Often considered Romania's greatest musical force and a significant mind of the 20th century, composer George Enescu (1881-1955) achieved international fame and succeeded in incorporating Romanian spirituality into worldwide culture. Masterworks of George Enescu provides a profound and very detailed analysis of more than 25 of this important composer's most representative works. Translated from musicologist Pascal Bentoiu's Romanian publication, Lory Wallfisch presents this vital work for the first time to English-speaking audiences, providing the worldwide public with the tools to understand and enjoy Enescu's music. Bentoiu presents a kind of travel diary through Enescu's creative legacy, offering a comprehensive, well-documented, knowledgeable, and generously illustrated analytical study of the composer's greatest masterpieces. Works such as the Romanian Rhapsodies, the Second Suite for Orchestra, Vox Maris, Impressions d'Enfance, his opera Oedipe, and several sonatas and quartets are carefully examined and admired for their substance and their ability to add dignity to the musical world. The works are presented chronologically, considering their conceptual realization as well as their inception and completion. Illustrated with more than 400 musical examples, this impressive study is a perfect guide toward the thorough enjoyment of Enescu's masterpieces.

Elvis Presley was never accused of a crime, but for years the FBI kept a file on Presley because of the crimes that went on in the background of his world: death threats made against him; a major extortion attempt while he was in the Army in Germany; complaints about his public performances, a mention of a paternity suit; the theft by larceny of an executive jet which he owned and the alleged fraud surrounding a 1955 Corvette which he owned. These formerly Top Secret Files show dramatically how the FBI and other law enforcement agencies had to react to crimes in Presley's world.

This is the first volume to explore the reception of the Pythagorean doctrine of cosmic harmony within a variety of contexts, ranging chronologically from Plato to 18th-century England. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning the relationship between music, philosophy, and science, and challenges the view that Renaissance discussions on cosmic harmony are either mere repetitions of ancient music theory or pre-figurations of the 'Scientific Revolution'. Utilizing this interdisciplinary approach, Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony offers a new perspective on the reception of an important classical theme in various cultural, sequential and geographical contexts, underlying the continuities and changes between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This project will be of particular interest within these emerging disciplines as they continue to explore the ideological significance of the various ways in which we appropriate the past.

Uncovering Music of Early European Women (1250 - 1750) brings together nine chapters that investigate aspects of female music-making and musical experience in the medieval and early modern periods. Part I, "Notes from the Underground," treats the spirituality of women in solitude and in community. Parts II and III, "Interlude" and "Music for Royal Rivals," respond to Joan Kelly's famous feminist question and suggest that women of a certain stature did have a Renaissance. Part IV, "Serenissime Sirene," plays with the notion of the allure of music and its risks in Venice during the Baroque. The process of uncovering requires close listening to women's creative endeavors in an ongoing effort to piece together equitably the terrain of early music. Contributors include: Cynthia J. Cyrus, Claire Fontijn, Catherine E. Gordon, Laura Jeppesen, Eva Kuhn, Anne MacNeil, Jason Stoessel, Elizabeth Randell Upton, and Laurence Wuidar. An invaluable book for college students and scholars interested in the social and cultural meanings of women in early music.

Covering a period from the Ancient World to the present day, the book suggests that until very recently, falsettists and counter-tenors have been distinct vocal genres. `The use of high male voices in the past has long been one of the most seriously misunderstood areas of musical scholarship and practice. In opening up this rich subject (to readers of all sorts) with refreshingly clear perspectives and plenty of new material, Simon Ravens' well-researched book goes a very long way to rectifying matters. Ravens writes damnably well, and if the story that emerges is necessarily a complex one, his treatment of it is always engagingly comprehensible.' ANDREW PARROTT Tracing the origins, influences and development of falsetto singing in Western music, Simon Ravens offers a revisionist history of high male singing from the Ancient Greeks to Michael Jackson. This history embraces not just singers of counter-tenor and alto parts up to and including our own time but the castrati of the Ancient world, the male sopranists of late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the dual-register tenors of the Baroque and Classical periods. Musical aesthetics aside, to understand the changing ways men have sung high, it is also vital to address extra-musical factors - which are themselves in a state of flux. Tothis end, Ravens illuminates his chronological survey by exploring topics as diverse as human physiology, the stereotyping of national characters, gender identity, and the changing of boys' voices. The result is a complex and fascinating history sure to appeal not only to music scholars but to performers and all those with an interest particularly in early music. Simon Ravens is a performer, writer, and director of Musica Contexta, with whom hehas performed in Britain and Europe, regularly broadcast, and made numerous acclaimed recordings. Ravens had previously founded and directed Australasia's foremost early music choir, the Tudor Consort. Between 2002 and 2007 his regular monthly column Ravens View appeared in the Early Music Review, to which he still regularly contributes.

Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing contributes to a wave of voice studies scholarship with the first book-length study of free jazz voice. It pieces together a history of free jazz voice that spans from sound poetry and scat in the 1950s to the more recent wave of free jazz choirs. The author traces the developments and offers a theory, derived from interviews with many of the most important singers in the history of free jazz voice, of how listeners have experienced and evaluated the often unconventional vocal sounds these vocalists employed. This theory explains that even audiences willing to enjoy harsh sounds from saxophones or guitars often resist when voices make sounds that audiences understand as not-human. Experimental poetry and scat were combined and transformed in free jazz spaces in the 1960s and 1970s by vocalists like Yoko Ono (in solo work and her work with Ornette Coleman and John Stevens), Jeanne Lee (in her solo work and her work with Archie Shepp and Gunter Hampel), Leon Thomas (in his solo work as well as his work with Pharoah Sanders and Carlos Santana), and Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols (who devoted much of their energy to creating unaccompanied free jazz vocal music). By studying free jazz voice we can learn important lessons about what we expect from the voice and what happens when those expectations are violated. This book doesn't only trace histories of free jazz voice, it makes an attempt to understand why this story hasn't been told before, with an impressive breadth of scope in terms of the artists covered, drawing on research from the US, Canada, Wales, Scotland, France, The Netherlands, and Japan.

Originally published in 1987, this volume charts the development of German song across a century and a half, relating it both to poetry and to the cultural scene in Germany. By emphasising genre rather than individual composers and while paying heed to acknowledged masterpieces - by quoting extensively from forgotten composers, the book avoids historical over simplification and arrives at a fuller picture of this rich tradition. In so doing, it uncovers much neglected material. The book investigates the relationship between German poets and composers and their native folk tradition. It further explores the interaction between convention and innovation and demonstrates how one poem can be interpreted quite differently by different composers. The book is accessible both to students of literature and music.

What is it like to work as a classical musician today? How can we explain ongoing gender, racial, and class inequalities in the classical music profession? What happens when musicians become entrepreneurial and think of themselves as a product that needs to be sold and marketed? Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work explores these and other questions by drawing on innovative, empirical research on the working lives of classical musicians in Germany and the UK. Indeed, Scharff examines a range of timely issues such as the gender, racial, and class inequalities that characterise the cultural and creative industries; the ways in which entrepreneurialism - as an ethos to work on and improve the self - is lived out; and the subjective experiences of precarious work in so-called 'creative cities'. Thus, this book not only adds to our understanding of the working lives of artists and creatives, but also makes broader contributions by exploring how precarity, neoliberalism, and inequalities shape subjective experiences. Contributing to a range of contemporary debates around cultural work, Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of Sociology, Gender and Cultural Studies.

First published in 1998, this volume comprises papers given at a conference on Lawes and his music held at Oxford in September 1995 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of his death. They examine not only Lawes's music but the milieu in which he worked. Part One examines the musical life of the English Court in Lawes's day, noting his activities there and his involvement with companies of players. Manuscript studies and a detailed account of the fatal battle are also included. Part Two comprises seven essays exploring the wide range of his instrumental and vocal music. William Lawes is acknowledged as the most exciting and innovative composer working in England during the reign of Charles I. His tragic early death at the Siege of Chester in 1645 only served to heighten his reputation among his contemporaries, lending him also the cloak of martyrdom in the service of his king.

For students learning the principles of music theory, it can often seem as though the tradition of tonal harmony is governed by immutable rules that define which chords, tones, and intervals can be used where. Yet even within the classical canon, there are innumerable examples of composers diverging from these foundational "rules." Drawing on examples from composers including J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms, and more, Bending the Rules of Music Theory seeks to take readers beyond the basics of music theory and help them to understand the inherent flexibility in the system of tonal music. Chapters explore the use of different rule-breaking elements in practice and why they work, introducing students to a more nuanced understanding of music theory.

First published in 1999, the essays that follow have been selected from the author's writings to explore musical institutions in 15th and 16th century Italy with a detailed focus on the papal choir, but with additional comments on Mantua (Mantova), Florence and France. Much of the material which formed the basis of those essays was largely drawn from archives. Richard Sherr explores diverse areas including the Medici coat of arms in a motet for Leo X, performance practice in the papal chapel during the 16th century, the publications of Guglielmo Gonzaga, Lorenzo de' Medici as a patron of music and homosexuality in late sixteenth-century Italy.

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.

The history of music at the Maison royale de Saint-Louis at Saint-Cyr - the famous convent school founded by Madame de Maintenon and established by Louis XIV in 1686 as a royal foundation - is both rich and intriguing; its large repertory of music was composed expressly for young female voices by important composers working within significant contemporary musical genres: liturgical chant, sacred motets, theatrical music, and cantiques spirituels. While these genres reflect contemporary styles and trends, at the same time the works themselves were made to conform to the sensibilities and abilities of their intended performers. Even as Jean-Baptiste Moreau's music for Jean Racine's biblical tragedies Esther and Athalie shows a number of similarities to contemporary tragedies lyriques, it departs from that more public genre in its brevity, generally simpler solo writing, and the integral use of the chorus. The musical style of the choral numbers closely parallels that of other choral music in the repertory at Saint-Cyr. The liturgical chant sung in the church was composed by Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, and is an example of plain-chant musical, a type of new ecclesiastical composition written during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, primarily for female religious communities in France. The large repertory of petits motets (short sacred Latin pieces for solo voice), mostly composed by Nivers and Louis-Nicolas Clerambault, are simpler and more restrained than works by their contemporaries. A close study of the motets reveals much about changes to musical style and performance practices at Saint-Cyr during the eighteenth century. The cantique spirituel, a song with a spiritual text in the vernacular French language, played a significant role in both the education and recreation of the girls at Saint-Cyr. Cantiques composed for the girls vary widely in terms of their style and difficulty, ranging from simple strophic melodies to more sophisticated works in the style of contemporary airs. In all cases, the stylistic features of the music for Saint-Cyr reflect a careful consideration of the needs and capabilities of the young singers of the school, as well as an awareness of the rigorous requirements of Madame de Maintenon, who kept a close watch over the propriety of all things relating to the piety, behavior, and image of her charges.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, neoclassicism was one of the dominant movements in American music. Today this music is largely in eclipse, mostly absent in performance and even from accounts of music history, in spite of-and initially because of-its adherence to an expanded tonality. No previous book has focused on the nature and scope of this musical tradition. Neoclassicism in American Music: Voices of Clarity and Restraint makes clear what neoclassicism was, how it emerged in America, and what happened to it. Music reviewer and scholar, R. James Tobin argues that efforts to define musical neoclassicism as a style largely fail because of the stylistic diversity of the music that fall within its scope. However, neoclassicists as different from one another as the influential Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith did have a classical aesthetic in common, the basic characteristics of which extend to other neoclassicists This study focuses, in particular, on a group of interrelated neoclassical American composers who came to full maturity in the 1940s.These included Harvard professor Walter Piston, who had studied in France in the 1920s; Harold Shapero, the most traditional of the group; Irving Fine and Arthur Berger, his colleagues at Brandeis; Lukas Foss, later an experimentalist composer whose origins lay in neoclassicism of the 1940s; Alexei Haieff, and Ingolf Dahl, both close associates of Stravinsky; and others. Tobin surveys the careers of these figures, drawing especially on early reviews of performances before offering his own critical assessment of individual works. Adventurous collectors of recordings, performing musicians, concert and broadcasting programmers, as well as music and cultural historians and those interested in musical aesthetics, will find much of interest here. Dates of composition, approximate duration of individual works, and discographies add to the work's reference value.

The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt: Dramaturgical Leaves: Richard Wagner completes the second half of Liszt's writings about stage works, its composers, and music drama. In this volume, Liszt focuses on the works of his most controversial devotee and son-in-law, Richard Wagner, whose music dramas Liszt championed as conductor during his tenure in Weimar. Here, we see Liszt prove his skill and expertise as a music critic, as well. He offers a critical analysis of the aesthetic and musical principles that underlie Wagner's operas, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, and The Flying Dutchman, including a thorough discussion of Wagner's Leitmotif system of composition. Additionally, his findings are substantiated with a plethora of music examples, which will satisfy those who wanted greater musical substance from his writings. He also foretells the magnitude of Wagner's influence on prosperity in his pamphlet-length essay, The Rhine's Gold. Finally, the editor and translator of this volume, Janita Hall-Swadley, provides a unique perspective on these same principles, which is based on Wagner's own mysterious diagram of "The Philosopher's Stone," which was supposed to be included in the original 1863 edition of the composer's important writing, Opera and Drama, but never made it to publication.

In Dean Dixon: Negro at Home, Maestro Abroad, conductor and scholar Rufus Jones Jr. brings to light a literal treasure trove of unpublished primary sources to tell the compelling story of this great American conductor. A testament to Dixon's resolve, this first-ever full-length biography of this American musical hero chronicles Dixon's musical upbringing, beginnings as a conductor, painful decision to leave his own country, rise to fame in Europe and his triumphant stand twenty-one years later when he returned to the United States to serve as a model for aspiring Black classical musicians. Dean Dixon: Negro at Home, Maestro Abroad will interest anyone who wants to know more about Black American history, American musical culture, and Black American concert music and musicians. More information is available at: www.maestroabroad.com

In Giving Voice to My Music, David Wordsworth's engrossing interviews take us into the world of twenty-four leading composers of choral music, composers for whom writing for choirs is central to their very existence. Here, they give voice to their inspirations, their passions and the challenges they have faced in working through the pandemic of 2020/21. They reveal how their life experiences have influenced their compositions, how they choose and relate to the texts they set, and how they interact with commissioners, singers and conductors alike. Enhanced by an extensive reference section and a revelatory list of the composers' own favourite pieces, readers will discover music that has enriched these composers' lives and encouraged their creativity. Giving Voice to my Music will be relished by singers, composers, conductors and above all audiences, for the new insights it offers into works that are already well-known but also for its introductions to new choral music that deserves to be better known.

Originally published in 1973. Folk-life and folk-culture, usually the preserve of the scholar, have been brought vividly and entertainingly to life in these recollections and stories of one man's life in the Irish countryside. This book tells the life story of John Maguire, who died in 1975, including over 50 of the songs he sang, with full musical transcriptions. He was a fine singer, firmly within the Irish tradition, and his songs are the record of a people, their history and traditions, their joys and sufferings, their comedies and tragedies. John Maguire's fascinating story, skilfully and unobtrusively collated by Robin Morton, is full of material that will interest singers and students of folksongs. His songs and music will be of value to all those interested in traditional music and song.

Originally published in 1977. The Travellers, from those living in bow-tents and horse-drawn caravans to those dwelling in motor caravans and permanent homes, are an important source of traditional music. Their society means that songs that have died out in more settled communities are preserved among them. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, widely known as two of the founding singers of the British and American folk revivals, here display a vast fund of folklore scholarship around the songs of British travelling people. Resulting from extensive collecting in southern and southeastern England and central and northeastern Scotland in the 1960s and 70s, this book contains 130 songs with music and comprehensive notes relating them to folkloristic and historical points of interest. It includes traditional ballads and ballads of broadside origin, bawdy, tragic and humorous songs about love, work and death. Most are in English or in Scots dialect with four in Anglo-Romani.

This is the first volume to explore the reception of the Pythagorean doctrine of cosmic harmony within a variety of contexts, ranging chronologically from Plato to 18th-century England. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning the relationship between music, philosophy, and science, and challenges the view that Renaissance discussions on cosmic harmony are either mere repetitions of ancient music theory or pre-figurations of the 'Scientific Revolution'. Utilizing this interdisciplinary approach, Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony offers a new perspective on the reception of an important classical theme in various cultural, sequential and geographical contexts, underlying the continuities and changes between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This project will be of particular interest within these emerging disciplines as they continue to explore the ideological significance of the various ways in which we appropriate the past.

What is it like to work as a classical musician today? How can we explain ongoing gender, racial, and class inequalities in the classical music profession? What happens when musicians become entrepreneurial and think of themselves as a product that needs to be sold and marketed? Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work explores these and other questions by drawing on innovative, empirical research on the working lives of classical musicians in Germany and the UK. Indeed, Scharff examines a range of timely issues such as the gender, racial, and class inequalities that characterise the cultural and creative industries; the ways in which entrepreneurialism - as an ethos to work on and improve the self - is lived out; and the subjective experiences of precarious work in so-called 'creative cities'. Thus, this book not only adds to our understanding of the working lives of artists and creatives, but also makes broader contributions by exploring how precarity, neoliberalism, and inequalities shape subjective experiences. Contributing to a range of contemporary debates around cultural work, Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of Sociology, Gender and Cultural Studies.

There have been numerous publications in the last decades on the Bible in literature, film, and art. But until now, no reference work has yet appeared on the Bible as it appears in Western music. In The Bible in Music: A Dictionary of Songs, Works, and More, scholars Siobhan Dowling Long and John F. A. Sawyer correct this gap in Biblical reference literature, providing for the first time a convenient guide to musical interpretations of the Bible. Alongside examples of classical music from the Middle Ages through modern times, Dowling Long and Sawyer also bring attention to the Bible's impact on popular culture with numerous entries on hymns, spirituals, musicals, film music, and contemporary popular music. Each entry contains essential information about the original context of the work (date, composer, etc.) and, where relevant, its afterlife in literature, film, politics, and liturgy. It includes an index of biblical references and an index of biblical names, as well as a detailed timeline that brings to the fore key events, works, and publications, placing them in their historical context. There is also a bibliography, a glossary of technical terms, and an index of artists, authors, and composers. The Bible in Music will fascinate anyone familiar with the Bible, but it is also designed to encourage choirs, musicians, musicologists, lecturers, teachers, and students of music and religious education to discover and perform some less well-known pieces, as well as helping them to listen to familiar music with a fresh awareness of what it is about.

Music, theatre and politics have maintained a long-standing, if varying and problematic, relationship. In the Ancient World, the relationship used to be a harmonious one, scholars have us believe, glorifying the moment at the beginning of Western history when a political community, or polis, affirmed itself in a practice that purportedly achieved the perfect integration of music and theatre. To revive this original harmony was, of course, one of the main impulses that engendered the genre of opera. However, while it is widely recognized that the political represented a prius in the Ancient triangle of music, theatre and politics, there has been little attention to the status of the political in the triangle's modern variety. Nonetheless, the relationship between the three continues to be strong. In many contexts, the political still takes priority, encouraging or curbing artistic creativity. The contributions in this volume bridge the conventional chronological division between 'late Romantic' and 'modern' music to thematize a wide array of issues in the context of Germany. The contributors focus on a national tradition and period in which the friction between music, theatre and politics grew particularly intense. Major themes include: reception history; the entwining of aesthetic and political intentions on the part of composers, critics and historians; and the construction and/or critique of collective political identities in and through music theatre.