This new volume incorporates all entries from the previous editions by Arthur Wenk, expanding to cover writings drawn from periodicals, theses, dissertations, books, and Festschriften from 1940 to 2000. Over 9,000 references to analyses of works by over 1,000 composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are included.
Thomas Schuttenhelm's book presents an investigation into Michael Tippett's creative process and a comprehensive critical commentary on his orchestral music.
When Ernst Krenek's opera Jonny spielt auf (Jonny plays on) opened in Leipzig in 1927, it became an instant and spectacular success. Performed in over a hundred cities and translated into a dozen languages, it became the most popular opera of this century. And Austrian-born Krenek, easily one of this century's most prolific major composers, became a wealthy man. Ten years later, however, he found himself a destitute refugee, fleeing to the United States as Hitler's troops invaded Austria. His work, always avant-garde, had become increasingly political; Hitler banned it and labeled Krenek a "cultural Bolshevist." The composer endured long periods of hardship and neglect before his music, which was much admired by such colleagues as Stravinsky and Alban Berg but strange to American ears, was rediscovered by Europeans after the war. Eventually it brought him financial security and many honors, including the Gold Medal of Vienna and the Cross of Austria, and it has been celebrated by festivals in Vienna, Salzburg, Berlin, and other cities. Krenek, who in 1945 became an American citizen, has been as experimental and broad-ranging in his compositions as he has been prolific. His 240 musical works illustrate brilliantly the principal musical trends of the century: Neoromantic tonality, Neoclassicism, free atonality, the twelve-tone technique, integral serialism, and electronic music. In addition, Krenek has also been an accomplished teacher and writer. He has taught some of America's leading composers and has several collections of essays in both German and English to his credit. In this first major biography of Krenek, Stewart chronicles both the personal and the professional events of this brilliant, resilient composer's life. He not only explains Krenek's music in terms that enable us to comprehend and appreciate its character but vividly illustrates how Krenek's imagination has been affected by his experiences, his associates, and the massive social and artistic changes of the twentieth century. Many of the most important music figures cross the landscape of this life—Franz Schreker, Artur Schnabel, T. W. Adorno, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau—confirming Krenek's position as one of the world's foremost composers. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
This comprehensive resource features more than 400 projections and colour illustrations augmented by MRI images for added detail to enhance the anatomy and positioning presentations.
Vincent Persichetti: Grazioso, Grit, and Gold is the first critical biography of the esteemed American composer, bringing together scholarly work and short contributed essays of prominent performers. Andrea Olmstead weaves a captivating narrative of the composer from his early life to his musical activities at Juilliard and death in 1987.
This volume explores twentieth-century organ music through in-depth studies of the principal centers of composition, the most significant composers and their works, and the evolving role of the instrument and its music. The twentieth-century was a time of unprecedented change for organ music, not only in its composition and performance but also in the standards of instrument design and building. Organ music was anything but immune to the complex musical, intellectual, and socio-political climate of the time. Twentieth-Century Organ Music examines the organ's repertory from the entire period, contextualizing it against the background of important social and cultural trends. In a collection of twelve essays, experienced scholars survey the dominant geographic centers of organ music (France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United States, and German-speaking countries) and investigate the composers who made important contributions to the repertory (Reger in Germany, Messiaen in France, Ligeti in Eastern and Central Europe, Howells in Great Britain). Twentieth-Century Organ Music provides a fresh vantage point from which to view one of the twentieth century's most diverse and engaging musical spheres.
The writings of twentieth-century Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski reveal many important aspects of his approach to music and his viewpoints as an artist and as a man. In Lutoslawski on Music, the first full collection of writings by this famous composer, Zbigniew Skowron has amassed an exciting assortment of essays, speeches, lectures, and articles, many of which are newly translated in English and previously unpublished. After an introductory autobiography, the writings, grouped in five parts, illustrate various aspects of the composer's creativity, and discuss musical form, compositional technique, and perception. Lutoslawski examines his own works as well as those of other composers, and expresses his views on crucial aspects of twentieth-century music, including the role of Schoenberg and Debussy and the impact of the western avant-garde of the 1950s. The book also contains Lutoslawski's Artistic Diary, his "notebook of ideas" written from 1959 to 1984 containing intensely personal reflections that do not appear in his public speeches and writings. Concluding with a select bibliography, this collection will give readers a unique and comprehensive overview of the man and his music, encouraging a full appreciation of Lutoslawski's compositional technique and aesthetic views, as well as his position in the history of twentieth-century music.
Inspired by Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose, Mick Short's classic introduction to stylistics, Language and Style represents the state-of-the-art in literary stylistics and encompasses the full breadth of current research in the discipline. Written by leading scholars in the field, chapters cover a variety of methodological and analytical approaches, from traditional qualitative analysis to more recent developments in cognitive and corpus stylistics. Addressing the three, key literary genres of poetry, drama and narrative, Language and Style is divided into carefully balanced sections. Based on original research, each chapter demonstrates a particular analytic technique and explains how this might be applied to a text from one of the literary genres. Framed by helpful introductory material covering the foundational principles of stylistics, the chapters act as practical exemplars of how to carry out stylistic analysis. Comprehensive and engaging, this invaluable resource is essential reading for anyone interested in stylistics.
As the century comes to a close, composition of music in the United States has reached little consensus in terms of style, techniques, or schools. In fourteen original articles, the contributors to this volume explore the broad range and diversity of post-World War II musical culture. Classical and jazz idioms are both covered, as is the broad history of electronic music in the United States.
The composer Witold Lutostawski (born 1913) is one of the outstanding musical personalities of the twentieth century. In this critical biography Steven Stucky traces Lutostawski's development from the Stravinsky-influenced music of his student days to his emergence in the 1960s as a leading avant-gardist. Since the vicissitudes of cultural life in his native Poland have profoundly affected the composer's career, the book includes detailed accounts of Lutostawski's official censure for 'formalism' in the late 1940s and the leading role he later played in a flourishing Polish modernist movement. Both well-known works, such as the Concerto for Orchestra, Trois poemes d'Henri Michaux and the Second Symphony, and the lesser-known early music are considered in detail. Fragments of many compositions never before published in the West are included. There are also analytical summaries of each major work from Jeux véitiens (1961) to Mi-parti (1976).
