Presents a first analytical study that looks at the overarching designs of Benjamin Britten's John Donne, Thomas Hardy and William Blake solo song cycles. By questioning when a group of songs ought to be understood not merely as a collection, but as a cycle, Sly shows that Britten's personal selection and arrangement is indispensable to understanding these cycles' extra-musical communication. The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Winter Words (poems by Hardy) and Songs and Proverbs of William Blake - composed in 1945, 1953 and 1965 respectively - each represent a philosophical exploration. The terrains set out by the three poets are distinct, but also engage one another in important and unexpected ways. Their cyclic architectures are expressed not only in their poetic arrangement, but in their musical settings. Key relationships and motive remain central for Britten. Keys convey a network of interconnections, create groupings of songs, and establish levels of tonal affinity or distance. Motive - often intervals that can fit into any melodic, harmonic or rhythmic context - is used to create aural affinities between or among individual songs. This book also offers a broader narrative revealing Britten's evolving philosophical convictions in post-war Britain. While it may not be the case that Britten intended any broader philosophical comment, the works together outline the cold and brittle state that emerges from loss and aligns with their composer's increasingly stark outlook on humanity.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Research and Information Guide presents the most extensive annotated bibliography of its subject yet produced. It offers comprehensive coverage of the English composer's prose works and accounts for over 1,000 secondary sources from all critical and scholarly eras. A single-numbering format and substantial indexes facilitate efficient searches of what is the most complete bibliography of Ralph Vaughan Williams since Neil Butterworth's guide to research was published by Garland in 1990.

John Taverner was the leading composer of church music under Henry VIII. His contributions to the mass and votive antiphon are varied, distinguished and sometimes innovative; he has left more important settings for the office than any of his predecessors, and even a little secular music survives. Hugh Benham, editor of Taverner's complete works for Early English Church Music, now provides the first full-length study of the composer for over twenty years. He places the music in context, with the help of biographical information, discussion of Taverner's place in society, and explanation of how each piece was used in the pre-Reformation church services. He investigates the musical language of Taverner's predecessors as background for a fresh examination and appraisal of the music in the course of which he traces similarities with the work of younger composers. Issues confronting the performer are considered, and the music is also approached from the listener's point of view, initially through close analytical inspection of the celebrated votive antiphon Gaude plurimum.

Featuring multidisciplinary research by an international team of leading scholars, this volume addresses the contested aspects of arabesque while exploring its penchant for crossing artistic and cultural boundaries to create new forms. Enthusiastically imported from its Near Eastern sources by European artists, the freely flowing line known as arabesque is a recognizable motif across the arts of painting, music, dance, and literature. From the German Romantics to the Art Nouveau artists, and from Debussy's compositions to the serpentine choreographies of Loie Fuller, the chapters in this volume bring together cross-disciplinary perspectives to understand the arabesque across both art historical and musicological discourses.

How was music depicted in and mediated through Romantic and Victorian poetry? This is the central question that this specially commissioned volume of essays sets out to explore in order to understand better music's place and its significance in nineteenth-century British culture. Analysing how music took part in and commented on a wide range of scientific, literary, and cultural discourses, the book expands our knowledge of how music was central to the nineteenth-century imagination. Like its companion volume, The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Ashgate, 2004) edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff, this book provides a meeting place for literary studies and musicology, with contributions by scholars situated in each field. Areas investigated in these essays include the Romantic interest in national musical traditions; the figure of the Eolian harp in the poetry of Coleridge and Shelley; the recurring theme of music in Blake's verse; settings of Tennyson by Parry and Elgar that demonstrate how literary representations of musical ideas are refigured in music; George Eliot's use of music in her poetry to explore literary and philosophical themes; music in the verse of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the personification of lyric (Sappho) in a song cycle by Granville and Helen Bantock; and music and sexual identity in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, Michael Field, Beardsley, Gray and Davidson.

A thorough examination of Shostakovich's string quartets is long overdue. Although they can justifiably lay claim to being the most significant and frequently performed twentieth-century oeuvre for that ensemble, there has been no systematic English-language study of the entire cycle. Judith Kuhn's book begins such a study, undertaken with the belief that, despite a growing awareness of the universality of Shostakovich's music, much remains to be learned from the historical context and an examination of the music's language. Much of the controversy about Shostakovich's music has been related to questions of meaning. The conflicting interpretations put forth by scholars during the musicological 'Shostakovich wars' have shown the impossibility of fixing a single meaning in the composer's music. Commentators have often heard the quartets as political in nature, although there have been contradictory views as to whether Shostakovich was a loyal communist or a dissident. The works are also often described as vivid narratives, perhaps a confessional autobiography or a chronicle of the composer's times. The cycle has also been heard to examine major philosophical issues posed by the composer's life and times, including war, death, love, the conflict of good and evil, the nature of subjectivity, the power of creativity and the place of the individual - and particularly the artist - in society. Soviet commentaries on the quartets typically describe the works through the lens of Socialist-Realist mythological master narratives. Recent Western commentaries see Shostakovich's quartets as expressions of broader twentieth-century subjectivity, filled with ruptures and uncertainty. What musical features enable these diverse interpretations? Kuhn examines each quartet in turn, looking first at its historical and biographical context, with special attention to the cultural questions being discussed at the time of its writing. She then surveys the work's reception history, and follows with a critical discussion of the quartet's architectural and harmonic features. Using the new tools of Sonata Theory, Kuhn provides a fresh analytical approach to Shostakovich's music, giving valuable and detailed insights into the quartets, showing how the composer's mastery of form has enabled these works to be heard as active participants in the Soviet and Western cultural discourses of their time, while remaining compelling and relevant to twenty-first-century listeners.

Filling a significant gap in current scholarship, the fourteen original essays that make up this volume individually and collectively reflect on the relationship between music and Orientalism in the British Empire over the course of the long nineteenth century. The book is in four themed sections. 'Portrayal of the East' traces the routes from encounter to representation and restores the Orient to its rightful place in histories of Orientalism. 'Interpreting Concert Music' looks at one of the principal forms in which Orientalism could be brought to an eager and largely receptive - yet sometimes resistant - mass market. 'Words and Music' investigates the confluence of musical and Orientalist themes in different genres of writing, including criticism, fiction and travel writing. Finally, 'The Orientalist Stage' discusses crucial sites of Orientalist representation - music theatre and opera - as well as tracing similar phenomena in twentieth-century Hindi cinema. These final chapters examine the rendering of the East as 'unachievable and unrecognizable' for the consuming gaze of the western spectator.

It is extremely detailed, with a particularly impressive range of references, including some quite obscure material that is nevertheless relevant. It would appeal chiefly to researchers of Beethoven and the Classical period in music. It would also appeal to scholars and students investigating the reception history of Ancient Greece and Rome in the 18th-19th century.

Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the persecution of musicians in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the focus of medical anxiety about music shifted to the idea that "musical brainwashing" and "subliminal messages" could strain the nerves and lead to mind control, mental illness and suicide. More recently, the prevalence of sonic weapons and the use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror have both made the subject of music that is bad for the health worryingly topical. This book outlines and explains the development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment until the present day, providing an original contribution to the history of medicine, music and the body.

Digital Scenography in Opera in the Twenty-First Century is the first definitive study of the use of digital scenography in Western opera production. The book begins by exploring digital scenography's dramaturgical possibilities and establishes a critical framework for identifying and comparing the use of digital scenography across different digitally enhanced opera productions. The book then investigates the impacts and potential disruptions of digital scenography on opera's longstanding production conventions, both on and off the stage. Drawing on interviews with major industry practitioners, including Paul Barritt, Mark Grimmer, Donald Holder, Elaine J. McCarthy, Luke Halls, Wendall K. Harrington, Finn Ross, S. Katy Tucker, and Victoria 'Vita' Tzykun, author Caitlin Vincent identifies key correlations between the use of digital scenography in practice and subsequent impacts on creative hierarchies, production design processes, and organisational management. The book features detailed case studies of digitally enhanced productions premiered by Dutch National Opera, Komische Oper Berlin, Opera de Lyon, The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Theatre Royal de la Monnaie, The Metropolitan Opera, Victorian Opera, and Washington National Opera.

Heitor Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras demonstrates how the composer achieved his own Brazilian neoclassical style in a group of works, nine suites in total, that is arguably one of the best examples of homage to J.S. Bach's music in the twentieth century. In this book, the corpus of Bachianas Brasileiras is contextualised and critically examined according to its structure and intertextual aspects, as well as its relationship to Bach's music, Brazilian popular music, and other works by contemporaries of Villa Lobos. A range of musical examples illustrate instances of the selected topics in the works, encompassing urban Brazilian popular music such as the choro, Brazilian northeast and afro rhythms, and citation of folkloric melodies. Dudeque's comprehensive examination of the Bachianas Brasileiras will be invaluable for scholars and researchers of music theory and analysis.

Beethoven's piano sonatas form one of the most important collections of works in the whole history of music. Spanning several decades of his life as a composer, the sonatas soon came to be seen as the first body of substantial serious works for piano suited to performance in large concert halls seating hundreds of people. In this comprehensive and authoritative guide, Charles Rosen places the works in context and provides an understanding of the formal principles involved in interpreting and performing this unique repertoire, covering such aspects as sonata form, phrasing, and tempo, as well as the use of pedal and trills. In the second part of his book, he looks at the sonatas individually, from the earliest works of the 1790s through the sonatas of Beethoven's youthful popularity of the early 1800s, the subsequent years of mastery, the years of stress (1812-1817), and the last three sonatas of the 1820s. Composed as much for private music-making as public recital, Beethoven's sonatas have long formed a bridge between the worlds of the salon and the concert hall. For today's audience, Rosen has written a guide that brings out the gravity, passion, and humor of these works and will enrich the appreciation of a wide range of readers, whether listeners, amateur musicians, or professional pianists. The book includes a link to recordings of Rosen performing extracts from several of the sonatas, illustrating points made in the text.

Eric Coates (1886-1957) is perhaps the most familiar name associated with British light music. Sir Charles Groves said that 'his music crackled with enthusiasm and vitality. He could write tunes and clothe them in the most attractive musical colours'. Coates won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, and from 1912 to 1919 he was principal viola of the Queen's Hall Orchestra under Sir Henry Wood. He also played under such conductors as Elgar, Delius, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and Beecham. It was, however, as a composer of orchestral music that he found his greatest success. Beginning with the Miniature Suite, written for the 1911 Promenade Concerts, he forged an enviable reputation as a composer. By the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular and highest-paid British composers, with a string of popular works flowing from his pen. Coates' music has become indelibly entwined with such popular radio programmes as the BBC's In Town Tonight, which was introduced by the 'Knightsbridge' March and Desert Island Discs whose signature tune for the past forty years has been By the Sleepy Lagoon. Perhaps his most memorable work was his march for the Dam Busters film. Michael Payne traces the changing fortunes of the career of the man who composed some of Britain's best-known music. In many ways, Coates' story is the story of British light music, and Payne's study offers a fascinating insight into the heyday and decline of the British light music tradition.

The cross-genre approach of this volume attempts to build a dialogue and synergies between communities of artists. The proposed monograph would appeal to academic readerships and postgraduate students in music and/or sound studies in a broad sense, with particular appeal to specialists in contemporary art music and or as music technology.

Felice Giardini and Professional Music Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London explores Giardini's influence on British musical life through his multifaceted career as performer, teacher, composer, concert promoter and opera impresario. The crux of the study is a detailed account of Giardini's partnership with the music seller/publisher John Cox during the 1750s, presented using new biographical information which contextualizes their business dealings and subsequent disaccord. The resulting litigation, the details of which have only recently come to light, is explored here via a complex set of archival materials. The findings offer new information about the economics of professional music culture at the time, including detailed figures for performers' fees, the printing and binding of music scores, the charges arising from the administration of concerts and operas, the sale, hire and repair of various instruments and the cost of what today we would call intellectual property rights. This is a fascinating study for musicologists and followers of Giardini, as well as for readers with an interest in classical music, social history and legal history.

Radiohead and the Journey Beyond Genre traces the uses and transgressions of genre in the music of Radiohead and studies the band's varied reception in online and offline media. Radiohead's work combines traditional rock sounds with a unique and experimental approach towards genre that sets the band apart from the contemporary mainstream. A play with diverse styles and audience expectations has shaped Radiohead's musical output and opened up debates about genre amongst critics, fans, and academics alike. Interpretations speak of a music that is referential of the past but also alludes to the future. Applying both music- and discourse-analytical methods, the book discusses how genre manifests in Radiohead's work and how it is interpreted amongst different audience groups. It explores how genre and generic flexibility affect the listeners' search for musical meaning and ways of discussion. This results in the development of a theoretical framework for the study of genre in individual popular music oeuvres that explores the equal validity of widely differing forms of reception as a multidimensional network of meaning. While Radiohead's music is the product of an eclectic mixture of musical influences and styles, the book also shows how the band's experimental stance has increasingly fostered debates about Radiohead's generic novelty and independence. It asks what remains of genre in light of its past or imminent transgression. Offering new perspectives on popular music genre, transgression, and the music and reception of Radiohead, the book will appeal to academics, students, and those interested in Radiohead and matters of genre. It contributes to scholarship in musicology, popular music, media, and cultural studies.

In this book on Richard Wagner's compelling but enigmatic masterpiece Goetterdammerung, the final opera of his monumental Ring tetralogy, Alexander H. Shapiro advances an ambitious new interpretation which uncovers intriguing new facets to the work's profound insights into the human condition. By taking a fresh look at the philosophical and historical influences on Wagner, and critically reevaluating the composer's intellectual worldview as revealed in his own prose works, letters, and diary entries, the book challenges a number of conventional views that continue to impede a clear understanding of this work's meaning. The book argues that Goetterdammerung, and hence the Ring as a whole, achieves coherence when interpreted in terms of contemporary nineteenth-century theories of progress, and, in particular, G.W.F. Hegel's philosophies of mind and history. A central target of the book is the article of faith that has come to dominate Wagner scholarship over the years - that Wagner's encounter in 1854 with Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy conclusively altered the final message of the Ring from one of historical optimism to existential pessimism. The author contends that Schopenhauer's uncompromising denigration of the will and denial of the possibility for human progress find no place in the written text of the Ring or in a plausible reading of the final musical setting. In its place, the author discovers in the famous Immolation Scene a celebration of mankind's inexhaustible capacity for self-improvement and progress. The author makes the further compelling case that this message of progress is communicated not through Siegfried, the traditional male hero of the drama, but through Brunnhilde, the warrior goddess who becomes a mortal woman. In her role as a battle-tested world-historical prophet she is the true revolutionary change agent of Wagner's opera who has the strength and vision to comprehend and thereby shape human history. This highly lucid and accessible study is aimed not only at scholars and researchers in the fields of opera studies, music and philosophy, and music history, but also Wagner enthusiasts, and readers and students interested in the history and philosophy of the nineteenth century.

Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music offers a range of approaches central to the performance of French piano music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors include scholars and active performers who see performance not as an independent activity but as a practice enriched by a wealth of historical and analytical approaches. To underline the usefulness of contextual understanding for performance, each author highlights the choices performers must confront with examples drawn from particular repertoires and composers. Topics explored include editorial practice, the use of early recordings, emergent disciplines such as analysis-and-performance, and traditions passed down from teacher to student. Themes that emerge demonstrate the importance of editions as a form of communication, the challenges of notation, the significance of detail and of deeper continuity, the importance of performing and teaching traditions, and the influence of cross disciplinary frameworks. A link to a set of performed examples on the frenchpianomusic.com website allows readers to hear and compare performances and interpretations of the music discussed. The volume will appeal to musicologists and analysts interested in performance, performers, students, and piano teachers.

Women's Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound shines a long-overdue light on the works and lives of female-identifying screen composers. Bringing together composer profiles, exclusive interview excerpts, and industry case studies, this volume showcases their achievements and reflects on the systemic gender biases women have faced in an industry that has long excluded them. Across 16 essays, an international array of contributors present a wealth of research data, biographical content, and musical analysis of film, television, and video game scores to understand how the industry excludes women, the consequences of these deficits, and why such inequities persist - and to document women's rich contributions to screen music in diverse styles and genres. The chapters amplify the voices of women composers including Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, Wendy Carlos, Anne Dudley, Rachel Portman, Hildur Gudnadottir, Mica Levi, Winifred Phillips, and more. From the mid-twentieth century to the present, and from classic Hollywood scores to pioneering electronic music, these are the stories and achievements of the women who have managed to forge successful careers in a male-dominated arena. Suitable for researchers, educators, and students alike, Women's Music for the Screen urges the screen music industry to consider these sounds and stories in a way it hasn't before: as voices that more accurately reflect the world we all share.

As the complicated relationship between music and theatre has evolved and changed in the modern and postmodern periods, music has continued to be immensely influential in key developments of theatrical practices. In this study of musicality in the theatre, David Roesner offers a revised view of the nature of the relationship. The new perspective results from two shifts in focus: on the one hand, Roesner concentrates in particular on theatre-making - that is the creation processes of theatre - and on the other, he traces a notion of 'musicality' in the historical and contemporary discourses as driver of theatrical innovation and aesthetic dispositif, focusing on musical qualities, metaphors and principles derived from a wide range of genres. Roesner looks in particular at the ways in which those who attempted to experiment with, advance or even revolutionize theatre often sought to use and integrate a sense of musicality in training and directing processes and in performances. His study reveals both the continuous changes in the understanding of music as model, method and metaphor for the theatre and how different notions of music had a vital impact on theatrical innovation in the past 150 years. Musicality thus becomes a complementary concept to theatricality, helping to highlight what is germane to an art form as well as to explain its traction in other art forms and areas of life. The theoretical scope of the book is developed from a wide range of case studies, some of which are re-readings of the classics of theatre history (Appia, Meyerhold, Artaud, Beckett), while others introduce or rediscover less-discussed practitioners such as Joe Chaikin, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Thalheimer and Karin Beier.

Mark Berry explores the political and religious ideas expounded in Wagner's Ring through close attention to the text and drama, the multifarious intellectual influences upon the composer during the work's lengthy gestation and composition, and the wealth of Wagner source material. Many of his writings are explicitly political in their concerns, for Wagner was emphatically not a revolutionary solely for the sake of art. Yet it would be misleading to see even the most 'political' tracts as somehow divorced from the aesthetic realm; Wagner's radical challenge to liberal-democratic politics makes no such distinction. This book considers Wagner's treatment of various worlds: nature, politics, economics, and metaphysics, in order to explain just how radical that challenge is. Classical interpretations have tended to opt either for an 'optimistic' view of the Ring, centred upon the influence of Young Hegelian thought - in particular the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach - and Wagner's concomitant revolutionary politics, or for the 'pessimistic' option, removing the disillusioned Wagner-in-Swiss-exile from the political sphere and stressing the undoubtedly important role of Arthur Schopenhauer. Such an 'either-or' approach seriously misrepresents not only Wagner's compositional method but also his intellectual method. It also sidelines inconvenient aspects of the dramas that fail to 'fit' whichever interpretation is selected. Wagner's tendency is not progressively to recant previous 'errors' in his oeuvre. Radical ideas are not completely replaced by a Schopenhauerian world-view, however loudly the composer might come to trumpet his apparent 'conversion'. Nor is Wagner's truly an Hegelian method, although Hegelian dialectic plays an important role. In fact, Wagner is in many ways not really a systematic thinker at all (which is not to portray him as self-consciously unsystematic in a Nietzschean, let alone 'post-modernist' fashion). His tendency, rather, is agglomerative,

- Global scope and focus on transnational encounters provide a new way of looking at the history of sound recording and the music industry - Inclusion of interdisciplinary perspectives makes this book relevant to music, sound studies, media studies, and the history of technology

The Philharmonic Society ('Royal' from 1912) is one of the oldest music societies in the world. Founded in 1813 to provide regular concerts of new music in London, it is famous for its commission of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. This detailed account by George Hogarth, music journalist and Secretary to the Society between 1850 and 1864, takes us from the inaugural concert in March 1813 including works by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven to plans for the golden jubilee concert. Noteworthy performances in these first fifty years included the UK premiere of Beethoven's Ninth in 1825, Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony in 1833 and a cornucopia of works by composers such as Wagner, Berlioz and Weber whose music now forms the core repertoire of the nineteenth century. Appendices provide extracts of letters from Mendelssohn, details of works by English composers performed at Society concerts, and lists of performers, Society members, Honorary Members and Patrons.

Henry Fothergill Chorley made his name as music journalist for The Athanaeum from 1830 until his retirement in 1868. He published weekly reviews of concerts as well as gossip on musicians and composers of the day. This book is based on four lectures presented by the author at the Royal Institution in 1862, and edited after his death by Henry Hewlett. It outlines the development of the different traditions and cultures of music across the world and how western classical composers were inspired and influenced by them. It contains many musical illustrations, drawn particularly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (for example, the fashionable so-called 'Turkish' music by composers including Mozart and Rossini). The book, though idiosyncratic and full of sweeping generalisations, conveys the spirit of its time and the lively character of its author. It will appeal to all those interested in the Victorian reception of world music.

Thirty Years' Musical Recollections, first published in 1862, is a year-by-year commentary in two volumes on the European operas, ballets, singers and dancers popular in London from 1830 to 1859. Its author was music critic of The Athaneum for over thirty years and also wrote book reviews, novels, plays and poems. Volume 2 covers the period 1847-1859 and serves as a valuable reference work to the musical life of London during these years. It begins with an account of the deterioration of Her Majesty's Theatre and the opening of the Royal Italian Opera. Chorley intersperses discerning observations about the changing trends in public taste with descriptions of famous opera singers - including Mademoiselle Alboni, Signor Ronconi, the Countess Rossi, Madame Ristori and Madame Pauline Viardot - and highlights their more noteworthy performances. The book is an entertaining eyewitness account of the lively musical scene in mid-nineteenth-century London.