The first full-length biographical study of Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994). The British-born Irish composer (Dame) Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) is best known today for her cycle of thirteen string quartets, composed over five decades. And yet, her oeuvre ranges from large scale choral works, to ballets, operas, and symphonic scores. Having studied with Charles Wood and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music, many of her compositions also garnered accolades from peers and established musical figures such as Gustav Holst, Donald Francis Tovey, and Henry Wood, among others. With access to a wealth of documentation previously unavailable, this book explores Maconchy's life and music within a greater consideration of the social and political context of the world in which she lived. While the influence of Bartók has been well documented, this book reveals the equally potent influence of Vaughan Williams on Maconchy's musical idiom. This book also discusses Maconchy's foray into administration and her advocacy of young composers through her work as the first woman to be elected Chairman of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain in 1959 and President of the Society for the Promotion of New Music following the death of Benjamin Britten in 1976. It will be required reading for those interested in the lives of women composers, twentieth-century British music, and musical modernism.

Mapping the Motet in the Post-Tridentine Era provides new dimensions to the discussion of the immense corpus of polyphonic motets produced and performed in the decades following the end of the Council of Trent in 1563. Beyond the genre's rich connections with contemporary spiritual life and religious experience, the motet is understood here as having a multifaceted life in transmission, performance and reception. By analysing the repertoire itself, but also by studying its material life in books and accounts, in physical places and concrete sonic environments, and by investigating the ways in which the motet was listened to and talked about by contemporaries, the eleven chapters in this book redefine the cultural role of the genre. The motet, thanks to its own protean nature, not bound to any given textual, functional or compositional constraint, was able to convey cultural meanings powerfully, give voice to individual and collective identities, cross linguistic and confessional divides, and incarnate a model of learned and highly expressive musical composition. Case studies include considerations of composers (Palestrina, Victoria, Lasso), cities (Seville and Granada, Milan), books (calendrically ordered collections, non-liturgical music books) and special portions of the repertoire (motets pro defunctis, instrumental intabulations).

At the end of his second year in Leipzig, J.S. Bach composed nine sacred cantatas to texts by Leipzig poet Mariane von Ziegler (1695-1760). Despite the fact that these cantatas are Bach's only compositions to texts by a female poet, the works have been largely ignored in the Bach literature. Ziegler was Germany's first female poet laureate, and the book highlights her significance in early eighteenth-century Germany and her commitment to advancing women's rights of self-expression. Peters enriches and enlivens the account with extracts from Ziegler's four published volumes of poetry and prose, and analyses her approach to cantata text composition by arguing that her distinctive conception of the cantata as a genre encouraged Bach's creative musical realizations. In considering Bach's settings of Ziegler's texts, Peters argues that Bach was here pursuing a number of compositional procedures not common in his other sacred cantatas, including experimentation with the order of movements within a cantata, with formal considerations in arias and recitatives, and with the use of instruments, as well as innovative approaches to Vox Christi texts and to texts dealing with speech and silence. A Woman's Voice in Baroque Music is the first book to deal in depth with issues of women in music in relation to Bach, and one of the few comprehensive studies of a specific repertory of Bach's sacred cantatas. It therefore provides a significant new perspective on both Ziegler as poet and cantata librettist and Bach as cantata composer.

for women's chorus and piano. This cantata features sixteen highly-varied folk song settings, bound together in seasonal groupings to take the listener on an engaging journey through the year from Spring to Winter. The prologue implores us to 'sing and be merry', and many of the songs facilitate this with their charmingly light-hearted melodies and imaginative orchestral accompaniment. There are also darker moments, such as the haunting and heart-rending setting of 'The Unquiet Grave' in 'Autumn'. For this comprehensive new edition, the editor Graham Parlett has drawn on all available sources, providing an authoritative full score with critical commentary. This edition also makes available new materials for the version for string orchestra and piano, and a new vocal score.

Combining new musicology trends, formal musical analysis, and literary feminist recovery work, Leslie Ritchie examines rare poetic, didactic, fictional, and musical texts written by women in late eighteenth-century Britain. She finds instances of and resistance to contemporary perceptions of music as a form of social control in works by Maria Barthelemon, Harriett Abrams, Mary Worgan, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Cowley, and Amelia Opie, among others. Relating women's musical compositions and writings about music to theories of music's function in the formation of female subjectivities during the latter half of the eighteenth century, Ritchie draws on the work of cultural theorists and cultural historians, as well as feminist scholars who have explored the connection between femininity and performance. Whether crafting works consonant with societal ideals of charitable, natural, and national order, or re-imagining their participation in these musical aids to social harmony, women contributed significantly to the formation of British cultural identity. Ritchie's interdisciplinary book will interest scholars working in a range of fields, including gender studies, musicology, eighteenth-century British literature, and cultural studies.

Representations of music were employed to create a wider 'Orient' on the pages, stages and walls of nineteenth-century Britain. This book explores issues of orientalism, otherness, gender and sexuality that arise in artistic British representations of non-European musicians during this time, by utilizing recent theories of orientalism, and the subsidiary (particularly aesthetic and literary) theories both on which these theories were based and on which they have been influential. The author uses this theoretical framework of orientalism as a form of othering in order to analyse primary source materials, and in conjunction with musicological, literary and art theories, thus explores ways in which ideas of the Other were transformed over time and between different genres and artists. Part I, The Musical Stage, discusses elements of the libretti of popular musical stage works in this period, and the occasionally contradictory ways in which 'racial' Others was represented through text and music; a particular focus is the depiction of 'Oriental' women and ideas of sexuality. Through examination of this collection of libretti, the ways in which the writers of these works filter and romanticize the changing intellectual ideas of this era are explored. Part II, Works of Fiction, is a close study of the works of Sir Henry Rider Haggard, using other examples of popular fiction by his contemporary writers as contextualizing material, with the primary concern being to investigate how music is utilized in popular fiction to represent Other non-Europeans and in the creation of orientalized gender constructions. Part III, Visual Culture, is an analysis of images of music and the 'Orient' in examples of British 'high art', illustration and photography, investigating how the musical Other was visualized.

Examines the life and work of Scottish cellist and antiquarian John Gunn (1766-1824) through newly discovered sources. The Scottish cellist and antiquarian John Gunn (1766-1824) is unique among British writers on music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Learned and practical, at home in classical and modern languages, knowledgeable in a wide range of musical topics and with even wider-ranging interests, and committed to the ideal of progress through rational thought, he typified the Enlightenment. His published output was large and diverse: a cello treatise in two quite different editions; two books on the flute and one on the piano; a treatise on figured bass; a history of the harp in the Highlands; and a translation of a French work of music theory. The list of his unrealised publications is even longer, including a proof of the oriental origins of the Scots. He married Anne Young, a well-known Edinburgh piano teacher, and his letters cast new light on the circumstances and date of her death. Taking account of Gunn's diverse experiences as a musician-scholar in Cambridge, London and Edinburgh, studying his sundry occupations, and exploring his social connections through a recently unearthed cache of his letters, this study moves away from 'treatise archaeology' and offers a broader view than is usually possible with such figures. The book will be of interest to those studying historical performance practice, music education in Enlightenment Britain, and the dissemination of Enlightenment thought.

A pioneer of musical modernism, Igor Stravinsky marked a significant turn in compositional method. He broke free from traditional styles and contemporary trends in the early part of the twentieth century to achieve an entirely new and truly modern aesthetic. Striking a remarkable concurrence of stasis and discontinuity, Stravinsky crafted large-scale compositions out of short repeating melodies, juxtaposed these primary motives with contrasting and varying fragments, and layered on fixed ostinati which repeated at their own rates throughout the piece. Previous scholarship on Stravinsky focuses on the disparate and independent nature of such textures, conceiving them as separated and deadlocked, unable to escape their repetitions, and having no goal. This connects Stravinsky's procedures with the more radical music of subsequent composers for whom disconnection has served as a primary aesthetic. Yet, from the perspective of his later works, the static and discontinuous depictions of Stravinsky's music seem incomplete and perhaps even simplistic. The "building blocks" of his novel textures often consist of tunes with identifiable intervallic shapes, goal pitches, and defining durational patterns-organizations that engender continuity and connection. In other words, although its basic materials are combined into new, often dissonant and usually repetitive textures, those materials still originate in, and depend upon, traditional concepts of melody, harmony, and pulsation. Presenting an innovative analytical model for Stravinsky's compositions, Building Blocks seeks a fuller perspective, and enables a fresh, insightful approach to this music and the theoretical constructs behind it. Author Gretchen Horlacher portrays the whole of Stravinsky's repertoire as radical or modern not because it eschews continuity and connection, but because it places them in relation to their opposites: the music holds our interest because undeniable references toward continuity are dynamically coordinated (rather than subsumed) with stasis and discontinuity. From this vantage point, Stravinsky's music becomes a commentary on the nature of time: the music draws into relation the tension between time as it is punctuated by fixed reference and as it flows from one event to another. It is quintessentially modern because of its inherent emphasis on multiple vantage points. A sensitive and sophisticated approach to the work of this iconic composer, Building Blocks will appeal to students and scholars of Stravinsky and his music, scholars of musical modernism and twentieth century music, and to a more limited extent, to performers-particularly conductors, pianists, and orchestral instrumentalists.

Originally published in German as Interpreting Mozart on the Keyboard in 1957, this definitive work on the performance of Mozart's works has greatly influenced students and scholars of keyboard literature and of Mozart. Now, in a completely updated and revised edition, this book includes the last half century of scholarship on Mozart's music, addressing the elements of performance and problems that may occur in performing Mozart's works on modern instruments.

This title was first published in 2001. This work provides detailed information taken from the 'Programmes-as-Broadcast' daily log of output held at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham. Arranged in chronological order, entries are given for broadcasts of first performances of musical works in the United Kingdom, and include details of: the date of the broadcast, the composer, the title of the work, performers and conductor. In addition to its usefulness as a reference tool, the Chronicle enables us to gauge the trends in twentieth-century British musical life, and the role of the BBC in their promotion.

The Music of Hugh Wood provides the first ever in-depth study of this well-known, yet only briefly documented composer. Over the years, Wood (b. 1932) has produced a sizeable oeuvre that explores the established genres of symphony, concerto, and quartet on the one hand, and songs and choruses on the other. Underpinned by an awareness of recent philosophical, theoretical and analytical concepts, Dr Edward Venn highlights both the technical basis of Wood's music and the expressive force of his work. In doing so, a picture emerges of Wood as an artist of considerable merit and power. The eclectic blend of national and international influences in the music of Hugh Wood combine to create an individual and distinctive musical language all his own. The book provides an overview of Wood's style, focussing on his engagement with modernism and the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic and formal characteristics of his musical language. From here a more detailed consideration of Wood's development as a composer is advanced, in which his technical development is illustrated alongside an exploration of various aspects of musical meaning embodied in his works. In the process, numerous analytical strategies ranging from formalist to narrative structures are utilized, demonstrating the fecundity and expressivity of Wood's music.

An insteresting case of self-borrowing. Bach took music from this work for his own Mass in B-minor (BWV 191/1 corresponds to the Gloria in excelsis Deo, BWV 191/2 to the Domine Deus, BWV 191/3 to the Cum sancto spiritu). This unusual cantata, the only one with a Latin text, may have been written to celebrate the Peace of Dresden (which ended the 2nd Silesian war) and first performed on Christmas day, 1745. This newly engraved, carefully edited vocal score is based on the Bach Gessellschaft edition. The convenient A4 size is ideal for vocalists, choruses, and rehearsal pianists.

One Hundred Years of Music provides a full account of the history of music from the death of Beethoven to the modern era. It covers a period of exceptional interest. The last hundred years coincide roughly with the rise and decline of Romanticism, include the various nationalist movements, and extend to the advent of "neo-classicism," the twelve-tone system, and still more modern techniques. Abraham devotes ample space to modernist and avant garde music, in which he explains the difficulties we experience in listening to the work of such composers as Schnberg, Bart k, and Berg. He also throws new light on many more familiar topics. In its earlier editions, One Hundred Years of Music became a standard work on this subject; it has since been brought updated to include coverage of later developments. Abraham approaches his subject as an historian of style rather than an esthetic critic. Rather than pass judgment on particular works or composers, he shows how music has developed, and thus provides a clear and connected history that is more substantial than most books of musical appreciation. An extensive chronology and a full bibliography and index add to the usefulness of the book for students, professionals and musical laymen alike. This third edition incorporates some corrections of fact, further enlarges the bibliography and chronology, and adds commentary on developments in music techniques. In order to correct the historical perspective, the author has included a "prelude" and three "interludes," giving rough sketches of general conditions in the musical world at intervals of thirty years. As the reader's sense of chronology is very apt to get confused when a number of simultaneous streams of development have to be described, the author has inserted the date of composition or performance (both if they are widely separated) of each work at the first mention of it.

New digitally-enhanced reprint of the classic vocal score issued by Breitkopf & Hartel in the early 20th century edited by the eminent musicologist Eusebius Mandyczewski.

(Limelight). Written between the late '30s and the early '90s, these pieces by John Cage here acquire the permanence they deserve. Some have never been published before. Many appeared only in magazines, journals, and catalogues; others in concert programs and on record covers. Also included are the texts of lectures and of crucial importance to the appreciation of his music Cage's notes on the performance of his compositions, courtesy of his music publisher, C.F. Peters.

Singing the News is the first study to concentrate on sixteenth-century ballads, when there was no regular and reliable alternative means of finding out news and information. It is a highly readable and accessible account of the important role played by ballads in spreading news during a period when discussing politics was treason. The study provides a new analytical framework for understanding the ways in which balladeers spread their messages to the masses. Jenni Hyde focusses on the melody as much as the words, showing how music helped to shape the understanding of texts. Music provided an emotive soundtrack to words which helped to shape sixteenth-century understandings of gendered monarchy, heresy and the social cohesion of the commonwealth. By combining the study of ballads in manuscript and print with sources such as letters and state records, the study shows that when their topics edged too close to sedition, balladeers were more than capable of using sophisticated methods to disguise their true meaning in order to safeguard themselves and their audience, and above all to ensure that their news hit home.

Michael Roeder's A History of the Concerto traces the concerto from its origins in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to its incarnation in the present. Basic to the concerto idea is the division of the performance group into two parts - one solo and the other orchestral - but the relationships between these two have undergone fundamental changes over the centuries. In many of the more familiar works from the nineteenth century, the composer frequently juxtaposes a dazzling soloist against a more conservative orchestral voice, but this has not always been the case. The developing concerto form, while always maintaining the dramatic opposition of solo and orchestral forces, evolved many rich variations specific to time, place, and composer. Whether in Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Beethoven's "Emperor", or Calandrelli's Concerto for Jazz Clarinet, the dual elements of cooperation and contention come into play. The changing role of the soloist; the development of instruments; the evolution of music's function in society; the influence of local, regional, and international culture; and the composer's individual story are all part of Roeder's documentation of concerto history. The book is divided into four sections corresponding to the major historical-stylistic periods of Western music and of concerto development - Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Twentieth Century. Within these sections, attention is given to geographical regions where strikingly different approaches to concerto style are found. Roeder explores major works as well as the pieces of lesser-known composers whose contributions were important to the changing character of the concerto. A History of the Concerto may be readfrom cover to cover, but readers may also use the extensive index to focus on specific concertos and their composers. Numerous musical examples illuminate critical points. While some readers may want to study the more detailed analyses with scores in hand, this is not essential for an understanding of the text. Michael Roeder's lucid and detailed historical study of the concerto will inform and delight those interested in understanding this popular and dynamic musical form.

Classical Concert Studies: A Companion to Contemporary Research and Performance is a landmark publication that maps out a new interdisciplinary field of Concert Studies, offering fresh ways of understanding the classical music concert in the twenty-first century. It brings together essays, research articles, and case studies from scholars and music professionals including musicians, music managers, and concert designers. Gathering both historical and contemporary cases, the contributors draw on approaches from sociology, ethnology, musicology, cultural studies, and other disciplines to create a rich portrait of the classical concert's past, present, and future. Based on two earlier volumes published in German under the title Das Konzert (The Concert), and with a selection of new chapters written for the English edition, this companion enables students, researchers, and practitioners in the classical and contemporary music fields to understand this emerging field of research, go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and methodologies, and spark a renaissance for the classical concert.

In the motets of Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, and their contemporaries, tenors have often been characterized as the primary shaping forces, prior in conception as well as in construction to the upper voices. Tenors are shaped by the interaction of talea and color, medieval terms now used to refer to the independent repetition of rhythms and pitches, respectively. The presence in the upper voices of the periodically repeating rhythmic patterns, often referred to as "isorhythm," has been characterized as an amplification of tenor structure. But a fresh look at the medieval treatises suggests a revised analytical vocabulary: for many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers, both color and talea involved rhythmic repetition, the latter in the upper voices specifically. And attention to upper-voice taleae independently of tenor structures brings renewed emphasis to the significant portion of the repertory in which upper voices evince formal schemes that differ from those in the tenors. These structures in turn suggest a revision of the presumed compositional process for motets, implying that in some cases upper-voice text and forms may have preceded the selection and organization of tenors. Such revisions have implications for hermeneutic endeavors, since not only the forms of motet voices but the meanings of their texts change, depending on whether analysis proceeds from the tenor up, or from the top down. Where the presumed compositional and structural primacy afforded to tenors has encouraged a strand of interpretation that reads the upper-voice poetry as conforming to, and amplifying, the tenor text snippets and their liturgical contexts, a "bottom-down" view casts tenors in a supporting role and reveals the poetic impulse of the upper voices as the organizing principle of motets.

Music in the Women's Institute has become stereotyped by the ritualistic singing of Jerusalem at monthly meetings. Indeed, Jerusalem has had an important role within the organization, and provides a valuable means within which to assess the organization's relationship with women's suffrage and the importance of rurality in the Women's Institute's identity. However, this book looks beyond Jerusalem by examining the full range of music making within the organization and locates its significance within a wider historical-cultural context. The Institute's promotion of conducting - a regular part of its musical activity since the 1930s - is discussed within the context of embodying overtly feminist sentiments. Lorna Gibson concludes that a redefinition of the term 'feminism' is needed and the concept of 'gendered spheres' of conducting provides a useful means of understanding the Institute's policy. The organization's promotion of folk song is also examined and reveals the Institute's contribution to the Folk Revival, as well as providing a valuable context within which to understand the National Federation's first music commission, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Folk Songs of the Four Seasons (1950). This work, and the Institute's second commission, Malcolm Williamson's The Brilliant and the Dark (1969), are examined with the context of the organization's music policy. In addition to discussing the background to the works, issues of critical reception are addressed. The book concludes with an Epilogue about the National Society Choir (later known as the Avalon Singers), which tested the organization's commitment to amateur music making. The book is the result of meticulous work undertaken in the archives of the National Federation, the BBC Written Archives Centre, the V&A archives, the Britten-Pears Library, the Ralph Vaughan Williams Library, the Women's Library and the Newspaper Library.

Warren Roberts has discovered a Rossini that others have not seen, a composer who commented ironically and satirically on religion and politics in Post-Napoleonic Europe. This book examines Rossini within the context of his own time, one of Napoleonic domination of Italy, restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in Naples in 1815, and the 1830 Revolution in Paris. Using the techniques of the historian,and reading librettos as texts, the author analyzes the five operas treated in detail in the book (Il barbiere di Siviglia, Cenerentola, La gazza ladra, Matilde di Shabran, and Il viaggio a Reims) as responses, each in its own way, to the history that the composer experienced. Roberts shows that Rossini made probing commentaries on politics and religion in a time of reaction and revolution, and that the composer was well-informed on post-Napoleonic politics. Rossini's comic writing served very serious purposes, exposing the problems and complications of an age that he observed with striking clarity. Warren Roberts is Professor Emeritusof History at the University at Albany, SUNY, and has published extensively on eighteenth-century French culture.

New in paperback! A unique directory for individuals who need to locate music for specific program needs. Goodenberger has brought together a spectrum of classical instrumental music cataloged according to programmatic content. Over 200 subject headings include Literature, Art, The Bible, Greek Myths, Animals, Cities, The Ocean, The Universe, Love, and Death. Each entry includes composer, title, translation, nickname, opus number, and type of work, such as orchestral, string quartet, or piano. Music teachers, conductors, producers in theatre, film, radio, and television, and individuals working in integrated arts will rely on this guide as an authoritative source. Cloth edition previously published in 1989.

Despite the Modernist search for new and innovative aesthetics and rejection of traditional tonality, several twentieth century composers have found their own voice while steadfastly relying on the aesthetics and techniques of Romanticism and 19th century composition principles. Musicological and reference texts have regarded these composers as isolated exceptions to modern thoughts of composition-exceptions of little importance, treated simplistically and superficially. Music critic and scholar Walter Simmons, however, believes these composers and their works should be taken seriously. They are worthy of more scholarly consideration, and deserve proper analysis, assessment, and discussion in their own regard. In Voices in the Wilderness, the first in a series of books celebrating the "Twentieth-Century Traditionalist," Simmons looks at six Neo-Romantic composers: Ernest Bloch Howard Hanson Vittorio Giannini Paul Creston Samuel Barber Nicolas Flagello Through biographical overviews and a comprehensive assessment of musical works, Simmons provides readers with a clear understanding of the significance of the composers, their bodies of work, and their placement in musicological history. The chapters delve deeply and objectively into each composer's oeuvre, addressing their origins, stylistic traits and consistencies, phases of development, strengths and weaknesses, and affinities with other composers. The composers' most representative works are identified, and each chapter concludes with a discography of essential recordings. Visit the author's website to read samples from the book and to listen to representative excerpts of each composer's work.

This guide to Mozart's two most popular piano concertos--the D minor, K. 466, and the C major, K. 467 (the so-called "Elvira Madigan")--presents the historical background of the works, placing them within the context of Mozart's compositional and performance activities at a time when his reputation as both composer and pianist was at its peak. The special nature of the concerto, as both a form and genre, is explored through a selective survey of some of the approaches that various critics have taken in discussing Mozart's concertos. The concluding chapter discusses a wide range of issues of interest to modern performers.