Although best known as the sister of Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-47) was a virtuoso pianist and a composer of considerable merit in her own right. Her oeuvre of more than 400 compositions remained largely unknown for more than a century after her untimely death, and her newly rediscovered reputation as a composer rests chiefly with her piano music. This volume is the first American publication of her important early works. Reproduced directly from rare first editions, its contents include "Vier Lieder fur das Pianoforte, "Op. 2, Op. 6, and Op. 8, in addition to two selections from S"ix Melodies pour le Piano," Op. 4 and Op. 5. Introduction.

In Rethinking Schubert, today's leading Schubertians offer fresh perspectives on the composer's importance and our perennial fascination with him. Subjecting recurring issues in historical, biographical and analytical research to renewed scrutiny, the twenty-two chapters yield new insights into Schubert, his music, his influence and his legacy, and broaden the interpretative context for the music of his final years. With close attention to matters of style, harmonic and formal analysis, and text setting, the essays gathered here explore a significant portion of the composer's extensive output across a range of genres. The most readily explicable aspect of Schubert's appeal is undoubtedly our continuing engagement with the songs. Schubert will always be the first port of call for scholars interested in the relationship between music and the poetic text, and several essays in Rethinking Schubert offer welcome new inquiries into this subject. Yet perhaps the most striking feature of modern scholarship is the new depth of thought that attaches to the instrumental works. This music's highly protracted dissemination has combined with a habitual critical hostility to produce a reception history that is hardly congenial to musical analysis. Empowered by the new momentum behind theories of nineteenth-century harmony and form and recently-published source materials, the sophisticated approaches to the instrumental music in Rethinking Schubert show decisively that it is no longer acceptable to posit Schubert's instrumental forms as flawed lyric alternatives to Beethoven. What this volume provides, then, is not only a fresh portrait of one of the most loved composers of the nineteenth century but also a conspectus of current Schubertian research. Whether perusing unknown repertoire or refreshing canonical works, Rethinking Schubert reveals the extraordinary methodological variety that is now available to research, painting a portrait of Schubert that is vibrant, plural, trans-national, and complex.

‘Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love.’ Romantic composer Hector Berlioz

Berlioz should know. He didn’t just hear the symphony when he fell in love with an Irish actress back in 1827, he wrote it.

What was love like for the people who could really feel that song coming on? Symphony of Seduction tells of the romantic misadventures, tragedies and occasional triumphs of some of classical music’s great composers, and traces the music that emerged as a result.

For the eccentric Erik Satie, love came just once – and even then, not for long. Robert Schumann had to take his future father-in-law to court to win the right to marry. Hector Berlioz planned to murder a two-timing fiancée while dressed in drag, and Richard Wagner turned the temptation of adultery into a stage work that changed the course of music while rupturing his own marriage. Debussy’s love triangle, Brahms’ love for the wife of his insane mentor – all find expression in works we now consider to be some of the summits of creative achievement.

Christopher Lawrence takes what we know about these love-crazed geniuses and adds a garnish of imagined pillow talk to recreate stories that are ultimately stranger than fiction – and come with a great soundtrack.

Over the past 30 years, musicologists have produced a remarkable new body of research literature focusing on the lives and careers of women composers in their socio-historical contexts. But detailed analysis and discussion of the works created by these composers are still extremely rare. This is particularly true in the domain of music theory, where scholarly work continues to focus almost exclusively on male composers. Moreover, while the number of performances, broadcasts, and recordings of music by women has unquestionably grown, these works remain significantly underrepresented in comparison to music by male composers. Addressing these deficits is not simply a matter of rectifying a scholarly gender imbalance: the lack of knowledge surrounding the music of female composers means that scholars, performers, and the general public remain unfamiliar with a large body of exciting repertoire. Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1960-2000 is the first to appear in a groundbreaking four-volume series devoted to compositions by women across Western art music history. Each chapter opens with a brief biographical sketch of the composer before presenting an in-depth critical-analytic exploration of a single representative composition, linking analytical observations with questions of meaning and sociohistorical context. Chapters are grouped thematically by analytical approach into three sections, each of which places the analytical methods used in the essays that follow into the context of late twentieth-century ideas and trends. Featuring rich analyses and critical discussions, many by leading music theorists in the field, this collection brings to the fore repertoire from a range of important composers, thereby enabling further exploration by scholars, teachers, performers, and listeners.

In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity. Somewhat counter-intuitively, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights. The book's theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates over relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.