Pierre Boulez is arguably the most influential composer of the second half of the twentieth century. Here, Jonathan Goldman provides a fresh appraisal of the composer's music, demonstrating how understanding the evolution of Boulez's ideas on musical form is an important step towards evaluating his musical thought generally. The theme of form arising from a grammar of oppositions - the legacy of structuralism - serves as a common thread in Boulez's output, and testifies to the constancy of Boulez's thought over and above his several notable aesthetic and stylistic changes. This book lends a voice to the musical works by using the writings - particularly the mostly untranslated collected College de France lectures (1976-95) - to comment on them. It also uses five musical works from the post-1975 period to exemplify concepts developed in Boulez's writings, presenting a vivid portrait of Boulez's extremely varied production.

Most histories of American music have ignored the presence of twelve-tone music before and during the Second World War, and virtually all have ignored its presence after 1970, even though so many major composers continued (and continue) to compose serially. This book provides a comprehensive history of twelve-tone music in America, and compels a revised picture of American music since 1925 as a dynamic steady-state within which twelve-tone serialism has long been, and still remains, a persistent presence: a vigorous and unbroken tradition for more than eighty years. Straus outlines how, instead of a rigid orthodoxy, American twelve-tone music is actually a flexible, loosely-knit cultural practice. The book provides close readings of thirty-seven American twelve-tone works by composers including Copland, Babbitt, Stravinsky and Carter, among many others, who represent a typically American diversity of background and life circumstances, and strips away the many myths surrounding twelve-tone music in America.

Modernism in music still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a postmodern persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the 'new musicology'. Yet these critiques have failed to dampen its ongoing resilience. The picture of modernism has considerably broadened and diversified, and has remained a pivotal focus of debate well into the twenty-first century. This Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be. At the same time, it resists any dilution of the term that would see its indiscriminate application to practically any and all music of a certain period. In addition to addressing issues already well established in modernist studies such as aesthetics, history, institutions, place, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, production and performance, communication technologies and the interface with postmodernism, this volume also explores topics that are less established; among them: modernism and affect, modernism and comedy, modernism versus the 'contemporary', and the crucial distinction between modernism in popular culture and a 'popular modernism', a modernism of the people. In doing so, this text seeks to define modernism in music by probing its margins as much as by restating its supposed essence.

The most influential compositional movement of the past fifty years, spectralism was informed by digital technology but also extended the aesthetics of pianist-composers such as Franz Liszt, Alexander Scriabin and Claude Debussy. Students of Olivier Messiaen such as Tristan Murail and Gerard Grisey sought to create a cooperative committed to exploring the evolution of timbre in time as a basis for the musical experience. In The Spectral Piano, Marilyn Nonken shows how the spectral attitude was influenced by developments in technology but also continued a tradition of performative and compositional virtuosity. Nonken explores shared fascinations with the musical experience, which united spectralists with their Romantic and early Modern predecessors. Examining Murail's Territoires de l'oubli, Jonathan Harvey's Tombeau de Messiaen, Joshua Fineberg's Veils, and Edmund Campion's A Complete Wealth of Time, she reveals how spectral concerns relate not only to the past but also to contemporary developments in philosophical aesthetics.

In this, the first book to take a big-picture view of the entire post punk period, acclaimed author and music journalist Simon Reynolds recreates a time of tremendous urgency and idealism in pop music. Full of anecdote and insight, and featuring the likes of Joy Division, The Fall, Pere Ubu, PiL and Talking Heads, Rip It Up And Start Again stands as one of the most inspired and inspiring books on popular music ever written.

Traditionally, ideas about twentieth-century 'modernism' - whether focused on literature, music or the visual arts - have made a distinction between 'high' art and the 'popular' arts of best-selling fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas 'Fats' Waller and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the 'popularity' of popular music in order to reconsider received and seeming self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.

An icon of British national identity and one of the most widely performed twentieth-century composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams has been as much misunderstood as revered; his international impact and enduring influence on areas as diverse as church music, film scores and popular music has been insufficiently appreciated. This volume brings together a team of leading scholars, examining all areas of the composer's output from new perspectives, and re-evaluating the cultural politics of his lifelong advocacy for the music-making of ordinary people. Surveys of major genres are complemented by chapters exploring such topics as the composer's relationship with the BBC and his studies with Ravel; uniquely, the book also includes specially commissioned interviews with major living composers Peter Maxwell Davies, Piers Hellawell, Nicola Lefanu and Anthony Payne. The Companion is a vital resource for all those interested in this pivotal figure of modern music.

This is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It treats those forms as inextricably intertwined, and sets them in a wide variety of social and critical contexts. The book comprises four sections - Histories, Techniques and Technologies, Mediation, Identities - with 16 thematic chapters. Each of these explores a musical or cultural topic as it developed over many years, and as it appeared across a diversity of musical practices. In this way, the text introduces both key musical repertoire and critical-musicological approaches to that work. It historicises music and musical thinking, opening up debate in the present rather than offering a new but closed narrative of the past. In each chapter, an overview of the topic's chronology and main issues is illustrated by two detailed case studies.

Music in Germany since 1968 modifies the dominant historiography of music in post-war Germany by shifting its axis from the years of reconstruction after 1945 to the era following the events of 1968. Arguing that the social transformations of 1968 led to a new phase of music in Germany, Alastair Williams examines the key topics, including responses to serialism, music and politics, and the re-evaluation of tradition. The book devotes central chapters to Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang Rihm, as focal points for areas such as postmodernism, musical semiotics and action-based gestures. Further chapters widen the scope by considering the precursors and contemporaries of Rihm and Lachenmann, especially in relation to the idea of historical inclusion. Williams's study also assesses the development of the Darmstadt summer courses, addresses the significance of German reunification, and considers the role of Germany in a new stage of musical modernism.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Research and Information Guide presents the most extensive annotated bibliography of its subject yet produced. It offers comprehensive coverage of the English composer's prose works and accounts for over 1,000 secondary sources from all critical and scholarly eras. A single-numbering format and substantial indexes facilitate efficient searches of what is the most complete bibliography of Ralph Vaughan Williams since Neil Butterworth's guide to research was published by Garland in 1990.

John Cage is best known for his indeterminate music, which leaves a significant level of creative decision-making in the hands of the performer. But how much licence did Cage allow? Martin Iddon's book is the first volume to collect the complete extant correspondence between the composer and pianist David Tudor, one of Cage's most provocative and significant musical collaborators. The book presents their partnership from working together in New York in the early 1950s, through periods on tour in Europe, until the late stages of their work from the 1960s onwards, carried out almost exclusively within the frame of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Tackling the question of how much creative flexibility Tudor was granted, Iddon includes detailed examples of the ways in which Tudor realised Cage's work, especially focusing on Music of Changes to Variations II, to show how composer and pianist influenced one another's methods and styles.

The first comprehensive study of the music of Frederick Delius (1862-1934), from his earliest pieces up to his final compositions, with background information and a complete list of works. There are many biographies and articles about Frederick Delius's life (1862-1934), but there has never been a comprehensive book about his music until now. Everything he wrote, from his earliest compositions right up to his finalworks, is analysed here; the history and background of each work and its critical reception are all examined, set against events in Delius's life and the wider musical world. The book contains numerous music examples and quotations from many contemporary newspapers and journals. A complete list of all of Delius's works, with catalogue numbers, and a select bibliography are also provided. MARTIN LEE-BROWNE is the Chairman of The Delius Society, a former Chairman of the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival, and author of The Life & Times of Frederic Austin (1996). PAUL GUINERY is a pianist and associate of the Royal College of Music, as well as a former broadcaster for BBC Radio 3 and co-author (with Lyndon Jenkins) of Delius and Fenby, A Photographic Journey (The Delius Society, 2004).

Music, Sound and Space is the first collection to integrate research from musicology and sound studies on music and sound as they mediate everyday life. Music and sound exert an inescapable influence on the contemporary world, from the ubiquity of MP3 players to the controversial use of sound as an instrument of torture. In this book, leading scholars explore the spatialisation of music and sound, their capacity to engender modes of publicness and privacy, their constitution of subjectivity, and the politics of sound and space. Chapters discuss music and sound in relation to distinctive genres, technologies and settings, including sound installation art, popular music recordings, offices and hospitals, and music therapy. With international examples, from the Islamic soundscape of the Kenyan coast, to religious music in Europe, to First Nation musical sociability in Canada, this book offers a new global perspective on how music and sound and their spatialising capacities transform the nature of public and private experience.

Modernism is both a contested aesthetic category and a powerful political statement. Modernist music was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis and forcibly replaced by socialist realism under the Soviets. Sympathetic philosophers and critics have interpreted it as a vital intellectual defence against totalitarianism, yet some American critics consider it elitist, undemocratic and even unnatural. Drawing extensively on the philosophy of Heidegger and Badiou, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism proposes a new dialectical theory of faithful, reactive and obscure subjective responses to musical modernism, which embraces all the music of Western modernity. This systematic definition of musical modernism introduces readers to theory by Badiou, Zizek and Agamben. Basing his analyses on the music of William Walton, Harper-Scott explores connections between the revolutionary politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and responses to the event of modernism in order to challenge accepted narratives of music history in the twentieth century.

Over the course of an astonishingly long career, Elliott Carter has engaged with many musical developments of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries from his early neo-classic music of the interwar period, to his modernist works of conflict and opposition in the 1960s and 1970s, to the reshaping of a modernist aesthetic in his latest compositions. Elliott Carter Studies throws new light on these many facets of Carter's extensive musical oeuvre. This collection of essays presents historic, philosophic, philological and theoretical points of departure for in-depth investigations of individual compositions, stylistic periods in Carter's output and his contributions to a variety of genres, including vocal music, the string quartet and the concerto. The first multi-authored book to appear on Carter's music, it brings together new research from a distinguished team of leading international Carter scholars, providing the reader with a wide range of perspectives on an extraordinary musical life."

For much of his career, the internationally known and still active Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has been understood as an iconoclast who challenged and resisted the musical establishment. This book explores his compositions as a case study for exploring the social and aesthetic implications of new music. Everett chronicles the evolution of Andriessen's music over the course of five decades: the formative years in which he experimented with serialism and collage techniques; his political activism in the late 1960s; 'concept' works from the 1970s that provide musical commentary on philosophical writings by Plato, St Augustine and others; theatrical and operatic collaborations with Robert Wilson and Peter Greenaway in the 1980s and 1990s; and recent works that explore contemplative themes on death and madness. Everett's analysis of Andriessen's music draws on theories of parody, narrativity, and intertextuality that have gained currency in musicological discourse in recent years.

Arvo Part is one of the most influential and widely performed contemporary composers. Around 1976 he developed an innovative new compositional technique called 'tintinnabuli' (Latin for 'sounding bells'), which has had an extraordinary degree of success. It is frequently performed around the world, has been used in award-winning films, and pieces such as Fur Alina and Spiegel im Siegel have become standard repertoire. This collection of essays, written by a distinguished international group of scholars and performers, is the essential guide to Arvo Part and his music. The book begins with a general introduction to Part's life and works, covering important biographical details and outlining his most significant compositions. Two chapters analyze the tintinnabuli style and are complemented by essays which discuss Part's creative process. The book also examines the spiritual aspect of Part's music and contextualizes him in the cultural milieu of the twenty-first century and in the marketplace.

The modern German composer discusses his childhood, his musical development, electronic music, chance, music theater, and music education.

Traditionally, ideas about twentieth-century 'modernism' - whether focused on literature, music or the visual arts - have made a distinction between 'high' art and the 'popular' arts of best-selling fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas 'Fats' Waller and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the 'popularity' of popular music in order to reconsider received and seeming self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.

The French composer Olivier Messiaen is one of the major figures of twentieth-century music. This collection of scholarly essays offers new cultural, historical, biographical and analytical perspectives on Messiaen's musical oeuvre from 1941 to 1992. The volume includes: a fascinating snapshot of Messiaen's life in occupied France; a study of the Surrealist poetics of Messiaen's song cycle Harawi; a chapter on Messiaen's iconoclastic path to the avant-garde heritage that he bequeathed to his pupils; discussion on Messiaen's place in twentieth-century music; and detailed analysis of specific works, including his opera St Francois d'Assise. The chapters provide fresh insights on the origins, style and poetics of Messiaen's music, and therefore provide an inspiration and foundation for future scholarship. Reflecting and expanding upon the broad range of Messiaen's own interdisciplinary interests, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of music, art, literature and theology.

Pierre Boulez is arguably the most influential composer of the second half of the twentieth century. Here, Jonathan Goldman provides a fresh appraisal of the composer's music, demonstrating how understanding the evolution of Boulez's ideas on musical form is an important step towards evaluating his musical thought generally. The theme of form arising from a grammar of oppositions - the legacy of structuralism - serves as a common thread in Boulez's output, and testifies to the constancy of Boulez's thought over and above his several notable aesthetic and stylistic changes. This book lends a voice to the musical works by using the writings - particularly the mostly untranslated collected College de France lectures (1976-95) - to comment on them. It also uses five musical works from the post-1975 period to exemplify concepts developed in Boulez's writings, presenting a vivid portrait of Boulez's extremely varied production.

2009 marks the 75th birthday of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, an occasion that presents an opportunity for reflection upon, and appreciation of, a period of compositional achievement that extends from the 1950s to the present. This book forms part of that reflection through a statement of the current condition of research on Maxwell Davies's music. Detailed analytical discussions of individual works, such as the opera Taverner and the First Symphony, coexist with broader issues and perspectives, including Davies's own writings about music, his engagement with sonata form, the compositional source, problems of text, and the situating of this music within and in relation to 'modern times'. The book describes selected works from all periods of Davies's rich and diverse career, resulting in a portrait of the music that, while it may be incomplete, reveals the essence of this remarkable composer and his music.

Demonstrating the vibrant nature of current research on Maurice Ravel, one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century French music, a team of distinguished international scholars provides new interdisciplinary perspectives and insights. Through historical, critical, and analytical means, the volume reveals the symbiotic relationships between Ravel's music and aesthetic, cultural, literary, gender, performance-based, and medical studies. While the chapters progress from French aesthetic-literary association, including Colette and Proust, to more extended disciplinary couplings, with American history, jazz, dance, and neurology, the organization is relatively free to enable other thematic links to emerge. The volume presents a refreshing variety of scholarly approaches to Ravel and his music, set within broad contexts and current musicological debates. In a Ravelian spirit, it is intended that the essays will serve collectively as a model for expanding the agendas of other composer-based studies.

Richard Strauss is a composer much loved among audiences throughout the world, both in the opera house and the concert hall. Despite this popularity, Strauss was for many years ignored by scholars, who considered his commercial success and his continued reliance on the tonal system to be liabilities. However, the past two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in the composer. This Companion surveys the results, focusing on the principal genres, the social and historical context, and topics perennially controversial over the last century. Chapters cover Strauss's immense operatic output, the electrifying modernism of his tone poems, and his ever-popular Lieder. Controversial topics are explored, including Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich and the sexual dimension of his works. Reintroducing the composer and his music in light of recent research, the volume shows Strauss's artistic personality to be richer and much more complicated than has been previously acknowledged.

When Shostakovich Studies was published in 1995, archival research in the ex-Soviet Union was only just beginning. Since that time, research carried out in the Shostakovich Family Archive, founded by the composer's widow Irina Antonovna Shostakovich in 1975, and the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture has significantly raised the level of international Shostakovich studies. At the same time, scholarly understanding of Soviet society and culture has developed significantly since 1991, and this has also led to a more nuanced appreciation of Shostakovich's public and professional identity. Shostakovich Studies 2 reflects these changes, focusing on documentary research, manuscript sources, film studies and musical analysis informed by literary criticism and performance. Contributions in this volume include chapters on Orango, Shostakovich's diary, behind-the-scenes events following Pravda's criticisms of Shostakovich in 1936 and a new memoir of Shostakovich by the Soviet poet Evgeniy Dolmatovsky, as well as analytical studies from a range of perspectives.