Christopher Fox (1955) has emerged as one of the most fascinating composers of the post-war generation. His spirit of experimentalism pervades an oeuvre in which he has blithely created his own version of a range of contemporary musical practices. In his work many of the major expressions of European cultural activity - Darmstadt, Fluxus, spectralism, postminimalism and more - are assimilated to produce a voice which is uniquely resonant and multifaceted. In this, the first major study of his work, musicologists, composers, thinkers and practitioners scrutinize aspects of Christopher Fox's music, each exploring elements that relate to their own distinct areas of practice, tracing Fox's compositional trajectory and situating it within post-war contemporary European music practice. Above all this book addresses the question: How can one person dip his fingers into so many paint pots and yet retain a coherent compositional vision? The range of Fox's musical concerns make his work of interest to anyone who wants to study the development of so-called new music spanning the latter twentieth century into the twenty first century.

Contemplating Shostakovich marks an important new stage in the understanding of Shostakovich and his working environment. Each chapter covers aspects of the composer's output in the context of his life and cultural milieu. The contributions uncover 'outside' stimuli behind Shostakovich's works, allowing the reader to perceive the motivations behind his artistic choices; at the same time, the nature of those choices offers insights into the workings of the larger world - cultural, social, political - that he inhabited. Thus his often ostensibly quirky choices are revealed as responses - by turns sentimental, moving, sardonic and angry - to the particular conditions, with all their absurdities and contradictions, that he had to negotiate. Here we see the composer emerging from the role of tortured loner of older narratives into that of the gregarious and engaged member of his society that, for better and worse, characterized the everyday reality of his life. This invaluable collection offers remarkable new insight, in both depth and range, into the nature of Shostakovich's working circumstances and of his response to them. The collection contains the seeds for a wide range of new directions in the study of Shostakovich's works and the larger contexts of their creation and reception.

The symphony retained its primacy as the most prestigious large-scale orchestral form throughout the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in Britain, Russia and the United States. Likewise, Australian composers produced a steady stream of symphonies throughout the period from Federation (1901) through to the end of the 1950s. Stylistically, these works ranged from essays in late nineteenth-century romanticism, twentieth-century nationalism, neo-classicism and near-atonality. Australian symphonies were most prolific during the 1950s, with 36 local entries in the 1951 Commonwealth Jubilee Symphony competition. This extensive repertoire was overshadowed by the emergence of a new generation of composers and critics during the 1960s who tended to regard older Australian music as old-fashioned and derivative. The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960 is the first study of this neglected genre and has four aims: firstly, to show the development of symphonic composition in Australia from Federation to 1960; secondly, to highlight the achievement of the main composers who wrote symphonies; thirdly, to advocate the restoration and revival of this repertory; and, lastly, to take a step towards a recasting of the narrative of Australian concert music from Federation to the present. In particular, symphonies by Marshall-Hall, Hart, Bainton, Hughes, Le Gallienne and Morgan emerge as works of particular note.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first comprehensive account of the life and influences of Cyril Scott, not merely a composer but an artist in the broadest possible sense of the term. Prolific and personable, innovative and contentious, Cyril Scott (1879 - 1970) was considered to be one of the most promising young talents in modern British music at the turn of the twentieth century. He was a member of the 'Frankfurt Group' (together with Percy Grainger, Norman O'Neill, Roger Quilter and Balfour Gardiner), his music was performed by some of the leading conductors of the time in Britain and on the Continent, and his friends included highly influential figures in European literature, art and politics. Apart from his music, Scott was the author of many books on alternative medicine, psychology, Occultism, Theosophy and comparative religion. He also wrote fiction, autobiography, and poetry. Scott embodied a unique time in a particularly unique way. His aesthetic ideas informed both his professional creative practice and his manner of living. He was not merely a composer, but an artist in thebroadest possible sense of the term. This book provides the first comprehensive account of Scott's life and influences as well as an outline and contextualization of his aesthetic thinking. It traces his changing conceptionof the function of art and the role of the artist from his formative exposure to Symbolism through his friendship with the German poet Stefan George, to his exploration of Western and Eastern esoteric traditions, showing how the prevailing cross-pollination of ideas allowed him to develop a fully integrated rationale for his art and life. The story of Scott's development guides the reader through some of the most fascinating intellectual discourses of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe. Sarah Collins' current research focuses on British music aesthetics and criticism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She has a particular interest in the interaction between turn-of-the-century conceptions of the function of criticism, theories of critical intuition and questions of moral philosophy. She lectured at the University of Queensland from 2006 and joined the faculty ofMonash University in 2012.

When the Hungarian composer GyArgy Ligeti passed away in June 2006, he was widely feted as being one of the greatest composers of our time. His complete published works were recorded during his lifetime and his music continues to inspire a steady stream of performances and scholarship. Ligeti's Laments provides a critical analysis of the composer's works, considering both the compositions themselves and the larger cultural implications of their reception. Bauer both synthesizes and challenges the prevailing narratives surrounding the composer's long career and uses the theme of lament to inform a discussion of specific musical topics, including descending melodic motives, passacaglia and the influence of folk music. But Ligeti 'laments' in a larger sense; his music fuses rigour and sensuality, tradition and the new and influences from disparate high and low cultures, with a certain critical and ironic distance, reflected in his spoken commentary as well as in the substance of his music. The notions of nostalgia, exoticism and the absolute are used to relate works of different eras and genres, along with associated concepts of allegory, melancholy, contemporary subjectivity and the voice.

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.

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.

In 1877, Ruskin accused Whistler of 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'. Was he right? After all, Whistler always denied that the true function of art was to represent anything. If a painting does not represent, what is it, other than mere paint, flung in the public's face? Whistler's answer was simple: painting is music - or it is poetry. Georges Braque, half a century later, echoed Whistler's answer. So did Braque's friends Apollinaire and Ponge. They presented their poetry as music too - and as painting. But meanwhile, composers such as Satie and Stravinsky were presenting their own art - music - as if it transposed the values of painting or of poetry. The fundamental principle of this intermedial aesthetic, which bound together an extraordinary fraternity of artists in all media in Paris, from 1885 to 1945, was this: we must always think about the value of a work of art, not within the logic of its own medium, but as if it transposed the value of art in another medium. Peter Dayan traces the history of this principle: how it created our very notion of 'great art', why it declined as a vision from the 1960s and how, in the 21st century, it is fighting back.

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.

Edmund Rubbra's music has given him a reputation as a 'spiritual' composer, who had an interest in Eastern thought, and a mid-life conversion to Roman Catholicism. This book takes a wide and detailed view of 'spiritual' dimensions or strands that were important in his life, positioning them both biographically and within the context of contemporaneous English culture. It proceeds to interpret through detailed analysis the ways these spiritual aspects are reflected in specific compositions. Thematical treatment of these spiritual issues, touching on Theosophy, dance, Eastern religions and thought, nature, the evolutionary theory of Teilhard de Chardin and the Christ figure, presents a multi-faceted view of Rubbra's life and music. Its contribution to a scholarly re-evaluation of his place within twentieth-century British music and culture engages and meshes with several areas of current scholarly research in the arts and humanities, including academic interest in Theosophy, modernism and the arts, experimental dance and the Indian cultural renaissance and East-West musical interactions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also adds to a burgeoning body of writings on music and spirituality, fuelled by the popularity of later twentieth-century and contemporary composers who make more overt spiritual references in their music.

For Olivier Messiaen, music was a way of expressing his faith. He considered it his good fortune to have been born a Catholic and declared that 'the illumination of the theological truths of the Catholic faith is the first aspect of my work, the noblest and no doubt the most useful'. Messiaen is one of the most widely performed and recorded composers of the twentieth-century and his popularity is increasing, but the theological component of his music has so far largely been neglected, or dealt with superficially, and continues to provide a serious impediment to understanding and appreciating his music for some of his audience. Messiaen the Theologian makes a significant contribution to Messiaen studies by providing cultural and historical context to Messiaen's theology. An international array of Messiaen scholars cover a wide variety of topics including Messiaen's personal spirituality, the context of Catholicism in France in the twentieth century, and comparisons between Messiaen and other artists such as Dante and T.S. Eliot. Interdisciplinary methodologies such as exegesis, theological studies and analysis are used to contribute to the understanding of several major works including A0/00clairs sur l'au-delA!..., Sept HaA-kaA- and Saint FranAois d'Assise. By approaching Messiaen and his music from such important and original perspectives, this book will be of interest not only to musicians and theologians, but also to readers interested in the connection between spirituality and the arts.

Serious scholarship on the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams is currently enjoying a lively revival after a period of relative quiescence, and is only beginning to address the enduring affection of concert audiences for his music. The essays that comprise this volume extend the study of Vaughan Williams's music in new directions that will be of interest to scholars, performers and listeners alike. This volume contains the work of eleven North American scholars who have been recipients of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship based at the composer's own school, Charterhouse, which was created and has been supported by the Carthusian Trust since 1985. This wide-ranging and detailed collection of essays covers the spectrum of genres in which Vaughan Williams wrote, including dance, symphony, opera, song, hymnody and film music. The contributors also employ a range of analytical and historical methods of investigation to illuminate aspects of Vaughan Williams's compositional techniques and influences, musical, literary and visual.

This is the first full-length study of British women's instrumental chamber music in the early twentieth century. Laura Seddon argues that the Cobbett competitions, instigated by Walter Willson Cobbett in 1905, and the formation of the Society of Women Musicians in 1911 contributed to the explosion of instrumental music written by women in this period and highlighted women's place in British musical society in the years leading up to and during the First World War. Seddon investigates the relationship between Cobbett, the Society of Women Musicians and women composers themselves. The book's six case studies - of Adela Maddison (1866-1929), Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Morfydd Owen (1891-1918), Ethel Barns (1880-1948), Alice Verne-Bredt (1868-1958) and Susan Spain-Dunk (1880-1962) - offer valuable insight into the women's musical education and compositional careers. Seddon's discussion of their chamber works for differing instrumental combinations includes an exploration of formal procedures, an issue much discussed by contemporary sources. The individual composers' reactions to the debate instigated by the Society of Women Musicians, on the future of women's music, is considered in relation to their lives, careers and the chamber music itself. As the composers in this study were not a cohesive group, creatively or ideologically, the book draws on primary sources, as well as the writings of contemporary commentators, to assess the legacy of the chamber works produced.

When considering the role music played in the major totalitarian regimes of the century it is music's usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. But as a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship both between art music and politicised mass culture, and between entertainment and propaganda. Nationality, self/other, power and ideology are the dominant themes of this book, whilst key topics include: music in totalitarian regimes; music as propaganda; music and national identity; emigre communities and composers; music's role in shaping identities of 'self' and 'other' and music as both resistance to and instrument of oppression. Taking the contributions together it becomes clear that shared experiences such as war, dictatorship, colonialism, exile and emigration produced different, yet clearly inter-related musical consequences.

The Music of Hugh Wood provides the first ever in-depth study of this well-known, yet only briefly documented composer. Over the years, Wood (b. 1932) has produced a sizeable oeuvre that explores the established genres of symphony, concerto, and quartet on the one hand, and songs and choruses on the other. Underpinned by an awareness of recent philosophical, theoretical and analytical concepts, Dr Edward Venn highlights both the technical basis of Wood's music and the expressive force of his work. In doing so, a picture emerges of Wood as an artist of considerable merit and power. The eclectic blend of national and international influences in the music of Hugh Wood combine to create an individual and distinctive musical language all his own. The book provides an overview of Wood's style, focussing on his engagement with modernism and the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic and formal characteristics of his musical language. From here a more detailed consideration of Wood's development as a composer is advanced, in which his technical development is illustrated alongside an exploration of various aspects of musical meaning embodied in his works. In the process, numerous analytical strategies ranging from formalist to narrative structures are utilized, demonstrating the fecundity and expressivity of Wood's music.

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.

Two crucial moments in the formation and disintegration of musical modernity and the musical canon occurred at the turn of the seventeenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Ljubica Ilic provides a fresh and close look at these moments, exploring the ways musical compositions shift to and away from ideological structures identified with modernity. The focus is on European art music whose grand narrative, defined by tonality and teleological development, begins in the seventeenth century and ends with twentieth-century modernisms. This particular musical "language game" coincides with historical changes in the phenomenological understanding of space and selfhood. A key concept of the book concerns musical compositions that remain without proper conclusions: if the wholesome (musical) work is a manifestation of wholesome subjectivity, the pieces Ilic explores deny it, reflecting conflict of the individual with previous beliefs, with contexts, and even within the self as the basic modern condition. The musical work is, in this case, still bounded and well-defined, but fractured by the incapability or refusal to satisfactorily conclude: the implicit cut forced upon it changes the expected musical flow or - speaking in spatial terms - it influences the musical form. By using the metaphor of space, Ilic explores: how the existence of a separate self as a primary feature of Western modernity becomes negotiated through awareness of the subject's own independence and individuality; innerness as something entirely separate from its surroundings; and the collective space of social interaction. Seeing musical storytelling as a metaphoric representation of selfhood, and modernity as a historical continuum, Ilic examines the boundaries and relationships between the musical work, the subject, and modern European history.

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.

Isolde Ahlgrimm (1914-1995) was an important pioneer in the revival of Baroque and Classical keyboard instruments in her native city, Vienna, and later, throughout Europe and the United States. She trained as a pianist at the Musikakademie in Vienna under the instruction of Viktor Ebenstein, Emil von Sauer and Franz Schmidt. In 1934 she met the musical instrument collector, Dr Erich Fiala, whom she married in 1938. His activities opened up the world of early instruments to her. Using a 1790 fortepiano by Michael Rosenberger, Isolde Ahlgrimm began her career as a specialist on early keyboard instruments with the first in her notable series of Concerte fA1/4r Kenner und Liebhaber, given in Vienna's Palais Palffy in February 1937. Ahlgrimm's career as a harpsichordist also began in 1937, when a new instrument was commissioned from the Ammer brothers in Eisenberg, Germany. In 1943 Ahlgrimm performed her first all-harpsichord programme, which consisted of the Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach. From 1949 to 1956, she devoted herself to performing and recording nearly all of Bach's harpsichord music for the newly-founded Dutch label, Philips, presenting her new approach to the harpsichord to a wider audience. Ahlgrimm's performances of Baroque music represented a radical departure from the distinctly twentieth-century interpretations by the much more famous Wanda Landowska and her followers. Most obviously, Ahlgrimm's harpsichord performances eliminated frequent registration changes (her instrument had hand stops rather than pedals to change registers), and largely eschewed the massive ritardandi and other anachronistic performance practices that were hallmarks of Landowska's essentially Romantic style. Ahlgrimm researched and emphasized rhetorical traditions on which the music was based. This became more pronounced throughout the course of her later performing, writing and teaching career, and it was the beginning of an approach to the performance of eighteenth-century music which was later further developed by Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and their students. Peter Watchorn provides an engaging study of this pioneer, and argues that Isolde Ahlgrimm's contribution to the harpsichord and fortepiano revival was pivotal, and that her use of period instruments and the inspiration she instilled in younger musicians, including Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, has been almost entirely overlooked by the wider musical world.

A thorough examination of Shostakovich's string quartets is long overdue. Although they can justifiably lay claim to being the most significant and frequently performed twentieth-century oeuvre for that ensemble, there has been no systematic English-language study of the entire cycle. Judith Kuhn's book begins such a study, undertaken with the belief that, despite a growing awareness of the universality of Shostakovich's music, much remains to be learned from the historical context and an examination of the music's language. Much of the controversy about Shostakovich's music has been related to questions of meaning. The conflicting interpretations put forth by scholars during the musicological 'Shostakovich wars' have shown the impossibility of fixing a single meaning in the composer's music. Commentators have often heard the quartets as political in nature, although there have been contradictory views as to whether Shostakovich was a loyal communist or a dissident. The works are also often described as vivid narratives, perhaps a confessional autobiography or a chronicle of the composer's times. The cycle has also been heard to examine major philosophical issues posed by the composer's life and times, including war, death, love, the conflict of good and evil, the nature of subjectivity, the power of creativity and the place of the individual - and particularly the artist - in society. Soviet commentaries on the quartets typically describe the works through the lens of Socialist-Realist mythological master narratives. Recent Western commentaries see Shostakovich's quartets as expressions of broader twentieth-century subjectivity, filled with ruptures and uncertainty. What musical features enable these diverse interpretations? Kuhn examines each quartet in turn, looking first at its historical and biographical context, with special attention to the cultural questions being discussed at the time of its writing. She then surveys the work's reception history, and follows with a critical discussion of the quartet's architectural and harmonic features. Using the new tools of Sonata Theory, Kuhn provides a fresh analytical approach to Shostakovich's music, giving valuable and detailed insights into the quartets, showing how the composer's mastery of form has enabled these works to be heard as active participants in the Soviet and Western cultural discourses of their time, while remaining compelling and relevant to twenty-first-century listeners.