Mozart's music has enthralled listeners for centuries. In this brilliant biography, acclaimed historian Paul Johnson draws upon his expert knowledge of the era and Mozart's own private letters to conjure Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life and times in rich detail.

Johnson charts Mozart's life from age three through to his later years - when he penned "The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni." Along the way, Johnson challenges some of the popular myths that cloud Mozart's image: his allegedly tempestuous personal relationships and supposedly bitter rivalry with Salieri, as well as the notion that he was desperately impoverished when he died.

The result - a bold, invigorating portrait of one of the most popular and influential composers of all time - is a welcome addition to Johnson's extraordinary body of work and makes a perfect gift for classical music lovers and fans of biographies.

for SATTBB & SA or SATB unaccompanied We are is a dynamic and vibrant setting of 'The human family', a powerful poem by American poet Maya Angelou. The poet's message that 'we are more alike than we are unalike' is carried through the piece by a compelling rhythmic figure, and the a cappella textures and interplay between voices creates an infectious energy. The rich texture of the double choir scoring allows the two groups of singers to work together to create the sense of unity and common purpose the poem speaks to. We are was commissioned by The King's Singers for their 50th anniversary celebrations and features on their album 'GOLD' (Signum, SIGCD500). The piece was originally presented with the first choir scoring as AATBarBarB, but has since been rescored for SATTBB, with the option for the second choir to be SA or SATB remaining unchanged.

Brilliant, practical, and humorous conversations with one of the twentieth-century's greatest musicologists on art, culture, and the physical pain of playing a difficult passage until one attains its rewards. Throughout his life, Charles Rosen combined formidable intelligence with immense skill as a concert pianist. He began studying at Juilliard at age seven and went on to inspire a generation of scholars to combine history, aesthetics, and score analysis in what became known as "new musicology." The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking presents a master class for music lovers. In interviews originally conducted and published in French, Rosen's friend Catherine Temerson asks carefully crafted questions to elicit his insights on the evolution of music-not to mention painting, theater, science, and modernism. Rosen touches on the usefulness of aesthetic reflection, the pleasure of overcoming stage fright, and the drama of conquering a technically difficult passage. He tells vivid stories about composers from Chopin and Wagner to Stravinsky and Elliott Carter. In Temerson's questions and Rosen's responses arise conundrums both practical and metaphysical. Is it possible to understand a work without analyzing it? Does music exist if it isn't played? Throughout, Rosen returns to the theme of sensuality, arguing that if one does not possess a physical craving to play an instrument, then one should choose another pursuit. Rosen takes readers to the heart of the musical matter. "Music is a way of instructing the soul, making it more sensitive," he says, "but it is useful only insofar as it is pleasurable. This pleasure is manifest to anyone who experiences music as an inexorable need of body and mind."

Commissioned for the 40th birthday of the organist Paul Walton, Walton's Paean is a work of great verve, with compelling rhythms, exciting harmonies, and catchy melodies propelling the celebratory music forward. Through the boisterous excitement, legato passages emerge as the piece hurtles towards the resounding finale. There is also a little joke in the occasional references to the music of Paul Walton's namesake, William.

In her early fifties, Moira Bennett was widowed with a school-age son and in need of a job. With virtually no previous working experience but full of energy and determination, she found herself working at the Britten-Pears School at Snape, helping to run masterclasses for young professional musicians studying with artists such as Peter Pears, Galina Vishnevskaya, Mstislav Rostropovich, Hugues Cuenod and William Pleeth. Her gift for arts administration - understanding the needs of performers and audiences - was soon to become highly valued at Aldeburgh, as she became the Registrar at the Britten-Pears School and went on to create the post of Development Director in the early days of commercial sponsorship of the arts. She was later invited to take on a similar role at the Barbican Centre, supporting a series of international arts festivals, before going on to work with the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2012 the Bittern Press published Moira Bennett's history of the Britten-Pears School, Making Musicians, which Classical Music magazine made one its Books of the Year. Now in her early nineties, Moira Bennett has written an extraordinary autobiography, casting an astute eye over her childhood and adolescence in South Africa, the impact of the Second World War and the Apartheid years on the country, and her second, 'unexpected', life in the arts.

(Music Sales America). A compendium of the world's most loved music. True to the spirit of the great composers, this volume fills the needs of students and teachers. Over 100 works, including Schubert's "Moment Musicale," Chopin's "Minute Waltz," Beethoven's "Rondo a Cappriccio," and much more. Spiral bound.

Nostalgia for the Future is the first collection in English of the writings and interviews of Luigi Nono (1924-1990). One of the most prominent figures in the development of new music after World War II, he is renowned for both his compositions and his utopian views. His many essays and lectures reveal an artist at the center of the analytical, theoretical, critical, and political debates of the time. This selection of Nono's most significant essays, articles, and interviews covers his entire career (1948-1989), faithfully mirroring the interests, orientations, continuities, and fractures of a complex and unique personality. His writings illuminate his intensive involvements with theatre, painting, literature, politics, science, and even mysticism. Nono's words make vividly evident his restless quest for the transformative possibilities of a radical musical experience, one that is at the same time profoundly engaged with its performers and spaces, its audiences, and its human and social motivations and ramifications.

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) is widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's most significant masters of vocal music-solo, choral and operatic-quite apart from his achievements in instrumental spheres. But what it cost him has been underestimated. In this seminal biography, which will serve as the definitive guide to the songs, Graham Johnson shows that it is in Poulenc's extraordinary songs and seeing how they fit into his life-his hidden sexuality, addiction and all-that we discover the composer's essential artistic being. With Jeremy Sams's song translations, the first in over forty years, and the insight that comes from a lifetime of performing this music, Johnson provides an essential volume for singers, pianists, listeners and readers interested in the artistic milieu of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Studies of concert life in nineteenth-century America have generally been limited to large orchestras and the programs we are familiar with today. But as this book reveals, audiences of that era enjoyed far more diverse musical experiences than this focus would suggest. To hear an orchestra, people were more likely to head to a beer garden, restaurant, or summer resort than to a concert hall. And what they heard weren't just symphonic works--programs also included opera excerpts and arrangements, instrumental showpieces, comic numbers, and medleys of patriotic tunes. This book brings together musicologists and historians to investigate the many orchestras and programs that developed in nineteenth-century America. In addition to reflecting on the music that orchestras played and the socioeconomic aspects of building and maintaining orchestras, the book considers a wide range of topics, including audiences, entrepreneurs, concert arrangements, tours, and musicians' unions. The authors also show that the period saw a massive influx of immigrant performers, the increasing ability of orchestras to travel across the nation, and the rising influence of women as listeners, patrons, and players. Painting a rich and detailed picture of nineteenth-century concert life, this collection will greatly broaden our understanding of America's musical history.

The Austro-Hungarian Hans Richter (1843-1916) was the first career-conductor to gain international fame. His first appointment was to Budapest, and he went on to dominate music-making in Vienna, Bayreuth, London, Manchester (with the Halle Orchestra) and other towns and cities in Britain and Europe between 1865 and 1912. Richter gave first performances of works by Wagner, Brahms, Elgar, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Stanford and Parry and helped to further the careers of Dvorak, Sibelius, Bartok and Glazunov. Christopher Fifield's remarkable study explores the personality, life and work of a conductor who influenced and inspired the leading composers, singers and instrumentalists of his day. Originally published in 1993, this revised and expanded edition contains extensive new material in the form of Richter's conducting books. Translated and reproduced in full, they detail every one of the 4,351 public performances Richter gave in a professional life spanning 47 years. Drawing on Richter's own diaries, the book also presents his correspondence with many contemporary composers (Wagner in particular) and performers. Fifield's biography of this seminal figure provides a revealing insight into British and European music and concert life during the long nineteenth century. CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD is a conductor, music historian, lecturer and broadcaster. He is the editor and author of the Letters and Diaries of Kathleen Ferrier and Max Bruch: His Life and Works, both published in new editions by The Boydell Press. He has also written Ibbs & Tillett - The rise and fall of a Musical Empire and The German Symphony between Beethoven and Brahms.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story!" With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

This book develops a comparative analysis of the relationship between western art music, nations and nationalism. It explores the influence of emergent nations and nationalism on the development of classical music in Europe and North America and examines the distinctive themes, sounds and resonances to be found in the repertory of each of the nations. Its scope is broad, extending well beyond the period 1848-1914 when national music flourished most conspicuously. The interplay of music and nation encompasses the oratorios of Handel, the open-air music of the French Revolution and the orchestral works of Beethoven and Mendelssohn and extends into the mid-twentieth century in the music of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Copland. The book addresses the representation of the national community, the incorporation of ethnic vernacular idioms into art music, the national homeland in music, musical adaptations of national myths and legends, the music of national commemoration and the canonisation of national music. Bringing together insights from nationalism studies, musicology and cultural history, it will be essential reading not only for musicologists but for cultural historians and historians of nationalism as well. MATTHEW RILEY is Reader in Music at the University of Birmingham. The late ANTHONY D. SMITH was Professor Emeritus of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics.

Ernest Newman (1868-1959) left an indelible mark on British musical criticism in a career spanning more than seventy years. His magisterial Life of Richard Wagner, published in four volumes between 1933 and 1946, is regarded as his crowning achievement, but Newman wrote many other influential books and essays on a variety of subjects ranging from early music to Schoenberg. In this book, the geneses of Newman's major publications are examined in the context of prevailing intellectual trends in history, criticism and biography. Newman's career as a writer is traced across a wide range of subjects including English and French literature, evolutionary theory and biographical method, and French, German and Russian music. Underpinning many of these works is Newman's preoccupation with rationalism and historical method. By examining particular sets of writings such as composer-biographies and essays from leading newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian and the Sunday Times, this book illustrates the ways in which Newman's work was grounded in late nineteenth-century intellectual paradigms that made him a unique and at times controversial figure. PAUL WATT is Senior Lecturer in Musicology in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University.