For over a century the Wagners have presided over the Bayreuth Festival, playing host to many of the greatest and ghastliest figures in the arts and politics amidst family in-fighting and political controversy.
John Bridcut, author of the acclaimed 'Britten's Children', will include significant fresh material which will make the book indispensable for Britten aficionados as well as for those who are discovering the composer's music for the first time.
Stravinsky in the Americas explores the ';pre-Craft' period of Igor Stravinsky's life, from when he first landed on American shores in 1925 to the end of World War II in 1945.
Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era.
The name Giuseppe Verdi conjures images of Italians singing opera in the streets and bursting into song at political protests or when facing the firing squad.
Beyond Reasonrelates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career:Der Ring des Nibelungen,Tristan und Isolde,Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, andParsifal.
Listening for the Secret is a critical assessment of the Grateful Dead and the distinct culture that grew out of the group's music, politics, and performance.
In this original study, Christopher Alan Reynolds examines the influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on two major nineteenth-century composers, Richard Wagner and Robert Schumann.
Bud Powell was not only one of the greatest bebop pianists of all time, he stands as one of the twentieth century's most dynamic and fiercely adventurous musical minds.
In the first musicological study of Kurt Weill's complete stage works, Stephen Hinton charts the full range of theatrical achievements by one of twentieth-century musical theater's key figures.
Luigi Russolo (1885-1947)-painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement-was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics.
In this groundbreaking, historically-informed semiotic study of late eighteenth-century music, Stephen Rumph focuses on Mozart to explore musical meaning within the context of Enlightenment sign and language theory.
Horace Silver is one of the last giants remaining from the incredible flowering and creative extension of bebop music that became known as "e;hard bop"e; in the 1950s.
John Deathridge presents a different and critical view of Richard Wagner based on recent research that does not shy away from some unpalatable truths about this most controversial of composers in the canon of Western music.
In this vibrant and pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a gifted group of Manhattan-based gay composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "e;American sound"e; and in the process served as architects of modern American identity.
In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two groundbreaking claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian worldview.
Jewish Identities mounts a formidable challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about "e;Jewish music,"e; which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence that must manifest itself in art created by members of that group.
This authoritative volume of 453 letters written by and to composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) provides unparalleled insight into one of the most extraordinary and paradoxical careers in American music history.
In this elegant study of the works of the undeservedly neglected composer Luigi Boccherini, Elisabeth Le Guin uses knowledge gleaned from her own playing of the cello as the keystone of her original approach to the relationship between music and embodiment.
In this provocative analysis of Beethoven's late style, Stephen Rumph demonstrates how deeply political events shaped the composer's music, from his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution to his later entrenchment during the Napoleonic era.
In this engrossing collection of essays, distinguished composer, theorist, journalist, and educator Arthur Berger invites us into the vibrant and ever-changing American music scene that has been his home for most of the twentieth century.
An aesthetic, historical, and theoretical study of four scores, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement is a groundbreaking and imaginative treatment of the important yet neglected topic of Russian opera in the Silver Age.
Combining a close study of Monteverdi's secular works with recent research on late Renaissance history, Gary Tomlinson places the composer's creative career in its broad cultural context and illuminates the state of Italian music, poetry, and ideology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
