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Essays by prominent scholars and organists examine the music of Franck and other nineteenth-century French organist-composers through stylistic analysis, study of compositional process, and exploration of how ideas about organ technique and performance-practice traditions developed and became codified.

Essays on the history of bands in America from ca. 1820 to 1930, offering new insights on a major sphere of music making that brought diverse repertories to wide audiences.

A long-needed and up-to-date overview of the syntax and principles that make Verdi's operas so effective and so beloved today.

This biography of Minna Planer, Richard Wagner's wife of 30 years, reveals her as an artist who was vital to her husband's creative life.

The formative early ballets of West Side Story creators Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins explored in detail for the very first time.Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins stand as giants of the musical-theatre world, but it was ballet that launched their stage careers and established their relationship. With Fancy Free (1944), their triumphant debut collaboration produced by Ballet Theatre, Bernstein, Robbins, and set designer Oliver Smith-all in their mid-twenties- captured the spirit of wartime New York, created a defining ballet of the period still widely performed today, and became overnight sensations. The hit musical On the Town (1944) and a now largely forgotten ballet, Facsimile (1946), followed over the next two years. Drawing extensively on previously unpublished archival documents, Bernstein and Robbins: The Early Ballets provides a richly detailed and original historical account of the creation, premiere, and reception of Fancy Free and Facsimile. It reveals the vital and sometimes conflicting role of Ballet Theatre, explores how Bernstein composed the scores, sheds light on the central importance of Oliver Smith, and considers the legacy of these works for all involved. The result is a new understanding of Bernstein, Robbins, and this formative period in their lives.

The first biography of the composer Gérard Grisey shows how the artist's sensuality and rigor came together to form the musical genre known as spectralism.

Scholars explore from many fresh angles the interweavings of two of the richest strands of human culture - music and esotericism - with examples from the medieval period to the modern age.

The first study focusing on the composition of new plainchant in northern-French confraternities for masses and offices in honor of saints thought to have healing powersStarting in the fourteenth century, northern France saw the rise of confraternities and other lay communities of men and women, organized around trades and religious devotions dedicated to specific patron saints. The composition of new plainchant for masses and offices in honor of saints thought to have healing powers occupied an important place in the devotional landscape of the region. Sarah Ann Long's deeply researched new book highlights the decentralized nature of religious and spiritual authority from 1300-1550, which allowed confraternities to cultivate liturgical practices heavily influenced by popular devotional literature. It challenges pre-conceived notions of the power of the Catholic Church at that time, and the extent to which religious devotions were regulated and standardized. The resulting conclusion is that confraternity devotions occupied a liminal space that provided a certain amount of musical freedom. Examining musical culture at the intersection of the medieval and early modern eras, this work explores such subjects as manuscript production and early music printing; and it investigates not only plainchant, but a broad range of musical styles from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. These include polyphonic embellishments of chant written by some of the most famous composers of the era, which were performed at the French, Burgundian, and Papal Courts.

A revelatory study of how composers and dramatists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France criticized and trivialized independent women in their portrayals of them in works of theater and opera.Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French theatrical works created an uneasy dialogue with the often-blistering depictions of marriage in contemporary writings by literary women. For over a century, composers and librettists attempted to silence such anti-traditionalist views through dramas that ridicule, banish, or, even more violently, silence and subjugate female characters who resist marriage. These dramas portray independent-minded women as agents ofchaos who deploy their sexuality to destabilize class demarcations, or to destroy families and at times the monarchy itself. Coquettes, Wives, and Widows: Gender Politics in French Baroque Opera and Theater shows how dramatists wrested narratives away from women and weaponized those narratives in a defense of the status quo. It examines a wide range of works of different types: from Jean-Philippe Rameau's Platee, ou Junon jalouseand Andre Campra's Arethuse, ou la Vengeance de l'Amour to representative works from the Comedie Francaise, the Comedie Italienne, and the fairgound theaters. Each theater offered denigrating portraits of independent womenas dissolute, obstinate, and extremist. The operas and other theatrical works explored in Coquettes, Wives, and Widows reveal who (in the view of many at the time) should exercise authority to make choices aboutwomen's lives. They also give evidence of widespread fears about how society might change if it were to grant women themselves that responsibility. Marcie Ray is Associate Professor of Musicology at Michigan State University.

Examines the history of musical self-quotation, and reveals and explores a previously unidentified case of Schubert quoting one of his own songs in a major instrumental work.Enthusiasts and experts have long relished Schubert's quotations of his own music. This study centers on a previously unidentified pairing: "e;Ave Maria,"e; one of his most beloved songs, and the Piano Trio no. 2, a masterpiece that holds a unique position in his career. Messing's Self-Quotation in Schubert interrogates the concept of self-quotation from the standpoints of terminology and authorial intent, and it demonstrates, for the first time, how Schubert's practice of self-quotation relates to prevailing practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Messing goes on to analyze in detail the musical relationships between the two works and to investigate thecircumstances that led Schubert to compose each of them. "e;Ave Maria"e; is one of the few Schubert songs for which we have documentation of some early private performances, and the trio stood at the heart of Schubert's only public concert devoted to his works. Messing establishes that Schubert sought to convey an associative meaning with this self-quotation, trusting in his contemporaries' familiarity with the original melody and with Walter Scott's poem, a text that carried profound resonances in Catholic Vienna. Scrutinizing this evidence yields the symbolic purpose behind Schubert's allusion to "e;Ave Maria"e; in the piano trio: honoring the recently deceased Beethoven andvalidating Schubert as his legatee. SCOTT MESSING is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music Emeritus at Alma College.

The first comprehensive biography of any American woman musician born before the Civil War brings to life a composer whose story is both old-fashioned and strikingly modern.Augusta Browne's five-decade career in music and letters reveals a gifted composer and author. Hailed as "e;one of the most prolific women composers in the USA before 1870,"e; Augusta Browne Garrett (c. 1820-1882) was also a dedicatedmusic educator and music journalist. The Americanness of her story resounds across the decades: an earnest little girl growing up amidst a troubled family business; a young professor of music who burst onto the New York City musical scene; and an entrepreneur who resolutely sought publication of her music and prose to her final day. In Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America, author Bonny Miller presents Browne'sunfamiliar story, assesses her musical works, and describes her literary publications. Browne's outsider status and self-agency offer a potent narrative that transcends antebellum and Victorian-era norms. She used the public arena of newspapers and magazines as conduits for her work during an era when women were ridiculed for public speaking. And yet in many ways her persona as a tenacious entrepreneur conflicted with her adherence to strict Christian precepts, despite her assertion of woman's equality with man. Making use of recently digitized sheet music as well as archives of newspapers and books of the period, Miller's narrative provides the first-ever comprehensive, nuanced account of this notable life in American music. BONNY H. MILLER is a pianist and independent scholar who has taught at universities in Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia.

A new and wide-ranging collection of essays by leading international scholars, exploring the concept and practices of virtuosity in Franz Liszt and his contemporaries.In the annals of music history, few figures have dominated the discussion of virtuosity as much as Franz Liszt. A flamboyant performer whose hair-raising technical feats at the piano created a sense of awe-inspiring excitement andan icon whose star power radiated far beyond the realm of music, Liszt was, along with his early model, Paganini, among the first major performer-composers to define himself principally by virtuosity. Featuring new essays by an international group of preeminent scholars, Liszt and Virtuosity offers a reevaluation of the concept and practices of virtuosity as shaped and defined in Liszt's multifaceted oeuvre, as well as a reconsiderationof Liszt's relation to other major and lesser-known musical figures, including Czerny, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, and Marie Jaell. Set in the context of larger trends within the fields of music history, musicanalysis, intellectual history, and performance studies, these capacious explorations demonstrate that Liszt's uniqueness and significance resided in his ability to transform virtuosity into a revolutionary musical force, pushingthe piano aesthetic to the limits of sound and poetic meaning.

Examines in detail the contexts of Brahms's masterpiece and demonstrates that, contrary to recent consensus, it was performed and received as an inherently Christian work during the composer's life.Despite its entirely biblical text, Brahms's long-beloved A German Requiem is now widely considered a work in which the composer espoused a theologically universal view. R. Allen Lott's comprehensive reconsideration of thework's various contexts challenges that prevailing interpretation and demonstrates that in its early years the Requiem was regarded as a traditional Christian work. Brahms's "e;A German Requiem"e; systematicallydocuments, for the first time, the early performance history and critical reception of this masterful work. A German Requiem was effortlessly incorporated into traditional Christian observances, and reviews of these performances and other appraisals by respected critics and scholars consistently deemed that the work possessed not only a Christian perspective, but a specifically Protestant one. A discussion of the musical traditions used byBrahms demonstrates how the work is imbued with the language of Lutheran church music through references to chorales and through allusions to preceding masterworks by Schutz, Bach, Mendelssohn, and others. Lott also offers an insightful exegesis of the Bible verses that Brahms selected. Altogether, this richly detailed study leads to a thorough reappraisal of Brahms's masterpiece. R. ALLEN LOTT is Professor of Music History in the School of Church Music and Worship at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

Bold new essays demonstrate how Leonard Bernstein influenced American culture, society, and politics through his conducting, composing, political relationships, and activism.Composer, conductor, activist, and icon of twentieth-century America, Leonard Bernstein (1918-90) had a rich association with Washington, DC. Although he never lived there, the US capital was the site of some of the most importantmoments in his life and work, as he engaged with the nation's struggles and triumphs. By examining Bernstein through the lens of Washington, DC, this book offers new insights into his life and music from the 1940s through the 1980s, including his role in building the city's artistic landscape, his political-diplomatic aims, his works that received premieres and other early performances in Washington, and his relationships with the nation's liberal and conservative political elites. The collection also contributes new perspectives on twentieth-century American history, government, and culture, helping to elucidate the political function of music in American democracy. The essays in Leonard Bernstein and Washington, DC, all newly written by leading authorities, situate this important American cultural figure in the seat of United States government. The result is a fresh new angle on Leonard Bernstein, American politics, and American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. Daniel Abraham is Professor of Music at American University, Alicia Kopfstein-Penk is Adjunct Professorial Lecturer at American University, and Andrew H. Weaver is Professor of Musicology at The Catholic University of America.

Reveals how Aaron Copland's complex relationship with the music of Gustav Mahler shaped his vision for American music in the twentieth century.The iconic American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) is often credited with creating an unmistakably American musical style, a style free from the powerful sway of the European classics that long dominated the art-music scene inthe United States. Yet Copland was strongly attracted to the music of the late-romantic Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), whose monumental symphonies and powerful songs have captivated and challenged American audiencesfor more than a century. Drawing extensively on archival and musical materials, Aaron Copland and the American Legacy of Gustav Mahler offers the first detailed exploration of Copland's multifaceted relationshipwith Mahler's music and its lasting consequences for music in America. Matthew Mugmon demonstrates that Copland, inspired by Mahler's example, blended modernism and romanticism in shaping a vision for American music in the twentieth century, and that he did so through his multiple roles as composer, teacher, critic, and orchestral tastemaker. Copland's career-long engagement with Mahler's music, as Mugmon compellingly illustrates, intersected with Copland's own Jewish identity and with his links to such towering figures in American music as Nadia Boulanger, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein. MATTHEW MUGMON is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Arizona.

English translation and revised edition of the most comprehensive and reliable biography of Claude Debussy.Francois Lesure's "e;critical biography"e; of Claude Debussy (Fayard, 2003) is widely recognized by scholars as the most comprehensive and reliable account of that composer's life and career as well as of the artistic milieu in whichhe worked. This encyclopedic volume draws extensively on Debussy's complete correspondence (at that time unpublished), a painstaking tracking of contemporary reviews and comments in the press, and an examination of other primary documents-including private diaries-that had not been available to previous biographers. As such, Lesure's book presents a wealth of new information while debunking a number of myths that had developed over the years since the composer's death in 1918. The present English translation and revised edition, by Debussy authority Marie Rolf, augments Lesure's numerous notes with several thousand new ones by Rolf, providing more precise information oncrucial and sometimes contentious points. It also reflects Debussy scholarship that has appeared since 2003, updating Lesure's seminal work. Rolf's translation-the first ever-will make Lesure's findings accessible to scholars, musicians, and music lovers in English-speaking lands and around the world. FRANCOIS LESURE (1923-2001) was the Director of the Music division of the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Professor of Musicology at the Universite libre de Bruxelles, and Chair of Musicology at the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes. MARIE ROLF is senior associate dean of graduate studies and professor of music theory at the Eastman School of Music and a memberof the editorial board for the Ouvres completes de Claude Debussy.

How do you create a style of opera that speaks to everyone, when no one agrees on what it should sayor how?French and Italian varieties of opera have intermingled and informed one another from the genre's first decades onward. Yet we still have only a hazy view of why and how those intersections occurred and what they meant to a givenopera's creators and audiences. Margaret Butler's Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform tackles these issues, examining performance, spectatorship, and politics in the Bourbon-controlled, northern Italian city of Parma in the mid-eighteenth century. Reconstructing the French context for Tommaso Traetta's Italian operas that consciously set out to fuse French and Italian elements, Butler explores Traetta's operas and recreations in Parma of operas and ballets by Jean-Philippe Rameau and other French composers. She shows that Parma's brand of entertainment is one in which Traetta's operas occupy points along a continuum representing a long and rich tradition of adaptation and generic play. Such a reading calls into question the very notion of operatic reform, showing the need for a more flexible conception of a volatile moment in opera's history. The book elucidates the complicated circumstances in which entertainments were created that spoke not only to Parma's multicultural audiences but also to an increasingly cosmopolitan Europe. MARGARET R. BUTLER is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The first critical study of the life and distinctive artistic vision of Heinrich Neuhaus, a legendary pianist-pedagogue widely considered one of the leading shapers of the renowned Russian piano tradition.Heinrich Neuhaus (1888-1964) was one of the most charismatic and sought after pianist-pedagogues of the twentieth century, earning a formidable reputation in the West as one of the pillars of Russian pianism through the success ofhis star pupils Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter, and his book About the Art of Piano Playing. Maria Razumovskaya's Heinrich Neuhaus: A Life beyond Music is the first critical study of this masterful artist. It explores what went on in his teaching studio but also seeks to understand the vibrant circumstances that underpinned Neuhaus's unique outlook and approach. These circumstances include his formative years of study in Europealongside Karol Szymanowski (his cousin) and the renowned pianist Artur Rubinstein, the turbulence of life during the Russian Civil War, Neuhaus's meteoric rise to fame in Moscow, and his lifelong friendship with the poet Boris Pasternak. Razumovskaya's book draws on previously unseen documents relating to Neuhaus's arrest and imprisonment in the infamous Lubyanka for criticizing the Soviet regime. By revealing how these influences helped form Neuhaus's distinct vision of a performer's subjectivity -- what he called an artist's "e;autopsychography"e; -- the book emphasizes important aesthetic principles and practices that were adopted by creative artists eager to escape the banality and limitations imposed by Socialist Realism. MARIA RAZUMOVSKAYA, a recital pianist and researcher, teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

The composer's diaries, translated for the first time, with commentary on his distinctive musical aesthetics and his relationship to artistic cross-currents in Czechoslovakia, France, and America.Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) was one of the most productive and frequently performed composers of the mid-twentieth century, renowned for such works as his opera Julietta; the Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano, and Timpani; and Symphony no. 6 ("e;Fantaisies symphoniques"e;). History books, however, rarely give a sense of what he stood for as a musician. Martinu's Subliminal States fills this gap by discussing the political, cultural, and musical challenges that he faced. The book also offers, for the first time, a translation of the composer's American Diaries, in which he set down his musical philosophy in direct and convincing terms. Martinu's diaries are, in large measure, a quest to establish a new kind of discourse on music. In place of the Romantic sentiment that he found others invoking to explain musical inspiration, Martinu suggested looking for"e;emotion"e; elsewhere, such as in the technical decisions a composer makes while producing the score, or even in the composer's ability to work "e;without conscious involvement."e; And in place of the schematic formal analyses that hefelt were misleading listeners about a work's "e;musical structure,"e; he urged that we treat the work as a Gestalt, or as a synergy of functional relations. Martinu's diaries provide a unique contribution to the history of musical aesthetics and shed light on a composer who loomed large in the musical worlds of Europe and America. THOMAS D. SVATOS is Assistant Professor at Zayed University.

A rich interdisciplinary exploration of the world of Sara Levy, a Jewish salonniere and skilled performing musician in late eighteenth-century Berlin, and her impact on the Bach revival, German-Jewish life, and Enlightenment culture.Sara Levy nee Itzig (1761-1854), a salonniere, skilled performing musician, and active participant in enlightened Prussian Jewish society, played a powerful role in shaping the dynamic cultural world of late eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century Berlin. A patron and collector of music, she studied harpsichord with Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-84) and commissioned musical compositions from both Friedemann and his brother Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-88). Archival evidence demonstrates Levy's position as an essential link in the transmission of the music of their father, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), and as a catalyst for the "e;Bach revival"e; of the early nineteenth century, which was led by her great-nephew Felix Mendelssohn. Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin represents the first scholarly exploration of the cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts that shaped Levy's world. Bringing together leading scholars from the fields of musicology, Jewish Studies, history, literary studies, gender studies, and philosophy, this volume presents cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research on the numerous mutually reinforcing aspects of Levy's life and work. Contributors: Rebecca Cypess, Marjanne E. Gooze, Barbara Hahn, Martha B. Helfer, Natalie Naimark-Goldberg, Elias Sacks, Yael Sela, Nancy Sinkoff, George B. Stauffer, Christoph Wolff, Steven Zohn Rebecca Cypess is Associate Professor of Music at Rutgers University. Nancy Sinkoff is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History and Director ofthe Center for European Studies at Rutgers University.

Some of Debussy's most beloved pieces, as well as lesser-known ones from his early years, set in a rich cultural context by leading experts from the English- and French-speaking worlds.The music of Claude Debussy has always been widely beloved by listeners and performers alike, more perhaps than that of any of the other pioneers of musical modernism. However rich in itself, his creative output also participated,and continues to participate, in a network of cultural connections, the scope and meaning of which can only be gleaned through multiple interpretive frameworks. Debussy's Resonance offers twenty new studies by some of themost active and respected English- and French-language scholars of French music. The book treats a large swath of the composer's music, from previously unexplored melodies of his early years to late pieces such as the ballet Jeux and the Douze Etudes, and takes into consideration the numerous contexts that helped shape the works and the different ways that musicologists and critics have explained them. CONTRIBUTORS: Katherine Bergeron, Matthew Brown, David J. Code, Mark DeVoto, Michel Duchesneau, David Grayson, Denis Herlin, Jocelyn Ho, Roy Howat, Steven Huebner, Julian Johnson, Barbara L. Kelly, Richard Langham Smith, Mark McFarland, Francois de Medicis, Robert Orledge, Boyd Pomeroy. Caroline Rae, Marie Rolf, August Sheehy FRANCOIS DE MEDICIS is Professor of Music at the Universite de Montreal. STEVEN HUEBNER is Professor of Music at McGill University.

Published for the first time: a rich epistolary dialogue revealing one master teacher's power to shape the cultural canon and one great composer's desire to embed himself within historical narratives.Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky began corresponding in 1929 when Stravinsky sought someone to supervise the musical education of his younger son, Soulima. Boulanger accepted the position and began what would prove to be a warmand lasting dialogue with the Stravinsky family. For fifty years, Boulanger exchanged letters with Igor Stravinsky. An additional 140 letters exist written to Boulanger from Stravinsky's immediate family: his wife Catherine, hismother Anna, and his sons Theodore and Soulima. Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence makes available a rich selection from this many-sided dialogue. The letters are published here in English translation (most for the first time in their entirety or at all). The little-known French originals are available on the book's companion website. The letters allow us to follow the conversation shared between Boulanger andthe Stravinskys from 1929 until 1972, the year following Igor Stravinsky's death. Through the words they exchanged, we see Boulanger and Stravinsky transition from respectful colleagues to close friends to, finally, distant icons, with music serving always as a central topic. These letters are a testament to one master teacher's power to shape the cultural canon and one composer's desire to embed himself within historical narratives. Their words touch upon matters professional and personal, musical and social, with the overall narrative reflecting the turmoil of life during the twentieth century and the fragility of artists hoping to leave their mark on the modernist period. Kimberly A. Francis is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Guelph, Canada.

Combines fresh approaches to the life and music of the beloved nineteenth-century composer with the latest and most significant ways of thinking about rhythm, meter, and musical time.Brahms and the Shaping of Time brings together essays by leading music scholars, each of which analyzes the music of Brahms with a particular focus on the music's temporality. The volume reveals numerous ways in which Brahms manipulates such basic elements as rhythm and phrase structure in pieces ranging from the Third Piano Sonata and the Double Concerto to a number of his most important and beloved songs. The first two essays examine aspects of rhythm and meter in Brahms's lieder, recognizing his meaningful deviations from temporal norms. The second two pick up the mantle from William Rothstein's landmark text Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music. Rothstein's study focused on the music of other composers, but suggested how a future study might explore the music of Brahms; these essays contribute to such a study while also pivoting the book's focus from vocal to instrumental music. Each of the chapters of the third pair cross-examines and expands our understanding of the hemiola. The concluding trio of essays promotes, through further analysis of individual works, ways of hearing that encourage the reader to breach the confines of the score's metric notation. Together, the essays in this volume offer fresh approaches to the life and music of the beloved nineteenth-century composer and incorporate significant new ways of thinking about rhythm, meter, and musical time. CONTRIBUTORS: Eytan Agmon, Richard Cohn, Harald Krebs, Ryan McClelland, Jan Miyake, Scott Murphy, Samuel Ng, Heather Platt, Frank Samarotto Scott Murphy is professorof music theory at the University of Kansas.

Probing analyses, from the renowned music theorist, of Schubert's great, yet still little-studied piano-solo, chamber, and symphonic masterpieces.In his instrumental works, Franz Schubert, like Beethoven, expanded on the classical traditions, especially in the areas of form and harmony. Yet many of these works have only recently begun to be appreciated for their true worthby performers, listeners, and scholars. Schubert's Mature Instrumental Music, by renowned music theorist David Beach, is an analytical study of selected symphonic, chamber, and solo-piano works written during the last ten years of the composer's short life, beginning with the Trout Quintet (D. 667) and ending with the String Quintet (D. 956). Each of the chapters in part 1 focuses on a crucial topic: harmony, phrase rhythm, motive,and sonata form. These chapters will be accessible to all musicians and other readers who have some basic training in harmony and form. Part 2 presents detailed analyses of nine fascinating representative movements. Beach's insights will enrich the listener's experience of what are now recognized as some of the great masterpieces of the early nineteenth century. David Beach is Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the Faculty of Music atthe University of Toronto. He is the author of Aspects of Unity in J. S. Bach's Partitas and Suites: An Analytical Study, and coeditor of Bach to Brahms: Essays on Musical Design and Structure and Explorations inSchenkerian Analysis, all published by the University of Rochester Press.

All-new interviews with 33 of the world's leading composers--from Adams and Crumb to Gubaidulina and Rihm--give unique insights into the creative process.Balint Andras Varga is perhaps the world's most respected interviewer of living composers. For The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste: Reflections on New Music, Varga has confronted thirty-three composers with quotations carefully chosen to elicit their thoughts about an issue that is crucial for any serious creative artist: How can one find courage to deal with the sometimes tyrannical expectations of the outside world? The result is an imaginary roundtable at which we encounter fresh, revealing, previously unpublished statements from such world-renowned composers as John Adams, Friedrich Cerha, George Crumb, Sofia Gubaidulina, Georg Friedrich Haas, Giya Kancheli, Gyorgy Kurtag, Helmut Lachenmann, Libby Larsen, Robert Morris, and Wolfgang Rihm. Also represented are composers who are becoming more prominent with the passing years -- Chaya Czernowin, Pascal Dusapin, and Rebecca Saunders -- as well as conductor-composer Michael Gielen, festival director Nicholas Kenyon, and music critics Paul Griffiths and Arnold Whittall. In The Courage of Composers and the Tyranny of Taste, composers and other insightful individuals comment on choices made, traps avoided, unforeseen consequences, proud accomplishments, occasional regrets: the whole range of experiences central to artistic creativity. Balint Andras Varga isthe acclaimed author of Gyorgy Kurtag: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages; Three Questions for 65 Composers; and From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir (all available from University of Rochester Press).

A pathbreaking study of the Parisian press's attempts to claim Richard Wagner's place in French history and imagination during the unstable and conflict-ridden years of the Third Reich. Richard Wagner was a polarizing figure in France from the time that he first entered French musical life in the mid nineteenth century. Critics employed him to symbolize everything from democratic revolution to authoritarian antisemitism. During periods of Franco-German conflict, such as the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, Wagner was associated in France with German nationalism and chauvinism. This association has led to the assumption that, with the advent of the Third Reich, the French once again rejected Wagner.Drawing on hundreds of press sources and employing close readings, this book seeks to explain a paradox: as the German threat grew more tangible from 1933, the Parisian press insisted on seeing in Wagner a universality that transcended his Germanness. Repudiating the notion that Wagner stood for Germany, French critics attempted to reclaim his role in their own national history and imagination.Claiming Wagner for France: Music and Politics in the Parisian Press, 1933-1944 reveals how the concept of a universal Wagner, which was used to challenge the Nazis in the 1930s, was gradually transformed into the infamous collaborationist rhetoric promoted by the Vichy government and exploited by the Nazis between 1940 and 1944. Rachel Orzech's study offers a close examination of Wagner's place in France's cultural landscape at this time, contributing to our understanding of how the French grappled with one of the most challenging periods in their history.

A bold application of the concept of "e;canonical"e; works to the development of French operatic and concert life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.This long-awaited book by a leading historian of European music life offers a fresh reading of concert and operatic life by showing how certain musical works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France came to be considered "e;canonic"e;: that is, admirable and worthy of being taken as models. In a series of interlinked essays, William Weber draws particular attention to the ways in which such reputations could shift in different eras and circumstances. The first chapter outlines how such a surge of reputation came about for Jean-Baptiste Lully after his death in 1687, followed a century later by one for the operas of Christoph-Willibald Gluck and Niccolo Piccinni. Next, Beverly Wilcox contributes a crucial chapter exploring how a canon of sacred works evolved at the Concert Spirituel between 1725 and 1790. Subsequent chapters detail the rise of an "e;incipient canon"e; for Joseph Haydn's music in the 1780s; a new operatic canon centered on works of Gioachino Rossini and Giacomo Meyerbeer; a century-long canonic repertory at the theater of the Opera-Comique; and, between 1860 and 1914, frequent concert performances of excerpts from Wagner's operas, sometimes along with excerpts from Meyerbeer's. Throughout, Weber and Wilcox demonstrate how the French musical press reflected musical taste, and also shaped it, across two centuries.

Here translated for the first time, Jean-Jacques Nattiez's widely hailed comparative guide to the techniques of music analysis focuses on a single vivid passage from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.The field of musicology has in recent decades branched out to incorporate methods from a wide range of other fields. But, when scholars examine a musical work, to what extent should they emphasize immanent (purely internal) features, and to what extent historical, cultural, psychological, or aesthetic networks of meanings associated with those features? Finally, what specific analytical method should be chosen, given that various methods can lead to seemingly incompatible results? Jean-Jacques Nattiez, a renowned figure in music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology, here examines numerous contending approaches that have been applied to the English-horn melody heard in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. His aim is to offer thereby a methodological guide and compendium that will allow specialists and students alike to navigate the multiplicity of theoretical orientations in musicology.Analytical models proposed by Heinrich Schenker, Nicolas Ruwet, Leonard B. Meyer, Fred Lerdahl, and other notable figures in the field of music analysis are discussed. Some of the analytical sketches by these scholars were previously unpublished and are presented to the public for the first time in the present book. The author also considers insights from the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. An examination of Wagner's wide-ranging musical sources (Venetian gondolier songs and Swiss shepherd songs) leads to acutely relevant passages in writings by Rousseau, Goethe, and Schopenhauer. The book culminates in Nattiez's own interpretation of the relationship between vocal and instrumental music in Tristan and Isolde. Jean-Jacques Nattiez is professor emeritus of musicology at the Universite de Montreal.

Guides modern performers and scholars through the intricacies of German Baroque metric theory, via analyses of treatises and organ music by J.S. Bach and other leading composers, such as Buxtehude, Bruhns, and Weckman.Before the advent of the metronome ca. 1800, there was little in the way of a standardized, commonly accessible method for precisely communicating how fast musical compositions should be performed. Instead of absolute time (that is, plottable on a metronome), Baroque musicians developed notational cues for relative speed: this was accomplished primarily through combinations of time signatures and note values. Julia Dokter's Tempo and Tactus in the German Baroque helps decode these tempo cues for modern performers.Part 1 investigates metric theory in music treatises from roughly 1600 to 1790. Parts 2 and 3 explore the organ scores of pivotal composers such as J. S. Bach, Dieterich Buxtehude, Matthias Weckman, and Nicolaus Bruhns, and present case studies demonstrating how Baroque tempo indications may interact in performance situations. Readers will discover how Baroque musicians modified the Renaissance mensural system to incorporate tempo shifts; how the various duple, triple, and compound meters interrelated; how the technical display of stylus phantasticus writing affected tempo; how tempo words (such as allegro) functioned; and how the choice of performing forces-chorus, solo keyboard, and so on-could affect the way tempo was notated. By addressing questions of tempo fundamental to German Baroque music, this book lays important groundwork for organists and for performers of other instrumental music of this period.

Presents previously unpublished memoirs (1933-77), lectures, and essays by the eminent harpsichordist and scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick.This collection of unpublished writings by the eminent harpsichordist and scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick contains his memoirs for the period 1933-77 as well as essays on a variety of topics, including his preparation for the first performance of Elliott Carter's Double Concerto, thoughts on editing Bach's Goldberg Variations, and reflections on recording, chamber music, performance, and harpsichords and their transport. The volume also contains five lectures from a Yale University lecture series presented between 1969 and 1971, a bibliography of publications by and about Kirkpatrick, a discography of his recordings, and a foreword by former Kirkpatrick student and renowned organist William Porter. Meredith Kirkpatrick, the niece of Ralph Kirkpatrick, is a librarian and bibliographer at Boston University and the editor of Ralph Kirkpatrick: Letters of the American Harpsichordist and Scholar (University of Rochester Press, 2014).