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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This annotated chronology of western music from 313-1425 is the first in a series of outlines covering the history of music in western civilization. The present volume covers the background, philosophy, theory, notation, style, and forms or classes of music of the periods stated and also the works of theorists or composers. Sources, facsimiles, and transcriptions of musical manuscripts and sources of treatises by musical theorists, in the original language and in English translation, are indicated where possible. The instruments of each historical period are listed and described. Musical terms are defined at the end of each chapter. Foreign words, parts of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church, musical terms, titles of theoretical works and musical manuscripts, and names of composers, theorists, and places of interest are defined in the section entitled Definition and Pronunciation. This section also includes the translation and pronunciation of words in Classical and Ecclesiastical Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Old English, and Old French. At the end of each section of the book are maps that show pertinent Empires and Kingdoms, and the areas of musical development and activity of each historical period. Appendices have been added in order to discuss notation and rhythm in greater depth and to divulge some different theories concerning the material found in the text. Supplemental sources for further study are found at the end of each historical period.

Schubert's Workshop offers a fresh study of the composer's compositional technique and its development, rooted in the author's experience of realising performing versions of Franz Schubert's unfinished works. Through close examination of Schubert's use of technical and structural devices, Brian Newbould demonstrates that Schubert was much more technically innovative than has been supposed, and argues that the composer's technical discoveries constitute a rich legacy of specific influences on later composers. Providing rich new insights into the creative practice of one of the major figures of classical music, this two-volume study reframes our understanding of Schubert as an innovator who constantly pushed at the frontiers of style and expression.

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.

Why would Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), modernist titan and so-called prophet of the New Music, commit himself time and again to the venerable sonata-allegro form of Mozart and Beethoven? How could so gifted a symphonic storyteller be drawn to a framework that many have dismissed as antiquated and dramatically inert? Mahler's Symphonic Sonatas offers a striking new take on this old dilemma. Indeed, it poses these questions seriously for the first time. Rather than downplaying Mahler's sonata designs as distracting anachronisms or innocuous groundplans, author Seth Monahan argues that for much of his career, Mahler used the inner, goal-directed dynamics of sonata form as the basis for some of his most gripping symphonic stories. Laying bare the deeper narrative/processual grammar of Mahler's evolving sonata corpus, Monahan pays particular attention to its recycling of large-scale rhetorical devices and its consistent linkage of tonal plot and affect. He then sets forth an interpretive framework that combines the visionary insights of Theodor W. Adorno-whose Mahler writings are examined here lucidly and at length-with elements of Hepokoski and Darcy's renowned Sonata Theory. What emerges is a tensely dialectical image of Mahler's sonata forms, one that hears the genre's compulsion for tonal/rhetorical closure in full collision with the spontaneous narrative needs of the surrounding music and of the overarching symphonic totality. It is a practice that calls forth sonata form not as a rigid mold, but as a dynamic process-rich with historical resonances and subject to a vast range of complications, curtailments, and catastrophes. With its expert balance of riveting analytical narration and thoughtful methodological reflection, Mahler's Symphonic Sonatas promises to be a landmark text of Mahler reception, and one that will reward scholars and students of the late-Romantic symphony for years to come.

This is a facsimile of the first edition, printed for the Author, in Edinburgh in 1721.

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.

Liszt's Dante Symphony is a thrilling tale of murder and covert spy rings amid the turbulent rise of Bismarck's Prussia, thus leading to Hitler's brutal Third Reich. Following the lives of a student of Liszt's, Angelo Di Purezza, and his son, the reader is taken on a journey of suspense that cascades over two generations. During those years Europe would experience numerous revolutions and witness two World Wars that would feature ghastly chemical weapons, atomic bombs, and deadly poison gas called Zyklon-B. Franz Liszt is joined by a huge cast of historical characters, including Napoleon III, Pope Pius IX, Rossini, Saint-Saens, Gustave Dore, Victor Hugo, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler and many others. The tale is an exciting amalgamation of history, politics, religion, music, the fine arts, secret codes, murder, suspense, sacrifices, and yes, even romance.

Following the author's acclaimed biographical dictionaries on Schubert and Mozart, Peter Clive here examines Beethoven's relations with the multitude of persons who formed his circle: relatives, friends, acquaintances, librettists, poets, publishers, artists, patrons, and musicians. With over 450 entries, this volume is the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the subject currently available in any language. It will appeal to all music lovers, both the scholar and the non-specialist alike.

American director Robert Altman (1925-2006) first came to national attention with the surprise blockbuster M*A*S*H (1970), and he directed more than thirty feature films in the subsequent decades. Critics and scholars have noted that music is central to Altman's films, and in addition to his feature films, Altman worked in theater, opera, and the emerging field of cable television. His treatment of sound is a hallmark of his films, alongside overlapping dialogue, improvisation, and large ensemble casts. Several of his best-known films integrate musical performances into the central plot, including Nashville (1975), Popeye (1980), Short Cuts (1993), Kansas City (1996), The Company (2003) and A Prairie Home Companion (2006), his final film. Even such non-musicals as McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) have been described as, in fellow director and protege Paul Thomas Anderson's evocative phrase, as "musicals without people singing." Robert Altman's Soundtracks considers Altman's celebrated, innovative uses of music and sound in several of his most acclaimed and lesser-known works. In so doing, these case studies serve as a window not only into Altman's considerable and varied output, but also the changing film industry over nearly four decades, from the heyday of the New Hollywood in the late 1960s through the "Indiewood" boom of the 1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. As its frame, the book will consider the continuing attractions of auteurism inside and outside of scholarly discourse, by considering Altman's career in terms of the director's own self-promotion as a visionary and artist; the film industry's promotion of Altman the auteur; the emphasis on Altman's individual style, including his use of music, by the director, critics, scholars, and within the industry; and the processes, tensions, and boundaries of collaboration.

Martin Luther was the architect and engineer of the Protestant Reformation, which transformed Germany five hundred years ago. In Martin Luther and the Arts, Andreas Loewe and Katherine Firth elucidate Luther's theory and practice, demonstrating the breadth, flexibility and rigour of Luther's use of the arts to reach audiences and convince them of his Reformation message using a range of strategies, including music, images and drama alongside sermons, polemical tracts, and his new translation of the Bible into German. Extensively based on German and English sources, including often neglected aspects of Luther's own writings, Loewe and Firth offer a valuable survey for theologians, historians, art historians, musicologists and literary studies scholars interested in interdisciplinary comparisons of Luther's work across the arts.

A biography of the conductor Mitropoulos. He was an advocate of difficult modern music and an early champion of Mahler; his performances brought the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra into the first rank of American orchestras.

Few Mexican musicians in the twentieth century achieved as much notoriety or had such an international impact as the popular singer and songwriter Agustin Lara (1897-1970). Widely known as "el flaco de oro" ("the Golden Skinny"), this remarkably thin fellow was prolific across the genres of bolero, ballad, and folk. His most beloved "Granada," a song so enduring that it has been covered by the likes of Mario Lanza, Frank Sinatra, and Placido Domingo, is today a standard in the vocal repertory. However, there exists very little biographical literature on Lara in English. In AgustinLara: A Cultural Biography, author Andrew Wood's informed and informative placement of Lara's work in a broader cultural context presents a rich and comprehensive reading of the life of this significant musical figure. Lara's career as a media celebrity as well as musician provides an excellent window on Mexican society in the mid-twentieth century and on popular culture in Latin America. Wood also delves into Lara's music itself, bringing to light how the composer's work unites a number of important currents in Latin music of his day, particularly the bolero. With close musicological focus and in-depth cultural analysis riding alongside the biographical narrative, Agustin Lara: A Cultural Biography is a welcome read to aficionados and performers of Latin American musics, as well as a valuable addition to the study of modern Mexican music and Latin American popular culture as a whole."