Based on private diaries, correspondence, and unpublished writings, George Rochberg, American Composer, reveals the impact of personal trauma on the creative and intellectual work of a leading postmodern composer.

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. Witty, urbane, and always entertaining, Berger describes the music scene in New York and Boston since the 1930s, discussing the heady days when he was a member of a tight-knit circle of avant-garde young composers mentored by Aaron Copland as well as his participation in a group at Harvard University dedicated to Stravinsky. As Virgil Thomson's associate on the New York Herald Tribune and founding editor of the prestigious Perspectives of New Music, Berger became one of the preeminent observers and critics of American music. His reflections on the role of music in contemporary life, his journalism career, and how changes in academia influence the composition and teaching of music offer a unique perspective informed by Berger's abundant intelligence and experience.

The renowned American composer George Rochberg (1918-2005) distilled a lifetime of insights about Western music across some three hundred years in A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language. In A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language, the renowned American composer George Rochberg distilled a lifetime of insights about Western music across some three hundred years. Rochberg describes how the asymmetrical tonal language of the late eighteenth century--the era of Haydn and Mozart--evolved through the gradual incursion of symmetry into a system based on the juxtaposition of tonal and atonal, asymmetrical and symmetrical--as seen in notable composers such as Webern, Prokofiev, and Rochberg himself. A Dance of Polar Opposites takes us inside the composer's studio, reveals how he assessed his and our musicalpast, and paints a picture of what he believed our musical future may be. George Rochberg (1918-2005), one of the most respected composers and writers about music in the second half of the twentieth century, was a finalist twice for the Pulitzer Prize and longtime professor at University of Pennsylvania. His writings include The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music (which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award);the memoir Five Lines, Four Spaces; and a volume of letters. Jeremy Gill was a student of George Rochberg and is a composer, conductor, and pianist.

What is postmodernism? How does it relate to music? This introduction clarifies the concept, providing ways of interpreting postmodern music.

Sonic Overload offers a new, music-centered cultural history of the late Soviet Union. It focuses on polystylism in music as a response to the information overload swamping listeners in the Soviet Union during its final decades. It traces the ways in which leading composers Alfred Schnittke and Valentin Silvestrov initially embraced popular sources before ultimately rejecting them. Polystylism first responded to the utopian impulses of Soviet ideology with utopian impulses to encompass all musical styles, from "high" to "low". But these initial all-embracing aspirations were soon followed by retreats to alternate utopias founded on carefully selecting satisfactory borrowings, as familiar hierarchies of culture, taste, and class reasserted themselves. Looking at polystylism in the late USSR tells us about past and present, near and far, as it probes the musical roots of the overloaded, distracted present. Based on archival research, oral historical interviews, and other overlooked primary materials, as well as close listening and thorough examination of scores and recordings, Sonic Overload presents a multilayered and comprehensive portrait of late-Soviet polystylism and cultural life, and of the music of Silvestrov and Schnittke. Sonic Overload is intended for musicologists and Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian specialists in history, the arts, film, and literature, as well as readers interested in twentieth- and twenty-first century music; modernism and postmodernism; quotation and collage; the intersections of "high" and "low" cultures; and politics and the arts.

"We haven't even made it to breakfast!" Composer Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) often used this phrase to shorthand her critical and partial approach to knowledge production across the vast artistic, technical and scientific discourses with which she worked. The same could be said about her own musical thought, which encompassed original presentational formats in existing and speculative media and approaches to sound and listening that conjoined real and imagined social worlds. In these conjunctions, this book discerns meeting points between frameworks for life that emerged from Amacher's multidisciplinary study of sound and listening: within acoustical spectra, inside human bodies and ears, across cities and edgleands, hypothetical creatures and virtual, fictive or distanciated environments. These figurations guide interpretative study of six signal projects: Adjacencies (1965/1966); City-Links (1967-1988); Additional Tones (1976 / 1988), Music for Sound-Joined Rooms (1980), Mini Sound Series (1985) and Intelligent Life (1980s) and countless sketches, notes and unrealized projects. The book explores Amacher's working methods with an interpretive style that emphasizes technical study, conceptual juxtaposition, intertextual play and narrative transport. This book also takes up Amacher's work as a guiding thread across shifting social discourses on life in the late 20th century U.S. Her projects convoked figurations of life and technoscience that could be partially and ironically accessed or conceptualized via complex auditory thresholds. This nascent feminist epistemology rooted in feminist science and technology studies centers biopolitical questions about difference and power in artistic and critical work that counts Amacher among its precedents"--

This is the first and only scholarly book to date on George Rochberg (b. 1918), the pre-eminent post-WWII American composer and essayist. It was compiled with his assistance and gathers into one volume previously scattered and hard-to-find material by and about the composer. Included are traditional types of scholarly information on Rochberg, e.g., his WORKS (date of composition, publisher, timing, commission, premiere, instrumentation, program notes by the composer, etc.), DISCOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY (a chronological listing of his compositions and the major events of his life), AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPTS & DOCUMENTS (housed in public collections/libraries), TEXTS (used in the works with voice), and BIBLIOGRAPHY (books, articles, and reviews by and a bout Rochberg). This is an essential guide for any performer, scholar, critic, or student of George Rochberg's music.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection of letters to and from the eminent harpsichordist, scholar, and early-music pioneer Ralph Kirkpatrick provides a portrait of the musician from the beginning of his career in Paris in the 1930s to its end in the early 1980s. This collection of letters to and from the eminent harpsichordist, scholar, and early-music pioneer Ralph Kirkpatrick provides a portrait of the musician from the beginning of his career in Paris in the 1930s to its end in the early 1980s, offering new insights into his work and scholarship. The volume contains letters from Europe to his family as well as correspondence with harpsichord makers, performers, and composers, including Nadia Boulanger, Alexander Schneider, John Kirkpatrick, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, John Challis, Kenneth Gilbert, Serge Koussevitzky, and Vincent Persichetti. In addition, two former students of Kirkpatrick, the guitarist Eliot Fisk and the harpsichordist Mark Kroll, write about their experiences studying with Kirkpatrick in a foreword and an afterword. The volume also includes a bibliography of publications by and about the musician, as well as a discography. MeredithKirkpatrick is a librarian and bibliographer at Boston University and is the niece of Ralph Kirkpatrick.

Eagle Minds—a selection from the correspondence between the Canadian composer and scholar Istvan Anhalt and his American counterpart George Rochberg—is a splendid chronicle and a penetrating analysis of the swerving socio-cultural movements of a volatile half-century as observed by two highly gifted individuals. Beginning in 1961 and spanning forty-four years, their conversation embraces not only music but other forms of contemporary art, as well as politics, philosophy, religion, and mysticism. The letters chronicle the deepening of their friendship over the years, and the openness, honesty, and genuine warmth between them provide the reader with an intimate look at their personalities. A fascinating intellectual tension emerges between the two men as they record their individual responses to musical modernism, to changing political and social realities, and to their Jewish heritage and sense of place, one as a son of Ukrainian immigrants to the United States, the other as a refugee from war-torn Hungary. Allowing us a privileged glimpse into the private lives and thoughts of these fascinating men, Eagle Minds is a valuable tool for scholars interested in North American composers in the late twentieth century and essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural and social history of that era.