Previously unseen letters, documents and photographs trace the life and artistic evolution of Elliott Carter, and capture his friendships with fellow musicians and others. Born in New York in December 1908, the venerable but still active American composer Elliott Carter is one of the most highly regarded figures in the music of our time. His works span more than seven decades and have been the subject of many analyses, and most of his writings have appeared in carefully edited collections. In contrast, few of the documents on his life and music, largely preserved at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, are known to the public. This body of material forms the main source of the present volume, which offers a richly annotated selection of Carter's correspondence and other documents, including unpublished writings, facsimiles of music manuscripts, and photographs. The book traces the biographical, intellectual, and artistic evolution of a composer who, building on American modernism and interacting with the latest developments in Europe, has forged a distinctive, highly sophisticated musical language, and captures his friendships with fellow musicians and friends such as Charles Ives, Nadia Boulanger, John Kirkpatrick, Aaron Copland, Nicolas Nabokov, and more recently, Pierre Boulez, Oliver Knussen, Heinz Holliger, Daniel Barenboim, and James Levine. Published in association with the Paul Sacher Foundation.

This book, first collection of essays in English on Bruno Maderna, brings the reader closer to one of the greatest European composer and conductor of the last century. Utopia, Innovation, Tradition: Bruno Maderna's cosmos is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to one of the most multifaceted and interesting musical personalities of the 20th century, a protagonist in the development of new music after World War II. The various essays cover the most important aspects of Bruno Maderna's peculiar compositional approach and, thanks to innovative methodological perspectives based mainly on the study of archival materials, arrive at new and often completely unexpected interpretations.

This study provides a new view of a composer long considered to be one of the century's most rigorously intellectual creators, Anton Webern. By examining a central pre-twelve-tone work, the Trakl cycle, Op 14, in the context of the Viennese intellectual and artistic climate, Professor Shreffler shows how Webern's responses to Trakl's complex verse enabled him to expand his musical vocabulary. The author's emphasis on Webern's compositional process is of particular importance: whether because of the anxiety of creating a new musical language, or because of an innate hyper-perfectionism (or both), Webern rejected most of what he composed. A close examination of the manuscript sources - fragments, sketches, and fair copies - of Webern's comparatively neglected middle-period lieder enables her to shed light on Webern's musical language and his working methods. A focus on the sources also helps to modify the view that his music progressed steadily in the direction of the twelve-tone technique. The works reveal instead a concern with expressing the essence of the text; this lyricism, rather than articulating a substantially different aesthetic from the later works, provides a better understanding of the consummate lyricism of all his music, however compressed or fragmented its utterance in the `classic' twelve-tone works.