Hamish MacCunn’s career unfolded amidst the restructuring of British musical culture and the rewriting of the Western European political landscape. Having risen to fame in the late 1880s with a string of Scottish works, MacCunn further highlighted his Caledonian background by cultivating a Scottish artistic persona that defined him throughout his life. His attempts to broaden his appeal ultimately failed. This, along with his difficult personality and a series of poor professional choices, led to the slow demise of what began as a promising career. As the first comprehensive study of MacCunn’s life, the book illustrates how social and cultural situations as well as his personal relationships influenced his career. While his fierce loyalty to his friends endeared him to influential people who helped him throughout his career, his refusal of his Royal College of Music degree and his failure to complete early commissions assured him a difficult path. Drawing upon primary resources, Oates traces the development of MacCunn’s music chronologically, juxtaposing his Scottish and more cosmopolitan compositions within a discussion of his life and other professional activities. This picture of MacCunn and his music reveals on the one hand a talented composer who played a role in establishing national identity in British music and, on the other, a man who unwittingly sabotaged his own career.

Shape is a concept widely used in talk about music. Musicians in classical, popular, jazz and world musics use it to help them rehearse, teach and think about what they do. Yet why is a word that seems to require something to see or to touch so useful to describe something that sounds? Music and Shape examines numerous aspects of this surprisingly close relationship, with contributions from scholars and musicians, artists, dancers, filmmakers, and synaesthetes. The main chapters are provided by leading scholars from music psychology, music analysis, music therapy, dance, classical, jazz and popular music who examine how shape makes sense in music from their varied points of view. Here we see shape providing a key notion for the teaching and practice of performance nuance or prosody; as a way of making relationships between sound and body movement; as a link between improvisational as well as compositional design and listener response, and between notation, sound and cognition; and as a unimodal quality linked to vitality affects. Reflections from practitioners, between the chapters, offer complementary insights, embracing musical form, performance and composition styles, body movement, rhythm, harmony, timbre, narrative, emotions and feelings, and beginnings and endings. Music and Shape opens up new perspectives on musical performance, music psychology and music analysis, making explicit and open to investigation a vital factor in musical thinking and experience previously viewed merely as a metaphor.

His original yet refined orchestral music was championed by Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner, Otto Klemperer, Serge Koussevitzky, and other celebrated conductors, and his sensitive songs were performed by such legendary singers as Alma Gluck and Kirsten Flagstad.".

In February 1995 Donald Mitchell, the foremost authority on the life and works of Gustav Mahler and Benjamin Britten, celebrated his seventieth birthday. To mark this event, the present Festschrift has been compiled under the editorship of Philip Reed. Distinguished composers, scholars, colleagues and friends from around the world have written on aspects of the two composers closest to Mitchell's heart - Mahler and Britten - to produce a volume which not only reflects some of the latest thinking on this pair of remarkable figures in the music of our century, but which also pays full tribute to the impact of Mitchell's own work on these composers over the last fifty years. The volume includes the fullest bibliography of Mitchell's writings yet compiled.

William Alwyn: A Research and Information Guide is a catalogue, discography and annotated bibliography of the nearly 500 works of this twentieth-century British composer. It will be invaluable to twentieth-century British composer researchers and aficionados, music history courses, and film music courses.

This cross-disciplinary volume illuminates the history of early phonography from a transnational perspective, recovering the myriad sites, knowledge practices, identities and discourses which dynamically shaped early recording cultures. With case studies from China, Australia, the United States, Latin America, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, Phonographic Encounters explores moments of interaction and encounter, as well as tensions, between local and global understandings of recording technologies. Drawing on an array of archival sources often previously unavailable in English, it moves beyond western-centric narratives of early phonography and beyond the strict confines of the recording industry. Contributions from media history, musicology, popular music studies, cultural studies, area studies and the history of science and technology make this book a key and innovative resource for understanding early phonography against the backdrop of colonial and global power relations.