In many ways, this is the story of the birth of the American style in classical music. George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931) was one of the most significant and influential American composers at the turn of the twentieth century and a leading light of the Boston cultural scene. Bill F. Faucett offers a detailed exploration of Chadwick's life and art utilizing archival material only recently made available. These crucial primary sources, including letters, diaries, and memoirs, enable a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Chadwick's music and aesthetic perspective, and provide a clearer lens through which to view his life, career, and times. The book traces Chadwick's story from his earliest musical education to his surging career in Boston's nascent musical culture of the 1880s, to his fruitful middle years, and finally to his later life and towering legacy. In addition to bringing newfound appreciation of Chadwick's life, Faucett's book offers penetrating examinations of his major compositions and a vivid re-creation of Boston's rich and influential musical and cultural scene.

Trained in Russia, Zeitlin (1884–1930) was an accomplished composer, conductor, performer, and pedagogue. In writing Palestina, Zeitlin, as he had done during his entire career, was fulfilling the goals of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, which he joined in 1908 while still a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory: to compose and perform works of art music on motivic material drawn from Jewish cantillation, liturgy, and folk song. In addition to employing two modes central to Jewish music and several Jewish tunes, in Palestina Zeitlin actually imitates the shofar calls heard in the synagogue before and during Rosh Hashanah and at the conclusion of Yom Kippur. This edition includes an extensive essay on the composer and on the themes and structure of Palestina, with insights into the Capitol Theatre and the role of music in picture palaces of this era.

In a book deeply impressive in its reach while also deeply embedded in its storied setting, bestselling historian Douglass Shand-Tucci explores the nature and expression of sexual identity at America's oldest university during the years of its greatest influence. The Crimson Letter follows the gay experience at Harvard in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing upon students, faculty, alumni, and hangers-on who struggled to find their place within the confines of Harvard Yard and in the society outside. Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were the two dominant archetypes for gay undergraduates of the later nineteenth century. One was the robust praise-singer of American democracy, embraced at the start of his career by Ralph Waldo Emerson; the other was the Oxbridge aesthete whose visit to Harvard in 1882 became part of the university's legend and lore, and whose eventual martyrdom was a cautionary tale. Shand-Tucci explores the dramatic and creative oppositions and tensions between the Whitmanic and the Wildean, the warrior poet and the salon dazzler, and demonstrates how they framed the gay experience at Harvard and in the country as a whole. The core of this book, however, is a portrait of a great university and its community struggling with the full implications of free inquiry. Harvard took very seriously its mission to shape the minds and bodies of its charges, who came from and were expected to perpetuate the nation's elite, yet struggled with the open expression of their sexual identities, which it alternately accepted and anathematized. Harvard believed it could live up to the Oxbridge model, offering a sanctuary worthy of the classical Greek ideals of male association, yet somehow remain true to its legacy of respectable austerity and Puritan self-denial. The Crimson Letter therefore tells stories of great unhappiness and manacled minds, as well as stories of triumphant activism and fulfilled promise. Shand-Tucci brilliantly exposes the secrecy and codes that attended the gay experience, showing how their effects could simultaneously thwart and spark creativity. He explores in particular the question of gay sensibility and its effect upon everything from symphonic music to football, set design to statecraft, poetic theory to skyscrapers. The Crimson Letter combines the learned and the lurid, tragedy and farce, scandal and vindication, and figures of world renown as well as those whose influence extended little farther than Harvard Square. Here is an engrossing account of a university transforming and transformed by those passing through its gates, and of their enduring impact upon American culture.

xv + 222 pp.

** Currently only Available in ePUB format download ** If you use a Kindle reader rather than an epub compatible reader, please request a Kindle file for the book by sending a copy of your receipt/invoice email to kindle@ignatius.com. Please allow 72 business hours for a response. Music plays such an important part in everyone's life but how much do we know about the history of music? How did music shape our civilization and how was music itself shaped by the Catholic Church? Susan Treacy, an experienced professor of music, is an excellent guide to the history of music. Every Catholic should own at least one book on music. This is it.