Deodat de Severac (1872-1921) is best known for his piano music but his compositions included orchestral and vocal works, including opera, cantata and incidental music. Claude Debussy described Severac's music as "exquisite and rich with ideas." The early works were influenced by Impressionist harmonies, church modes, cyclic techniques, folk-like melodies and Andalusian motives. Severac's style changed dramatically in 1907 when he left Paris and began to include Catalan elements in his compositions - a transition that has hitherto gone unrecognized. Robert Waters provides a much-needed study of the life and works of Severac, focusing on the composer's regionalist philosophy. Severac's engagement with folk music was not a patriotic gesture in the vein of nationalistic composers, but a way of expressing regional identity within France to counter the restrictive styles sanctioned by the Paris Conservatory. His musical philosophy mirrored larger social and political debates regarding anti-centralist positions on education, politics, art and culture in fin de siecle France. Such debates involved political and social leaders whom Severac knew and personally admired, including the writer Maurice Barres and the poet Frederic Mistral. The book will appeal to those specializing in French music, European ethnic musics, piano music and French music history.

During the 1940s, country music was rapidly evolving from traditional songs and string band styles to honky-tonk, western swing, and bluegrass, via radio, records, and film. The Blue Sky Boys, brothers Bill (1917-2008) and Earl (1919-1998) Bolick, resisted the trend, preferring to perform folk and parlor songs, southern hymns, and new compositions that enhanced their trademark intimacy and warmth. They were still in their teens when they became professional musicians to avoid laboring in Depression-era North Carolina cotton mills. Their instantly recognizable style was fully formed by 1936, when even their first records captured soulful harmonies accented with spare guitar and mandolin accompaniments. They inspired imitators, but none could duplicate the Blue Sky Boys' emotional appeal or their distinctive Catawba County accents. Even their last records in the 1970sretained their unique magical sound decades after other country brother duets had come and gone. In this absorbing account, Dick Spottswood combines excerpts from Bill Bolick's numerous spoken interviews and written accounts of his music, life, and career into a single narrative that presents much of the story in Bill's own voice. Spottswood reveals fascinating nuggets about broadcasting, recording, and surviving in the 1930s world of country music. He describes how the growing industry both aided and thwarted the Bolick brothers' career, and how World War II nearly finished it. The book features a complete, extensively annotated list of Blue Sky Boys songs, an updated discography that includes surviving unpublished records, and dozens of vintage photos and sheet music covers.

Alex Stobbs is determined to make every day count. Despite suffering from cystic fibrosis and enduring a gruelling regime of drugs and treatment, he has already achieved more in his nineteen years than many do in a lifetime. A musical prodigy, he was the subject of the Bafta-nominated documentary, A Boy Called Alex, and millions watched as he achieved his dream - to conduct the Bach Magnificat.Now at university, Alex is preparing for his next challenge: to conduct the three-hour-long St Matthew Passion. Struggling to balance university life with the demands of constant rehearsals, and hospitalised in the last few weeks before the performance, Alex remains determined to pull off the greatest performance of his life. Introduced by his mother, Suzanne, this is a memoir of remarkable humour and energy, which shows that it is not Alex's illness that makes him extraordinary, but his determination to achieve his dreams in spite of it.

Nicholas Medtner (1880-1951) has always been a neglected figure in the history of Russian music, and yet his friend Rachmaninoff considered him the greatest of contemporary composers. He wrote three fine piano concertos, more than one hundred solo piano compositions, including a cycle of fourteen sonatas fully worthy to be set alongside those of Scriabin and Prokofiev, and many beautiful songs. He was also a great pianist. Leaving Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, Medtner lived for a time in Germany and France before finally settling in London, where he passed the final sixteen years of his life. The present work is the first to tell the full story of his eventful life and to consider in turn each of his compositions. The author has drawn on Medtner's own correspondence and writings and collected the reminiscences of those who knew him personally to build a comprehensive picture of a great, if still largely unrecognised, musician.

Ballet impresario Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev and composer Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev are eminent figures in twentieth-century cultural history, yet this is the first detailed account of their fifteen-year collaboration. The beginning was not trouble-free, but despite two false starts (Ala i Lolli and the first version of its successor, Chout) Diaghilev maintained his confidence in the composer. With his guidance and encouragement Prokofiev established his mature balletic style. After some years of estrangement during which Prokofiev wrote for choreographer Boris Romanov and conductor/publisher Serge Koussevitsky, Diaghilev came to the composer's rescue at a low point in his Western career. The impresario encouraged Prokofiev's turn towards 'a new simplicity' and offered him a great opportunity for career renewal with a topical ballet on Soviet life (Le Pas d'acier). Even as late as 1928-29 Diaghilev compelled Prokofiev to achieve new heights of expressivity in his characterizations (L'Enfant prodigue). Although Western scholars have investigated Prokofiev's operas, piano works, and symphonies, little attention has been paid to his early ballets written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Despite Prokofiev's devotion to opera, it was his ballets for Diaghilev as much as his concertos and solo piano works that earned his renown in Western Europe in the 1920s. Stephen D. Press discusses the genesis of each ballet, including the important contributions of the scenic designers (Mikhail Larionov, Georgy Yakulov and Georges Rouault) and the choreographer/dancers (Leonid Massine, Serge Lifar and George Balanchine), and the special relationship between the ballets' progenitors.

FranAois Couperin's contribution to the literature of baroque keyboard music has long been recognized. FranAois Couperin and 'The Perfection of Music' updates and expands upon David Tunley's valuable 1982 BBC Music Guide to the composer, and examines the whole of Couperin's output including the organ masses, motets and chamber music, in addition to the well-known works for harpsichord. Taking as its focal point Couperin's concept of the perfection of music through the union of the French and Italian styles, this book takes a more analytical approach to Couperin's work. Early chapters outline the main contrasting features of the two schools in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries, and it becomes clear that Couperin's expressive power owed much to his fusion of the polarities of the French classical tradition with that of the Italian baroque. The book features a number of appendices, including the prefaces to Couperin's work both in the original French and in English translation, and a glossary of dances of the French baroque.

This reference provides a new perspective on the work of music's great composers from Bach to Stravinsky, by compiling the comments and criticism offered by other composers, such as Mahler, Wagner, Ravel, Tchaikovsky, and many others. Holmes presents an assessment of composers and musical developments as seen not specifically by the critics but by the composers' peers. While acknowledging that not all composers were necessarily perceptive critics and that few were able to sufficiently distance themselves from their own and others' work to be objective, the book offers many insights in the comments made by composers.

The book is organized into 78 short chapters, each focussing on one composer and relating the complimentary or caustic comments made about him by as many as 20 other composers. The chapters are arranged alphabetically by composer and presented in a narrative form, offering years of birth and death and an introductory sentence along with the quotations. The sources of all quotations are documented in a separate note section, and an index of the 85 composers quoted and their subjects is also included. More than just a book of musical anecdotes, this reference will be an important addition to both public and university libraries. It will also be of interest to scholars of music criticism and history, critics and writers who will find it a useful source of quotes, and the general reader interested in music.

Christopher Fox (1955) has emerged as one of the most fascinating composers of the post-war generation. His spirit of experimentalism pervades an oeuvre in which he has blithely created his own version of a range of contemporary musical practices. In his work many of the major expressions of European cultural activity - Darmstadt, Fluxus, spectralism, postminimalism and more - are assimilated to produce a voice which is uniquely resonant and multifaceted. In this, the first major study of his work, musicologists, composers, thinkers and practitioners scrutinize aspects of Christopher Fox's music, each exploring elements that relate to their own distinct areas of practice, tracing Fox's compositional trajectory and situating it within post-war contemporary European music practice. Above all this book addresses the question: How can one person dip his fingers into so many paint pots and yet retain a coherent compositional vision? The range of Fox's musical concerns make his work of interest to anyone who wants to study the development of so-called new music spanning the latter twentieth century into the twenty first century.

The original essays in this collection chronicle the transformation of Arnold Schoenberg's works from music as pure art to music as a vehicle of religious and political ideas, during the first half of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions from musicologists, music theorists, and scholars of German literature and of Jewish studies.

Forbidden Planet is a product of the MGM studio, which at the time of the production of this film was hardly in the business of making science-fiction films. Originally planned as a "B" picture, the 1956 Forbidden Planet was praised for its spectacular special effects and brilliant color cinematography. The plot practically tingles with sexual innuendo and the dialogue is rich in references to Freudian psychology. However, in spite of all this, the film was marketed to a juvenile audience. Notwithstanding its uncommon look and "feel," perhaps the most unusual aspect of the film is the way it sounds. Never before had a major Hollywood effort utilized a score generated entirely by electronic means, yet seldom does one find commentary on how Louis and Bebe Barron's score again and again challenges Hollywood norms. In addition to placing the composers and film in historical context, James Wierzbicki's study offers a deep and thorough analysis of not only the music as used in the film, but also of the decontextualized music as presented by the Barrons on the 1977 "original soundtrack album." The text is generously illustrated with transcriptions and graphs, and can serve as a model for the examination of other extended works of electronic music for which no written score has ever existed.

Leonard Bernstein touched millions of lives as composer, conductor, teacher, and activist. He frequently visited homes around the world through the medium of television, particularly through his fifty-three award-winning Young People's Concerts (1958-1972), which at their height were seen by nearly ten million in over forty countries. Originally designed for young viewers but equally attractive to eager adults, Bernstein's brilliance as a teacher shined brightly in his televised presentations. And yet, despite the light touch of the "maestro," the innocence of his audience, and the joyousness of each show's topic, the turbulence of the times would peek through. In this first in-depth look at the series, Alicia Kopfstein-Penk's Leonard Bernstein and His Young People's Concerts illustrates how the cultural, social, political, and musical upheavals of the long sixties impacted Bernstein's life and his Young People's Concerts. Responding to trends in corporate sponsorship, censorship, and arts programming from the Golden Age of Television into the 1970s, the Young People's Concerts would show the impact of and reflect the social and cultural politics of the Cold War, Vietnam, the Civil Rights and Women's Movements, and the Counterculture. Bernstein cheerfully bridged classical and popular tastes, juxtaposing the Beatles with Mozart even as he offered personal, televised pleas for peace and unity. At the same time, the concerts reflect Bernstein's troubled relationship as a professional musician with the dominance of atonality and his quest to nurture American music. Anyone who enjoys the oeuvre of Leonard Bernstein, has watched his Young People's Concerts, or is passionate about the history of the long sixties will find in Leonard Bernstein and His Young People's Concerts a story of all three captured in this monumental study.

No band has ever been able to demonstrate the enduring power of rock and roll quite like the Rolling Stones, who continue to enthrall, provoke, and invigorate their legions of fans more than fifty years since they began. In Counting Down the Rolling Stones: Their 100 Finest Songs, rock writer Jim Beviglia dares to rank the band's finest 100 songs in descending order. Beviglia provides an insightful explanation about why each song deserves its place. Looking at the story behind the song and supplying a fresh take on the musical and lyrical content, he illuminates these unforgettable songs for new and diehard fans alike. Taken together, the individual entries in Counting Down the Rolling Stones tell a fascinating story of the unique personalities and incredible talents that made the Stones a band for the ages. Counting Down the Rolling Stones is the perfect playlist builder, whether it is for the longtime fan or the newbie just getting acquainted with the work of Mick, Keith, and the boys.

Since her late-1990s debut as a member of the R&B trio Destiny's Child, Beyonce Knowles has garnered both praise and criticism. While some consider her an icon of female empowerment, others see her as detrimental to feminism and representing a negative image of women of color. Her music has a decidedly pop aesthetic, yet her power-house vocals and lyrics focused on issues like feminine independence, healthy sexuality and post partum depression give her songs dimension and substance beyond typical pop fare. This collection of new essays presents a detailed study of the music and persona of Beyonce-arguably the world's biggest pop star. Topics include: the body politics of respectability; feminism, empowerment and gender in Beyonce's lyrics; black female pleasure; and the changing face of celebrity motherhood.

This investigation of Polish, Jewish, and German sources demonstrates the roles of music in occupied Poland. Its former citizens had their access to music controlled by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda. It was rationed as other goods, depending on racial (i.e. also legal) status. Official music performances served as a propagandistic tool to further divide the Nazi-segregated population. Music played clandestinely embodied resistance. It restored the sense of community and helped save musicians persecuted as Jews, like Wladyslaw Szpilman. The documents analyzed in the monograph confirm the dehumanization of prospective victims, mixed with a narcissistic self-righteous view of Nazi songs and propaganda ultimately led to the organized presence of music in the Holocaust sites.

The New York Times bestseller and the definitive portrait of Kurt Cobain--as relevant as ever, as we remember the impact of Cobain on our culture twenty-five years after his death--now with a new preface and an additional final chapter from acclaimed author Charles R. Cross. It has been twenty-five years since Kurt Cobain died by his own hand in April 1994; it was an act of will that typified his short, angry, inspired life. Veteran music journalist Charles R. Cross fuses his intimate knowledge of the Seattle music scene with his deep compassion for his subject in this extraordinary story of artistic brilliance and the pain that extinguished it. Based on more than four hundred interviews; four years of research; exclusive access to Cobain's unpublished diaries, lyrics, and family photos; and a wealth of documentation, Heavier Than Heaven traces Cobain's life from his early days in a double-wide trailer outside of Aberdeen, Washington, to his rise to fame, success, and the adulation of a generation. Charles Cross has written a new preface for this edition, giving readers context for the time in which the book was written, six years after Kurt's death, and reminding everyone how fresh that cultural experience was when the interviews for the book were done. The new final chapter will update the story since, regarding investigations into Cobain's death, Nirvana's induction into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, and how their place in rock history has only risen over the decades.

The music Mozart composed in Vienna closely examined, bringing out the processes of re-invention and re-formulation it displays. The stylistic evolution of Mozart's Viennese instrumental repertory as a whole [1781-1791], closely tied to historical and contextual lines of enquiry, has yet to receive systematic attention. This book fills the gap through a study of stylistic re-invention, a practically- and empirically-based theory that explains how innovative, putatively inspired ideas take shape in Mozart's works and lead to stylistic re-formulation. Re-invention comprises a two-stage process: Mozart manipulates pre-existent stylistic features of his music to climactic effect, in so doing introducing a demonstrably 'new' stylistic dimension with broad aesthetic resonance; he subsequently re-appraises his style in response to the dimension in question. From close examination of a variety of Mozart's works [piano concertos, string quartets and symphonies in particular], supported by study of Mozart's other chamber and dramatic works, the author shows that stylistic re-invention is a consistent and coherent manifestation of stylistic development. Ultimately re-invention puts centre stage the interaction of intellectual and imaginative elements of Mozart's musicalpersonality, accounting both for processes of reflection and re-appraisal and for striking conceptual leaps. SIMON P. KEEFE is James Rossiter Hoyle Chair of Music, University of Sheffield.

Deems Taylor (1885-1966) was a composer, music critic, author, commentator, translator, and artist. He was the first American composer commissioned to write an opera by New York's Metropolitan Opera, and composed orchestral and solo works that remain part of the repertoire. He gained fame initially introducing the regular radio broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic in the mid-'30s; his fame was so great, that animator Walt Disney invited him to be the on-screen host of Fantasia. Taylor wrote for many popular journals, including Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, as well as the daily press, and his work was collecting in many best-selling books. Taylor's biographer, James Pegolotti, has made a fresh selection of the best of Taylor's writings on music for this new volume. Divided into parts reflecting a chronological look at Taylor's entire career, the work exposes the reader to Taylor's wit and keen intellect. Pegolotti has written brief introductions for each section, placing Taylor's work in the context of its time. Deems Taylor: Selected Writings brings into full view a forgotten important music reviewer and social commentator of the first half of the twentieth century.

Charles Francois Gounod: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him and his compositions.

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) is generally considered the most popular and well-known composer of American art music, and yet little scholarly attention has been paid to Copland since the 1950s. This volume begins with a portrait of the composer and an evaluation of significant research trends which is intended to fill a void and to suggest directions for further research. The guide also provides a section discussing Copland's interdisciplinary interests, such as ballet and film work, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of writings about Copland and his music.

Jerome Hines has interviewed 40 singers, a speech therapist, and a throat specialist to provide this invaluable collection of advice for all singers. This collection includes the commentary of Licia Albanese, Franco Corelli, Placido Domingo, Nicolai Gedda, Marilyn Horne, Sherrill Milnes, Birgit Nilsson, Luciano Pavarotti, Rose Ponselle, Beverly Sills, Joan Sutherland and many others. "Probably the best book on the subject." Publishers Weekly

Bessie Smith occupies a unique place in the history of American music. She was one of the first undisputed artists to come from the American vernacular tradition of the twentieth century, and as a woman, she was a figure of extraordinary power. She organized and led her own touring companies, wrote some of her repertoire, controlled her many relationships (romantic and otherwise), and even negotiated her own contracts. This type of agency was virtually unheard of in the popular music industry during the first half of the century, and Smith is often cited as a major influence on artists who sought to manage their work and reputation. Her musical output comprises a long series of recordings done between 1923 and 1933, all of which feature her vocal range, musical ability, and emotional power. Her band included some of the best black musicians of the day. In Experiencing Bessie Smith, John Clark chronicles Bessie Smith's vital contribution to and influence on music, the music industry, and the recording industry. While her recording career lasted only a decade, she toured long before setting her music to vinyl, with much of her early career amply documented. Singers from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin were influenced by her work, and both musicians and music lovers today continue to be entranced by her unmistakable style.

Leslie Stuart (1864-1928) was a British songwriter best remembered as the composer of the hit show, Florodora. He began writing popular songs as a teenager, first for blackface and vaudeville performers, and eventually for more "legitimate" shows and revues. Florodora (1899), written in collaboration with London's most fashionable librettist, Owen Hall, was a musical-comedy sensation. Its combination of the traditional slow love ballads and waltzes with more rhythmic and long-lined numbers made it a worldwide success. He continued to compose through the first decade of the 20th century, laying the groundwork for the coming innovations in British and American musical theater.

In Rhythm Is My Beat: Jazz Guitar Great Freddie Green and the Count Basie Sound, Alfred Green tells the story of his father, rhythm guitarist Freddie Green, whose guitar work served as the pulse of the Count Basie Band. A quiet but key figure in big band jazz, Freddie Green took a distinct pride in his role as Basie's rhythm guitarist, redefining the outer limits of acoustic rhythm guitar and morphing it into an art form. So distinct was Green's style that it would eventually give birth to notations on guitar charts that read: "Play in the style of Freddie Green." This American jazz icon, much like his inimitable sound, achieved stardom as a sideman, both in and out of Basie's band. Green's signature sound provided lift to soloists like Lester Young and vocalist Lil' Jimmy Rushing, a reflection of Green's sophisticated technique, that produced, in Green's words, his "rhythm wave." Billie Holiday, Ruby Braff, Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan, Teddy Wilson, Ray Charles, Judy Carmichael, Joe Williams and other recording artists all benefited from the relentless fours of the man who came to be known as Mr. Rhythm. The mystique surrounding Freddie Green's technique is illuminated through generous commentary by insightful interviews with other musicians, guitar professionals and scholars, all of whom offer their ideas on Freddie Green's sound. Alfred Green throughout demystifies the man behind the legend. This work will interest jazz fans, students, and scholars; guitar enthusiasts and professionals; music historians and anyone interested not only in the history of jazz but of the African American experience in jazz.

In the 1940s and '50s, Richard Dyer-Bennet (1913-1991) was among the best known and most respected folk singers in America. Paul O. Jenkins tells, for the first time, the story of Dyer-Bennet, often referred to as the "Twentieth-Century Minstrel." Dyer-Bennet's approach to singing sounded almost foreign to many American listeners. The folk artist followed a musical tradition in danger of dying out. The Swede Sven Scholander was the last European proponent of minstrelsy and served as Dyer-Bennet's inspiration after the young singer traveled to Stockholm to meet him one year before Scholander's death.

Dyer-Bennet's achievements were many. Nine years after his meeting with Scholander, he became the first solo performer of his kind to appear in Carnegie Hall. This book argues Dyer-Bennet helped pave the way for the folk boom of the mid-1950s and early 1960s, finding his influence in the work of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and many others. It also posits strong evidence that Dyer-Bennet would certainly be much better known today had his career not been interrupted midstream by the anticommunist, Red-scare blacklist and its ban on his performances..