrated, innovative uses of music and sound in several of his most acclaimed and lesser-known works. In so doing, these case studies serve as a window not only into Altman's considerable and varied output, but also the changing film industry over nearly four decades, from the heyday of the New Hollywood in the late 1960s through the "Indiewood" boom of the 1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. As its frame, the book will consider the continuing attractions of auteurism inside and outside of scholarly discourse, by considering Altman's career in terms of the director's own self-promotion as a visionary and artist; the film industry's promotion of Altman the auteur; the emphasis on Altman's individual style, including his use of music, by the director, critics, scholars, and within the industry; and the processes, tensions, and boundaries of collaboration.

Few Mexican musicians in the twentieth century achieved as much notoriety or had such an international impact as the popular singer and songwriter Agustin Lara (1897-1970). Widely known as "el flaco de oro" ("the Golden Skinny"), this remarkably thin fellow was prolific across the genres of bolero, ballad, and folk. His most beloved "Granada," a song so enduring that it has been covered by the likes of Mario Lanza, Frank Sinatra, and Placido Domingo, is today a standard in the vocal repertory. However, there exists very little biographical literature on Lara in English. In AgustinLara: A Cultural Biography, author Andrew Wood's informed and informative placement of Lara's work in a broader cultural context presents a rich and comprehensive reading of the life of this significant musical figure. Lara's career as a media celebrity as well as musician provides an excellent window on Mexican society in the mid-twentieth century and on popular culture in Latin America. Wood also delves into Lara's music itself, bringing to light how the composer's work unites a number of important currents in Latin music of his day, particularly the bolero. With close musicological focus and in-depth cultural analysis riding alongside the biographical narrative, Agustin Lara: A Cultural Biography is a welcome read to aficionados and performers of Latin American musics, as well as a valuable addition to the study of modern Mexican music and Latin American popular culture as a whole."

Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourie explores the varied aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of Russian composer Arthur Lourie. A St. Petersburg native allied with the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age decadence, Lourie was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and America, where his career foundered. Making his way by serving others, he became Stravinsky's right-hand man, Serge Koussevitsky's ghostwriter, and philosopher Jacques Maritain's muse. Lourie left his mark on the poems of Anna Akhmatova, on the neoclassical aesthetics of Stravinsky, on Eurasianism, and on Maritain's NeoThomist musings about music. Lourie serves as a flawless lens through which aspects of Silver Age Russia, early Bolshevik rule, and the cultural space of exile come into sharper focus. But this interdisciplinary collection of essays, edited by musicologists Klara Moricz and Simon Morrison, also looks at Lourie himself as an artist and intellectual in his own right. Much of the aesthetic and technical discussion concerns his grandly eulogistic opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, understood as both a belated Symbolist work and as a NeoThomist exercise. Despite the importance Lourie attached to the opera as his masterwork, Blackamoor has never been performed, its fate thus serving as an emblem of Lourie's own. Yet even if Lourie seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history, he looms large in studies of emigration and cultural memory. Here Lourie's life, like his last opera, is presented as a meditation on the circumstances and psychology of exile. Ultimately, these essays recover a lost realm of musical and aesthetic possibilities-a Russia that Lourie, and the world, saw disappear.

Charles Ives, perhaps the quintessential American composer of the twentieth century, drew on his childhood experiences in a small New England town in his music. Through his close relationship with his father, George, a Civil War bandmaster, Ives developed a powerful feeling for nineteenth-century rural America. This book--the first full-scale psychoanalytic biography of a major composer--examines the lives of the two men and shows how a knowledge of their relationship as father and son, teacher and pupil, is central to an understanding of Ives's work. Stuart Feder, a psychoanalyst with training in musicology, demonstrates that George exerted so pervasive an influence on Charles's creative life that Ives's music may be seen as the result of an unconscious fantasy of posthumous collaboration between father and son. The music bears George's mark, not only in its incorporation of hymn tunes, parlor ballads, Civil War marches, and other homely sources that derived from his youth, but also in its use of technical musical devices attributed to George. Moreover, the span of Ives's creative life reveals another connection to his father: Charles's musical productivity began to wane in his forties, as he approached the age at which his father died. Dr. Feder examines the influence of George's teaching and storytelling on Charles's years as a composer. Ives's later decline is traced psychologically and medically. Using Ives's music as an essential part of his data, Dr. Feder demonstrates how music can illuminate and be expressive of the inner life of its creator.

Elinor Remick Warren's distinguished career as a composer, concert pianist, and accompanist for renowned singers spanned seventy-five years of American musical history. She began writing music in 1904 at age four. Her first published composition, a song, was accepted by G. Schirmer in 1916. Thereafter, her compositions appeared regularly through 1990. Her full oeuvre is cataloged here along with performance information, discography, and review and critical commentary, all of which is carefully documented, cross-referenced, and indexed. A biographical sketch is supplemented by a long interview conducted by the author with Warren four years before the composer's death in 1991. Among the useful appendixes are textual sources for Warren's many vocal compositions.

A seminal figure in the development of distinctively American concert music, Roy Harris created a large body of compositions in virtually all media in a career spanning more than fifty years, from the 1920s to the 1970s. His fortunes fluctuated widely with the public and critical community. Eclipsed during the 1960s, when his conservative idiom with its strong nationalistic stance was out of vogue, he and his work have gained increased scholarly, performance, and recording interest in recent decades, which have brought to the fore an entire generation of neglected American composers. Documenting and organizing Harris's complex oeuvre is the essential concern of the present book, and the catalogue of works and performances provides information on instrumentation, premieres, publication, and special aspects of each composition. Like the catalog, the discography is the most thorough ever assembled for Harris, and it also includes commentary on features of the recordings. The extensive annotated bibliography includes reference sources, scholarly works, general works, text sources, folksong sources, writings by Harris, and critical reviews. Works, recordings, and bibliography are carefully enumerated, cross-referenced, and indexed. An opening study of Harris's life, works, and style incorporates gleanings from an oral history collection recently made available. This research tool is an essential companion to any critical study of Harris and will provide a firm base on which future such studies can be developed.

Since Britten's death in 1976, numerous articles and books have been written about his life and work. Much has been made of the strong influences of his pacifism and his homosexuality. It is often suggested that Britten felt himself to be an outsider from 'normal' society, and that this accounts for the his concern to portray the 'outsider' in his operas. There is no doubt that this is an important aspect of Britten's art, but the present work attempts to show that his music embraces much wider and more universal concerns, and in addressing those concerns there is a clearly defined pattern of spiritual influence. Part One of the book examines Britten's early life, and the strong presence which the Church had in his childhood and adolescence. It explores the way in which certain spiritual influences were first manifested, and how, like the more specifically musical 'themes' which Donald Mitchell has noted, they can be traced throughout Britten's life and work. The author was privileged to have conversations with two clergymen who were influential in Britten's life, as well as gathering valuable insights through a long series of conversations with Sir Peter Pears. Part Two examines a wide range of the composer's music in which a spiritual dimension can be traced. The specifically liturgical music has received rather less critical notice than Britten's larger works. The music is discussed here, and shown to possess musical characteristics in common with the larger works. Britten could not be described as a conventional Christian; still less is it true to describe him, as Eric Walter White has done, as 'keen, wherever possible, to work within the framework of the Church of England'. Nevertheless, his spirituality was rooted in the religious experience of his childhood. This book seeks to demonstrate that Britten retained a sense of the Christian values absorbed in childhood and adolescence, and that these - along with the specifically Christian heritage of plainsong - were strongly influential in his choice and treatment of themes.

With over 100 compositions in his catalog, Ross Lee Finney is a highly regarded composer whose career spans more than 50 years. This work offers contemporary music scholars, students, and enthusiasts an in-depth survey of the life, works, and writings of this important composer, theorist, and teacher. Finney is one of the first significant composers to come out of the American Midwest. He is known for blazing new trails by writing tonal music in the serialist style, developing a unique method of composition by applying physics' theory of complementarity to music, and using symmetrical hexachords to achieve an overall tonal effect. An important addition to any music library. Of special interest are excerpts from the author's interview with Finney in 1992, which provide the reader with a unique insight into the life and work of this individual and innovative composer. The book is divided into four major sections: a biography, a list of works including detailed information regarding premieres and other significant performances, a complete discography of all commercial recordings, and a comprehensive bibliography of writings by and about Finney. Two appendices provide alphabetical and chronological lists of compositions, and a comprehensive index includes all important names, institutions, places, and events mentioned throughout the text.

In the 1930s, Aaron Copland began to write in an accessible style he described as "imposed simplicity." Works like El Salon Mexico, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring feature a tuneful idiom that brought the composer unprecedented popular success and came to define an American sound. Yet the cultural substance of that sound-the social and political perspective that might be heard within these familiar pieces-has until now been largely overlooked. While it has long been acknowledged that Copland subscribed to leftwing ideals, Music for the Common Man is the first sustained attempt to understand some of Copland's best-known music in the context of leftwing social, political, and cultural currents of the Great Depression and Second World War. Musicologist Elizabeth Crist argues that Copland's politics never merely accorded with mainstream New Deal liberalism, wartime patriotism, and Communist Party aesthetic policy, but advanced a progressive vision of American society and culture. Copland's music can be heard to accord with the political tenets of progressivism in the 1930s and '40s, including a fundamental sensitivity toward those less fortunate, support of multiethnic pluralism, belief in social democracy, and faith that America's past could be put in service of a better future. Crist explores how his works wrestle with the political complexities and cultural contradictions of the era by investing symbols of America-the West, folk song, patriotism, or the people-with progressive social ideals. While much has been written on the relationship between politics and art in the 1930s and '40s, very little of that attention has been aimed at the world of concert music. Music for the Common Man offers fresh insights on familiar pieces and the political context in which they emerged.

Cyril Scott once described Percy Grainger as a `lovable eccentric'. The Australian-American pianist, composer, ethnologist, and aspiring `all-round man' was, however, more eccentric to his own age than to ours. His views on the environment, food, the body, participatory democracy, and sex all anticipated by several decades views more typical of the mid-late twentieth century. Prolific as a composer, performer, and recording artist, Grainger was an indefatigable writer. This selection of forty-six essays about the production, promotion, and propagation of music is drawn from his over 150 public writings. Written between the turn of the century and the early 1950s, these essays reveal Grainger's youthful compositional plans, his ideas about piano technique, and his enduring high regard for the music of Edvard Grieg, Frederick Delius, and `Frankfurt Group' colleagues Cyril Scott, Roger Quilter, and Henry Balfour Gardiner. Grainger on Music also pursues his evolving thoughts about Nordic music, `Free Music', instrumental usage, and his occasional suggestions for musical development in Australia and the United States.

George Whitefield Chadwick was one of the most prolific composers that the United States ever produced. During a career that spanned over 50 years, he was considered the Dean of American Composers from the 1880s until after World War I. He composed in nearly every genre, including opera/stage works (seven), orchestral music (17 major works), songs (over 100), and dozens of choral and chamber works. Chadwick benefited from numerous performances of his music-particularly by the Boston Symphony Orchestra-and many of his works were published during his lifetime. He was also considered one of the foremost teachers of his era. He began teaching composition at the New England Conservatory of Music, and became its Dean in 1897, a post he held for more than 30 years. Chadwick and his music are currently enjoying a revival.

Radie Britain: A Bio-Bibliography is a concise biography which summarizes the major events in the prolific American composer's life, and describes the conditions under which her singular talent emerged. An in-depth interview with Britain herself gives the opportunity to hear her own personal thoughts on her life, music, and creative philosophy. Walter and Nancy Bailey give an exhaustive list of works and performances, each accompanied by significant information on the work or documented performance. Also included are Britain's compositions for orchestra and band; chamber ensemble; solo piano; piano duets; the harp; chorus and solo voice as well as her stage works. Authorized by Miss Britain and compiled with her help, this is a comprehensive guide to the work of a gifted musician. A bibliography of Britain's writings concludes the text along with reviews of her performances and other press materials. With its chronological arrangement, this bibliography traces Britain's musical evolution much like a second biography. An index to the entire volume is provided. Both chronological and alphabetical lists of works can be found in the appendixes.

In his introduction Mr. Foss gives us a short sketch of Delius; contributions by Rogber Quilter, Charles Kennedy and Percy Scott.

This volume in the Greenwood Press series, Bio-Bibliographies in Music, provides new details about the life and works of Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski. It includes a detailed catalogue of the composer's works and performances, including his film music, incidental music for the theatre, music for radio plays, and songs he composed under a pseudonym, as well as a bibliography, discography, and brief biographical sketch. His unique style was distinguished by an individual harmonic system controlled aleatory technique that he developed more fully during the 1960s and 1970s. The discography includes over 300 recordings and the bibliography includes writings the composer and a separate section for the writings about him, including concert and recording reviews, books, articles, dissertations, and interviews.

This research tool will appeal to Lutoslawski fans and to musicologists. Each section is cross-referenced throughout. An appendix provides an alphabetical list of all of the composer's works.

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

This volume presents the life and works of Robert Russell Bennett, whose prolific career as composer and arranger spanned much of the twentieth century. George J. Ferencz chronicles how Bennett's concert works, orchestrations, and commercial scores both reflected and enhanced the musical vitality of New York City, where he spent most of his professional life. Although Bennett enjoyed commercial success, his stylistic preferences embraced the classics, and Ferencz appropriately focuses his study on Bennett's original concert works rather than his popular scores. Ferencz introduces the artist with a lengthy biographical profile, followed by a complete list of works and selected performances which features compositions rather than arrangements in an effort to document those works most representative of Bennett's singular talent. All of Bennett's known commercial recordings are cataloged in the discography, and an annotated bibliography highlights writings about the composer and his works. Subsequent appendixes list commercial orchestrations and original scores for shows, film, and television, and a full index completes the work.

A symbol of Trinidadian culture, the steelband has made an extraordinary transformation since its origins-from junk metal to steel orchestra, and from disparaged underclass pastime to Trinidad and Tobago's national instrument. Now, Shannon Dudley gives the first discerning look at the musical thinking that ignited this transformation, and the way it articulates with Afro-Trinidadian tradition, carnival, colonial authority, and nationalist politics. Music from behind the Bridge tells the story of the steelband from the point of view of musicians who overcame disadvantages of poverty and prejudice with their extraordinary ambition. Literally referring to the poor neighborhoods nestled in the hills bordering Port of Spain to the East, "Behind the Bridge" is also a metaphor for conditions of social disadvantage and cultural resistance that shaped the steelband movement in the various Afro-Trinidadian communities where it first took root.
The book further explores the implications of the steelband's "nationalization" in post-independence Trinidad and Tobago, and contemporary steelband musicians' preoccupation with the formally adjudicated annual Panorama competition. In discussing the intersection of musical thinking, festivity, and politics, this book connects important questions about the history of the steelband to general questions about the relation between popular culture and nationalism.

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

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

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

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