Experiencing Berlioz: A Listener’s Companion is an in-depth entrée into the sound world of Hector Berlioz, recognized today as one of the most profoundly original and engaging composers in 19th-century Europe. Melinda O’Neal offers the non-specialist a pathway into the underlying allure of Berlioz's music. His views on rehearsing and conducting, bumpy career ride and failures, the journey of a work through revisions and editions, and historical performance practices provide a backdrop to discussions of his most significant works. As O’Neal addresses the motivation and conception, sonic atmosphere, and compositional strategies of key works, she provides a new multifaceted experience not only to music historians and performers but also to any amateur music lover who has ever been entranced by Berlioz’s undeniable musical veracity. As the listener interacts with Berlioz's music, the ear's curiosity and imagination will take flight.

Experiencing Mahler surveys the symphonies and major song sets of Gustav Mahler, presenting them not just as artworks but as vivid and deeply felt journeys. Mahler took the symphony, perhaps the most tradition-bound genre in Western music, and opened it to the widest span of human experience. He introduced themes of love, nature, the chasmic depth of midnight, making peace with death, facing rebirth, seeking one’s creator, and being at one with God. Arved Ashby offers the non-specialist a general introduction into Mahler’s seemingly unbounded energy to investigate the elements that make each work an experiential adventure—one that has redefined the symphonic genre in new ways. In addition to the standard nine symphonies, Ashby discusses Das Lied von der Erde, the three most commonly heard song sets (the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder, and Rückert-Lieder), and the unfinished Tenth Symphony (in Cooke’s edition). Experiencing Mahler is a far-reaching and often provocative search for meaning in the music of one of the most beloved composers of all time.

Claude Debussy holds a place as a one of the most recognizable and influential composers in the classical music. Debussy forged a new and influential sound for the twentieth century with his remarkable harmonies, fluid rhythms, airy textures, and an instinct for mystery and beauty. In Experiencing Debussy: A Listener’s Companion, Teresa Davidian welcomes readers into the infectious appeal of Debussy’s major works to consider how they can still attract and move audiences. In such works as the hauntingly beautiful Clair de Lune and the groundbreaking Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Davidian looks beneath the surface of the music to explain its power, all the while drawing connections between different pieces to place them securely within the context of Debussy’s life and times. Written in an accessible style, Experiencing Debussy provides an engaging tour through Debussy’s works for the concertgoers, movie buffs, performers, and students regardless of musical background.

The musical output of pianist and composer Herbie Hancock is a design rarely seen in jazz; a child prodigy working their way up the ranks to elder statesman and influencing an entire generation of musicians across numerous genres. Sowing his oats in classical repertoire, Hancock used jazz to satiate his musical curiosities enhanced by his undying love of the technological advancements of the day. As a result, Hancock has traversed expectations and continues to be a staple in mainstream music. In concert with his performance style, Hancock’s compositional efforts have added to the jazz canon and remain popular standards today. Like a musical protein, Hancock has used jazz as his foundation and added his own personal spices creating a unique harmonic invention. In addition to being a virtuoso pianist and composer, Hancock has explored many forms of music such as rock, funk and world music, always looking ahead rather than rehashing what has already been accomplished. Hancock’s chameleon-like ways of changing musical direction to broaden contemporary styles has been met with excitement from both peers and fans alike. But all of this came naturally to Hancock, whose boundless energy and creativity formed the music he loved so deeply. In Experiencing Herbie Hancock: A Listener’s Companion, author Eric Wendell looks beyond the successes and failures of Hancock’s career in an effort to explore Hancock’s musical design both within the jazz community and within the popular mainstream. Furthermore, Wendell will explore the dramatic impact that Hancock has held on the jazz community and how his efforts have fostered the cross-genre continuity of modern jazz practitioners. Experiencing Herbie Hancock: A Listener’s Companion, is an ideal work for jazz aficionados, music students and anyone who appreciates the efforts of an artist that would rather look ahead to the great unknown then tread backwards on past endeavors.

Praise for Berlioz, Volume I "We now have a biography that not only takes in the immense documentation of Berlioz's early life but goes far beyond it in piecing together an incomparably rich portrait of the man and his milieu. . . . The picture is so vivid and the prose so magnetic that not a word seems wasted. . . . Cairns's biography of Berlioz must take its place with the handful of great lives of composers, such as Thayer's Beethoven, Newman's Wagner, and Walker's Wolf."--Hugh MacDonald, The Listener "Even at this halfway stage, [Cairns's] Berlioz stands as one of the great biographies of our day, and also one of the great feats of literary sympathy with an artistic genius, filled with a love, knowledge, and understanding of his subject that flame up on every page."--Max Loppert, Financial Times "This biography is kindled by sympathy and enthusiasm for its subject, and is written with a lifelong professional experience of Berlioz behind it. It is also beautifully and interestingly written. The chapters flow together like Berlioz's own harmonic changes, and with equal resonance."--Roger Norrington, Independent

Covers sixty of the world's most celebrated composers, from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to Tchaikovsky, Gershwin and Bernstein. It weaves five hundred years of history and music into a rich tapestry of sound and story.

Ths text ffers an overall assessment of Berlioz's musical achievement as we approach the bicentary of his birth in 2003. This is a full-length musical study of the composer taking into account the rediscovered Messe solennelle.

A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. Famously, in Richard Wagner’s estimation, he hovered as a “transient, marvelous exception,” a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who “does not belong in our musical solar system,” the likes of whom would never be seen again. For his contemporaries, as for later critics, Berlioz was simply too strange—and too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier with genre and form, and too difficult to analyze. He was, in many ways, a composer without a world. Berlioz and His World takes a deep dive into the composer’s complex legacy, tracing lines between his musical and literary output and the scientific, sociological, technological, and political influences that shaped him. Comprising nine essays covering key facets of Berlioz’s contribution and six short “object lessons” meant as conversation starters, the book reveals Berlioz as a richly intersectional figure. His very difficulty, his tendency to straddle the worlds of composer, conductor, and critic, is revealed as a strength, inviting new lines of cross-disciplinary inquiry and a fresh look at his European and American reception.

Still chiefly known as the extravagant composer of the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz was an artist caught in the crossfire between the academic classicism of the French musical establishment and the romantic modernism of the Parisian musical scene. He was a thinker in an age that invented both the religion of art and the notion of the 'genius' who preached and practised it. This Companion contains essays by eminent scholars on Berlioz's place in nineteenth-century French cultural life, on his principal compositions (symphonies, overtures, operas, sacred works, songs), on his major writings (a delightful volume of memoires, a number of short stories, large quantities of music criticism, an orchestration treatise), on his direct and indirect encounters with other famous musicians (Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner), and on his legacy in France. The volume is framed by a detailed chronology of his life and a usefully annotated bibliography.

Inge van Rij's book demonstrates how Berlioz used the sights and sounds of the orchestra to explore other worlds.