French concert music and jazz often enjoyed a special creative exchange across the period 1900-65. French modernist composers were particularly receptive to early African-American jazz during the interwar years, and American jazz musicians, especially those concerned with modal jazz in the 1950s and early 1960s, exhibited a distinct affinity with French musical impressionism. However, despite a general, if contested, interest in the cultural interplay of classical music and jazz, few writers have probed the specific French music-jazz relationship in depth. In this book, Deborah Mawer sets such musical interplay within its historical-cultural and critical-analytical contexts, offering a detailed yet accessible account of both French and American perspectives. Blending intertextuality with more precise borrowing techniques, Mawer presents case studies on the musical interactions of a wide range of composers and performers, including Debussy, Satie, Milhaud, Ravel, Jack Hylton, George Russell, Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck.
"The first in-depth historical study of the origins of spectral music, which is widely regarded, alongside minimalism, as one of the two most influential compositional movements of the last fifty years. The book will appeal to anyone interested in how classical music developed in the late twentieth century"--
Explores the political aesthetics of 'lateness' in the cultural sphere after World War I, mapping intersections between the activities, attitudes and ideas of musical and literary figures in Britain. The book will appeal to readers interested in musical modernism, literary modernism and the politics of interwar Britain.
An insightful account of a fascinating musical environment by an historian with experience of music colleges and universities. Investigates the standpoints of British conservatoire music education, its musical culture (and its conflicts) and the funding that paid (very poorly) for it. For readers interested in society, culture and music.
The first comprehensive study of the late music of one of the most influential composers of the last half century, this book places Elliott Carter's music from 1995 to 2012 in the broader context of post-war contemporary concert music, including his own earlier work. It addresses Carter's reception history, his aesthetics, and his harmonic and rhythmic practice, and includes detailed essays on all of Carter's major works after 1995. Special emphasis is placed on Carter's settings of contemporary modernist poetry from John Ashbery to Louis Zukofsky. In readable and engaging prose, Elliott Carter's Late Music illuminates a body of late work that stands at the forefront of the composer's achievements.
The correspondence between John Cage and Peter Yates represents the final part of Cage's three most significant exchanges of letters. Cage argued 'composing's one thing, performing's another, listening's a third': in this exchange he engages directly with the last part of that triad of musical elements.
Prokofiev's last four operas are major works of his career in the Soviet Union, yet the original versions remain unfamiliar since they exist only in manuscript form. This book offers bold new interpretations, draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, and includes comparisons with works of literature, film, and theatre.
The 'prequel' to Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Music (Cambridge, 2014), this book demonstrates that the term 'atonal' is effective in describing Schoenberg's music from 1908-21. Written for music scholars, performers and conductors, it features detailed analyses that will help them understand the core logic of some of the most difficult pieces of music.
This thematic examination of Britten's operas focuses on the way that ideology is presented on stage. As well as being a record of the ideological world of mid-twentieth-century Britain, these operas continue to diagnose problems in our own time. This book argues that it is timely - if uncomfortable - for current audiences to re-address his music.
Russell Hartenberger offers a performer's perspective on Steve Reich's compositions, from his iconic minimalist work, Drumming, to his masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians. This study explores the performance issues encountered by musicians in Reich's original ensemble and reveals the techniques they developed to bring his compositions to life.
Morton Feldman is widely regarded as one of America's greatest composers. His music is famously idiosyncratic, but, in many cases, the way he presented it is also unusual because, in the 1950s and 1960s, he often composed in non-standard musical notations, including a groundbreaking variety on graph paper that facilitated deliberately imprecise specifications of pitch and, at times, other musical parameters. Feldman used this notation, intermittently, over seventeen years, producing numerous graph works that invite analysis as an evolving series. Taking this approach, David Cline marshals a wide range of source materials - many previously unpublished - in clarifying the ideology, organisation and generative history of these graphs and their formative role in the chronicle of post-war music. This assists in pinpointing connections with Feldman's compositions in other formats, works by other composers, notably John Cage, and contemporary currents in painting. Performance practice is examined through analysis of Feldman's non-notated preferences and David Tudor's celebrated interpretations.
The anti-fascist cantata Il canto sospeso, the string quartet Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima and the 'Tragedy of Listening' Prometeo cemented Luigi Nono's place in music history. In this study, Carola Nielinger-Vakil examines these major works in the context of Nono's amalgamation of avant-garde composition with Communist political engagement. Part I discusses Il canto sospeso in the context of all of Nono's anti-fascist pieces, from the unfinished Fucik project (1951) to Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (1966). Nielinger-Vakil explores Nono's position at the Darmstadt Music Courses, the evolution of his compositional technique, his penchant for music theatre and his use of spatial and electronic techniques to set the composer and his works against the diverging circumstances in Italy and Germany after 1945. Part II further examines these concerns and shows how they live on in Nono's work after 1975, culminating in a thorough analysis of Prometeo.
Modernism is key to Western art music yet remains poorly understood. This book offers new perspectives on transformations in recent composition, performance and musical thought. It recasts modernism as a whole, revealing both its connections to tradition and its contemporary vitality.
The first comprehensive study of musical Holocaust representations in the Western tradition to examine both musical language and cultural value.
This panoramic study of musical modernism synthesizes cultural, biographical, and analytic perspectives to provide a group portrait of the leading figures in post-war British art music. Philip Rupprecht explores the music of the Manchester Group and other composers in works spanning sixties theatricality through to seventies pop, electronic and post-minimalist music.
Including articles, essays, letters, broadcasts and interviews, some previously unpublished, this volume brings together more than seventy written and spoken-word sources to illuminate the life and work of the composer Peter Maxwell Davies. This book will appeal to music specialists and others interested in British post-war culture.
The most influential compositional movement of the past fifty years, spectralism was informed by digital technology but also extended the aesthetics of pianist-composers such as Liszt, Scriabin and Debussy. In The Spectral Piano, Marilyn Nonken explores these shared fascinations and the parallels between the movement's contemporary aesthetics and psychological research.
Thomas Schuttenhelm's book presents a comprehensive commentary on Michael Tippett's orchestral music. Narrated by the composer's letters and writings, and supported by evidence from his sketchbooks and manuscripts, this study of his creative cycles explores the intentions of the composer, and the multiplicity of meanings that reside within his works.
Jack Boss takes a unique approach to analyzing Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, adapting the composer's notion of a 'musical idea' - problem, elaboration, solution - as a theoretical framework. Containing analytical readings of key works including Moses und Aron, this study provides the reader with a clearer understanding of this vitally important composer.
New Music at Darmstadt explores the rise and fall of the so-called 'Darmstadt School', through a wealth of primary sources and analytical commentary. Martin Iddon's book examines the creation of the Darmstadt New Music Courses and the slow development and subsequent collapse of the idea of the Darmstadt School, showing how participants in the West German new music scene, including Herbert Eimert and a range of journalistic commentators, created an image of a coherent entity, despite the very diverse range of compositional practices on display at the courses. The book also explores the collapse of the seeming collegiality of the Darmstadt composers, which crystallised around the arrival there in 1958 of the most famous, and notorious, of all post-war composers, John Cage, an event Carl Dahlhaus opined 'swept across the European avant-garde like a natural disaster'.
In fifteen case studies from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, Music and Protest in 1968 presents new global perspectives on the relationship between music and socio-political protest. Chapters cover a wide range of musical styles and genres, including jazz, folk, pop, rock, early, avant-garde and experimental music.
Tracing the history of musical modernism in Italy from the fin de siecle to the Cold War, this book follows the work of Luigi Dallapiccola, the leading Italian composer of the mid-twentieth century, as he moved from support for the fascist regime to a committed resistance to totalitarianism.
In fifteen case studies from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, Music and Protest in 1968 presents new global perspectives on the relationship between music and socio-political protest. Chapters cover a wide range of musical styles and genres, including jazz, folk, pop, rock, early, avant-garde and experimental music.
David Beard presents the first definitive survey of Harrison Birtwistle's music for the opera house and theatre, from his smaller-scale works, such as Down by the Greenwood Side and Bow Down, to the full-length operas, such as Punch and Judy, The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain. Blending source study with both music analysis and cultural criticism, the book focuses on the sometimes tense but always revealing relationship between abstract musical processes and the practical demands of narrative drama, while touching on theories of parody, narrative, pastoral, film, the body and community. Each stage work is considered in terms of its own specific musico-dramatic themes, revealing how compositional scheme and dramatic conception are intertwined from the earliest stages of a project's genesis. The study draws on a substantial body of previously undocumented primary sources and goes beyond previous studies of the composer's output to include works unveiled from 2000 onwards.
Van den Toorn and McGinness take a fresh look at the dynamics of Stravinsky's musical style from a variety of analytical, critical and aesthetic angles. Starting with processes of juxtaposition and stratification, the book offers an in-depth analysis of works such as The Rite of Spring, Les Noces and Renard. Characteristic features of style, melody and harmony are traced to rhythmic forces, including those of metrical displacement. Along with Stravinsky's formalist aesthetics, the strict performing style he favoured is also traced to rhythmic factors, thus reversing the direction of the traditional causal relationship. Here, aesthetic belief and performance practice are seen as flowing directly from the musical invention. The book provides a counter-argument to the criticism and aesthetics of T. W. Adorno and Richard Taruskin, and will appeal to composers, critics and performers as well as scholars of Stravinsky's music.
Heather Wiebe's book examines educational, occasional and religious works of Benjamin Britten that engage both with the distant past and with key episodes of postwar reconstruction, elucidating the role of music in mid-century British culture while exploring issues of memory, enchantment and cultural citizenship.
John Cage is best known for his indeterminate music, which leaves a significant level of creative decision-making in the hands of the performer. But how much licence did Cage allow? Martin Iddon's book is the first volume to collect the complete extant correspondence between the composer and pianist David Tudor, one of Cage's most provocative and significant musical collaborators. The book presents their partnership from working together in New York in the early 1950s, through periods on tour in Europe, until the late stages of their work from the 1960s onwards, carried out almost exclusively within the frame of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Tackling the question of how much creative flexibility Tudor was granted, Iddon includes detailed examples of the ways in which Tudor realised Cage's work, especially focusing on Music of Changes to Variations II, to show how composer and pianist influenced one another's methods and styles.
Graham Griffiths places Stravinsky's reinvention in the early 1920s, as both neoclassical composer and concert-pianist, at the centre of a fundamental reconsideration of the composer's entire output - viewed from the unprecedented perspective of his relationship with the piano.
Music in Germany since 1968 modifies the dominant historiography of music in post-war Germany by shifting its axis from the years of reconstruction after 1945 to the era following the events of 1968. Arguing that the social transformations of 1968 led to a new phase of music in Germany, Alastair Williams examines the key topics, including responses to serialism, music and politics, and the re-evaluation of tradition. The book devotes central chapters to Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang Rihm, as focal points for areas such as postmodernism, musical semiotics and action-based gestures. Further chapters widen the scope by considering the precursors and contemporaries of Rihm and Lachenmann, especially in relation to the idea of historical inclusion. Williams's study also assesses the development of the Darmstadt summer courses, addresses the significance of German reunification, and considers the role of Germany in a new stage of musical modernism.
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