The state of contemporary music is dizzyingly diverse in terms of style, media, traditions, and techniques. How have trends in music developed over the past decades? Music Composition in the 21st Century is a guide for composers and students that helps them navigate the often daunting complexity and abundance of resources and influences that confront them as they work to achieve a personal expression. From pop to classical, the book speaks to the creative ways that new composers mix and synthesize music, creating a music that exists along a more continuous spectrum rather than in a series of siloed practices. It pays special attention to a series of critical issues that have surfaced in recent years, including harmony, the influence of minimalism, the impact of technology, strategies of "openness," sound art, collaboration, and improvisation. Robert Carl identifies an emerging common practice that allows creators to make more informed aesthetic and technical decisions and also fosters an inherently positive approach to new methods.

Uniquely revealing interviews with one of the world's greatest living composers. Gyoergy Kurtag (b. 1926) is widely regarded as one of the foremost composers in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Born in Romania, he received crucial training in Paris from Olivier Messiaen and Marianne Stein. He was also shaped by his broadening contact there with the music of Webern and such challenging literary works as the plays of Samuel Beckett. After many years in Hungary, teaching at the Budapest Academy of Music,Kurtag settled near Bordeaux with his wife Marta. The two regularly perform duo-recitals of his music. In 2006, his . . . concertante . . . (2003, for violin, viola and orchestra) won the coveted Grawemeyer Award for MusicComposition. This unique set of interviews with Kurtag, alone or with his wife, gives a fascinating insight into the composer's personality, which is marked by shyness but also an unquenchable thirst for impressions of every kind [artistic, natural and human]. The two speak with disarming openness about their lives -- the background against which masterpieces like Messages of the Late Miss R. V. Troussova (1976-80, for soprano and chamber orchestra) or Stele (1994, for orchestra) were written. The analysis of certain of Kurtag's works, especially of . . . concertante . . ., shows the way that his mind works: no system, no dogma, no formulae -- rather, basic human emotions expressed through means that speak directly to the listener's innermost feelings. The Hungarian music publisher Balint Andras Varga has spent nearly forty years working for and with composers.He has published several books, including extensive interviews with Lutoslawski, Berio, and Xenakis.

This is an illustrated biography of the American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Despite international fame and success, he was a man constantly struggling with inner conflicts. The best loved and most successful conductor of his generation, also a virtuoso pianist, he was adored by an international public, but suffered years of hostile criticism from the New York press. An inspiration to fellow American musicians, he was the first native American to direct a major American orchestra, and the first to conquer Europe (conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and at La Scala, Milan). His conducting style was famously flamboyant, yet he possessed a rare ability to communicate his music to the listener, who was often held spellbound. But Bernstein often dismissed conducting for its temporary character, and declared himself to be primarily a composer. Among other musicals, Bernstein wrote the world-famous West Side Story (1957), and the moving score to the film On the Waterfront, but he never enjoyed unanimous critical acclaim for his serious classical works, such as Chichester Psalms and Mass. In later years he feared that he would be remembered solely for his musicals.

A biography of Benjamin Britten which presents a panorama of British musical life since the 1920s.

The Whistling Blackbird: Essays and Talks on New Music is the long-awaited book of essays from Robert Morris, the greatly admired composer and music theorist. In these essays, Morris presents a new and multifaceted view of recent developments in American music. His views on music, as well as his many compositions, defy easy classification, favoring instead a holistic, creative, and critical approach. The Whistling Blackbird contains fourteen essays and talks, divided into three parts, preceded by an "Overture" that portrays what it means to compose music in the United States today. Part 1 presents essays on American composers John Cage, Milton Babbitt, Richard Swift, and Stefan Wolpe. Part 2 comprises talks on Morris's music that illustrate his ideas and creative approaches over forty years of music composition, including his outdoor compositions, an ongoing project that began in 1999. Part 3 includes four essays in music criticism: on the relation of composition to ethnomusicology; on phenomenology and attention; on music theory at the millennium; and on issues in musical time. Threaded throughout this collection of essays are Morris's diverse and seemingly disparate interests and influences. English romantic poetry, mathematical combinatorics, group and set theory, hiking, Buddhist philosophy, Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting, jazz and nonwestern music, chaos theory, linguistics, and the American transcendental movement exist side by side in a fascinating and eclectic portrait of American musical composition at the dawn of the new millennium. Robert Morris is Professor of Music Composition at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

'To Richter (no first name necessary), warm greetings to the best pianist in the Soviet Union - indeed in the whole world.' Prokofiev Throughout a life dedicated to music, Richter maintained a stubborn silence about his own ideals and aspirations. Here at last he opens up his heart in these exceptional interviews with Bruno Monsaingeon, who became close to Richter not long before the pianist's death in 1995. These conversations take us on a journey which begins with Richter's childhood memories, follows his early career and his development into 'an artist of the people', and finally charts his rise to international acclaim. Richter's personal notebooks, kept for nearly thirty years, constitute an unparalleled witness to the music of our time. The pianist writes with precision, humour and clarity and is uninhibitedly himself. These are the private thoughts of a nonconformist, one of the greatest performers of the century, yet one whose life was inextricably bound to the history of the USSR.

A new narrative for the emergence of human music, drawing from archaeology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and developments in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. In this path-breaking book, renowned musicologist Gary Tomlinson draws from these areas to construct a new narrative for the emergence of human music. Starting at a period of human prehistory long before Homo sapiens or music existed, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that, by changing the communication and society of prehumen species, laid the foundation for musical behaviors in more recent times. He traces in Neandertals and early sapiens the accumulation and development of these capacities, and he details their coalescence into modern musical behavior across the last hundred millennia. But A Million Years of Music is not about music alone. Tomlinson builds a model of human evolution that revises our understanding of the interaction of biology and culture across evolutionary time-scales, challenging and enriching current models of our deep history. As he tells his story, he draws in other emerging human traits: language, symbolism, a metaphysical imagination and the ritual it gives rise to, complex social structure, and the use of advanced technologies. Tomlinson's model of evolution allows him to account for much of what makes us a unique species in the world today and provides a new way of understanding the appearance of humanity in its modern form.

In recent years the music of minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass has, increasingly, become the subject of important musicological reflection, research and debate. Scholars have also been turning their attention to the work of lesser-known contemporaries such as Phill Niblock and Eliane Radigue, or to second and third generation minimalists such as John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Michael Nyman and William Duckworth, whose range of styles may undermine any sense of shared aesthetic approach but whose output is still to a large extent informed by the innovative work of their minimalist predecessors. Attempts have also been made by a number of academics to contextualise the work of composers who have moved in parallel with these developments while remaining resolutely outside its immediate environment, including such diverse figures as Karel Goeyvaerts, Robert Ashley, Arvo PArt and Brian Eno. Theory has reflected practice in many respects, with the multimedia works of Reich and Glass encouraging interdisciplinary approaches, associations and interconnections. Minimalism's role in culture and society has also become the subject of recent interest and debate, complementing existing scholarship, which addressed the subject from the perspective of historiography, analysis, aesthetics and philosophy. The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music provides an authoritative overview of established research in this area, while also offering new and innovative approaches to the subject.

Love it or loathe it, few would disagree that the music of Harrison Birtwistle stands amongst the most assured, original and challenging music ever to have been produced by a British composer. While for some the uncompromisingly modernist surface of his music can be an obstacle to closer acquaintance, for others, it is Birtwistle's articulation of deep aspects of the human psyche that continues to excite and fascinate. In this book, Jonathan Cross - a leading commentator on contemporary music - aims to uncover the sources of Birtwistle's thinking, and to present a critical account of his musical, dramatic and aesthetic preoccupations through an examination of such topics as theatre, myth, ritual, pastoral, pulse and line. He offers a range of contexts within which the music can be understood so that the curious and the initiated alike may be drawn towards new and enriching experiences of the extraordinarily powerful music of Harrison Birtwistle.

Fully revised edition of Peter Dickinson's acclaimed study of one of the great British composers of the twentieth century. Sir Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) was one of the leading British composers of the mid-twentieth century and his music has unique qualities which will ensure its survival far beyond transient fashions. Peter Dickinson knew Berkeley for more than thirty years and this much enlarged book places the composer in the context of his extended study with Nadia Boulanger, his friendship with Britten, and the achievement of an independent voice of remarkable distinction. The new book now benefits from interviews with Lady Berkeley, Michael Berkeley, Julian Bream, Colin Horsley, Sir John Manduell, Nicholas Maw, Malcolm Williamson and the late Basil Douglas, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Norman del Mar. There are photographs, a full list of works, bibliographies and over a hundred musical examples. PETER DICKINSON is Head of Music at the Institute of United States Studies at the University of London and an Emeritus Professor of the Universities of Keele and London.

This second of two volumes of the letters and diaries of Benjamin Britten is supplemented by the editors' detailed commentary and extensive contemporary documentation. The aim is to present a portrait not only of the composer but of an age.

Volume One of these remarkable letters and diaries opens with a letter from Britten aged nine to his formidable mother, Edith. Music is already at the centre of his life, and it accompanies him through prep and public school and then to London to the Royal College of Music, where the phenomenally gifted but inexperienced young composer is plunged into metropolitan life and makes influential new friends, among them W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. This was a time of prodigious musical creativity, a growing awareness of his sexuality, and the dawning of his political convictions. Most importantly, during this period Britten met Peter Pears and established the musical and personal relationship that was to last a lifetime. Volume One comes to a close in May 1939, when Britten, accompanied by Pears, departs for North America. The letters and diaries in this illuminating first volume and its successor are supplemented by the editors' detailed commentary and by exhaustive contemporary documentation. Together they constitute a comprehensive portrait not only of the composer but of an age.

This Element explores the life and work of Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969), as a composer, violinist, pianist and author. She lived a remarkable life in Poland, navigating the complex world of Polish communist society and Soviet dominance after the Second World War, and brought Polish music to wider European attention. The Element describes the historical context of her life, her major achievements, and the language and development of her compositions, which attracted notable interest in Polish musical life. She wrote a wide range of pieces, making a significant contribution to the string repertoire, with important String Quartets and violin works. In her sixty years she achieved impressive triumphs as a women composer, served the Polish Composers Union and often judged major international competitions.

This edition provides the full set of letters in English translation. It is complemented by the letters' online availability in their original language. Rosa Harriet Newmarch [1857-1940] was well-known in her lifetime as the leading British authority on Russian music, yet she also enjoyed a long and close friendship with the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius [1865-1957]. This edition traces a personal and professional relationship that lasted more than three decades, as documented in more than 130 letters, notes and telegrams currently held in the National Archives of Finland. The correspondence, conducted in a mixture of French and German, reveals the intense friendship between Sibelius and Newmarch, sheds detailed light on Newmarch's contribution to the development of musical life in Britain, and provides some of Sibelius's most intimate commentary on his own works, as well as on those of other composers. This edition contains the complete extant correspondence between Newmarch and Sibelius in English translation, complemented by comprehensive commentaries on the events and personalities referred to, and is prefaced by an extensive introduction outlining Newmarch's definitive role in promoting Sibelius and his music in early twentieth-century Britain. An appendix reproduces a previously unknown programme note that Newmarch wrote for the first British performance of Sibelius's Fourth Symphony. The book's translation and publication of the letters in English is complemented by the letters' online availability in their original language. PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK is University Lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford, and Tutor and Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford.

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.

The stage works of Saint-Saens range from grand open-air pageants to one-act comic operas, and include the first composed film score. Yet, with the exception of Samson et Dalila, his twelve operas have lain in the shadows since the composer's death in 1921. Widely performed in his lifetime, they vanished from the repertory - never played, never recorded - until now. With four twenty-first-century revivals as a backdrop, this timely book is the first study of Saint-Saens's operas, demonstrating the presence of the same breadth and versatility as in his better known works. Hugh Macdonald's wide knowledge of French music in the nineteenth century gives a powerful understanding of the different conventions and expectations that governed French opera at the time. The interaction of Saint-Saens with his contemporaries is a colourful and important part of the story.

Offers an intimate view of a contemporary composer's creative world and how others may interpret it. Howard Skempton has contributed to British musical life for more than half a century, as composer, performer and commentator. His music is characterised by simplicity yet sophistication and is appreciated by lay and specialist listeners in equal measure. Skempton studied in London with Cornelius Cardew in the late 1960s, co-founding the Scratch Orchestra, and has written over 600 pieces since then, informed by and informing compositional trends. His outputincludes pieces for solo piano, accordion, cello, and guitar, chamber ensemble, orchestra, and voice. His music is performed by leading artists and recorded by, amongst others, Sony and NMC. This book offers an intimateview of a composer's creative world and how others may interpret it. It is not a conventional "life and works" though it contains a timeline, authorised work list and discography for orientation. It is written for anyone interested in contemporary music and (auto)biography, whether performer, listener, specialist, or student. The first four chapters comprise transcripts of conversations between Skempton and Esther Cavett followed by reflections from different commentators (respectively Matthew Head, Heather Wiebe, Arnold Whittall and Pwyll Ap Sion). Skempton and Cavett discuss his musical origins, the wide array of musical and extra-musical influences on his music, his early adult life in London, his compositional development and processes, and how he teaches composition. The reflections are rich and wide-ranging, providing biographical, cultural and aesthetic insights and including close readings of keyscores. The penultimate chapter draws upon voices of Skempton's performers (Peter Hill, Thalia Myers, John Tilbury and James Weeks). To close, Cavett reflects on how Skempton told his story and the process of describing a creative life in music. The book includes manuscripts of six previously unpublished compositions and images of Skempton and his collaborators. ESTHER CAVETT is Senior Research Fellow at King's College, London. MATTHEWHEAD is Professor of Music at King's College, London. CONTRIBUTORS: Esther Cavett, Rosie Clements, Luke Deane, Matthew Head, Peter Hill, Thalia Myers, Howard Skempton, Pwyll Ap Sion, John Tilbury, James Weeks, HeatherWiebe, Arnold Whittall.

for Tenor Tuba (Euphonium) and piano Vaughan Williams's Concerto for Bass Tuba and Orchestra was the first major concerto to be written for the instrument. It was composed in 1953-4 to mark the 50th anniversary of the LSO, and was premiered by the orchestra's principal tuba player, Philip Catelinet. The original plan to transpose it for Euphonium was not realised during the composer's lifetime, and only now, in this transcription by David Childs, has that goal been attained, with Vaughan Williams's orchestration deftly transposed and rearranged by Rodney Newton to allow this characteristic work to enter the repertoire of many more players.

A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was an English classical scholar and poet who had an enormous influence on many British poets and musicians. A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was both a celebrated poet and the foremost classicist of his day. His poetry was set to music by numerous composers including Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney, John Ireland and Samuel Barber. Housman's painstaking vocation, to restore classical manuscripts by correcting textual errors, took up virtually the whole of his working life. A seemingly inaccessible, aloof man, he never set out tobe a professional poet, yet poetry poured out of him and became his monument. His renowned A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems were born of an inner crisis, sparked by a profound but unreciprocated attachment fora fellow undergraduate. To be sexually different in the time of Oscar Wilde was to invite ostracism and disgust. This fact, allied with his secretiveness and penchant for irony, reinforced his reticence on personal matters. Untilnow, he has remained a hidden personality, held in the public mind as prim and grim. This biography reveals by contrast a man of many facets, one companionable in small groups, generous to a fault, and always on the lookout for humour and fun; a master of English prose; a witty and compelling after-dinner speaker; an occasional writer of nonsense verse; a frequenter of the music hall; an intrepid early traveller by air; and a connoisseur of food and wine. Drawing on Housman's published letters and on 81 significant new finds, Edgar Vincent conjures up a new Housman, created out of his reactions to the events of his life as he experienced them. It weaves together his scholarly life and the biographical elements in his poetry to examine his emotional and sexual needs with dispassion and empathy and to uncover his hidden sensibilities and creative world. EDGAR VINCENT read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford. Following Oxford he was commissioned in the Navy, spending most of his time with the Royal Marines. Subsequently he worked for Imperial Chemical Industries for thirty years. He then fulfilled a life-longambition to write his book Nelson: Love & Fame, published by Yale University Press in 2003. The book was shortlisted for the BBC 4 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, was a New York Times Notable Book and was named one ofAtlantic Monthly's Books of the Year.

The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, first published in 2004, is an appraisal of the development of music in the twentieth century from the vantage-point of the twenty-first. This wide-ranging and eclectic book traces the progressive fragmentation of the European 'art' tradition, and its relocation as one tradition among many at the century's end. While the focus is on Western traditions, both 'art' and popular, these are situated within the context of world music, including a case study of the interaction of 'art' and traditional musics in post-colonial Africa. An international authorship brings a wide variety of approaches to music history, but the aim throughout is to set musical developments in the context of social, ideological, and technological change, and to understand reception and consumption as integral to the history of music.

Schoenberg and Redemption presents a new way of understanding Schoenberg's step into atonality in 1908. Reconsidering his threshold and early atonal works, as well as his theoretical writings and a range of previously unexplored archival documents, Julie Brown argues that Schoenberg's revolutionary step was in part a response to Wagner's negative charges concerning the Jewish influence on German music. In 1898, and especially 1908, Schoenberg's Jewish identity came into confrontation with his commitment to Wagnerian modernism to provide an impetus to his radical innovations. While acknowledging the broader turn-of-the-century Viennese context, Brown draws special attention to continuities between Schoenberg's work and that of Viennese moral philosopher Otto Weininger, himself an ideological Wagnerian. She also considers the afterlife of the composer's ideological position when, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the concept of redeeming German culture of its Jewish elements took a very different turn.

While acknowledging that Pierre Boulez is not a philosopher, and that he is wary of the potential misuse of philosophy with regard to music, this study investigates a series of philosophically charged terms and concepts which he uses in discussion of his music. Campbell examines significant encounters which link Boulez to the work of a number of important philosophers and thinkers, including Adorno, Levi-Strauss, Eco and Deleuze. Relating Boulez's music and ideas to broader currents of thought, the book illuminates a number of affinities linking music and philosophy, and also literature and visual art. These connections facilitate enhanced understanding of post-war modernist music and Boulez's distinctive approach to composition. Drawing on a wide range of previously unpublished documentary sources and providing musical analysis of a number of key scores, the book traces the changing musical, philosophical and intellectual currents which inform Boulez's work.

With extracts from the composer's letters, writings, interviews, and broadcasts, and supported by evidence from his sketchbooks and manuscripts, Meaning and Identity in the Orchestral Music of Michael Tippett explores Tippett's intentions and argues that the experiences that triggered his creative impulses are integral to understanding his music. In his discussion of Tippett's creative process, Thomas Schuttenhelm attempts to recapture the circumstances under which Tippett's orchestral works were created, to document how his visionary aspirations were developed and sustained throughout the creative cycle, and to chart how conception was transmuted from idea through to performance. Analysing Tippett's orchestral works throughout his long career, from the Symphonic Movement of 1931 to his final masterpiece The Rose Lake in 1991-3, Schuttenhelm explores each work in detail to offer a comprehensive commentary on one of the most influential British composers of the twentieth century.

This collection of essays is the first book-length study of music history and cosmopolitanism, and is informed by arguments that culture and identity do not have to be viewed as primarily located in the context of nationalist narratives. Rather than trying to distinguish between a true cosmopolitanism and a false cosmopolitanism, the book presents studies that deepen understanding of the heritage of this concept - the various ways in which the term has been used to describe a wide range of activity and social outlooks. It ranges over a two hundred-year period, and more than a dozen countries, revealing how musicians and audiences have responded to a common humanity by embracing culture beyond regional or national boundaries. Among the various topics investigated are: musical cosmopolitanism among composers in Latin America, the Ottoman Empire, and Austro-Hungarian Empire; cosmopolitan popular music historiography; cosmopolitan musical entrepreneurs; and musical cosmopolitanism in the metropolises of New York and Shanghai.