Composers and songwriters

Before the French Revolution, making music was an activity that required permission.

New York City witnessed a dazzling burst of creativity in the 1920s.

Irving Berlin remains a central figure in American music, a lyricist/composer whose songs are loved all over the world.

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867-1944), the most widely performed composer of her generation, was the first American woman to succeed as a creator of large-scale art music.

"e;I've done everything in the theatre except marry a property man,"e; Fanny Brice once boasted.

Hailed by The New York Times as "e;America's Aristophanes,"e; Will Rogers was one of this century's most astute and beloved humorists.

If Benny Goodman was the "e;King of Swing,"e; then Fletcher Henderson was the power behind the throne.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) was one of the most important and honored American composers of the twentieth century.

Even as orchestras, performers, enthusiasts, and critics across the nation--and across the globe--celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, George Gershwin (1898-1937) remains one of America's most popular yet least appreciated composers.

Alec Wilder wrote songs and lyrics of unsurpassed beauty and originality, and his work won the respect and admiration of such important musical figures as Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Mitch Miller, Gunther Schuller, and many others.

Art Tatum defined the limits of the possible in jazz piano.

Drawing upon a remarkable mix of intensive research and the personal experience of a career devoted to the music about which Dvorak so presciently spoke, Maurice Peress's lively and convincing narrative treats readers to a rare and delightful glimpse behind the scenes of the burgeoning American school of music and beyond.

How does creativity thrive in the face of fascism?

It's a cliche that the world is shrinking.

Lorenz Hart singlehandedly changed the craft of lyric writing.

Nadine Jansen, a flugelhornist and pianist, remembers a night in the 1940s when a man came out of the audience as she was playing both instruments.

For more than half of his long life, composer Roger Sessions was a commanding figure on the American musical scene.

George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would "e;invigorate"e; the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring.

Is music removed from politics?

In Crossing Paths, John Daverio explores the connections between art and life in the works of three giants of musical romanticism.

Fantasy Pieces examines from several vantage points a vital life-force of Robert Schumann's music, namely metrical conflict.

To the perennial question "e;which comes first, the music or the words?

This new study draws on analysis, literary criticism, and source studies to propose a new conception of the nineteenth-century romantic cycle.

The Muse That Sings is a unique behind-the-scenes look at both twentieth-century music and the nuts and bolts of creative work.

Lydia Mendoza began her legendary musical career as a child in the 1920s, singing for pennies and nickels on the streets of downtown San Antonio.

Between 1908 and 1923, Arnold Schoenberg began writing music that went against many of the accepted concepts and practices of this art.

How did Renaissance composers write their music?

This book is the first biography of 20th-century pianist Rudolf Serkin, providing a narrative of Serkin's life with emphasis on his European roots and the impact of his move to America.

This is the first book-length examination of Bartok's 1911 opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, one of the twentieth century's enduring operatic works.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) is frequently considered the most significant American female composer in this century.

A generation before Walt Disney, Fred Thompson was the "e;boy-wonder"e; of American popular amusements.

Written more than a century ago and initially regarded even by their creators as nothing more than light entertainment, the fourteen operas of Gilbert & Sullivan emerged over the course of the twentieth century as the world's most popular body of musical-theater works, ranking second only to Shakespeare in the history of English-language theater.

'A Gilbert is of no use without a Sullivan.

Most scholars since World War Two have assumed that composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) maintained a strong attachment to Judaism throughout his lifetime.

When Bela Bartok died in September of 1945, he left a partially completed viola concerto commissioned by the virtuoso violist William Primrose.

A jazz writer for three decades, W.

Renowned music historians Floyd and Margaret Grave present a fresh perspective on a comprehensive survey of the works.

Following the earlier volumes in the Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure series, Mahler's Fourth Symphony is a study of origins of one of Mahler's most popular and accessible works.

For this authoritative post-cold-war biography of Shostakovich's illustrious but turbulent career under Soviet rule, Laurel E.

Enrique Granados (1867-1916) is one of the most compelling figures of the late-Romantic period in music.

A freewheeling blend of continental European folk music and the songs, tunes, and dances of Anglo and Celtic immigrants, polkabilly has enthralled American musicians and dancers since the mid-19th century.

Dizzy Gillespie was one of the most important and best-loved musicians in jazz history.

This is the first book to consider all aspects of the life of Agostino Steffani (1654-1728), a composer, diplomat, and bishop.

Johann Sebastian Bach's two surviving passions--St.

Georges Barrere (1876-1944) holds a preeminent place in the history of American flute playing.

In this penetrating study, Russell Stinson explores how four of the greatest composers of the nineteenth century--Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms--responded to the model of Bach's organ music.

In Oh Joy!

The past ten years have seen a rapidly growing interest in performing and recording Classical and Romantic music with period instruments; yet the relationship of composers' notation to performing practices during that period has received only sporadic attention from scholars, and many aspects of composers' intentions have remained uncertain.

Today, the saxophone is an emblem of "e;cool"e; and the instrument most closely associated with jazz.

Bach's cantatas are among the highest achievements of Western musical art, yet studies of the individual cantatas that are both illuminating and detailed are few.