Art music, orchestral and formal music

In China, a nation where the worlds of politics and art are closely linked, Western classical music was considered during the cultural revolution to be an imperialist intrusion, in direct conflict with the native aesthetic.

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

In this book, a leading authority on film music examines scores of the silent film era.

Rarely studied in their own right, writings about music are often viewed as merely supplemental to understanding music itself.

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.

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.

The Exultet rolls of southern Italy are parchment scrolls containing text and music for the blessing of the great Easter candle; they contain magnificent illustrations, often turned upside down with respect to the text, The Exultet in Southern Italy provides a broad perspective on this phenomenon that has long attracted the interest of those interested in medieval art, liturgy, and music.

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.

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.

In this book Christopher Hasty presents a striking new theory of musical duration.

Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok explores the means by which two early 20th century operas - Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande (1902) and Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) - transformed the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language.

Building on ideas first advanced by Arnold Schoenberg and later developed by Erwin Ratz, this book introduces a new theory of form for instrumental music in the classical style.

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

This book draws upon both musicology and cultural history to argue that French musical meanings and values from 1898 to 1914 are best explained not in terms of contemporary artistic movements but of the political culture.

Is music removed from politics?

This volume examines musical culture both inside and outside seventeenth-century Sienese convents.

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?

"e;Pygmy music"e; has captivated students and scholars of anthropology and music for decades if not centuries, but until now this aspect of their culture has never been described in a work that is at once vividly engaging, intellectually rigorous, and self-consciously aware of the ironies of representation.

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

The Divine Office--the cycle of daily worship other than the Mass--is the richest source of liturgical texts and music from the Latin Middle Ages.

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

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

Based on extensive fieldwork and documentary research in China, this book is a chronicle of the musical history of Lijiang County in China's southern Yunnan Province.

How did Renaissance composers write their music?

The motet was unquestionably one of the most important vocal genres from its inception in late twelfth-century Paris through the Counter-Reformation and beyond.

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.

Calling Back the Spirit describes how, in the face of Indonesian and foreign cultural pressures, the Makassarese people of South Sulawesi are defending their local spirit through music and dance.

In the mid-1960s, Steve Reich radically renewed the musical landscape with a back-to-basics sound that came to be called Minimalism.

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.

When first published in 1947, A Short History of Opera immediately achieved international status as a classic in the field.

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

In the London of Shakespeare and William Byrd, Thomas East was the premier, often exclusive, printer of music.

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.

It's difficult to imagine Franz Liszt performing in Peoria, but his contemporary and foremost rival, Sigismund Thalberg, did just that.

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.

In The Composer as Intellectual, musicologist Jane Fulcher reveals the extent to which leading French composers between the World Wars were not only aware of but also engaged intellectually and creatively with the central political and ideological issues of the period.

World Musics in Context is a wide-ranging survey of musics of the world, in their historical and social contexts, from ancient times to the present day.

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.

In this book, a follow-up to his 1996 monograph Celestial Sirens, Robert Kendrick examines the cultural contexts of music in early-modern Milan.

One of the most fascinating figures of seventeenth-century music, composer and singer Antonia Padoani Bembo (c.

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