This text is a practical guide to the compositional techniques, resources, and technologies available to composers today. Each chapter traces the development of traditional and modern elements that form the foundation of music in the late twentieth century. Among the subjects discussed are interval exploration, serialism, pitch-class sets, twelve-tone music, electronic music, algorithmic composition, and indeterminacy.
Twenty of Israel's leading art-music composers discuss the interaction of inspiration, method and cultural context in their work, revealing both international and national influence and scope. Israel’s contemporary art music reflects a modern society that is an intricate fabric of national and ethnic origins, languages and dialects, customs and traditions—a heterogeneous culture of cultures. It is a rich and distinctive environment—at once ancient and modern, spiritual and secular, traditional and progressive. Twenty Israeli Composers, the first published collection of interviews with Israeli composers, explores this developing and distinctive music culture. The featured composers have earned distinction in Israel and abroad, and reflect the pluralism of Israeli art music, culture, and society. In first-person narrative, they discuss the interaction of inspiration, method, and cultural context in their work, revealing both international and national influence and scope. Three generations of contemporary composers-immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, North and South America, and naïve sabras- share their ideas about music, the creative process, and their experiences as artists living and working in Israel. Robert Fleisher furnishes a biographical sketch of each composer, followed by a summary of recent accomplishments. The book also includes a bibliography, discography, and information for further study.
This is a compelling and inspiring look at spiritual beliefs that influenced some of the world's greatest composers, now revised and expanded with eight additional composers.
This kaleidoscopic collection reflects on the multifaceted world of classical music as it advances through the twenty-first century. With insights drawn from leading composers, performers, academics, journalists, and arts administrators, special focus is placed on classical music’s defining traditions, challenges and contemporary scope. Innovative in structure and approach, the volume comprises two parts. The first provides detailed analyses of issues central to classical music in the present day, including diversity, governance, the identity and perception of classical music, and the challenges facing the achievement of financial stability in non-profit arts organizations. The second part offers case studies, from Miami to Seoul, of the innovative ways in which some arts organizations have responded to the challenges analyzed in the first part. Introductory material, as well as several of the essays, provide some preliminary thoughts about the impact of the crisis year 2020 on the world of classical music. Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges will be a valuable and engaging resource for all readers interested in the development of the arts and classical music, especially academics, arts administrators and organizers, and classical music practitioners and audiences.
Get complete guidance on both traditional orchestration and modern production techniques with this unique book. With effective explanations and clear illustrations, you will learn how to integrate the traditional approach to orchestration with the modern sequencing techniques and tools available. You will discover how to bridge the two approaches in order to enhance your final production. The accompanying CD includes a comprehensive and wide selection of examples, templates and sounds to allow you to hear the techniques within the book. By covering both approaches, this book provides a comprehensive and solid learning experience that will develop your skills and prove extremely competitive in the music production business.
" . . . Strickland's own deep involvement with the works of these composers [is] revealed by the questions and comments he poses in an appreciative, Paterian way. His profound pleasure in these works also leads him to scrutinize and challenge them intimately." —Publishers Weekly "This is an indispensable book about American music . . . " —Fanfare " . . . exhilarating . . . Any of the interviews in American Composers will stimulate your curiosity and appetite." —Hungry Mind Review " . . . not only engaging, but also a useful representation of the major compositional styles of the 1980s and their corresponding practitioners." —Notes Philip Glass, Keith Jarrett, Meredith Monk, and eight other active American composers reveal a broad spectrum of musical personalities in these candid, in-depth conversations. Witty and articulate, their remarks convey the great vitality, diversity, and distinctiveness of today's American music.
With Contemporary Piano: A Performer and Composer’s Guide to Techniques and Resources, Alan Shockley provides a comprehensive resource for composers writing music that uses extended techniques for the piano, and for pianists interested in playing repertoire that makes use of techniques and/or implements unfamiliar to them. Shockley explains dozens of ways to prepare a piano without damaging the instrument, how to notate every standard technique and many, many obscure ones, and the specific geographies of every common concert hall piano. This will be the standard reference for pianists touring and playing inside-the-piano repertoire, and for composers at all levels of familiarity with the piano hoping to understand the mechanical miracle that is the modern piano.
Over three decades, Paul Griffiths's survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage's development of zen music; in Milton Babbitt's settling of the serial system and in Dmitry Shostakovich's unsettling symphonies; in Karlheinz Stockhausen's development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono's pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis's view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio's consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that haven't yet stopped unfolding. This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no singular history of music; Griffiths's study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how and why they converge and diverge. This new edition of Modern Music and After discusses not only the music of the fifteen years that have passed since the previous edition, but also the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the latter half of the twentieth century. In particular, the book has been expanded to incorporate the variety of responses to the modernist impasse experienced by composers of the 1980s and 1990s. Griffiths then moves the book into the twenty-first century as he examines such highly influential composers as Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino. For its breadth, wealth of detail, and characteristic wit and clarity, the third edition of Modern Music and After is required reading for the student and the enquiring listener.
