One of the greatest of contemporary composers has here set down in delightfully personal fashion his general ideas about music and some accounts of his own experience as a composer. Every concert-goer and lover of music will take keen pleasure in his notes about the essential features of music, the process of musical composition, inspiration, musical types, and musical execution. Throughout the volume are to he found trenchant comments on such subjects as Wagnerism, the operas of Verdi, musical taste, musical snobbery, the influence of political ideas on Russian music under the Soviets, musical improvisation as opposed to musical construction, the nature of melody, and the function of the critic of music. Musical people of every sort will welcome this first presentation in English of an unusually interesting book.

One of the greatest of contemporary composers has here set down in delightfully personal fashion his general ideas about music and some accounts of his own experience as a composer. Every concert-goer and lover of music will take keen pleasure in his notes about the essential features of music, the process of musical composition, inspiration, musical types, and musical execution. Throughout the volume are to he found trenchant comments on such subjects as Wagnerism, the operas of Verdi, musical taste, musical snobbery, the influence of political ideas on Russian music under the Soviets, musical improvisation as opposed to musical construction, the nature of melody, and the function of the critic of music. Musical people of every sort will welcome this first presentation in English of an unusually interesting book.

The knowledge that finales are by tradition (and perhaps also necessarily) 'different' from other movements has been around a long time, but this is the first time that the special nature of finales in instrumental music has been examined comprehensively and in detail. Three main types offinale, labelled 'relaxant', 'summative', and 'valedictory', are identified. Each type is studied closely, with a wealth of illustration and analytical commentary covering the entire period from the Renaissance to the present day. The history of finales in five important genres -- suite, sonata,string quartet, symphony, and concerto -- is traced, and the parallels and divergences between these traditions are identified. Several wider issues are mentioned, including narrativity, musical rounding, inter-movement relationships, and the nature of codas. The book ends with a look at thefinales of all Shostakovich's string quartets, in which examples of most of the types may be found.

Wallace Stevens’s musicality is so profound that scholars have only begun to grasp his ties to the art of music or the music of his own poetry. In this study, two long-time specialists present a polyphonic composition in which they pursue various interlocking perspectives. Their case studies demonstrate how music as a temporal art form may affect a poetic of ephemerality, sensuous experience, and affective intensification. Such a poetic, they argue, invites flexible interpretations that respond to poetry as an art of textual performance. How did Stevens enact the relation between music and memory? How can we hear his verse as a form of melody-making? What was specific to his ways of recording birdsong? Have we been missing the latent music of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Claude Debussy in particular poems? What were the musical poetics he shared with Igor Stravinsky? And how is our experience of the late poetry transformed when we listen to a musical setting by Ned Rorem? The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens will appeal to experts in the poet’s work, students of Modernism in the arts, and a wider audience fascinated by the dynamics of exchange between music and poetry.

How is it possible to talk or write about music? What is the link between graphic signs and music? What makes music meaningful? In this book, distinguished scholar Leo Treitler explores the relationships among language, musical notation, performance, compositional practice, and patterns of culture in the presentation and representation of music. Treitler engages a wide variety of historical sources to discuss works from medieval plainchant to Berg's opera Lulu and a range of music in between.

Publisher Description

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

“This is a short book but a teeming one, boiling over with the insights that have accrued over forty years and more, ever since Pieter van den Toorn set the musicological world on its ear with his revelations about Stravinsky's creative methods, deduced from an unprecedentedly close and fruitful examination of the published scores. Since then he has been at the manuscripts as well, and has made even further-reaching observations about Stravinsky's epochal rhythmic innovations. All of this he now places at the disposal of musicians and general readers, laid out with a chronology of the composer's life and times—a great gift to us all and a fitting crown to a most distinguished scholarly career.” —Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) divided his time between law studies and music until 1906, when, under the tutelage of composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, he dedicated himself exclusively to composition. Five years later, he achieved international fame with his ballet scores The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, the last of which caused a riot at its Paris premiere in 1913. For the next 50 years, both Stravinsky’s music style and his life were characterized by dramatic changes, as he moved from his “Russian period” to neo-classicism to serialism, and from Russia to Switzerland to France to the United States. Yet no matter how much his style changed, his music was always distinctively his, and his compositions remain among the greatest produced in the twentieth century. In Simply Stravinsky, Professor Pieter van den Toorn takes a fresh look at the composer and his legacy, providing a compact, exciting, and accessible introduction to the twentieth century’s most celebrated composer and his timeless music. From Stravinsky’s apprenticeship in St. Petersburg to his life among the émigré community in Southern California, Prof. van den Toorn shows how the composer’s music was tied to his personality and how it came to influence artists from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass. Designed for classical music beginners, as well as those who want to know more about one of the great musical innovators, Simply Stravinsky is an insightful and highly readable portrait of the man who helped define modern music.

Between 1946 and 1959, the most outspoken voice in British film music was that of the Austrian emigre Hans Keller. This work is a collection of writings on film music by the celebrated critic.

This volume gathers together a cross-section of essays and book chapters dealing with the ways in which musicians and their music have been pressed into the service of political, nationalist and racial ideologies. Arranged chronologically according to their subject matter, the selections cover Western and non-Western musics, as well as art and popular musics, from the eighteenth century to the present day. The introduction features detailed commentaries on sources beyond those included in the volume, and as such provides an invaluable and comprehensive reading list for researchers and educators alike. The volume brings together for the first time seminal articles written by leading scholars, and presents them in such a way as to contribute significantly to our understanding of the use and abuse of music for ideological ends.