Sir Andrzej Panufnik used to say that he communicated in music, not words. But his literary legacy is substantial, as this book demonstrates. Its major element is Composing Myself, the autobiography he wrote in 1985, long since a collector's item and here republished in a fully annotated new edition. It provides a graphic account of an often dramatic life. Panufnik's early success in pre-World War II Poland was soon eclipsed by the horrors of the Nazi occupation. Composing Myself documents in striking detail the desperate circumstances in which Panufnik repeatedly found himself - and the personal courage with which he responded. Post-War Poland then progressed from theovert terrors of Nazism to the deadening hand of Communism, and Panufnik charts the methodical attempts of Party orthodoxy to stifle independent thought. In spite of the success he enjoyed as a conductor, Panufnik was unable to compose under such restrictions, feeling he was being suffocated. Though a patriot to his bones, he boldly decided that escape to the west was the only option, and his account of his defection - in 1954, at the height of the Cold War - reads like a le Carre thriller. Safe in England, he was able to rebuild his career, overcoming official neglect of his music to become one of Britain's best-respected composers - and to be greeted as a national hero when he finally managed to return to his beloved Poland, free at last. Composing Myself is complemented by the complete programme notes he wrote to shed light on the impulse behind, and design of, his music, complete with theoften visually striking diagrams he drew to articulate their formal logic. A third section includes his few other articles, including a 1955 report to the unsuspecting west of the true nature of Polish intellectual life under Communism, an insightful radio broadcast on Szymanowski and a brief tribute to Bartok. Finally, Part IV collects the more important of the interviews Panufnik gave over the course of his career.

How does music manifest through time and, simultaneously, how does time manifest through music? For the experimental psychologist, the experience of time during music listening or performance is something that may be studied empirically. For philosophers, fundamental questions of time continue to be the subject of ongoing debate in philosophy: is time linear? What are past, present and future? What is duration and what makes a perceptual present, or moment? For the performer, musical time can exist as a subjective vehicle of expression. Although any of the three could be chosen as a starting point, the order presented in the text's structure offers a journey from empiricism to application, via contemplation. This volume deals with the complex relationship between music and time. It presents a staunchly interdisciplinary perspective defined by the terms Psychology, Philosophy and Practice. The text is divided into sections concerning "experience", "enactment" and "meaning", as points of intersection between the three primary methodologies of the title. As such, this is a book for the scholar, the student of music, and the interested reader. For the scholar, it offers new interconnections and comparisons. For the student, its pluralistic approach presents the most comprehensive overview available to date regarding the topic. For the interested reader, the volume offers answers to questions which concern us as listeners and audiences at concerts, gigs, and festivals.

Popular Musicology and Identity paves new paths for studying popular music's entwinement with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, locality, and a range of other factors. The book consists of original essays in honour of Stan Hawkins, whose work has been a major influence on the musicological study of gender and identity since the early 1990s. In the new millennium, musicological approaches have proliferated and evolved alongside major shifts in the music industry and popular culture. Reflecting this plurality, the book reaches into a range of musical contexts, eras, and idioms to critically investigate the discursive structures that govern the processes through which music is mobilised as a focal point for negotiating and assessing identity. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, Popular Musicology and Identity accounts for the state of popular musicology at the onset of the 2020s while also offering a platform for the further advancement of the critical study of popular music and identity. This collection of essays thus provides an up-to-date resource for scholars across fields such as popular music studies, musicology, gender studies, and media studies.

The displacement of Chou Wen-chung from his native China in 1948 forced him into Western-European culture. Ultimately finding his vocation as a composer, he familiarized himself with classical and contemporary techniques but interpreted these through his traditionally oriented Chinese cultural perspective. The result has been the composition of a unique body of repertoire that synthesizes the most progressive Western compositional idioms with an astonishingly traditional heritage of Asian approaches, not only from music, but also from calligraphy, landscape painting, poetry, and more. Chou's importance rests not only in his compositions, but also in his widespread influence through his extensive teaching career at Columbia University, where his many students included Bright Sheng, Zhou Long, Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Joan Tower, and many more. During his tenure at Columbia, he also founded the U.S.-China Arts Exchange, which continues to this day to be a vital stimulus for multicultural interaction. The volume will include an inventory of the Chou collection in the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland.

Most classical musicians, whether in orchestral or ensemble situations, will have to face a piece by composers such as Ligeti, Messiaen, Varese or Xenakis, while improvisers face music influenced by Dave Holland, Steve Coleman, Aka Moon, Weather Report, Irakere or elements from the Balkans, India, Africa or Cuba. Rafael Reina argues that today's music demands a new approach to rhythmical training, a training that will provide musicians with the necessary tools to face, with accuracy, more varied and complex rhythmical concepts, while keeping the emotional content. Reina uses the architecture of the South Indian Karnatic rhythmical system to enhance and radically change the teaching of rhythmical solfege at a higher education level and demonstrates how this learning can influence the creation and interpretation of complex contemporary classical and jazz music. The book is designed for classical and jazz performers as well as creators, be they composers or improvisers, and is a clear and complete guide that will enable future solfege teachers and students to use these techniques and their methodology to greatly improve their rhythmical skills. An accompanying website of audio examples helps to explain each technique. For examples of composed and improvised pieces by students who have studied this book, as well as concerts by highly acclaimed karnatic musicians, please copy this link to your browser: http://www.contemporary-music-through-non-western-techniques.com/pages/1587-video-recordings

Winner of the 2022 Vincent H. Duckles Award, Music Library Association John Adams: A Research and Information Guide offers the first comprehensive guide to the musical works and literature of one of the leading American composers of our time. The research guide catalogs and summarizes materials relating to Adams's work, providing detailed annotated bibliographic entries for both primary and secondary sources. Covering writings by and interviews with Adams, books, journal articles and book chapters, newspaper articles and reviews, dissertations, video recordings, and other sources, the guide also contains a chronology of Adams's life, a discography, and a list of compositions. Robust indexes enable researchers to easily locate sources by author, composition, or subject. This volume is a major reference tool for all those interested in Adams and his music, and a valuable resource for students and researchers of minimalism, contemporary American music, and twentieth-century music more broadly.

This lively and readable study explores popular music between the wars, the era of Noel Coward and Ivor Novello, Gracie Fields and George Formby. James J. Nott tells the story from the days of the jazz mania of the 1920s to the outbreak of the Second World War. He examines the huge popularity of dance halls such as the fabled Hammersmith Palais, and concludes with a fascinating checklist of the most popular songs.

Investigating Musical Performance considers the wide range of perspectives on musical performance made tangible by the cross-disciplinary studies of the last decades and encourages a comparison and revision of theoretical and analytical paradigms. The chapters present different approaches to this multi-layered phenomenon, including the results of significant research projects. The complex nature of musical performance is revealed within each section which either suggests aspects of dialogue and contiguity or discusses divergences between theoretical models and perspectives. Part I elaborates on the history, current trends and crucial aspects of the study of musical performance; Part II is devoted to the development of theoretical models, highlighting sharply distinguished positions; Part III explores the relationship between sign and sound in score-based performances; finally, the focus of Part IV centres on gesture considered within different traditions of musicmaking. Three extra chapters by the editors complement Parts I and III and can be accessed via the online Routledge Music Research Portal. The volume shows actual and possible connections between topics, problems, analytical methods and theories, thereby reflecting the wealth of stimuli offered by research on the musical cultures of our times.

NOMINATED FOR THE JAZZ JOURNALISTS ASSOCIATION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 WINNER OF THE PRESTO JAZZ BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 An articulate, scrupulously researched account based on first-hand information, this book presents Brubeck's contribution to music with the critical insight that it deserves - ***** BBC Music Magazine This is the writing about jazz that we've been waiting for - Mike Westbrook The sheer descriptive verve, page after page, made me want to listen to every single musical example cited. A major achievement - Stephen Hough 'Definitive . . . remarkable. Clark writes intelligently and joyously.' - Mojo In 2003, music journalist Philip Clark was granted unparalleled access to jazz legend Dave Brubeck. Over the course of ten days, he shadowed the Dave Brubeck Quartet during their extended British tour, recording an epic interview with the bandleader. Brubeck opened up as never before, disclosing his unique approach to jazz; the heady days of his 'classic' quartet in the 1950s-60s; hanging out with Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis; and the many controversies that had dogged his 66-year-long career. Alongside beloved figures like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, Brubeck's music has achieved name recognition beyond jazz. But finding a convincing fit for Brubeck's legacy, one that reconciles his mass popularity with his advanced musical technique, has proved largely elusive. In Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time, Clark provides us with a thoughtful, thorough, and long-overdue biography of an extraordinary man whose influence continues to inform and inspire musicians today. Structured around Clark's extended interview and intensive new research, this book tells one of the last untold stories of jazz, unearthing the secret history of 'Take Five' and many hitherto unknown aspects of Brubeck's early career - and about his creative relationship with his star saxophonist Paul Desmond. Woven throughout are cameo appearances from a host of unlikely figures from Sting, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, and Keith Emerson, to John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varese. Each chapter explores a different theme or aspect of Brubeck's life and music, illuminating the core of his artistry and genius.

By common consent the leading British composer of the twentieth-century's middle decades, Britten continues to create significant contexts for the work of those who survived and succeeded him. This collection of revised reprints of essays, reviews and analyses first published between 1995 and 2018 surveys a cross-section of contemporary classical composition in the UK. The governing perspective is the impact of the life and work of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) on British composers who, with the exception of Michael Tippett and Robert Simpson, were born between the 1930s and the 1980s. Despite obvious and considerable differences in character and style, British composers like Harrison Birtwistle and Thomas Ades, Robin Holloway and James Dillon, have continued, like Britten himself, to seek personal perspectives on the still prominent procedures and personalities of more distant baroque, classical and romantic eras. Most if not all of these composers would deny being influenced by Britten, and many have reservations about his music. Yet, in light of the fact that British musical life and the institutions that support it have not changed radically since Britten's own time - the pace of technological change notwithstanding - to speak of 'British music after Britten' inevitably involves something more than mere chronology. As by common consent the leading British composer of the twentieth-century's middle decades, Britten continues to create significant contexts for the work of those who survived and succeeded him.

The life of an extraordinary artist and intellect: the composer, author and socialite Alma Mahler, whose life spanned one of the most captivating and dramatic periods in history Alma Mahler was once at the epicentre of Vienna's artistic and intellectual life. A talented composer in her own right, she was open, generous, remarkably creative, curious, challenging and zealous in her pursuit of love. Artists, architects, musicians and writers jostled to join her coterie. Gustav Klimt was her first kiss; Gustav Mahler her first husband. But her life was haunted by tragedy, and the support and inspiration that Alma gave to the men she loved came at the heavy price of her own artistic fulfilment. Drawing extensively on previously unpublished diaries and letters, Cate Haste illuminates the passionate spirit of one of history's most complex and charismatic muses, a modern woman with an elemental vitality that could scarcely be contained by her century - who will live forever in the art she created and inspired.

A singer in an evening dress, a grand piano. A modest-sized audience, mostly well-dressed and silver-haired, equipped with translation booklets. A program consisting entirely of songs by one or two composers. This is the way of the Lieder recital these days. While it might seem that this style of performance is a long-standing tradition, German Song Onstage demonstrates that it is not. For much of the 19th century, the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were heard in the home, salon, and, no less significantly, on the concert platform alongside orchestral and choral works. A dedicated program was rare, a dedicated audience even more so. The Lied was a genre with both more private and more public associations than is commonly recalled. The contributors to this volume explore a broad range of venues, singers, and audiences in distinct places and time periods-including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany-from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century. These historical case studies are set alongside reflections from a selection of today's leading musicians, offering insights on current Lied practices that will inform future generations of performers, scholars, and connoisseurs. Together these case studies unsettle narrow and elitist assumptions about what it meant and still means to present German song onstage by providing a transnational picture of historical Lieder performance, and opening up discussions about the relationship between history and performance today.

Drawing on newly available archival material, key works, and correspondence of the era, Australian Music and Modernism defines "Australian Music" as an idea that emerged through the lens of the modernist discourse of the 1960s and 70s. At the same time that the new "Australian Music" was distinctive of the nation, it was also thoroughly connected to practices from Europe and shaped by a new engagement with the music of Southeast Asia. This book examines the intersection of nationalism and modernism at this formative time. During the early stages of "Australian Music" there was disagreement about what the idea itself ought to represent and, indeed, whether the idea ought to apply at all. Michael Hooper considers various perspectives offered by such composers as Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale, and Nigel Butterley and analyzes some of the era's significant works to articulate a complex understanding of "Australian Music" at its inception.

This collection brings together for the first time essays on postmodernism and music and covers a wide range of musical styles including concert music, jazz, film music, and popular music. Topics include:
* the importance of technology and marketing in postmodern music
* the appropriation and reworking of Western music by non-Western bands
* postmodern characteristics in the music of Gorecki, Rochberg, Zorn and Bolcom as well as Bjork and Wu Tang Clan
* issues of music and race
* comparisons of postmodern architecture to postmodern music.

This Companion provides a comprehensive analysis and appraisal of all of Scott's available (published and unpublished) music and a broad picture of his entire output in literary, dramatic and philosophical genres. Cyril Scott (1879-1970) was an English composer, writer and poet. He was a prolific composer-pianist writing over 400 works including four symphonies, three operas and concerti for piano, violin, cello, oboe and harpsichord. Oftenperforming his own compositions he became a pioneer of British piano music, and his music was admired by composers as diverse as Debussy, Strauss, Stravinsky and Percy Grainger, the last a lifelong friend. A true polymath, Scottwas also the author of forty-one books, including two autobiographies and one unpublished memoir, on subjects ranging from music, alternative medicine and humour to occultism, theosophy and Christianity. In addition, he wrote poems and plays and painted watercolours. This Companion explores the life and work of this remarkably creative man. It provides a comprehensive analysis and appraisal of all the available music and includes a complete catalogue of his musical works, along with a discography. Several works completely unknown to the musical world, both music and literary (such as the memoir 'Near the End of Life'), are here newly catalogued and discussed. Altogether, thevolume gives a broad picture of Scott's entire output in literary, dramatic and philosophical genres. LEWIS FOREMAN has published many books and articles on music. His Boydell titles include Bax: A Composer and hisTimes (2007), The John Ireland Companion (2011) and with Susan Foreman Felix Aprahamian (2015). DESMOND SCOTT is the son of Cyril Scott. He was an actor, theatre director and TV writer. He is also a sculptor and past-President of the Sculptors Society of Canada. He has contributed to The New Percy Grainger Companion (Boydell Press, 2010) and has published articles in musical journals on Cyril Scott. LESLIE DE'ATH isProfessor, Faculty of Music, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Singing, a pianist, conductor and opera director. He has recorded Scott's complete solo piano music for Dutton. Contributors: PETER ATKINSON, MARTYN BRABBINS, LESLIE DE'ATH, PETER DICKINSON, LEWIS FOREMAN, KATHERINE HUDSON, VALERIE LANGFIELD , KURT LELAND, STEPHEN LLOYD, STEVEN MARTIN, ROHINTEN DADDY MAZDA, RICHARD PRICE, EDMUND RUBBRA, DESMOND SCOTT, MARTIN YATES

The works of twenty composers from the golden age of English romantic song, major figures - Parry, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Quilter, Ireland, Gurney, Warlock and Finzi - studied alongside the lesser-known. Constantly illuminating. JOHN STEANE, GRAMOPHONE The composers in this book represent the outstanding songwriters from what we can now see as the golden age of English romantic song. As well as the major figures - Parry, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Quilter, Ireland, Gurney, Warlock and Finzi - there are chapters on lesser-known composers, such as Denis Browne and Charles Orr. Detailed consideration is given to three songwriters who have sufferedunaccountable neglect, Arthur Somervell, Armstrong Gibbs and Herbert Howells, and there are chapters on Elgar, Delius and Holst, whose reputations were made in other fields but whose contribution to English song is nevertheless important. Also taking their rightful places in the book are Frank Bridge, Arnold Bax, George Butterworth and E.J. Moeran. Each chapter begins with a discussion of its composer's song-output and of the poets and poetry he sets, and goes on to give an account of the influences on him and the hallmarks of his style; the songs are then discussed in detail, focusing on the major works. The text is illustrated with musical examples and there is a comprehensive bibliography and index. TREVOR HOLD was a composer and poet who wrote extensively on English song. His setting of Laurie Lee's 'Day of these Days' won the English Poetry and Song Society/English Music Society 2002 GoldenJubilee Song Competition. He died in January 2004.

Musicians frequently incorporated portions of works by other musicians into their own compositions and performances throughout the twentieth century. This book examines how this practice of "quotation" affected cultural dialogues regarding race, childhood, madness and the mass media. When a musician borrows from a piece, he or she draws upon not only a melody but also the cultural associations of the original piece. By working with and altering a melody, a musician also transforms those associations.

A groundbreaking study of the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich-and the consequences for music worldwide With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany's historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment.

As a noted composer and critic, Paul Dukas was a major figure in fin-de-siecle and early twentieth-century French music. Best known for L'Apprenti sorcier, he was internationally recognised as an artist and intellectual ofdistinction who contributed significantly to Parisian musical cultures and critical debates. As a noted composer and critic, and later an editor and composition teacher, Paul Dukas (1865-1935) was a major figure in fin-de-siecle and early twentieth-century French music. Although his catalogue of published scores was relatively modest in quantity, he was internationally recognised as an artist and intellectual of distinction who contributed significantly to Parisian musical cultures and critical debates as they evolved from the 1890s until the 1930s Moving in the same circles as Debussy and Faure, as well as networking with trailblazers such as the Ballets Russes director Sergei Diaghilev and the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, Dukas created works that reflect French sensibilities but also resonate with transnational audiences. L'Apprenti sorcier is still his best-known work, while the opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue has been revived and remains relevant for the twenty-first century. Works such as the Piano Sonata and the ballet La Peri respectively exemplify the twin attractions of tradition and progress for the composer. Intensely self-critical, however, he ended up destroying many of his scores. This book is the first full-length Anglophone study of Dukas. It perceives his critical essays as a form of creative, philosophical thought that synthesised the riches of the Parisian music scene yet also represented the formationand development of his own artistic voice. Investigating Dukas's interrelated identities as composer and critic, it seeks to explain his broad aesthetic motivations and artistic agenda. LAURA WATSON is Lecturer in Musicat Maynooth University.

First emerging in North America and Europe in the late 1920s, contemporary percussion practices have transitioned from the fringes of contemporary music to the forefront over the past 90 years. In the 1960s contemporary percussion practices reached Australian shores and a new generation of artists added their voices to this narrative. The role of Australian activity is not yet embedded in the wider narrative of international contemporary percussion, nor is the significance of developments in contemporary percussion practices fully realised in the context of Australian music history. In this monograph, political, social and cultural influences on this art form will be examined for the first time in a historical survey of contemporary percussion music in Australia over a 50-year period, from 1960 to 2010. The rise of the percussion ensemble in the twentieth century to a standard chamber music ensemble is now recognised as one of the major advances in western art music practice internationally. A focus will be placed on ensemble activity via definitive documentation and analysis of ensembles that are amongst the most pioneering and longest established of Australian contemporary music organisations, including the Australian Percussion Ensemble, Synergy Percussion, Adelaide Percussions, Nova Ensemble, Tetrafide Percussion, Taikoz, Clocked Out and Speak Percussion amongst others. Closing with a discussion of influences and identity, this historical narrative will expand our understanding of the impact of Australian contributions to the international contemporary music scene while simultaneously examining how developments in contemporary percussion have contributed to Australia's cultural identity.

Identity and Diversity in New Music: The New Complexities aims to enrich the discussion of how musicians and educators can best engage with audiences, by addressing issues of diversity and identity that have played a vital role in the reception of new music, but have been little-considered to date. Marilyn Nonken offers an innovative theoretical approach that considers how the environments surrounding new music performances influence listeners' experiences, drawing on work in ecological psychology. Using four case studies of influential new music ensembles from across the twentieth century, she considers how diversity arises in the musical environment, its impact on artists and creativity, and the events and engagement it makes possible. Ultimately, she connects theory to practice with suggestions for how musicians and educators can make innovative music environments inclusive.

The displacement of Chou Wen-chung from his native China in 1948 forced him into Western-European culture. Ultimately finding his vocation as a composer, he familiarized himself with classical and contemporary techniques but interpreted these through his traditionally oriented Chinese cultural perspective. The result has been the composition of a unique body of repertoire that synthesizes the most progressive Western compositional idioms with an astonishingly traditional heritage of Asian approaches, not only from music, but also from calligraphy, landscape painting, poetry, and more. Chou's importance rests not only in his compositions, but also in his widespread influence through his extensive teaching career at Columbia University, where his many students included Bright Sheng, Zhou Long, Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Joan Tower, and many more. During his tenure at Columbia, he also founded the U.S.-China Arts Exchange, which continues to this day to be a vital stimulus for multicultural interaction. The volume will include an inventory of the Chou collection in the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland.

A conductor is one of classical music's most recognisable but misunderstood figures, attracting so many questions:

'Surely orchestras can play perfectly well without you? '

'Do you really make any difference to the performance?'

'Are the musicians even watching you?'

The Silent Musician is not a manual for conductors, nor a history of conducting. It is for all who wonder what conductors actually do, and why they matter.

Roderick Chadwick and Peter Hill give a detailed account of the evolution of Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux for piano solo, from its initial conception in the Black Forest in 1953 to its completion and premiere in the Parisian 'Concerts du Domaine Musical' at the end of the decade. Through close examination of the composer's birdsong cahiers they demonstrate how Messiaen translated nature into music in a way that had a major impact on his later work. They also consider issues of performance, and Messiaen's artistic relationship with his dedicatee and wife-to-be, Yvonne Loriod, including the significance of her two recordings of the cycle. This book illuminates the Catalogue from a variety of angles: its historical significance, as a study of how mimicry of nature can be transformed into music of mesmeric originality, and as a guide that offers a wealth of fresh insights to listeners and performers.

What is music, and why does it move us? From Pythagoras to the present, writers have struggled to isolate the essence of "pure" or "absolute" music in ways that also account for its profound effect. In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds traces the history of these efforts across more than two millennia, paying special attention to the relationship between music's essence and its qualities of form, expression, beauty, autonomy, as well as its perceived capacity to disclose philosophical truths. The core of this book focuses on the period between 1850 and 1945. Although the idea of pure music is as old as antiquity, the term "absolute music" is itself relatively recent. It was Richard Wagner who coined the term, in 1846, and he used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For Wagner, music that was "absolute" was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. His contemporary, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, embraced this quality of isolation as a guarantor of purity. Only pure, absolute music, he argued, could realize the highest potential of the art. Bonds reveals how and why perceptions of absolute music changed so radically between the 1850s and 1920s. When it first appeared, "absolute music" was a new term applied to old music, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had become-paradoxically-an old term associated with the new music of modernists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Bonds argues that the key developments in this shift lay not in discourse about music but rather the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century-line and color, as opposed to object-helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism. By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to the twentieth-century, Bonds not only provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept but also provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how essence has been used to explain music's effect. A long awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field, Absolute Music will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history, theory, and aesthetics of music.