This short collection of essays focuses on four areas of immersive sound environments: repetition, sustained tones, performed installations and approaches to extended forms. Through in depth exploration of the experiential nature of these subjects, the authors offer reflections upon the materials used for these environments, how they are organised, and the consequences of this on how we listen.

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.

for women's chorus and piano. This cantata features sixteen highly-varied folk song settings, bound together in seasonal groupings to take the listener on an engaging journey through the year from Spring to Winter. The prologue implores us to 'sing and be merry', and many of the songs facilitate this with their charmingly light-hearted melodies and imaginative orchestral accompaniment. There are also darker moments, such as the haunting and heart-rending setting of 'The Unquiet Grave' in 'Autumn'. For this comprehensive new edition, the editor Graham Parlett has drawn on all available sources, providing an authoritative full score with critical commentary. This edition also makes available new materials for the version for string orchestra and piano, and a new vocal score.

Second edition of a book which caused huge controversy in its first printing - now completely revised and updated. Argues that research into the cultural history of music can significantly help our understanding of the evolution of English national identity. Only book of its kind to cover such a revolutionary period in British music. Looks at how music reflected the privileged elite, ignoring the vast majority of 'music lovers', and was crucial in the construction of a British national identity. The second edition features a new and expanded introduction, a new chapter on Mendelssohn's Elijah - and the complete text has also been updated and revised. -- .

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 Classical Revolution studies the recent emergence of a new brand of classical music, one rooted in "pre-modern" tonal traditions. Through polemical essays on the conflict between re-emergent tradition and the usual, bland "modern music" in which academic atonalism, process music and attempts to borrow some life from pop and world music form a rather isolated territory, Borstlap examines both the philosophical and aesthetic positions of these new classical composers, positions too often misunderstood because they create a new and unexpected category, not in the margins of music life but directly related to the central performance culture. As Borstlap points out, part of the ongoing problem of contemporary music, a problem first created by modernism, is a profound misunderstanding of musical modernism itself. At the heart of his argument is the distinction between music and "sonic art" a distinction that renders superfluous the loaded labels of "progressive" and "conservative" in disputes over music. Addressing questions of cultural identity, musical meaning, and the aesthetics of beauty, The Classical Revolution closely examines the institutional biases of the modern-music establishment and its all-too-solid grip on the production and reception of new music. By drawing attention to new classical composers in a traditionalist mold, Borstlap illustrates how their increasing success in the realm of performance-as opposed to academic study-bespeaks a broader set of trends in serious contemporary composition. The Classical Revolution is an accessible and informative polemic for music lovers with an interest in the meaning of classical music in general, and the classical tradition in particular which seems to be re-emerging in the 21st century. It should equally interest academics, music directors, promoters, programmers, musicians, and music students alike since here, a wide field of new musical experience opens itself up, with a hopeful perspective on the future of music.

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.

This updated second edition is an in-depth exploration of Elgar's compositions and of writings by and about the composer and his music. The past 16 years have seen a steady increase in scholarly publications and the emergence of The Elgar Society Journal, as well as further discoveries of the composer's MSS and letters, and the new edition incorporates this latest research. The compositions are examined in a work-by-work catalog, in chronological order, in which each entry gives a complete census and collation of manuscript, proof, text, biographical, printed edition and bibliographical sources for each item. The listing also includes unfinished sketches and details of much unpublished material. The bibliography section covers selected established literature as well as details of reviews and articles contained in the European periodicals at the climax of Elgar's career. Christopher Kent was nominated unanimously by the Scrutiny Panel of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Research Centres for the 2014 C.B. Oldman Prize for the most outstanding reference resource published in 2014. He received the award at their Annual Conference held at the University of Aston, Birmingham in April.

Jazz in New Orleans provides accurate information about, and an insightful interpretation of, jazz in New Orleans from the end of World War II through 1970. Suhor, relying on his experiences as a listener, a working jazz drummer, and writer in New Orleans during this period, has done a great service to lovers of New Orleans music by filling in some gaping holes in postwar jazz history and cutting through many of the myths and misconceptions that have taken hold over the years. Skillfully combining his personal experiences and historical research, the author writes with both authority and immediacy. The text, rich in previously unpublished anecdotes and New Orleans lore, is divided into three sections, each with an overview essay followed by pertinent articles Suhor wrote for national and local journals including Down Beat and New Orleans Magazine. Section One, "Jazz and the Establishment," focuses on cultural and institutional settings in which jazz was first battered, then nurtured. It deals with the reluctance of power brokers and the custodians of culture in New Orleans to accept jazz as art until the music proved itself elsewhere and was easily recognizable as a marketable commodity. Section Two, "Traditional and Dixieland Jazz," highlights the music and the musicians who were central to early jazz styles in New Orleans between 1947 and 1953. Section Three, "An Invisible Generation," will help dispel the stubborn myth that almost no one was playing be-bop or other modern jazz styles in New Orleans before the current generation of young artists appeared in the 1980s.

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

This book examines Delius's individual approaches to genre, form, harmony, orchestration and literary texts which gave the composer's musical style such a unique voice. Frederick Delius' (1862-1934) music has proved impervious to analytical definition. Delius's approaches to genre, form, harmony, orchestration and literary texts are all highly individual, not to say eccentric in their deliberate aim to avoid conformity. Rarely does Delius follow a conventional line, and though one can readily point to important influences, the larger Gestalt of each work has a syntax and coherence for which conventional analytical methods are mostly inadequate. Delius's musical style has also defied one of the most essential critical tools of his musical epoque - that of national identity. His style bears no relation either to the Victorian or Edwardian aesthetic of British music spearheaded by Parry, Stanford and Elgar before the First World War, nor to the more overtly nationalist, folk-song-orientated pastoralism of post-war Britain in such composers as Vaughan Williams and Holst. In contrast, Delius acknowledged himself a 'stateless' individual and considered that his music refused to belong to any national school or movement. To test these claims, the book explores a number of important factors. Delius's musical education at the Leipzig Conservatorium and the works he produced there. Delius's musical voice, notably his harmonic and melodic style and the close structural relationship between these two factors. The book also explores the question of Delius and 'genre' in which the investigation of form is central, especially in opera, the symphonic poem, the choral work (where words are seminal to the creation of structural design) and the sonata and concerto (to which Delius brought his own individual solution). Other significant factors are Delius's cosmopolitan use of texts, operatic plots and picturesque impressions, his relationship to Nietzsche's writings and the genre of dance, and the role of his 'earlier' works (1888-1896) in which it is possible to plot a course of stylistic change with reference to the influences of Grieg, Sinding, Florent Schmitt, Wagner, Strauss and Debussy.

Australian by birth but a longtime resident of Great Britain, David Lumsdaine (b.1931) is central to both Australian and British modernism. During the early 1970s Australian musical modernism was at its height. Lumsdaine and his Australian contemporaries were engaged with practices from multiple places, producing music that displays the attributes of their disparate influences; in so doing they formed a new conception of what it meant to be an Australian composer. The period is similarly important in Britain, for it saw the rise to prominence of composers such as Birtwistle, Davies, Goehr, Gilbert, Wood, Cardew and many others who were Lumsdaine's contemporaries, colleagues and friends. Hooper presents here a series of analyses of Lumsdaine's compositions, focusing on works written between 1966 and 1980. At the early end of this period is Kelly Ground, for solo piano. One of Lumsdaine's first acknowledged works, Kelly Ground connects explicitly with the music of high modernism, employing ideas about temporality as espoused by Ligeti, Stockhausen and Boulez, to form a new ritual for the (now mythical) Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Hooper places Lumsdaine's music in the context of Australian and British avant-gardes, and reveals its elegance, lyricism and technical virtuosity.

In the first decade of the twentieth-century, many composers rejected the principles of tonality and regular beat. This signaled a dramatic challenge to the rationalist and linear conceptions of music that had existed in the West since the Renaissance. The 'break with tonality', Neo-Classicism, serialism, chance, minimalism and the return of the 'sacred' in music, are explored in this book for what they tell us about the condition of modernity. Modernity is here treated as a complex social and cultural formation, in which mythology, narrative, and the desire for 're-enchantment' have not completely disappeared. Through an analysis of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Boulez and Cage, 'the author shows that the twentieth century composer often adopted an artistic personality akin to Max Weber's religious types of the prophet and priest, ascetic and mystic. Twentieth Century Music and the Question of Modernity advances a cultural sociology of modernity and shows that twentieth century musical culture often involved the adoption of 'apocalyptic' temporal narratives, a commitment to 'musical revolution', a desire to explore the limits of noise and sound, and, finally, redemption through the rediscovery of tonality. This book is essential reading for those interested in cultural sociology, sociological theory, music history, and modernity/modernism studies.

The rehabilitation of British music began with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford. Ralph Vaughan Williams assisted in its emancipation from continental models, while Gerald Finzi, Edmund Rubbra and George Dyson flourished in its independence. Stephen Town's survey of Choral Music of the English Musical Renaissance is rooted in close examination of selected works from these composers. Town collates the substantial secondary literature on these composers, and brings to bear his own study of the autograph manuscripts. The latter form an unparalleled record of compositional process and shed new light on the compositions as they have come down to us in their published and recorded form. This close study of the sources allows Town to identify for the first time instances of similarity and imitation, continuities and connections between the works.

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.

Brings new insights to the music of well-known European composers by telling a fascinating, little-known story about French music publishing, specifically through the lens of Jacques Durand's Édition Classique. French composers, performers and musicologists acted as editors of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European 'classics', primarily for piano. Among these editors were Fauré, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Ravel and Dukas; the objects of their enquiries included core works by Rameau, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin. Presenting six composer-editor case studies, the volume shows that the French 'accent', both musical and cultural, upon this predominantly Austro-German music was highly varied. Editorial responses range from scholarly approaches to those directed by performance or compositional agendas, and from pan-European to strongly patriotic stances. Intriguing intersections are revealed between old and new, and between French and cross-European canons. Beyond editing, the book explores the Édition's role in pedagogy and performance, including by pianists Robert Casadesus and Yvonne Loriod, and in the reassertion of contemporary French composition, especially regarding innovation around neoclassicism. It will interest a wide readership, including musicologists, performers and concert-goers, cultural historians and other humanities scholars.

Conlon Nancarrow (1912--1997) was an American-Mexican composer whose works for the player piano exhibit a level of innovation and complexity which remains unmatched even today--his catalogue of works is often considered the Well-Tempered Clavier of the twentieth century. Encounters with Conlon Nancarrow, by Jurgen Hocker, is the first extensive biography of Nancarrow. Hocker gives insight to the life and personality of the often reclusive Nancarrow, making use of many as-yet-unpublished sources and interviews as well as a timeline and a comprehensive catalogue of Nancarrow's works. Encounters with Conlon Nancarrow is an indispensable reference book for musicians, musicologists, and player piano collectors, but it is also sure to appeal to anyone with a particular interest in American contemporary music.

Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) were contemporaries at the Royal College of Music. The three composers' careers were launched with performances in the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts in the 1930s - a time when, in Britain, as Williams noted, a woman composer was considered 'very odd indeed'. Even so, by the early 1940s all three had made remarkable advances in their work: Lutyens had become the first British composer to use 12-note technique, in her Chamber Concerto No. 1 (1939-40); Maconchy had composed four string quartets of outstanding quality and was busy rethinking the genre; and Williams had won recognition as a composer with great flair for orchestral writing with her Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1940) and Sea Sketches (1944). In the following years, Lutyens, Maconchy and Williams went on to compose music of striking quality and to attain prominent positions within the British music scene. Their respective achievements broke through the 'sound ceiling', challenging many of the traditional assumptions which accompanied music by female composers. Rhiannon Mathias traces the development of these three important composers through analysis of selected works. The book draws upon previously unexplored material as well as radio and television interviews with the composers themselves and with their contemporaries. The musical analysis and contextual material lead to a re-evaluation of the composers' positions in the context of twentieth-century British music history.

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.

This collection of original essays is in tribute to the work of Derek Scott on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As one of the leading lights in Critical Musicology, Scott has helped shape the epistemological direction for music research since the late 1980s. There is no doubt that the path taken by the critical musicologist has been a tricky one, leading to new conceptions, interactions, and heated debates during the past two decades. Changes in musicology during the closing decades of the twentieth century prompted the establishment of new sets of theoretical methods that probed at the social and cultural relevance of music, as much as its self-referentiality. All the scholars contributing to this book have played a role in the general paradigmatic shift that ensued in the wake of Kerman's call for change in the 1980s. Setting out to address a range of approaches to theorizing music and promulgating modes of analysis across a wide range of repertories, the essays in this collection can be read as a coming of age of critical musicology through its active dialogue with other disciplines such as sociology, feminism, ethnomusicology, history, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, aesthetics, media studies, film music studies, and gender studies. The volume provides music researchers and graduate students with an up-to-date authoritative reference to all matters dealing with the state of critical musicology today.

Vaughan Williams's 6th Symphony was composed immediately after the Second World War and its dramatic and at times violent musical language was long felt to be a comment on that conflict (though the composer denied it had any programmatic intent). Its power and invention were immediately recognized and it has remained part of the concert repertoire ever since. For this newly engraved edition, editor David Lloyd-Jones has consulted all extant sources and materials to create a score matching the composer's intentions. Fully compatible orchestral parts are available on hire.

This book explores the web of pitch relations that generates the musical language of non-serialized twelve-tone music and supplies both the analytical materials and methods necessary for analyses of a vast proportion of the 20th century musical repertoire. It does so in a simple, clear, and systematic manner to promote an easily accessible and global understanding of this music. Since the chromatic scale is the primary source for the pitch materials of 20th-century music, common sub-collections of the various modes and interval cycles serve as the basis for their mutual transformation. It is precisely this peculiarity of the non-serialized twelve-tone system that allows for an array of pitch relations and modal techniques hitherto perceived difficult if not impossible to analyze. Susanni and Antokoletz present the principles, concepts, and materials employed for analysis using a unique theoretic-analytical approach to the new musical language. The book contains a large number of original analyses that explore a host of composers including Ives, Stravinsky, Bartok, Messiaen, Cage, Debussy, Copland, and many more, providing insight into the music of the tonal revolution of the twentieth century and contributing an important perspective to how music works in general.

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

This volume explores twentieth-century organ music through in-depth studies of the principal centers of composition, the most significant composers and their works, and the evolving role of the instrument and its music. The twentieth-century was a time of unprecedented change for organ music, not only in its composition and performance but also in the standards of instrument design and building. Organ music was anything but immune to the complex musical, intellectual, and socio-political climate of the time. Twentieth-Century Organ Music examines the organ's repertory from the entire period, contextualizing it against the background of important social and cultural trends. In a collection of twelve essays, experienced scholars survey the dominant geographic centers of organ music (France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United States, and German-speaking countries) and investigate the composers who made important contributions to the repertory (Reger in Germany, Messiaen in France, Ligeti in Eastern and Central Europe, Howells in Great Britain). Twentieth-Century Organ Music provides a fresh vantage point from which to view one of the twentieth century's most diverse and engaging musical spheres.