Music-History & Criticism

Brahms's First Symphony has been hailed as Beethoven's Tenth. Its controversial status and relationship in the Beethovenian tradition is considered alongside other important issues in the early reception history of this key work in the symphonic repertory. David Brodbeck begins with an account of...

After the death of Mahler in 1911 the great Austro-German symphonic line was carried on mainly in England, America, Scandinavia and Russia. The Fifth Symphony of Carl Nielsen, a Danish composer, was composed in 1921. David Fanning discusses its place within the symphonic tradition...

Adelina Patti was the most highly regarded singer in the 19th century. She earned nearly $5000 a night and had her own railway carriage; yet during the same period a minor comic singer would perform for the cost of his food and a pair...

Vivaldi's celebrated Four Seasons are among the most popular works of all time and these, with the rest of the concertos in Op. 8, represent the composer's remarkable innovation in the field of the Baroque concerto. This detailed guide examines the work's origin and...

Described by Aaron Copland as "among the finest creations of the modern repertoire," Berg's Violin Concerto has become a twentieth-century classic. In this authoritative and highly readable guide the reader is introduced not only to the concerto itself but to all that surrounded and...

This volume is one of the first to examine in detail the numerous violin treatises of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. It provides a scholarly historical and technical guide to violin pedagogical method, technique and performance practice during the most critical period in the...

Chopin's four ballades are widely regarded as being among the most significant extended works for solo piano of the nineteenth century. In an illuminating discussion, Jim Samson combines history and analysis to provide a comprehensive picture of these popular piano works, investigating the social...

This highly acclaimed study of English song is the first detailed account of an unusually fruitful interrelationship between English music and English poetry. The period covered is known as the English Musical Renaissance and runs from the last years of the nineteenth century to...

Haydn's Creation is one of the great masterpieces of the classical period. This absorbing and original account of the work provides an indispensable guide for the concert-goer, performer and student alike. The author places the work within the oratorio tradition, and contrasts the theological...

Donald Burrows brings many new insights to this fascinating account of one of the favorite works of the concert hall. He traces the course of Messiah from Handel's initial musical response to the libretto, through the oratorio's turbulent first years to its eventual popularity...

This collection of essays examines the works of composer Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most influential and controversial composers of the twentieth century, in the context of the "New Music" that was the historical and cultural movement of his time. In these essays, Schoenberg's...

Le nozze di Figaro (1786) was Mozart's first mature opera buffa. It was also the first of his three major collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. Unlike Don Giovanni (1787) and Così fan tutte (1790), Figaro has few obvious problems, and even if...

This first comprehensive guide to Debussy's only completed opera, Pell饌s et M駘isande was written by the leading authorities on French music of the period. As a background to the opera, the authors, together with David Grayson, discuss various aspects of the play. They consider...

This new and illuminating study of medieval polyphony examines the links between music and contemporary political, civil and religious events. The period from the second half of the twelfth century to the second half of the fifteenth is of great historical interest since it...

This book is an introduction to the esthetics of music. Aesthetics, which were of prime importance in thinking about music in the nineteenth century, are today sometimes suspected of being idle speculation. Yet judgments about music and every sort of musical activity are based...

We tend to take for granted the labels we put to different forms of music. This study considers the origins and implications of the way in which we categorize music. Whereas earlier ways of classifying music were based on its different functions, for the...

The French composer Olivier Messiaen is one of the major figures of twentieth-century music. This collection of scholarly essays offers new cultural, historical, biographical and analytical perspectives on Messiaen's musical oeuvre from 1941 to 1992. The volume includes: a fascinating snapshot of Messiaen's life...

Hugo Riemann (1849-1919) is generally acknowledged as the most important musicologist of his age. By analyzing his musical thought within the turn-of-the-century context of interest in the natural sciences, German nationhood and modern technology, this book reconstructs how Riemann's ideas not only "made sense"...

Despite Vaughan Williams' seminal importance in British music, international stature as a symphonist, and wider significance as an icon of Englishness, very little new research on his life or music has been published since the mid-1960s. The ten essays presented here examine diverse subjects...

Erik Satie remains one of the most bizarre figures in music history, yet everything he did has its own curious logic, once it can be perceived. In this important new study Dr Orledge reveals what made Satie 'tick' as a composer, dealing with every...

Berlioz's Orchestration Treatise (1843) is a classic textbook by a master of the orchestra, which has not been available in English translation for over a century. This is a book by and about Berlioz, since it provides not only a new translation but also...

Sibelius Studies presents a new portrait of this popular and prolific composer. Sibelius's symphonies often have been mentioned in the same breath with Beethoven's; indeed, in the twentieth century, they have enjoyed a commensurate popularity. The book contextualizes Sibelius' symphonies and tone poems in...

This book is a study of the prose writings of Richard Wagner and their relevance to an understanding of his music and drama, as well as their relation to music criticism and aesthetics in the nineteenth century in general. It looks at central themes...

This study is a comprehensive assessment of J. S. Bach's use of articulation marks (i.e. slurs and dots) in the large body of primary sources. Dr Butt analyses the role of such markings within the compositional process, how they relate to the norms of...

David Kopp's book develops a model of chromatic chord relations in nineteenth-century music by composers such as Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. The emphasis is on explaining chromatic third relations and the pivotal role they play in theory and practice. Drawing on tenets...

In 1947 the theologian and musicologist Friedrich Smend published a study which claimed that J. S. Bach regularly employed the natural-order number alphabet (A=1 to Z=24) in his works. Smend provided historical evidence and music examples to support his theory which demonstrated that by...

This guide to the orchestra and orchestral life combines orchestral repertory history with critical thought. It includes topics such as the art of orchestration, scorereading, conducting, international orchestras, recording, and becoming an orchestral musician, educator or informed listener.Author: Colin LawsonISBN-10: 0521001323ISBN-13: 9780521001328Publisher: Cambridge University...

Where previous accounts of the Renaissance have not fully acknowledged the role that music played in this decisive period of cultural history, Laurenz L?teken merges historical music analysis with the analysis of the other arts to provide a richer context for the emergence and...

In Search of Soul explores the meaning of "soul" in sacred and profane incarnations, from its biblical origins to its central place in the rich traditions of black and Latin history. Surveying the work of writers, artists, poets, musicians, philosophers and theologians, Alejandro Nava...

Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people, particularly how certain ways of organizing sounds becomes integral to how we perceive ourselves and how we feel connected to some people and disconnected from others. Presenting a series of case...

Nostalgia for the Future is the first collection in English of the writings and interviews of Luigi Nono (1924-1990). One of the most prominent figures in the development of new music after World War II, he is renowned for both his compositions and his...

This new collection views Russian music through the Greek triad of "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful" to investigate how the idea of "nation" embeds itself in the public discourse about music and other arts with results at times invigorating, at times corrupting....

Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture documents the transition of recorded music on CDs to music as digital files on computers. More than two decades after the first digital music files began circulating in online archives and playing through new software media players, we have...

Experiencing Latin American Music draws on human experience as a point of departure for musical understanding. Students explore broad topics--identity, the body, religion, and more--and relate these to Latin American musics while refining their understanding of musical concepts and cultural-historical contexts. With its brisk...

This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the Nazis' total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Pamela M. Potter...

In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by "experimental" in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time--New York City, 1964--Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic's disastrous performance of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis;...

The Danger of Music gathers some two decades of Richard Taruskin's writing on the arts and politics, ranging in approach from occasional pieces for major newspapers such as the New York Times to full-scale critical essays for leading intellectual journals. Hard-hitting, provocative, and incisive,...

Charles Mingus is one of the most important--and most mythologized--composers and performers in jazz history. Classically trained and of mixed race, he was an outspoken innovator as well as a bandleader, composer, producer, and record-label owner. His vivid autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, has done...

Ellen Rosand shows how opera, born of courtly entertainment, took root in the special social and economic environment of seventeenth-century Venice and there developed the stylistic and aesthetic characteristics we recognize as opera today. With ninety-one music examples, most of them complete pieces nowhere...

Where did musical minimalism come from--and what does it mean? In this significant revisionist account of minimalist music, Robert Fink connects repetitive music to the postwar evolution of an American mass consumer society. Abandoning the ingrained formalism of minimalist aesthetics, Repeating Ourselves considers the...

Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labor has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide...

This compelling investigation of the later music of Franz Schubert explores the rich terrain of Schubert's impromptus and last piano sonatas. Drawing on the relationships between these pieces and Schubert's Winterreise song cycle, his earlier "Der Wanderer," the closely related "Unfinished" Symphony, and his...

During the years between the world wars, a small but dynamic community of African American jazz musicians left the United States and settled in Paris, creating a vibrant expatriate musical scene and introducing jazz to the French. While the Harlem Renaissance was taking off...

This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been...

This magnificent survey of the most popular period in music history is an extended essay embracing music, aesthetics, social history, and politics, by one of the keenest minds writing on music in the world today.Dahlhaus organizes his book around "watershed" years--for example, 1830, the...

There had long been a need for a modern English translation of Wagner's Ring--a version that would be reliable and readable yet at the same time be a true reflection of the literary quality of the German libretto. First published in 1993, this acclaimed...

A solid grounding in musical techniques of the 17th and 18th centuries is essential to a complete understanding of Baroque music. As scholar Denis Stevens says in his introduction to this work, Full enjoyment will come only when the soloist learns the gentle art...

A solid grounding in musical techniques of the 17th and 18th centuries is essential to a complete understanding of Baroque music. Arnold's legendary work is a comprehensive survey of the topic, covering every issue of significance to today's performers. The text is fully amplified...

Between the physical world of vibration and the world of consciously heard music lies a third area, which is the province of the psychology of music. This introduction, first published in 1938, by the developer of the Seashore test of musical ability, is a...

Amy Absher's The Black Musician and the White City tells the story of African American musicians in Chicago during the mid-twentieth century. While depicting the segregated city before World War II, Absher traces the migration of black musicians, both men and women and both...