This book is the first biography of 20th-century pianist Rudolf Serkin, providing a narrative of Serkin's life with emphasis on his European roots and the impact of his move to America. With the help of interviews, the authors focus on three key aspects of Serkin's work, particularly as it unfolded in America: his art and career as a pianist, his activities as a pedagogue, including his long association with the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and his key role in institutionalizing a redefinition of musical values in America through his work as artistic director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Vermont. The book concludes with a discography by Paul Farber that documents an essential part of Serkin's achievement.

This is a guide to research on the great composer, Maurice Ravel. It includes over 2000 annotated entries of the scholarly literature on Ravel, including catalogues, facsimilies of autographs, music editions, textual criticism, bibliographies, monographs, articles, and dissertations covering his life and music.

The first full-length volume on the life work of one of the most well-known and prolific masters of our time, "William Thomas McKinley: A Bio-Bibliography" provides both musicologists and performers with a guide toward further exploration of the composer and his music. Included within are a complete biography on McKinley, the man and performer; a discography of both McKinley's compositions and his performances; and an in-depth catalog of his works. Each entry of the catalog contains a complete manuscript description, a detailed listing of any sketches or drafts which exist, a piece-specific bibliography, a complete performance history, and editorial notes. Also included are the composer's own writings about his works in the form of his program notes. Program notes by other authors are included as well, as they are the product of interviews with the composer.

The book has been organized with easy access and a larger audience of performers, musicologists, and other interested parties firmly in mind. The works numbering system has been completely restructured from previous bio-bibliographies in order to provide performers with quicker access to works for their particular instrument or group of instruments. Works are cross-listed in several ways and the book is thoroughly indexed, making for easy information access.

Indispensable reading for historians and musicologists as well as those interested in Wagner's philosophy and the aesthetics of music. Despite the enormous and accelerating worldwide interest in Wagner leading to the bicentenary of his birth in 2013, his prose writings have received scant scholarly attention. Wagner's book-length essay on Beethoven, written to celebrate the centenary of Beethoven's birth in 1870, is really about Wagner himself rather than Beethoven. It is generally regarded as the principal aesthetic statement of the composer's later years, representing a reassessment ofthe ideas of the earlier Zurich writings, especially Oper und Drama, in the light of the experience gained through the composition of Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg and the greater part of DerRing des Nibelungen. It contains Wagner's most complete exegesis of his understanding of Schopenhauer's philosophy and its perceived influence on the compositional practice of his later works. The essay also influenced the young Nietzsche. It is an essential text in the teaching of not only Wagnerian thought but also late nineteenth-century musical aesthetics in general. Until now the English reader with no access to the German original has been obliged to work from two Victorian translations. This brand new edition gives the German original and the newly translated English text on facing pages. It comes along with a substantial introduction placing the essay not onlywithin the wider historical and intellectual context of Wagner's later thought but also in the political context of the establishment of the German Empire in the 1870s. The translation is annotated throughout with a full bibliography. Richard Wagner's Beethoven will be indispensable reading for historians and musicologists as well as those interested in Wagner's philosophy and the aesthetics of music. ROGER ALLEN is Fellow and Tutor in Music at St Peter's College, Oxford.

This lavishly illustrated hard back book tells the incredible story of Francis Albert Frank Sinatra and begins in Hoboken New Jersey on December 12th 1915 where Frank is born the only child of Italian immigrants. Beginning his musical career in the swing era as a boy singer with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra found success as a solo artist from the early 1940s after being signed by Columbia Records in 1943. Sinatra became one of the best-selling artists of all time, having sold more than 150 million records worldwide including the hits New York New York, My Way and Strangers in the Night. He was a founding member of the Rat Pack with Sammy Davis Junior and Dean Martin. Sinatra won an Academy Award for his performance in From Here to Eternity. He starred in a number of musicals including On the Town, Guys and Dolls and High Society. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1997. Sinatra was also the recipient of eleven Grammy Awards, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. One of the most popular and influential musical artists of the 20th century, Sinatra had a popularity that was later matched only by Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Michael Jackson. He has been called the greatest singer of the 20th Century.

A complete biographical reference work covering all aspects of the classical music world.
* Over 8,000 detailed biographical entries
* Covers the classical and light classical fields
* Entries range from composers to conductors and managers
* Includes up-and-coming musicians as well as well-established names
Contents include:
* Profiles of composers, musicians, singers, arrangers, writers, conductors, soloists and managers throughout the world
* Listings of orchestras and festivals
* Lists of music libraries, conservatoires, music organizations and opera companies
* Details of major competitions and awards
* Lists of Masters of the King's/Queen's music

'How refreshing, to read a book about music written for a music lover and not a musicologist. In clear, lucid, entertaining prose, Jane Glover makes those of us who lack musical literacy better understand and appreciate Handel's divinity.' - Donna Leon, author of Handel's Bestiary and the Inspector Brunetti mysteries Handel in London tells the story of a young German composer who in 1712, followed his princely master to London and would remain there for the rest of his life. That master would become King George II and the composer was George Frideric Handel. Handel, then still only twenty-seven and largely self-taught, would be at the heart of musical activity in London for the next four decades, composing masterpiece after masterpiece, whether the glorious coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest, operas such as Giulio Cesare, Rinaldo and Alcina or the great oratorios, culminating, of course, in Messiah. Here, Jane Glover, who has conducted Handel's work in opera houses and concert halls throughout the world, draws on her profound understanding of music and musicians to tell Handel's story. It is a story of music-making and musicianship, of practices and practicalities, but also of courts and cabals, of theatrical rivalries and of eighteenth-century society. It is also, of course, the story of some of the most remarkable music ever written, music that has been played and sung, and loved, in this country - and throughout the world - for three hundred years.

The desire to voice the artistic revelation of the truth of a precarious, multi-faceted, yet integrated self lies behind much of Szymanowski's work. This self is projected through the voices of deities who speak languages of love. The unifying figure is Eros, who may be embodied as Dionysus, Christ, Narcissus or Orpheus, and the gospel he proclaims tells of the resurrection and freedom of the desiring subject. This book examines Szymanowski's exploration of the relationship between the authorial voice, mythology and eroticism within the context of the crisis of the modern subject in Western culture. Stephen Downes analyses mythological and erotic aspects of selected songs from the composer's early career, moving to an interpretation of the voice of the homoerotic lover, embodied as a mad muezzin, in terms of heroic notions of Orphic elegy. Discussing the encounters of King Roger with the voices of Narcissus, the Siren and Dionysus, Downes shows how the composer uses the unifying Christ/Eros figure as a means of indicating that the King might be transformed from anguished despot to loving expressive subject. The book ends with an examination of Szymanowski's desire to fuse Slavonic and Middle-Eastern mythological inspirations in an attempt to fulfil a utopian vision of a pan-European culture bound together by the spirit of Eros.

Provides biographical details on some of the most talented, influential and up-and-coming artists and individuals from the world of popular music.
Now in its fully-updated and revised fifth edition, this title includes over 5,000 biographies charting the achievements and careers of pop, rock, folk, jazz, dance, world and country artists throughout the world.
Features include:
* Over 5,000 alphabetically arranged entries containing full biographical information: major career details, concerts, recordings and compositions, honours and contact address
* Full contact details for companies and organizations throughout the popular music industry - including record companies, management agencies, agents and promoters
* Lists of key festivals and musical events worldwide, with relevant contact details.

A complete biographical reference work covering all aspects of the classical music world.
* Over 8,000 detailed biographical entries
* Covers the Classical and Light Classical fields
* Entries range from composers to conductors and managers
* Includes up-and-coming musicians as well as well- established names.
Contents
* Profiles composers, musicians, singers, arrangers, writers, conductors, soloists and managers throughout the world
* Includes listings of orchestras and festivals
* Lists music libraries, conservatoires, music organizations and opera companies
* Details major competitions and awards
* Lists Masters of the King's/Queen's music.

The album examined in this book transformed the singer John Farnham from a faded teen pop star into the most popular solo rock performer in Australia, in a career that has lasted for more than 30 years. Whispering Jack remains the top-selling album by an Australian artist in Australia, and constitutes the turning point in Farnham’s bid to achieve credibility as an adult contemporary musician. The first single from the album, ‘You’re the Voice,’ has achieved such iconic status that it is routinely referred to as Australia’s unofficial national anthem. The book examines the album, its context and that history in order to recover a crucial conjuncture in the development of Australian rock and popular music, one that has previously been ignored in Australian popular music studies.

'One of the most rewarding pieces of hip-hop criticism ever written' Jeff Chang 'Brilliant' Giles Peterson 'Will Ashon's dazzling study gets to the heart of hip hop, pop culture and the history of contemporary America. Essential' Matt Thorne 'Each of these chambers contains wonders of history, destiny and mythology' Margo Jefferson Will Ashon tells, in 36 interlinked 'chambers', the story of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and how it changed the world. As unexpected and complex as the album itself, Chamber Music ranges from provocative essays to semi-comic skits, from deep scholarly analysis to satirical celebration, seeking to contextualise, reveal and honour this singularly composite work of art. From the FBI's war on drugs to the porn theatres of 42nd street, from the history of jazz to the future of politics, Chamber Music is an explosive and revelatory new way of writing about music and culture.

Having spent his entire career as a professional singer, songwriter, and musician, Thinking About Tomorrow is the amazing tale of rock and roll survivor Keith West. From being inspired by Elvis in the 1950s to pop stardom and working alongside the greats of the music world in the 1960s, Keith was at the eye of the storm alongside peers including The Who, The Beatles, The Kinks, The Small Faces, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and many, many more. With his Tomorrow bandmates - Steve Howe, Junior and Twink - Keith was a pioneer of psychedelic music in the 1960s with songs such as My White Bicycle, and he also achieved international fame alongside Mark Wirtz with the song Excerpt from a Teenage Opera (popularly remembered by millions of music fans as Grocer Jack). Tomorrow evolved from the R&B and mod bands Four + 1 and The In Crowd and, while their recorded output is small, their influence on other artists and the way rock music would develop is widely-regarded as enormous. Steve Howe went on to continue his incredible guitar adventures in Yes and Asia, and Twink would continue to influence the rock world as a member of pioneering bands The Pretty Things, The Pink Fairies, and Hawkwind. Keith would go on to have a long career in the music business, embracing punk in the late 70s and indie music in the 80s and 90s. But this is no straightforward tale of rock and roll hedonism; the book also pulls back the curtain on the mysterious world of the music industry. It reveals how agents, managers, publishers, record companies, songwriters, artists and the media are all locked together in an endless pursuit of the elusive elixir of their professional lives - a hit. Yet, once lightning has struck, the tragic consequences, the tremendous opportunities and the money generated can still create ripples half a century later...

Shortly after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's death, his widow Constanze sent a manuscript copy of one of his most beloved operas, Die Zauberfloete, to the court of the Elector of Cologne. It was eventually published by Nicolaus Simrock in 1814 as the first full-score edition. However, the question still remains as to why this early copy in her possession diverges from Mozart's autograph in so many libretto details. The Authentic Magic Flute Libretto: Mozart's Autograph or the First Full-Score Edition? investigates the origin and claim to authenticity of the first full-score edition of Die Zauberfloete, drawing attention to the close bond between words and music. Michael Freyhan brings the subtlety of the first edition word setting to the attention of scholars, musicians, and opera-lovers, setting out the evidence for its authenticity and detailing the quest, pursued in 15 countries, for the earliest possible historical sources. Freyhan examines the differences between the first edition and the autograph, discussing the quality of the word-setting-supported by 32 musical examples-and evaluating the relationship of the two texts in terms of language and literature. The following chapters discuss the early history of the autograph, focusing on four alleged owners, its market value, and the misleading catalogue numbering systems seen on the first page. Details of the performance and publication history of the first edition text are followed by a new perspective on the disputed authorship of the libretto, in light of the possible existence of two authentic texts. A concluding chapter discusses Mozart's sketches and working methods, while an appendix traces the character and career of Karl Ludwig Giesecke, one of the writers who claimed ownership of the opera's libretto. The book also includes several photos and the complete first edition libretto, in German and with literal English translation, providing a side-by-side text comparison with the autograph text.

George Gershwin is at once one of America's most popular and least appreciated composers. In this important new work, some of America's leading experts on popular music have contributed articles about Gershwin and the rediscovery of both his songs and his concert music.

Almost fifty years since his passing, the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams continues to captivate audiences around the world, evoking the sound and spirit of folksong, and the image of rural landscape. In Vaughan Williams on Music, we read the composer in his own words, as he pursues two related ambitions: to create his own musical language, and to make early twentieth-century England a musical nation. Music lovers, students, and researchers alike will find in this volume a substantial collection of the composer's writings which either went unpublished or have been unavailable since their initial publication. The book contains 102 items written by the composer between 1897 and the year of his death, 1958, including articles for musical magazines, transcripts of broadcasts, obituary notices, and program notes. This wide-ranging material illuminates Vaughan Williams's work as a composer, and highlights his numerous other roles as an active supporter of amateur music-makers, a leader in the folksong revival, educator, performer, campaigner for English music, and polemicist. By addressing a variety of topics, Vaughan Williams reveals the complex and volatile political, musical, and cultural contexts in which he worked over a period of six decades. In these circumstances, Vaughan Williams demonstrates the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his understanding, and his commitment to communicating with a wide audience. His writings are purposely accessible to reach this audience, permeated with central themes of originality, folksong, a sense of history, and the importance of self-expression. Moreover, the collection reveals the emergence of Vaughan Williams's aesthetics of music during the early 1900s, as he came to terms with the legacy of Brahms and Wagner in order to develop his personal musical idiom. Vaughan Williams on Music is a significant resource for scholars of both British music and the history of British culture, as well as an enjoyable read for all who love Vaughan Williams's music.

Visionary composer, theorist, and creator of musical instruments, Harry Partch (1901-1974) was a leading figure in the development of an indigenously American contemporary music. A pioneer in his explorations of new instruments and new tunings, Partch created multimedia theater works that combine sight and sound in a compelling synthesis. He is acknowledged as a major inspiration to postwar experimental composers as diverse as Gyoergy Ligeti, Lou Harrison, Philip Glass, and Laurie Anderson, and his book Genesis of a Music, first published in 1949, is now considered a classic. This book is the first to tell the complete story of Partch's life and work. Drawing on interviews with many of Partch's associates and on the complete archives of the Harry Partch Estate, Bob Gilmore provides a full and sympathetic portrait of this extraordinary creative artist. He describes Partch's complicated relationships with friends, patrons, the musical establishment, and the world at large. He traces Partch's upbringing in the remote desert towns of the Southwest, his explosive encounter with formal music education in Los Angeles, and his revolutionary course as a composer that began with an interest in the musicality of speech patterns. After immersing himself in hobo subculture during the Depression, Partch came to occupy a lonely and uncompromising position as a cultural outsider. Richly fascinating in themselves, Partch's compositions, writings, and life also have much to reveal about American society and the creative impulses of the artistic avant-garde.

Notation in Johannes Brahms's sonata scores tells violinists and pianists far more than merely what pitches to play and how long to play them-if read carefully, these scores reveal an immense amount of expression, both of musical and human essences. Joel Lester's Brahms's Violin Sonatas magnifies key passages from these scores, revealing in clear and accessible language how the composer built his themes and musical narratives and how, ultimately, Brahms's music came to sound Brahmsian. Through close readings and annotated musical examples, Brahms's Violin Sonatas guides practitioners to read scores with care and to develop their own informed interpretation of the pieces, eschewing the notion of a single "correct" interpretation of the historical score. By exploring not only the sonatas' musical elements, but also their relationship to important events in the composer's life, Lester shows how subtle components can communicate the gestures, moods, personalities, and emotions that make Brahms's music so compelling. A companion volume to the author's award-winning 1999 study Bach's Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, and Performance (OUP), Brahms's Violin Sonatas is a clear and practical guide to understanding and performing Brahms's music in the present.

How does musical harmony engage listeners in relations of desire? Where does this desire come from? Author Kenneth Smith seeks to answer these questions by analyzing works from the turn of the twentieth- century that are both harmonically enriched and psychologically complex. Desire in Chromatic Harmony yields a new theory of how chromatic chord progressions direct the listener on intricate journeys through harmonic space, mirroring the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. Smith extends this mode of enquiry into sophisticated music theory, while exploring philosophically engaged European and American composers such as Richard Strauss, Alexander Skryabin, Josef Suk, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland. Focusing on harmony and chord progression, the book drills down into the diatonic undercurrent beneath densely chromatic and dissonant surfaces. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk's asrael Symphony to an exploration of "perversion" in Strauss's elektra; from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski's Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland's The Tender Land, Desire in Chromatic Harmony cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity, revealing the psychological make-up of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.

Hailed as a child prodigy and later acclaimed as England's finest extempore organist, Samuel Wesley - son of Charles Wesley and nephew of John Wesley, the founders of Methodism - is best known today for his musical compositions and for his promotion of the music of J. S. Bach. At the heart of this source book is a calendar of Samuel Wesley's correspondence. The editors date and summarise the content of over 1100 surviving letters and other documents, most of which have not previously been published. The book accordingly reveals considerable new information about Wesley and his complex personal affairs, including his incarceration for debt and his confinement in a lunatic asylum for a year. Many details are provided about London musical life in the era from Boyce to Mendelssohn that prior scholars have not taken into account. The book also presents a chronology of Wesley's life, a descriptive list of his nearly 550 musical and literary works, a discography, an iconography and a bibliography. It therefore is the most comprehensive available reference source for Wesley's life, times and music.

The first large-scale study of the music of Herbert Howells, prodigiously gifted musician and favourite student of the notoriously hard-to-please Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Herbert Howells (1892-1983) was a prodigiously gifted musician and the favourite student of the notoriously hard-to-please Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Throughout his long life, he was one of the country's most prominent composers, writing extensively in all genres except the symphony and opera. Yet today he is known mostly for his church music, and there is as yet relatively little serious study of his work. This book is the first large-scale study of Howells's music, affording both detailed consideration of individual works and a broad survey of general characteristics and issues. Its coverage is wide-ranging, addressing all aspects of the composer's prolific output and probing many of the issues that it raises. The essays are gathered in five sections: Howells the Stylist examines one of the most striking aspect of the composer's music, its strongly characterised personal voice; Howells the VocalComposer addresses both his well-known contribution to church music and his less familiar, but also important, contribution to the genre of solo song; Howells the Instrumental Composer shows that he was no less accomplished for his work in genres without words, for which, in fact, he first made his name; Howells the Modern considers the composer's rather overlooked contribution to the development of a modern voice for British music; and Howells in Mourning explores the important impact of his son's death on his life and work. The composer that emerges from these studies is a complex figure: technically fluent but prone to revision and self-doubt; innovative but also conservative; a composer with an improvisational sense of flow who had a firm grasp of musical form; an exponent of British musical style who owed as much to continental influence as to his national heritage. This volume, comprising a collection of outstanding essays by established writers and emergent scholars, opens up the range of Howells's achievement to a wider audience, both professional and amateur. PHILLIP COOKE is Lecturer in Composition at theUniversity of Aberdeen. DAVID MAW is Tutor and Research Fellow in Music at Oriel College, Oxford, holding Lectureships also at Christ Church, The Queen's and Trinity Colleges. CONTRIBUTORS: Byron Adams, Paul Andrews, Graham Barber, Jonathan Clinch, Phillip A. Cooke, Jeremy Dibble, Lewis Foreman, Fabian Huss, David Maw, Diane Nolan Cooke, Lionel Pike, Paul Spicer, Jonathan White. Foreword by John Rutter.

Separating fact from fiction, this book explores how the legendary violinist challenged the very notion of what it meant to be a musician. Our inherited image of Nicolo Paganini as a 'demonic violinist' has never been analysed in depth. What really made him 'demonic'? This book investigates the legend of Paganini. Separating fact from fiction, it explains how the virtuoso violinist challenged the very notion of what it meant to be a musician. Mai Kawabata considers Paganini's performance innovations, violin techniques and musical ethos in the light of contemporary attitudes towards musicand the supernatural, gender, sexuality, violence, heroism and masculinity as well as conceptions of power. The many perceptions of Paganini as demonic - Faust, magician, devil, rake/libertine, Napoleon - were inter-related but not equivalent. A swirl of cultural factors coalesced in the performer to create that phenomenon of Romanticism, a larger-than-life Gothic villain. Kawabata shows how the idea of virtuosity spiralled out of control, acquiring a potent, overwhelmingly negative aura in the process, as the mythology surrounding Paganini outlived and outgrew the man to monstrous proportions. An appendix brings together late nineteenth-century British press and literature coverage of Paganini that contributed to the developing myth surrounding the now famous composer and performer. MAI KAWABATA is Lecturer in Music at the University of East Anglia and a professional violinist.

"As a composer one forgets, in time, the fine detail of composition processes which produced past work... it must be left to scholars to recreate, slowly and painstakingly, earlier creative processes." Peter Maxwell Davies. In the eight essays presented here, leading scholars of the music of Peter Maxwell Davies explore some of the composer's creative processes. David Roberts, Peter Owens and Richard McGregor examine Davies's employment of pitch-class sets and other models evident in his sketch material, while Joel Lester looks at the serial elements that produce structure and effect in the work Ave Maris Stella. The political, literary and musical influences evident in the 1987 opera Resurrection and in subsequent orchestral works come under scrutiny from John Warnaby. Davies's use of older dramatic forms and ritual is the focus of Michael Burden's examination of his music theatre. The composer's own descriptions of his compositional process contain distinctly modernist overtones as Arnold Whittall suggests in the concluding essay in the volume. The sustained textural multiplicity evident in much of Davies's music points to this modernism. It is a multiplicity mirrored in the variety of approaches taken by the commentators in this volume. The differing points of view on offer complement and contrast each other, allowing the reader to appreciate the different levels on which Davies's music works.