Following Stalin's death in 1953, during the period now known as the Thaw, Nikita Khrushchev opened up greater freedoms in cultural and intellectual life. A broad group of intellectuals and artists in Soviet Russia were able to take advantage of this, and in no realm of the arts was this perhaps more true than in music. Students at Soviet conservatories were at last able to use various channels--many of questionable legality--to acquire and hear music that had previously been forbidden, and visiting performers and composers brought young Soviets new sounds and new compositions. In the 1960s, composers such as Andrey Volkonsky, Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Part, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Valentin Silvestrov experimented with a wide variety of then new and unfamiliar techniques ranging from serialism to aleatory devices, and audiences eager to escape the music of predictable sameness typical to socialist realism were attracted to performances of their new and unfamiliar creations.
This "unofficial" music by young Soviet composers inhabited the gray space between legal and illegal. Such Freedom, If Only Musical traces the changing compositional styles and politically charged reception of this music, and brings to life the paradoxical freedoms and sense of resistance or opposition that it suggested to Soviet listeners. Author Peter J. Schmelz draws upon interviews conducted with many of the most important composers and performers of the musical Thaw, and supplements this first-hand testimony with careful archival research and detailed musical analyses. The first book to explore this period in detail, Such Freedom, If Only Musical will appeal to musicologists and theorists interested in post-war arts movements, the Cold War, and Soviet music, as well as historians of Russian culture and society."

When the Second World War broke out, ballet in Britain was only a few decades old. Few had imagined that it would establish roots in a nation long thought to be unresponsive to dance. Nevertheless, the war proved to be a boon for ballet dancers, choreographers and audiences, for the nation's dancers were forced to look inward to their own identity and sources of creativity. As author Karen Eliot demonstrates in this fascinating book, instead of withering during the enforced isolation of war, ballet in Britain flourished, exhibiting a surprising heterogeneity and vibrant populism that moved ballet outside its typical elitist surroundings to be seen by uninitiated, often enthusiastic audiences. Ballet was thought to help boost audience morale, to render solace to the soul-weary and to afford entertainment and diversion to those who simply craved a few hours of distraction. Government authorities came to see that ballet could serve as a tool of propaganda; the ways it functioned within the larger public discourse of propaganda and sacrifice, and how it answered a public mood of pragmatism and idealism, are also topics in this story of the development of a national ballet identity. This narrative has several key players- dance critics, male and female dancers, producers, audiences, and choreographers. Exploring the so-called "ballet boom" during WWII, the larger story of this book is one of how art and artists thrive during conflict, and how they respond pragmatically and creatively to privation and duress.

Examining, for the first time, the compositions of Johann Joseph Fux in relation to his contemporaries Bach and Handel, The Musical Discourse of Servitude presents a new theory of the late baroque musical imagination. Author Harry White contrasts musical "servility" and "freedom" in his analysis, with Fux tied to the prevailing servitude of the day's musical imagination, particularly the hegemonic flowering of North Italian partimento method across Europe. In contrast, both Bach and Handel represented an autonomy of musical discourse, with Bach exhausting generic models in the mass and Handel inventing a new genre in the oratorio. A potent critique of Lydia Goehr's seminal The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, The Musical Discourse of Servitude draws on Goehr's formulation of the "work-concept" as an imaginary construct which, according to Goehr, is an invention of nineteenth-century reception history. White locates this concept as a defining agent of automony in Bach's late works, and contextualized the "work-concept" itself by exploring rival concepts of political, religious, and musical authority which define the European musical imagination in the first half of the eighteenth century. A major revisionist statement about the musical imagination in Western art music, The Musical Discourse of Servitude will be of interest to scholars of the Baroque, particularly of Bach and Handel.

Chopin's Second Ballade, Op. 38 is frequently performed, and takes only seven or so minutes to play. Yet the work remains very poorly understood--disagreement prevails on issues from its tonic and two-key structure to its posited relationship with the poems of Adam Mickiewicz. Chopin's PolishBallade is a reexamination and close analysis of this famous work, revealing the Ballade as a piece with a powerful political story to tell.
Through the general musical styles and specific references in the Ballade, which use both operatic strategies and approaches developed in programmatic piano pieces for amateurs, author Jonathan Bellman traces a clear narrative thread to contemporary French operas. His careful historical exegesis of previously ignored musical and cultural contexts brings to light a host of new insights about this remarkable piece, which, as Bellman shows, reflects the cultural preoccupations of the Polish emigres in mid-1830s Paris, pining with bitter nostalgia for a homeland now under Russian domination. This vital connection to the extramusical culture of its day forms the basis for a plausible relationship with the nationalistic poetry of Mickiewicz. Chopin's Polish Ballade also solves the long-standing conundrum of the two extant versions of the Ballade, making an important point about the flexible notion of "work" that Chopin embraced."

The Critical Nexus confronts an important and vexing enigma of early writings on music: why chant, which was understood to be divinely inspired, needed to be altered in order to work within the then-operative modal system. To unravel this mystery, Charles Atkinson creates a broad framework that moves from Greek harmonic theory to the various stages in the transmission of Roman chant, citing numerous music treatises from the sixth to the twelfth century. Out of this examination emerges the central point behind the problem: the tone-system advocated by writers coming from the Greek harmonic tradition was not suited to the notation of chant and that this basic incompatibility led to the creation of new theoretical constructs. By tracing the path of subsequent adaptation at the nexus of tone-system, mode, and notation, Atkinson promises new and far-reaching insights into what mode meant to the medieval musician and how the system responded to its inherent limitations.
Through a detailed examination of the major musical treatises from the sixth through the twelfth centuries, this text establishes a central dichotomy between classical harmonic theory and the practices of the Christian church. Atkinson builds the foundation for a broad and original reinterpretation of the modal system and how it relates to melody, grammar, and notation. This book will be of interest to all musicologists, music theorists working on mode, early music specialists, chant scholars, and medievalists interested in music.

The French flute player and conductor Paul Taffanel (1844-1908) was an extraordinary virtuoso and a major figure in fin-de-siecle Parisian musical life. Based on a treasure trove of private documents of Taffanel's previously unpublished letters and papers, Taffanel: Genius of the Flute
recounts the rich story of his multi-faceted career as a player, conductor, composer, teacher, and leader of musical organizations.
As a player, Taffanel had a rare vision of the flute as a serious, expressive instrument and his name sits at the center of the extraordinary lineage of flutists. At a crucial moment in the flute's history -- after it had been completely remodeled by Theobald Boehm -- Taffanel had far-ranging
influence, creating the modern French school of playing which has since been widely adopted throughout the world, and re-establishing the instrument in the mainstream of music. Taffanel was also an inspiring teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, to whom many modern flutists can trace their roots.
Taffanel also pioneered a renaissance in playing and composing chamber music for wind instruments. He founded the Societe de musique de chambre pour instruments a vent (Society of Chamber Music for Wind Instruments) in 1879, reviving the wind ensemble music of Mozart and Beethoven, and stimulating
the composition of many new works, among them Gounod's Petite symphonie. The ensemble broke the dominance of piano and strings in recital and chamber music and fostered many of the canonic works in that repertoire.
Although foremost a flutist and teacher, Taffanel was also an important opera and orchestra conductor, virtually without rival in Paris. From 1890, he served as chiefconductor at the Paris Opera and the Society des concerts du Conservatoire (Paris Conservatory Orchestra) - the first time a flutist,
rather then a string player, had been appointed to such key positions. At the Opera he was charged with all new productions and gave notable French premieres of various Wagner operas and Verdi's Otello. At the Societe des concerts he championed contemporary French composers, particularly his great
friend Saint-Saens, and gave the world premiere of Verdi's Sacred Pieces.
Beyond his work as a performer, teacher and conductor, Taffanel was a fluent composer for the flute and wind quintet, a formidable administrator of several musical organizations, and was a major personality in Parisian musical life. Blakeman expertly places Taffanel's story in the rich political and
cultural backdrop of the time, evoking Conservatoire intrigues, the Societe des concerts, and Taffanel's relationships with various musicians and major composers. Blakeman details the circumstances surrounding landmark commissions, performances, and repertoire, and weaves the details from Taffanel's
correspondence with first-person interviews and flute lore. What emerges is a portrait of an all-round musician who was also a modest and genial man.

At the end of WWII, themes in music shifted from soldiers' experiences at war to coming home, marrying their sweethearts, and returning to civilian life. The music itself also shifted, with crooners such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra replacing the Big Bands of years past. Country music, jazz, and gospel continued to evolve, and rhythm and blues and the new rock and roll were also popular during this Time. Music is not created without being influenced by the political events and societal changes of its time, and the Music of the Postwar Era is no exception. *includes combined musical charts for the years 1945-1959 *approximately 20 black and white images of the singers and musicians who represent the era's music

Wilfrid Mellers is a composer, musician and author. Honorary Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. This is his classic book on Bach.

In late eighteenth-century Vienna and the surrounding Habsburg territories, over 50 minor-key symphonies by at least 11 composers were written. These include some of the best-known works of the symphonic repertoire, such as Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony and Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550. The driving energy, intense pathos and restlessness of these compositions demand close attention and participation from the listener, and pose urgent questions about meaning and interpretation.
In response to these questions, The Viennese Minor-Key Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Mozart combines historical perspectives with recent developments in music analysis to shed new light on this distinctive part of the repertoire. Through an intertextual, analytical approach, author Matthew Riley treats the minor-key symphony as a subgenre of several strands, reconstructing the compositional world it occupied. His work enables signals to be understood, puts characteristic strategies in clear relief, and ultimately reveals the significance this music held for both composers and listeners of the time. Riley gives us a fresh picture of the familiar masterpieces of Haydn and Mozart, while also focusing on lesser known composers.

Without any formal training in music composition or even the ability to notate melodies on a musical staff, Irving Berlin took a knack for music and turned it into the most successful songwriting career in American history. Berlin was the first Tin Pan Alley songwriter to go "uptown" to Broadway with a complete musical score (Watch Your Step in 1914); he is the only songwriter to build a theater exclusively for his own work (The Music Box); and his name appears above the title of his Broadway shows and Hollywood films (iIrving Berlin's Holiday Inn), still a rare honor for songwriters. Berlin is also notable due the length of his 90+ year career in American Song; he sold his first song at the age of 8 in 1896, and passed away in 1989 at the age of 101 having outlived several of his own copyrights. Throughout his career, Berlin showed that a popular song which appealed to the masses need not be of a lesser quality than songs informed by the principles of "classical" music composition. Forty years after his last published song many of his songs remain popular and several have even entered folk song status ("White Christmas," "Easter Parade," and "God Bless America"), something no other 20th-century American songwriter can claim. As one of the most seminal figures of twentieth century, both in the world of music and in American culture more generally, and as one of the rare songwriters equally successful with popular songs, Broadway shows, and Hollywood scores, Irving Berlin is the subject of an enormous corpus of writing, scattered throughout countless publications and archives. A noted performer and interpreter of Berlin's works, Benjamin Sears has unprecedented familiarity with these sources and brings together in this Reader a broad range of the most insightful primary and secondary materials. Grouped together according to the chronology of Berlin's life and work, each section and article features a critical introduction to orient the reader and contextualize the materials within the framework of American musical history. Taken as a whole, they provide a new perspective on Berlin that highlights his musical genius in the context of his artistic development through a unique mix of first-hand views of Berlin as an artist, critical assessments of his work, and more general overviews of his life and work.

The last of the Spanish Romantics, composer, conductor, and impresario Federico Moreno Torroba (1891-1982) left his mark on virtually every aspect of Spanish musical culture during a career which spanned six decades, and saw tremendous political and cultural upheavals. After Falla, he was the most important and influential musician: in addition to his creative activities, he was President of the General Society of Authors and Editors and director of the Academy of Fine Arts and Teatro Zarzuela. His enduring contributions as a composer include copious amounts of guitar music composed for Andres Segovia and several highly successful zarzuelas which remain in the repertoire today. Written by two leading experts in the field, Federico Moreno Torroba: A Musical Life in Three Acts explores not only his life and work, but also the relationship of his music to the cultural milieu in which he moved. It sheds particular light on the relationship of Torroba's music and the cultural politics of Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-75). Torroba came of age in a cultural renaissance that sought to reassert Spain's position as a unique cultural entity, and authors Walter A. Clark and William Krause demonstrate how his work can be understood as a personal, musical response to these aspirations. Clark and Krause argue that Torroba's decision to remain in Spain even during the years of Franco's dictatorship was based primarily not on political ideology but rather on an unwillingness to leave his native soil. Rather than abandon Spain to participate in the dynamic musical life abroad, he continued to compose music that reflected his conservative view of his national and personal heritage. The authors contend that this pursuit did not necessitate allegiance to a particular regime, but rather to the non-political exaltation of Spain's so-called 'eternal tradition', or the culture and spirit that had endured throughout Spain's turbulent history. Following Franco's death in 1975, there was ambivalence towards figures like Torroba who had made their peace with the dictatorship and paid a heavy price in terms of their reputation among expatriates. Moreover, his very conservative musical style made him a target for the post-war avant-garde, which disdained his highly tonal and melodic espanolismo. With the demise of high modernism, however, the time has come for this new, more distanced assessment of Torroba's contributions. Richly illustrated with figures and music examples, and with a helpful discography for reference, this biography brings a fresh perspective on this influential composer to Latin American and Iberian music scholars, performers, and lovers of Spanish music alike.

The Romantic pianist-the solo pianist who plays nineteenth-century piano music-has become an attractive figure in the popular imagination, considering the innumerable artworks, literature, and films representing this performer's seductive allure. Dreams of Love pursues a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach to understanding the "romantic" pianist as a cultural icon, focusing on the role of technology in producing and perpetuating this mythology over the past two centuries. Sound recording and cinema have shaped the pianist's music and image since the early twentieth century, but these contemporary media technologies build upon practices established during the early nineteenth century: the influence of the piano keyboard on early telegraphs and typewriters, the invention of the solo recital alongside developments in photography, and the ways that piano design and the placement of the instrument on stage structure our viewing-listening perspectives. The concept of technology can be broadened to include the performance of gender and sexuality as further ways of making the pianist into an attractive cultural figure. The book's three sections deal with the touch, sights, and sounds of the Romantic pianist's playing as mediated through various forms of technology. Analyzing these persistent Liebestraume and exploring how they function can reveal their meaning for performers, audiences, and music lovers of the past and present too.

Music both influences and reflects the times in which it was created. In the Middle Ages, the previous Dark Ages, the Crusades, and the feudal system all impacted the types and forms of music in the period. Charlemagne standardized the church mass and promoted the Gregorian chant, to the point of threatening excommunication if any other were performed. Musical notation -- the staff line -- was developed during the period. The troubadours of France, Meistersingers of Germany, the Cantus Firmus of Italy, and the instruments that played the music are all included in this thorough guide to music of the middle ages.

Topics include: the British Isles, Dance Music, Eastern Europe, France, Germanic Lands, Harps, Italy, the Low Countries, Spain, and more.

Sounding Authentic considers the intersecting influences of nationalism, modernism, and technological innovation on representations of ethnic and national identities in twentieth-century art music. Author Joshua S. Walden discusses these forces through the prism of what he terms the "rural miniature": short violin and piano pieces based on folk song and dance styles. This genre, mostly inspired by the folk music of Hungary, the Jewish diaspora, and Spain, was featured frequently on recordings and performance programs in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, Sounding Authentic shows how the music of urban Romany ensembles developed into nineteenth-century repertoire of virtuosic works in the style hongrois before ultimately influencing composers of rural miniatures. Walden persuasively demonstrates how rural miniatures represented folk and rural cultures in a manner that was perceived as authentic, even while they involved significant modification of the original sources. He also links them to the impulse toward realism in developing technologies of photography, film, and sound recording. Sounding Authentic examines the complex ways the rural miniature was used by makers of nationalist agendas, who sought folkloric authenticity as a basis for the construction of ethnic and national identities. The book also considers the genre's reception in European diaspora communities in America where it evoked and transformed memories of life before immigration, and traces how many rural miniatures were assimilated to the styles of American popular song and swing. Scholars interested in musicology, ethnography, the history of violin performance, twentieth-century European art music, the culture of the Jewish Diaspora and more will find Sounding Authentic an essential addition to their library.

This Life of Sounds portrays an important and previously unexplored corner of the history of new music in America: the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo. Composers Lukas Foss (the Center's founder), Lejaren Hiller, and Morton Feldman were the music directors over the life of "the Buffalo group," during the years 1964-1980. Based on Foss's plan, the Rockefeller Foundation provided annual fellowships for young composers and virtuoso instrumentalists to live in Buffalo for up to two years, thus creating a cadre of like-minded musicians who would spend their time studying, creating, and performing difficult - often controversial - new work. The now legendary group of musicians (some would say "musical outlaws") who participated in the Buffalo group included Pulitzer Prize winner George Crumb, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, Julius Eastman, and many more. Composers John Cage, Jim Tenney, Iannis Xenakis and others all figure in the story as well. The book provides valuable accounts of the Center's influential concert series, Evenings for New Music, performed in Buffalo, New York and throughout Europe; its famous recording of Terry Riley's In C; the political activism of the time; and the intersection of academic, private, and institutional funding for the arts. Life magazine declared in an article about the 1965 Festival of the Arts Today titled, "Can This Be Buffalo?," "Buffalo exploded last month in a two-week avant garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York..." The concerts, the festivals, and the adventurous musical climate attracted filmmakers and young visual artists resulting in what one person called "one of those kinds of places the way people talk about Vienna in 1900-1910."

Exploring Twentieth Century Vocal Music is a unique people centred book designed to aid singers and voice teachers to discover and decipher the innovative repertoire of the twentieth century. The book familiarizes the reader with new notation systems employed by some contemporary composers. It suggest rehearsal techniques and vocal exercises that will help singers prepare to tackle the repertoire. And the book offers a list of the most important and interesting works to emerge in the twentieth century, along with suggested recital programmes that will introduce audiences as well as singers to this under - explored body of music.

In Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, contributors from musicology, literary studies, history, and art history provide an account of the works of 13th-century composer Adam de la Halle, one of the first named authors of medieval vernacular music for whom a complete works manuscript survives. The essays illuminate Adam's generic transformations in polyphony, drama, debate poetry, and other genres, while also emphasizing his place in a large community of trouveres active in the bustling urban environment of Arras. Exploring issues of authorship and authority, tradition and innovation, the material contexts of his works, and his influence on later generations, this book provides the most complete and up-to-date picture available in English of Adam's oeuvre. Contributors are Alain Corbellari, Mark Everist, Anna Kathryn Grau, John Haines, Anne Ibos-Auge, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Judith A. Peraino, Isabelle Ragnard, Jennifer Saltzstein, Alison Stones, Carol Symes, and Eliza Zingesser.

John Cage was among the first wave of post-war American artists and intellectuals to be influenced by Zen Buddhism and it was an influence that led him to become profoundly engaged with our current ecological crisis. In John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger asks: what did Buddhism mean to Cage? And how did his understanding of Buddhist philosophy impact on his representation of nature? Following Cage's own creative innovations in the poem-essay form and his use of the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching to shape his music and writing, this book outlines a new critical language that reconfigures writing and silence. Interrogating Cage's 'green-Zen' in the light of contemporary psychoanalysis and cultural critique as well as his own later turn towards anarchist politics, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics provides readers with a critically performative site for the Zen-inspired "nothing" which resides at the heart of Cage's poetics, and which so clearly intersects with his ecological writing.

Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria explores the nature of sound as a powerful yet ambivalent force in the religious struggles that permeated Germany during the Counter-Reformation. Author Alexander J. Fisher goes beyond a musicological treatment of composers, styles, and genres to examine how music, and more broadly sound itself, shaped the aural landscape of Bavaria as the duchy emerged as a militant Catholic bulwark. Fisher focuses particularly on the ways in which sound-including bell-ringing, gunfire, and popular song, as well as cultivated polyphony-not only was deployed by Catholic secular and clerical elites to shape the religious identities of Bavarian subjects, but also carried the potential to challenge and undermine confessional boundaries. Surviving literature, archival documents, and music illustrate the ways in which Bavarian authorities and their allies in the Catholic clergy and orders deployed sound to underline crucial theological differences with their Protestant antagonists, notably the cults of the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the saints. Official and popular rituals like divine worship, processions, and pilgrimages all featured distinctive sounds and music that shaped and reflected an emerging Catholic identity. Although officials imposed a severe regime of religious surveillance, the Catholic state's dominance of the soundscape was hardly assured. Fisher traces archival sources that show the resilience of Protestant vernacular song in Bavaria, the dissemination and performance of forbidden, anti-Catholic songs, the presence of Lutheran chorales in nominally Catholic church services into the late 16th century, and the persistence of popular "noise" more generally. Music, Piety, and Propaganda thus reveals historical, theological, and cultural issues of the period through the piercing dimension of its sounds, bringing into focus the import of sound as a strategic cultural tool with significant impact on the flow of history.

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Paul Marie Thodore Vincent d'Indy (1851-1931), was a composer and teacher. He initially read law and then moved to music. He studied under Csar Franck at the Conservatoire de Paris. He co-founded the Schola Cantorum in 1894.