for SSATB unaccompanied This expressive Wedding anthem sets an extract from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence. With chromatic inflections and gently arching vocal lines, the music perfectly reflects the text's emphasis on the relationship between pleasure and sorrow. Joy and Woe are woven fine will make a striking addition to the repertory of more experienced choirs looking to try something new.

for SSATB and organ This attractive and uplifting anthem sets the text of the Eastertide Vidi aquam antiphon. Different parts of the text are treated to contrasting musical ideas, including extended melismatic upper-voice passages and mainly homophonic full-choir sections, and the undulating organ part represents the flowing water of the text. A welcome addition to a service or concert programme for all fans of Gabriel Jackson's music. Commissioned by the Friends of Lincoln Cathedral for their 75th anniversary and first performed by the Choir of Lincoln Cathedral with Charles Harrison (organ), directed by Aric Prentice, on 25 June 2011.

For SATB (divisi) with 2 soprano solos

Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways Toward Performance presents analyses of fourteen song cycles composed after the turn of the twentieth century, with a focus on offering ways into the musical and poetic structure of each cycle to performers, scholars, and students alike. Ranging from familiar works of twentieth-century music by composers such as Schoenberg, Britten, Poulenc, and Shostakovich to lesser-known works by Van Wyk, Sviridov, Wheeler, and Sanchez, this collection of essays captures the diversity of the song cycle repertoire in contemporary classical music. The contributors bring their own analytical perspectives and methods, considering musical structures, the composers' selection of texts, how poetic narratives are expressed, and historical context. Informed by music history, music theory, and performance, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles offers an essential guide into the contemporary art-music song cycle for performers, scholars, students, and anyone seeking to understand this unique genre.

'Clear and matter-of-fact, adopting the cool objectivity that is advisable when dealing with such extraordinary and chilling material, this book is needed to make us reflect on an essential part of the history of twentieth-century music.' - Peter Franklin;In this authoritative study, one of the first to appear in English, Erik Levi explores the ambiguous relationship between music and politics during one of the darkest periods of recent cultural history. Utilising material drawn from contemporary documents, journals and newspapers, he traces the evolution of reactionary musical attitudes which were exploited by the Nazis in the final years of the Weimar Republic, chronicles the mechanisms that were established after 1933 to regiment musical life throughout Germany and the occupied territories, and examines the degree to which the climate of xenophobia, racism and anti-modernism affected the dissemination of music either in the opera house and concert hall, or on the radio and in the media.

One of contemporary music's most significant and controversial figures, Brian Ferneyhough's complex and challenging music draws inspiration from painting, literature, and philosophy, as well as music from the recent and distant past. His dense, multilayered compositions intrigue musicians while pushing both performer and instrument to the limits of their abilities. A wide-ranging survey of his life and work to date, "Brian Ferneyhough" examines the critical issues fundamental to understanding the composer as a musician and a thinker. Debuting in celebration of Ferneyhough's seventieth birthday in 2013, this book strikes a rich balance between critical analysis of the music and close scrutiny of its aesthetic and philosophical contexts, making possible a more rounded view of the composer than has been available.

By bringing together the most recent scholarship, this book sheds new light on Berg's life and music. The three main sections are each devoted to a particular genre. The first essay in each section surveys Berg's development within the genre concerned, whilst the subsequent chapters discuss particular works in more detail. An introductory section to the book sets Berg's music in the context of other artistic and musical developments of the period from 1890 to the 1930s.

The music of Peter Ilyich Tschaikowsky in an advanced piano duo arrangement as recorded by Martha Argerich and Nicolas Economou on Deutsche Grammophon. Titles: Overture * March * Danse de la F?e Drag?e * Danse Russe Trepak * Danse Arab * Danse Chinoise * Danse des Mirlitons * Valse des fleurs.

In this engaging work Vaughan Williams takes advantage of the expressive possibilities of the cello, ranging from wistful and melancholic to lively and jovial. It was composed in 1929 and premiered the following year by its dedicatee, the legendary Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. The five folk songs on which the work is founded are 'Salisbury Plain', 'The Long Whip', 'Low down in the broom', 'Bristol Town', and 'I've been to France'. Materials for the orchestral accompaniment are available on hire.

for SSATB & piano or string orchestra The Shipping Forecast is in 3 movements: 'Donegal', 'They that go down to the sea in ships', and 'Naming'. The first and last movement are settings of poems by the poet, broadcaster, and academic, Sean Street. In 'Donegal' snatches of the shipping forecast (spoken) are woven into the atmospheric texture of the poem. The second movement is a setting of the Psalm 107: 23-26 | 28-29: 'They that go down to the sea in ships'. The setting has the feel of a Celtic lullaby, moving from a simple statement to a centre of turmoil then back to overlapping phrases, melting into tranquillity at the end. In the final movement, 'Naming', the text becomes 'a meditation on the fortunes of the sea as reflected in other names, gathered from coastal maps of Newfoundland'. Energetic, in perpetual motion and rhythmic, 'Naming' drives the whole work to an upbeat finish.

Sergei Rachmaninoff experienced life-changing upheavals and competing inflection points of musical taste, traversing countries and continents as he pursued the triply-brilliant career of composer-conductor-virtuoso pianist. Born in tsarist Russia and raised as a nobleman in a well-educated musical family, Rachmaninoff led a bold lifestyle as a cutting-edge composer, admirer of the latest trends in art, and even aficionado of new developments in farm equipment for his beloved estate of Ivanovka. Wherever his concertizing took him, to glittering capitals all over the world, Rachmaninoff became a nexus for prominent musicians, writers, actors, and other personalities defining this era. Valeria Z. Nollan's biography of perhaps the finest pianist of the twentieth century plunges readers into Rachmaninoff's complex inner world. Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cross Rhythms of the Soul is the first biography of Rachmaninoff in English that presents him in the fullness of his Russian identity. As someone whose own life in Russian emigration ran in parallel ways to Rachmaninoff's own-and whose meetings with the composer's grandson in Switzerland informed her work-Nollan brings important cultural insights into her observations of the activities of this generation of creative artists. She also traces the intricacies of Rachmaninoff's relations with the women closest to him-whose imprints are palpable in his compositions-and introduces a mystery woman whose existence challenges our established narrative of his life.

A sensitive and detailed investigation of the complex relationship between text and music in medieval chant. How do text and melody relate in western liturgical chant? Is the music simply an abstract vehicle for the text, or does it articulate textual structure and meaning? These questions are addressed here through a case study of the second-mode tracts, lengthy and complex solo chants for Lent, which were created in the papal choir of Rome before the mid-eighth century. These partially formulaic chants function as exegesis, with non-syntactical text divisions and emphatic musical phrases promoting certain directions of inner meditation in both performers and listeners. Dr Hornby compares the four second-mode tracts representing the core repertory to related ninth-century Frankish chants, showing that their structural and aesthetic principles are neither Frankish nor a function of their notation in the earliest extant manuscripts, but are instead a well-remembered written reflection of a long oral tradition, stemming from Rome. Dr EMMA HORNBY teaches in the Department of Music at the University of Bristol.

A brief, detailed biography of the composer/architect, student and protege of Honegger, Milhaud, Messiaen, Le Corbusier. Xenakis himself is a major proponent of advancing the boundaries of musical possibilities.

The interdisciplinary approach of Music and Medieval Manuscripts is modeled on the work of the scholar to whom the book is dedicated. Professor Andrew Hughes is recognized internationally for his work on medieval manuscripts, combining the areas of paleography, performance, liturgy and music. All these areas of research are represented in this collection with an emphasis on the continuity between the physical characteristics of medieval manuscripts and their different uses. Albert Derolez provides a landmark and controversial essay on the origins of pre-humanistic script, while Margaret Bent proposes a new interpretation of a famous passage from a fifteenth-century poem by Martin Le Franc. Timothy McGee contributes an innovative essay on late-medieval music, text and rhetoric. David Hiley discusses musical changes and variation in the offices of a major saint's feast, and Craig Wright presents an original study of Guillaume Dufay. Jan Ziolkowski treats the topic of neumed classics, an under-explored aspect of the history of medieval pedagogy and the transmission of texts. The essays that comprise this volume offer a unique focus on medieval manuscripts from a wide range of perspectives, and will appeal to musicologists and medievalists alike.

This collection of original essays is in tribute to the work of Derek Scott on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As one of the leading lights in Critical Musicology, Scott has helped shape the epistemological direction for music research since the late 1980s. There is no doubt that the path taken by the critical musicologist has been a tricky one, leading to new conceptions, interactions, and heated debates during the past two decades. Changes in musicology during the closing decades of the twentieth century prompted the establishment of new sets of theoretical methods that probed at the social and cultural relevance of music, as much as its self-referentiality. All the scholars contributing to this book have played a role in the general paradigmatic shift that ensued in the wake of Kerman's call for change in the 1980s. Setting out to address a range of approaches to theorizing music and promulgating modes of analysis across a wide range of repertories, the essays in this collection can be read as a coming of age of critical musicology through its active dialogue with other disciplines such as sociology, feminism, ethnomusicology, history, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, aesthetics, media studies, film music studies, and gender studies. The volume provides music researchers and graduate students with an up-to-date authoritative reference to all matters dealing with the state of critical musicology today.

For all of its apparent simplicity-a few chords, twelve bars, and a supposedly straightforward American character-blues music is a complex phenomenon with cultural significance that has varied greatly across different historical contexts. One Sound, Two Worlds examines the development of the blues in East and West Germany, demonstrating the multiple ways social and political conditions can shape the meaning of music. Based on new archival research and conversations with key figures, this comparative study provides a cultural, historical, and musicological account of the blues and the impact of the genre not only in the two Germanys, but also in debates about the history of globalization.

Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach collects seventeen essays by leading Bach scholars. The authors each address in some way such questions of meaning in J. S. Bach's vocal compositions-including his Passions, Masses, Magnificat, and cantatas-with particular attention to how such meaning arises out of the intentionality of Bach's own compositional choices or (in Part IV in particular) how meaning is discovered, and created, through the reception of Bach's vocal works. And the authors do not consider such compositional choices in a vacuum, but rather discuss Bach's artistic intentions within the framework of broader cultural trends-social, historical, theological, musical, etc. Such questions of compositional choice and meaning frame the four primary approaches to Bach's vocal music taken by the authors in this volume, as seen across the book's four parts: Part I: How might the study of historical theology inform our understanding of Bach's compositional choices in his music for the church (cantatas, Passions, masses)? Part II: How can we apply traditional analytical tools to understand better how Bach's compositions were created and how they might have been heard by his contemporaries? Part III: What we can understand anew through the study of Bach's self-borrowing (i.e., parody), which always changed the earlier meaning of a composition through changes in textual content, compositional characteristics, the work's context within a larger composition, and often the performance context (from court to church, for example)? Part IV: What can the study of reception teach us about a work's meaning(s) in Bach's time, during the time of his immediate successors, and at various points since then (including our present)? The chapters in this volume thus reflect the breadth of current Bach research in its attention not only to source study and analysis, but also to meanings and contexts for understanding Bach's compositions.

The analytic-theoretical approach to Stravinsky’s music introduced in the opening four chapters of this volume became the standard in theoretical and musicological circles during the past several decades. The features of the approach were adopted and expanded upon by numerous scholars: see Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Period (1996); Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (1998); and Stephen Walsh. Working independently from an historical perspective, Richard Taruskin came to many of the same conclusions regarding Stravinsky’s musical language. Entirely unique is the discussion of the rhythmic emphasis of Stravinsky’s music, the metrical displacement of repeated themes and chords, and the disruptive effect of displacement on the listener. Brought into play is the evolutionary history of meter and its entrainment by the listener; the concept of "sensorimotor synchronization" as advanced by the psychologist Bruno Repp, and that in turn of the "contrametric" nature of Stravinsky’s music as introduced by David Huron. Explored is the relationship between African polyrhythm, as discussed by Kofi Agawu, David Locke, and Steve Reich, to the polyrhythmic stratifications in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Of major concern are the critical and aesthetic issues arising from the interpretation and performance of Stravinsky’s music. The aesthetic views not only of Stravinsky himself but also of critics such as Theodor Adorno, Richard Taruskin, and Robert Craft are discussed at length. Accompanying the essays are over 100 musical illustrations and analytical designs, set and processed with consummate skill by Andre Mount. The essays are prefaced by a newly composed Introduction and then concluded with a lengthy unpublished chapter on the individual work and its classification; "Reflections on the Post-War years of Babbitt, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky". Interactions between the three composers are discussed, as is the relocation, by the early 1940s, of the Paris-Vienna split between Stravinsky and Schoenberg to Los Angeles, California. Even in the twilight years of their respective careers, Stravinsky and Schoenberg remained at a distance from one another.

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.