Fromental Halevy, best known for his opera La Juive, captured the romantic and contentious spirit of his time. His was one of the most eventful eras in French history, ranging from the fall of Napoleon to the establishment of the Second Empire, and he took part in what was happening around him, often reflecting it in his music. As a composer, Halevy regarded opera as a magic spectacle fusing drama, music, dance and art. His work - innovative, demanding, captivating - included more than 30 grand operas and operas comiques, almost all widely performed and many immensely popular throughout nineteenth century Europe and the United States. And, loyal to his Jewish faith, Halevy set to music several psalms for liturgical use in French synagogues. Wagner, for all his virulent anti-Semitism, hailed "Halevy's brilliant energy that has sped French grand opera along a new road". This book, our century's first full-length biography of Halevy, which includes previously unpublished excerpts from his diaries and correspondence, illuminates that road.

In this thorough research guide to the career and music of Bill Dixon the author has documented how Dixon refined a sonically unique pan-tonal language of trumpet playing. As a trumpeter, composer, educator, and theoretician, Bill Dixon has politically and musically influenced many phases of the development of Black music in the second half of the 20th century. This authoritative guide details information about the life and music of Bill Dixon. Bill Dixon comments throughout the text on the familiar and unfamiliar aspects of his career as it unfolds between performances and recordings. The recollections of those who have collaborated with Bill Dixon over the years supplement the thorough research here presented on the life and career of Bill Dixon and, additionally, the New York avant garde artistic sphere in which he worked. Bill Dixon has refined a sonically unique pan-tonal language of trumpet playing. As a trumpeter, composer, educator, and theoretician, Bill Dixon has politically and musically influenced many phases of the development of Black music in the second half of the 20th century. This authoritative guide details information about the life and music of Bill Dixon. Bill Dixon comments throughout the text on the familiar and unfamiliar aspects of his career as it unfolds between performances and recordings. The recollections of those who have collaborated with Bill Dixon over the years supplement the thorough research here presented on the life and career of Bill Dixon and subsequently, on the New York avant garde artistic sphere in which he worked. Music and music history scholars, especially those interested in jazz and Black music, will be attracted to the wealth of information provided, often from primary sources, on Bill Dixon and Black music through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The discography included encompasses issued and non-issued recordings as well as listings for every known Bill Dixon performance. Collaborations with dancers, directors, filmmakers and painters, among others, are also documented.

The American singer and guitarist Ramblin' Jack Elliott (1931- ) is a seminal figure in the folk music revivals of the United States and Great Britain. Declared an American treasure by former President Bill Clinton, Elliott has traveled and performed for more than 50 years, and his life and career neatly parallel the ascension of folk music's "renaissance" from the 1940s through the present day. Ramblin' Jack Elliott: The Never-Ending Highway is the first complete biography of this important figure in the history of folk music. Elliott's music and Beat-era sensibility influenced countless artists in the fields of folk, rock, and country and western music, and Hank Reineke provides the full story of Elliott's relationships and influences. Most notably, his associations with Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan are well-documented: Elliott is considered Guthrie's most famous protege and Elliott mentored Dylan in his early career. Reineke also recounts how Elliott's life intersected with Derroll Adams, Jack Kerouac and the Beats, Princess Margaret, James Dean, and scores of others. The book examines the full breadth of Elliott's career, discussing how the rough-edged cowboy singer survived in the music industry and eventually won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Recording and the prestigious National Medal of the Arts. In addition to the biography, Reineke has amassed the first exhaustive and comprehensive discography of albums from the singer's notable back-catalog (1955-2009), including nearly 60 LP and CD issues, many rare and sought-after 78rpm discs, EPs, and 45rpm recordings, as well as a number of contributions to compilations, soundtracks, festival recordings, and guest appearances. This impressive volume is rounded out with a bibliography, an index, and more than 30 photographs, making this a must-have for scholars and fans of American folk music."

Karel Husa is a Czechoslovakian-American composer and educator who has made important contributions to modern musical literature. Especially well known for his compositions for wind band, Husa is also in constant demand as a guest conductor and lecturer throughout the musical world. This volume provides a complete guide to his compositions and to recordings of his work, together with a full bibliography. Following a brief biography is a list of Husa's compositions, arranged by genre. Each entry includes the date of composition, duration of the work, and the performance medium, as well as details relating to the commission, premiere, and publication. The discography of commercially produced recordings of Husa's music is arranged alphabetically and supplies information on label and label number, date of issue, contents, and performers. The bibliography is comprehensive, listing writings by and about Husa and annotating each work cited. Systematic cross-referencing is used throughout the book. A convenient resource for musicians and musicologists, this bio-bibliography is an appropriate choice for music and academic libraries.

What's it like to grow up on a small farm in Illinois only to find yourself, some 20 years later, performing on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House? And then to travel the world, singing in historic theaters from La Scala in Milan to Vienna, Paris, London, and beyond? Former Met star Sherrill Milnes tells all in this completely updated, first-time-in-paperback edition of his very successful biography.

Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourie explores the varied aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of Russian composer Arthur Lourie. A St. Petersburg native allied with the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age decadence, Lourie was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and America, where his career foundered. Making his way by serving others, he became Stravinsky's right-hand man, Serge Koussevitsky's ghostwriter, and philosopher Jacques Maritain's muse. Lourie left his mark on the poems of Anna Akhmatova, on the neoclassical aesthetics of Stravinsky, on Eurasianism, and on Maritain's NeoThomist musings about music. Lourie serves as a flawless lens through which aspects of Silver Age Russia, early Bolshevik rule, and the cultural space of exile come into sharper focus. But this interdisciplinary collection of essays, edited by musicologists Klara Moricz and Simon Morrison, also looks at Lourie himself as an artist and intellectual in his own right. Much of the aesthetic and technical discussion concerns his grandly eulogistic opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, understood as both a belated Symbolist work and as a NeoThomist exercise. Despite the importance Lourie attached to the opera as his masterwork, Blackamoor has never been performed, its fate thus serving as an emblem of Lourie's own. Yet even if Lourie seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history, he looms large in studies of emigration and cultural memory. Here Lourie's life, like his last opera, is presented as a meditation on the circumstances and psychology of exile. Ultimately, these essays recover a lost realm of musical and aesthetic possibilities-a Russia that Lourie, and the world, saw disappear.

The musical dramas of Richard Wagner have, for the last 150 years, thrilled and amazed listeners everywhere. In "Wagner Moments", author J.K. Holman has assembled 100 such moments, from the living and dead, famous and not so famous, from Charles Baudelaire to Placido Domingo, musicians and non-musicians. Mr. Holman edits these stories and asides, placing them in their biographical and historical context to the certain enjoyment of Wagner aficionados everywhere.

Smith explores Pete Townshend's artistic struggle between his own creative impulses and those of the commercial public. Faced with a modern version of the minstrel's dilemma, Townshend, early in his career, ignored his creative instincts to satisfy commercial agendas. After his success, he slowly withdrew to resolve his conflict between creativity and commercialism. Townshend's creative vision unfolds against the conflicts and compromises battled with the entertainment industry. A common theme, that of the seeker, weaves throughout the various phases of Townshend's career and highlights his own quest for complete artistic expression free from compromise.

In "The Minstrel's Dilemma," Townshend is shown as a musician confronting the same battles begun by early minstrels and later fought by composers such as Beethoven and Mozart. He is referred to as a rock auteur, creating music that reflects his personal experiences and creative views. He is called a seeker, in search of artistic freedom toward personal expression. And at the end of his thirty-year struggle he is a true artist, able to live up to audience expectation while attending to his own artistic impulses.

The first performance of Handel’s 'Messiah' in Dublin in 1742 is now legendary. Gentlemen were asked to leave their swords at home and ladies to come without hoops in their skirts in order to fit more people into the audience. Why then, did this now famous and much-loved oratorio receive a somewhat cool reception in London less than a year later? Placing Handel’s best-known work in the context of its times, this vivid account charts the composer’s working relationship with his librettist, the gifted but demanding Charles Jennens, and looks at Handel’s varied and evolving company of singers together with his royal patronage. Through examination of the composition manuscript and Handel’s own conducting score, held in the Bodleian, it explores the complex issues around the performance of sacred texts in a non-sacred context, particularly Handel’s collaboration with the men and boys of the Chapel Royal. The later reception and performance history of what is one of the most successful pieces of choral music of all time is also reviewed, including the festival performance attended by Haydn, the massed-choir tradition of the Victorian period and today’s ‘come-and-sing’ events.

Every recorded performance of Mahler shymphonies--and Das Lied--from 1924 until press time! What a labor and how sorely needed! Music Journal In the past 25 years a revival of interest in the music of Gustav Mahler has resulted in nearly 300 new recordings of his symphonies. The breadth and complexity of these works, together with the plethora of recent releases, signals the need for a guide that will be useful both to novice and the experienced collector. Lewis M. Smoley's book fills this need, providing critical analysis and specific recording information for all known recordings of Mahler's symphonies as well as indexes by conductor, orchestra, and label. The result of extensive research, this volume includes many recordings that have not appeared in previous listings. Recording made around the world from 1924 through 1986 are treated in chapters devoted to each of the 11 symphonies--including Das Lied von der Erde and the unfinished 10th. Listings are arranged alphabetically under the name of the conductor and analyzed in terms of quality of performance, specific interpretation and interpretive styles, and sonics. Recordings of special merit are noted. Entries supply information about reissues as well as original pressings, type of recording, and alternative versions of some of the scores. Cross-referenced indexes list conductor, orchestra, vocal soloists, chorus, and record label for the recordings discussed. The foreword and preface place Mahler's recorded symphonies in perspective and discuss some of the interpretive and textual issues that continue to be debated. This single-volume guide is appropriate for both the average listener and the serious enthusiast, and will also be a valuable addition to the collections of music schools and conservatories.

The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight features twenty-one conversations with musicians who have had at least fifty years of professional experience, and several as many as seventy-five. In all, these voices reflect some seventeen hundred years' worth of paying dues. Appealing to casual fans and jazz aficionados alike, these interviews have been carefully, but minimally edited by Peter Zimmerman for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians' actual words. Five of the interviewees-Dick Hyman, Jimmy Owens, Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, and Yusef Lateef-have received the National Endowment for the Arts' prestigious Jazz Masters Fellowship, attesting to their importance and ability. While not official masters, the rest are veteran performers willing to share their experiences and knowledge. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they are as people. The musicians interviewed for the book range in age from their early seventies to mid-nineties. Older musicians started their careers during the segregation of the Jim Crow era, while the youngest came up during the struggle for civil rights. All grapple with issues of race, performance, and jazz's rich legacies. In addition to performing, touring, and recording, many have composed and arranged, and others have contributed as teachers, historians, studio musicians, session players, producers, musicians' advocates, authors, columnists, poets, and artists. The interviews in The Jazz Masters are invaluable primary material for scholars and will appeal to musicians inspired by these veterans' stories and their different approaches to music.

Charles Ives, perhaps the quintessential American composer of the twentieth century, drew on his childhood experiences in a small New England town in his music. Through his close relationship with his father, George, a Civil War bandmaster, Ives developed a powerful feeling for nineteenth-century rural America. This book--the first full-scale psychoanalytic biography of a major composer--examines the lives of the two men and shows how a knowledge of their relationship as father and son, teacher and pupil, is central to an understanding of Ives's work. Stuart Feder, a psychoanalyst with training in musicology, demonstrates that George exerted so pervasive an influence on Charles's creative life that Ives's music may be seen as the result of an unconscious fantasy of posthumous collaboration between father and son. The music bears George's mark, not only in its incorporation of hymn tunes, parlor ballads, Civil War marches, and other homely sources that derived from his youth, but also in its use of technical musical devices attributed to George. Moreover, the span of Ives's creative life reveals another connection to his father: Charles's musical productivity began to wane in his forties, as he approached the age at which his father died. Dr. Feder examines the influence of George's teaching and storytelling on Charles's years as a composer. Ives's later decline is traced psychologically and medically. Using Ives's music as an essential part of his data, Dr. Feder demonstrates how music can illuminate and be expressive of the inner life of its creator.

Dual natures comprised Chopin's personality. On one hand, he was a highly creative romantic idealist and on the other, a realist trying to cope with the world at large. Documentary evidence illustrates the disparities in his personality as a reflection of these two diverse aspects of his psyche. Of special interest are five previously unpublished letters in English and the unfolding of Chopin's controversial relationships with Tytus Woyciechowski, Julian Fontana, George Sand, and Solange Sand. This critical portrayal of Chopin's personality traces his journeys and experiences from Warsaw to Paris and reveals, among other characteristics and traits, Chopin's developmental problems during his adolescence, his unattractive behavior in his relationship with Julian Fontana, and George Sand's unrequited love for Chopin. The culture of the time and the atmosphere surrounding Chopin's relationships emerge in the detailed evidence presented.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is relevant to Chopin's youth in Warsaw. His relationship with Tytus Woyciechowski during the formative years in Warsaw significantly impacted Chopin's emotional development. The second part of the book focuses on Chopin's adult years in Paris including his liaison with George Sand, which is considered through her daughter, Solange, and four friends and acquaintances common to both Sand and Chopin. The text is extensively annotated and this research of Chopin's life and personality will appeal to both the Chopin scholar and enthusiast. It will also be of interest to students of French Romantic literature, Romantic music, and Polish music of the nineteenth century.

Esteemed by many of his most distinguished contemporaries, including Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) was a protege of Brahms and Mahler. Despite this, he was overshadowed by the composers of the second Viennese school, and for many years after his death was remembered merely as the brother-in-law of Schoenberg. But with centenary celebrations of Zemlinsky's birth, scholars began a careful examination of his works and realized they had discovered a forgotten master. Zemlinsky's wonderful melodic gift was manifested in operas, choral works, chamber music, and symphonic pieces, but was realized most fully in his more than one hundred songs.

In this important new study--the first such work in English--Lorraine Gorrell focuses on these songs, revealing the ways in which they represented a bridge between the 19th-century romantic lied and the 20th-century avant-garde. Of interest to scholars studying both the German art song and the development of the second Viennese school, Gorrell's work uses Zemlinsky's songs as a lens through which to examine an important, highly influential musical figure.

The BBC Proms is the world's biggest and longest-running classical music festival and one of the jewels in the crown for the BBC. Held every summer at the Royal Albert Hall in London, it is one of the strongest brand names in the music world and attracts a glittering array of artists and orchestras. Whether you're a first-time visitor or an experienced Prommer, watching at home or listening on radio or online, the BBC Proms Guide will be an excellent companion to a remarkable summer of music, which you can treasure and return to in years to come. Filled with the latest programme details and illuminating articles by leading experts, journalists and writers, the BBC Proms Guide gives a wide-ranging insight into the performers and repertoire, as well as thought-provoking opinion pieces about audiences, music and music-making. The contents for 2021 include a specially commissioned short story by award-winning author Chibundu Onuzo; an exploration of music and silence by author, commentator and broadcaster Will Self; a celebration of the history and influence of the iconic Royal Albert Hall 150 years after its opening by historian, author, curator and television presenter Lucy Worsley; a tribute to anniversary composer Igor Stravinsky; and an article spotlighting the remarkable Kanneh-Mason siblings (spearheaded by royal-wedding cellist Sheku).

1963 ä tail fins were in sock hops were hot and a fairytale white knight was president. That summer sixteen year-old singer Lesley Gore released her debut single It's My Party propelling her to Number One on the charts. For the next several years the crowned Princess of Pop dominated the radio with a string of hits including Judy's Turn to Cry She's A Fool Sunshine Lollipops & Rainbows and the rousing anthem for independence You Don't Own Me making her the most successful and influential solo female artist of the 60s. But beneath the bubblegum fa§ade was a girl squirming against social and professional pressures to simply be herself and to forge a future where she could write and perform music beyond the trappings of teenage angst and love triangles. Assembled over five years of research and interviews this is the first and long overdue biography of Lesley Gore one of pop music's pioneering Mothers which chronicles her meteoric rise to fame her devastating fall from popularity and struggle for relevance in the 1970s and her reemergence as a powerful songwriter political activist and camp icon. The biography includes behind-the-scenes stories about the making of her hit records debunks or clarifies popular myths about her career and places her remarkable life and times within a historical context to reveal how her music was both impacted by and contributed to each decade of her astounding fifty-year career.

In this book, follow the career of Carrie Underwood as she goes from the American Idol competition to worldwide celebrity. Carrie Underwood: A Biography follows the singer from a small town in Oklahoma to the stages of the most prestigious concert halls in the world. Along the way, fans will read about this girl-next-door's decision to compete on American Idol and her subsequent triumph there, about her first recordings in Nashville and her platinum albums, and about her sold-out concert tours with superstars like Brad Paisley, Kenny Chesney, and Keith Urban. But the book isn't only about Underwood as a celebrity. It is also about how she uses that celebrity to do good works, including speaking out for the Humane Society of the United States, participating in a song that benefited Stand Up For Cancer, doing public service announcements for the Do Something youth organization, and touring for the USO.

Elinor Remick Warren's distinguished career as a composer, concert pianist, and accompanist for renowned singers spanned seventy-five years of American musical history. She began writing music in 1904 at age four. Her first published composition, a song, was accepted by G. Schirmer in 1916. Thereafter, her compositions appeared regularly through 1990. Her full oeuvre is cataloged here along with performance information, discography, and review and critical commentary, all of which is carefully documented, cross-referenced, and indexed. A biographical sketch is supplemented by a long interview conducted by the author with Warren four years before the composer's death in 1991. Among the useful appendixes are textual sources for Warren's many vocal compositions.

The extraordinary story of African American composer Edmond Dede, raised in antebellum New Orleans, and his remarkable career in France In 1855, Edmond Dede, a free black composer from New Orleans, emigrated to Paris. There he trained with France's best classical musicians and went on to spend thirty-six years in Bordeaux leading the city's most popular orchestras. How did this African American, raised in the biggest slave market in the United States, come to compose ballets for one of the best theaters outside of Paris and gain recognition as one of Bordeaux's most popular orchestra leaders? Beginning with his birth in antebellum New Orleans in 1827 and ending with his death in Paris in 1901, Sally McKee vividly recounts the life of this extraordinary man. From the Crescent City to the City of Light and on to the raucous music halls of Bordeaux, this intimate narrative history brings to life the lost world of exiles and travelers in a rapidly modernizing world that threatened to leave the most vulnerable behind.

The Grateful Dead, one of the most meticulously documented rock bands, significantly influenced American music and popular culture. Its popularity has endured for three decades despite mixed critical reception. Jerry Garcia, thought of among many as a musical icon and spokesperson for more than one generation of fans, was often equally scorned by various critics. This collection of scholarly essays attests to the varied fields of interest the band and its followers, known as Deadheads, have affected, including psychology, law, and ethnomusicology. The contributions explore the diversity of the culture of fans, empirically analyze the music, apply literary criticism to the lyrics, and explore Dead-related philosophical and theological concepts -- in other words, they are as eclectic as the myriad Grateful Dead fans themselves.

Appealing to Grateful Dead scholars, fans, and collectors alike, these twenty-two essays are grouped by subject, and each essay includes a bibliography of resources for further research.

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This is a biographical dictionary of some 1500 conductors. . . . Much of this information is valuable and would be hard to find in other sources. The author's style is ingratiating and fresh. . . . His coverage is superb." Library Journal