Grand Tours is a chronicle of the American visits of five charismatic pianists--Leopold de Meyer, Henri Herz, Sigismund Thalberg, Anton Rubenstein, and Hans von Bulow--during the late nineteenth century. Performing Beethoven and Chopin in gold-rush era California, these pianists introduced many Americans to the delights of the concert hall. With humor and insight, Lott describes the clash between the flamboyant, elegant, European pianists and American audiences more accustomed to circuses and rodeos than these "serious" entertainments. Lott also explores the creative and sometimes outlandish publicity techniques of managers seeking to capitalize on rich but uncharted American markets. The tours, which included almost a thousand concerts in more than one hundred cities in America and Canada, illustrate the rigors of the performing life, the wide range of nineteenth-century audiences and their gradual transformation from boisterous participators to respectful listeners, and the establishment of the piano recital as it exists today. With the colorful personalities of the pianists, the juxtaposition of high art and unsophisticated audiences, and the predilection of Americans to treat even the most serious subjects with humor, the book is illuminating and entertaining. The text is illustrated with ads, newspaper clippings, and correspondence that bring to life this collision of cultures.

This engaging book discusses the colorful personalities Land beloved music of the French romantic organist-composers. Michael Murray draws vivid portraits of Aristide Cavaille-Coll (1811-1899), the greatest and most influential organ builder of his time, and of seven oilier musicians with connections to Cavaille-Coll and to onc another: Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921), Cesar Franck (1822-1890), Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937), Louis Vicine (1870-1937), Marcel Dupre' (1886-1971), Jean Langlais (1907-1991), and Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992).

The book offers to lovers of French music and culture -- and especially to student organists -- details of these composers' lives and times and of their styles and techniques. Drawing on his personal acquaintance with Messiaen, Langlais, Dupre', and other famous contemporaries, and on period documents, original accounts, early recordings, and other primary sources, Murray examines the relationship between organ building and musical composition, the nature of romanticism and classicism, and the ever-perplexing question of composer versus interpreter.

The Polish composer Henryk Górecki (born 1933) achieved world-wide renown in 1992 when his Third Symphony, written in 1976, was recorded on CD and became an international bestseller. It is now one of the best known musical compositions of recent years, yet Górecki's other music is still relatively little known. This study, the first detailed account of his works in any language, provides biographical information as background to the music, and is by a leading enthusiast for Górecki's music.

Domenico Dragonetti (1763-1846) was the most famous double-bass player in history. He dominated the English musical world for just over half a century. This critical biography explores his extraordinary career as musician, composer, entrepreneur, and pedagogue.

This study, the first of its kind on a work of Vaughan Williams, traces the genesis of the composer's enigmatic final symphony as documented in the surviving manuscripts. The latter reveal an underlying programme based on Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and chart the composer's struggle to find the technical means by which to realize his most complex spiritual vision.

The Oxford History of English Music, Volume 2 takes the story of English Music from c.1715 to the present day, following on from Volume 1, published in 1991. It discusses not only the music of major composers but that of many lesser figures, together with folk music, light and popular music, and the social and historical background.

Sebastien Erard's (1752-1831) inventions have had an enormous impact on instruments and musical life and are still at the foundation of piano building today. Drawing on an unusually rich set of archives from both the Erard firm and the Erard family, author Robert Adelson shows how the Erard piano played an important and often leading role in the history of the instrument, beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing into the final decades of the nineteenth. The Erards were the first piano builders in France to prioritise the more sonorous grand piano, sending gifts of their new model to both Haydn and Beethoven. Erard's famous double-escapement action, which improved the instrument's response while at the same time producing a more powerful tone, revolutionised both piano construction and repertoire. Thanks to these inventions, the Erard firm developed close relationships with the greatest pianist composers of the nineteenth century, including Hummel, Liszt, Moscheles and Mendelssohn. The book also presents new evidence concerning Pierre Erard's homosexuality, which helps us to understand his reluctance to found a family to carry on the Erard tradition, a reluctance that would spell the end of the golden era of the firm and lead to its eventual demise. The book closes with the story of Pierre's widow Camille, who directed the firm from 1855 until 1889. Her influential position in the male-dominated world of instrument building was unique for a woman of her time.

What is experimental music today? This book offers an up to date survey of this field for anyone with an interest, from seasoned practitioners to curious readers. This book takes the stance that experimental music is not a limited historical event, but is a proliferation of approaches to sound that reveals much about present-day experience. An experimental work is not identifiable by its sound alone, but by the nature of the questions it poses and its openness to the sounding event. Experimentation is a way of working. It pushes past that which is known to discover what lies beyond it, finding new knowledge, forms, and relationships, or accepting a state of uncertainty. For each of these composers and sound artists, craft is developed and transformed in response to the questions they bring to their work. Scientific, perceptual, or social phenomena become catalysts in the operation of the work. These practices are not presented according to a chronology, a set of techniques, or social groupings. Instead, they are organized according to the content areas that are their subjects, including resonance, harmony, objects, shapes, perception, language, interaction, sites, and histories. Musical materials may be subject, among other treatments, to systemization, observation, examination, magnification, fragmentation, translation, or destabilization. These restless and exploratory modes of engagement have continued to develop over recent decades, expanding the scope of both musical practice and listening.

This book examines formal organization in Haydn's symphonies. The structure of individual movements as well as the relationships between them are analysed in detail. All common instrumental forms of the Classical era (sonata, rondo, variations, and so forth) are discussed. The author reconstructs Haydn's principles of formal thought and explains how these principles governed his compositional choices.

Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century builds on the foundations of Music since the First World War (first published 1977, revised edition 1988). It updates and reshapes the original text and places it in the wider context of twentieth-century serious music before 1918 and after 1975, surveying the immense variety of technical developments in twentieth-century serious music. Sections of detailed analysis, with particular emphasis on such major figures as Stravinsky, Bartók, Messiaen, Tippett, and Ligeti, are framed by more concise sketches of a range of significant composers from Fauré, to Wolfgang Rihm. Extensive music examples reinforce this technical focus.

At the climax of one of his most important and comprehensive works, "De cessatione legalium, the thirteenth-century theologian and natural philosopher, Robert Grosseteste, uses a musical example to make a point fundamental to the treatise. Music, using time as its material, located between the abstract and the concrete, served as an analogy, thus making a difficult philosophical concept perceptible. In using music as an analogy, Gorsseteste drew upon a long tradition established by Augustine, confirmed within the new Aristotelian reception, and a newly-translated Platonic dialogue. But the first rector of the University of Oxford was also demonstrating music's place within the curriculum of the early university, namely, as a "ministry discipline, efficiently and efficaciously exemplifying traditional Augustinian, as well as new Aristotelian principles.
This book unites the most important theological-philosophical subjects discussed by Robert Grosseteste throughout his prodigious output, with those exemplified by an anonymous contemporary English writer on music. The work shows how music collaborated with the other liberal arts, operating within the early university curriculum as a ministry discipline. Music made accessible through the "figurae of its notation, and through sound, otherwise nearly unapproachable, new Aristotelian concepts. The influence was reciprocal in that new Aristotelian tools and conceptualization greatly influenced music notation and style. Music theory has been studied in isolation, as pertaining only to music. This study is the first to relate music of the early thirteenth century to its intellectual context, overturning dogma, uncritically accepted since thebeginning of this century, concerning so-called "modal rhythm," and showing how "contrary motion," rather than forming a musical convention, demonstrated a key Aristotelian concept.

The role of natural magic in the rise of seventeenth-century experimental science has been the subject of lively controversy for several decades. Now Penelope Gouk introduces a new element into the debate: how music mediated between these two domains. Arguing that changing musical practice in sixteenth-century Europe affected seventeenth-century English thought on science and magic, she maps the various relationships among these apparently separate disciplines. Gouk explores these relationships in several ways. She adopts the methods of social geography to discuss the disciplinary, social, and intellectual overlapping of music, science, and natural magic. She gives a historical account of the emergence of acoustics in English science, the harmonically based physics of Robert Hooke, and the position of harmonics within Newton's transformation of natural philosophy. And she provides a gallery of images in which contemporary representations of instruments, practices, and concepts demonstrate the way in which musical models informed and transformed those of natural philosophy. Gouk shows that as the "occult" features of music became subject to the new science of experimentation, and as their causes became evident, so natural magic was pushed outside the realms of scientific discourse.

In an intentionally light-hearted style, Fritz Spiegl has researched the lives and loves of the great composers through the ages. In an alphabetically arranged panorama of biographical portraits, he humorously uncovers hitherto unknown aspects of the composers' personalities that are, at best, discreetly ignored by serious musical analysts or, at worst, have never made the history books at all. He also includes some of the female composers, such as Augusta Holmes and Maria Szymanowska, who are only just becoming appreciated for their contributions to music. Fritz Spiegl's treatment and disclosures, however, are not just idle gossip. His concise use of biographical details gives a clear picture of each composer's musical career, revealing how his emotional life came to influence his music and, in some cases, vice versa. This volume alo features a special section which contains Spiegl's extensive researches into some of the pets of the great composers.

This book is about how music "in a key" is composed. Further, it is about how such music was composed when it was no longer compulsory to do so, starting a few years before the First World War. In an eclectic journey through the history of compositional technique, Daniel Harrison contends that the tonal system did not simply die out with the dawn of twentieth century, but continued to supplement newer techniques as a compelling means of musical organization, even into current times. Well-known art music composers such as Bartok, Hindemith, Prokofiev, and Messiaen are represented alongside composers whose work moves outside the standard boundaries of art music: Leonard Bernstein, Murice Durufle, Frank Martin, Xiaoyong Chen. Along the way, the book attends to military bugle calls, a trailer before a movie feature, a recomposition of a famous piece by Arnold Schoenberg, and the music of Neil Diamond, David Shire, and Brian Wilson. A celebration of the awesome variety of musical expressions encompassed in what is called tonal music, Pieces of Tradition is a book for composers seeking ideas and effects, music theorists interested in its innovations, and all those who practice the analysis of composition in all its modern and traditional variations.

This revised edition of the standard catalogue of the music and writings of Ralph Vaughan Williams includes all known published and unpublished works, with full details of instrumentation, revisions, and first performances. There is much new information on the location of manuscripts and sketches, and there are many corrections to the information and dates given in the existing text. The volume includes a bibliography of the literary works of Vaughan Williams compiled by Peter Starbuck, and an appendix of folk songs collected by the composer. The indexes have been completely updated.

Mozart's emergence as a mature artist coincides with the rise to prominence of the piano, an instrument that came alive under his fingers and served as medium for many of his finest compositions. In Mozart's Piano Music, William Kinderman reconsiders common assumptions about Mozart's life and art while offering comprehensive and incisive commentary on the solo music and concertos. After placing Mozart's pianistic legacy in its larger biographical and cultural context, Kinderman addresses the lively gestural and structural aspects of Mozart's musical language and explores the nature of his creative process. Incorporating the most recent research throughout this encompassing study, Kinderman expertly surveys each of the major genres of the keyboard music, including the four-hand and two-piano works. Beyond examining issues such as Mozart's earliest childhood compositions, his musical rhetoric and expression, the social context of his Viennese concertos, and affinities between his piano works and operas, Kinderman's main emphasis falls on detailed discussion of selected individual compositions.

The fourth volume in the Greenwood series providing a near-definitive survey on the output of sound recordings made in Europe by The Gramophone Company (1900-1929), this work covers the Dutch area and includes a good deal of Belgian material as well. Included in the contents are examples of the work from serious artists in classical music together with popular and comic songs and social comment dealing with an era that has nearly passed out of the range of living memory. Of interest to record collectors, music archivists, reference librarians, and music and social historians.

The Gramophone Company was the major producer of sound recordings from 1900 to 1929, besides having a virtual monopoly of the major talents. It was organized into ten geographical/ethnic divisions. Four of these areas have had discographies published on them; Kelly's previous Greenwood volumes cover Italy, France, and Germany. The fourth, on Scandinavia, was published by another company.

Covers the life and works of classical music composer, Peter Schickele, who is probably best known for his humorous alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach. Schickele has walked the line between a professional composer and musical satirist for over 35 years, and his compositions have reached into virtually every genre of music from jazz to rock to folk to movie music and to classical. The major influences in his career include his love of the theater, Spike Jones, and a philosophy that no genre of music is inherently inferior. Schickele was consulted during the compilation of this volume, therefore, much of the date and premier information comes from his own resources. This volume contains a brief biography of Peter Schickele and a detailed list of his Works and Performances, a discography, a bibliography, an alphabetical index, a chronology, and a name index. Scholars who study humor in music and 21st century American composers will now have a comprehensive sourcebook on Peter Schickele and his works.

From the Jim Crow world of 1920s Greenville, South Carolina, to Greenwich Village's Café Society in the '40s, to their 1974 Grammy-winning collaboration on "Loves Me Like a Rock," the Dixie Hummingbirds have been one of gospel's most durable and inspiring groups. Now, Jerry Zolten tells the Hummingbirds' fascinating story and with it the story of a changing music industry and a changing nation. When James Davis and his high-school friends starting singing together in a rural South Carolina church they could not have foreseen the road that was about to unfold before them. They began a ten-year jaunt of "wildcatting," traveling from town to town, working local radio stations, schools, and churches, struggling to make a name for themselves. By 1939 the a cappella singers were recording their four-part harmony spirituals on the prestigious Decca label. By 1942 they had moved north to Philadelphia and then New York where, backed by Lester Young's band, they regularly brought the house down at the city's first integrated nightclub, Café Society. From there the group rode a wave of popularity that would propel them to nation-wide tours, major record contracts, collaborations with Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon, and a career still vibrant today as they approach their seventy-fifth anniversary. Drawing generously on interviews with Hank Ballard, Otis Williams, and other artists who worked with the Hummingbirds, as well as with members James Davis, Ira Tucker, Howard Carroll, and many others, The Dixie Hummingbirds brings vividly to life the growth of a gospel group and of gospel music itself.

This, the second edition, was significantly revised and expanded. It incorporates a substantial amount of new material - notably three sections on the operas Hugh the Drover, Sir John in Love and The Poisoned Kiss. Also Wilfrid inserted into the final chapter A Double Man's Last Harvest, an account of the late A minor sonata for violin and piano.

Enrique Granados (1867-1916) is one of the most compelling figures of the late-Romantic period in music. During his return voyage to Spain after the premiere of his opera Goyescas at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1916, a German submarine torpedoed the ship on which he and his wife were sailing, and they perished in the waters of the English Channel. His death was mourned on both sides of the Atlantic as a stunning loss to the music world, for he had died at the pinnacle of his career, and his late works held the promise of greater things to come.
Granados was among the leading pianists of his time, and his eloquence at the keyboard inspired critics to dub him the "poet of the piano." In Enrique Granados: Poet of the Piano, Walter Aaron Clark offers the first substantive study in English of this virtuoso pianist, composer, and music pedagogue. While providing detailed analyses of his major works for voice, piano, and the stage, Clark argues that Granados's art represented a unifying presence on the cultural landscape of Spain during a period of imperial decline, political unrest, and economic transformation. Drawing on newly discovered documents, Clark explores the cultural spheres in which Granados moved, particularly of Castile and Catalonia. Granados's best-known music was inspired by the art of Francisco Goya, especially the Goyescas suite for solo piano that became the basis for the opera. These pieces evoked the colorful and dramatic world that Goya inhabited and depicted in his art. Granados's fascination with Goya's Madrid set him apart from fellow nationalists Albeniz and Falla, who drew their principal inspiration from Andalusia. Though he was resolutely apolitical, Granados's attraction to Castile antagonized some Catalan nationalists, who resented Castilian domination. Yet Granados also made important contributions to Catalan musical theater and was a prominent figure in the modernist movement in Barcelona.
Clark also explores the personal pressures that shaped Granados's music. His passionate affair with a wealthy socialite created domestic tensions, but it was also a source of inspiration for Goyescas. Persistent financial difficulties forced him to devote time to teaching at the expense of composition, though as a result Granados made considerable contributions to piano pedagogy and music education in Barcelona through the music academy he founded there.
While Granados's tragic and early demise casts a pall over his life story, Clark ultimately reveals an artist of remarkable versatility and individuality and sheds new light on his enduring significance.