A fresh perspective on two well-known personalities, Schoenberg's Correspondence with Alma Mahler documents a modern music friendship beginning in fin-de-siécle Vienna and ending in 1950s Los Angeles. This volume is the first English-language edition of the complete extant correspondence in new English translations from the original German, many from new transcriptions of handwritten originals, and it is the first English-language book of Schoenberg's correspondence with a female associate. These often quite candid letters afford readers a fascinating glimpse into the personalities, ideologies, institutions, protocols, and aesthetics of early twentieth-century European music culture. Critics, conductors, composers, and visual artists are appraised, kindly or venomously; visual artists and writers also appear. Above all, Alma Mahler (1879-1964) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) emerge as intriguing, complex individuals who transcend their conventional representations as, respectively, a femme fatale and a musical radical. For Schoenberg, Alma was a sympathetic confidante, a comrade in their shared battle against musical conservatism, yet also a canny negotiator of Vienna's social circles, a skill that brought Schoenberg into contact with important patrons. Not only did he invite Alma to his premieres, lectures, and art exhibitions, but Schoenberg also sent her scores of his music and drafts of his writings. He revealed to her his plans for his innovative new music society, the Society for Private Music Performances, and his development of a new method of composition with twelve tones. The letters remind us of how crucial the social and personal dimensions of music culture were to the early twentieth-century composers and musicians. Gender, ethnicity, and social class conditioned their opportunities in music---and in life---and their shared experience of fleeing fascism to a new country with a different culture and language resonates with our own epoch.

Alex Ross’s sweeping history of twentieth-century classical music, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, is a gripping account of a musical revolution.

Mezzo-soprano Gorrell (music, Winthrop U.) discusses Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942), who was highly regarded as a conductor, composer, pianist, and teacher by leading musicians of his age but whose music was hardly played for about 30 years after his death. Starting with his early years, she discusses his personal and musical life in light of artistic, political, and social events, as well as his associations with other composers, his relationship with Alma Schindler, his early and later unpublished songs, his symphonic songs, and Two Songs, Op. 27, the American songs. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This is the fourth volume in this definitive study of the life and music of Gustav Mahler. It concentrates on Mahler's least known period, his American years, and includes much new material (letters, articles, and interviews) about Mahler and the many performances he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic in New York.

With his setting of Stefan George's portentous poetic text Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten (I feel the air of another planet) in the Second String Quartet, Op. 10 (1908), Arnold Schoenberg proclaimed the arrival of a new kind of music for the twentieth century. Pendragon Press marks the centenary of this epochal masterpiece with the publication of a wide-ranging collection of essays on Schoenberg's chamber works, and the man behind the music. With a list of distinguished contributors from three continents including Alexander Carpenter, James Deaville, Murray Dineen, Sabine Feisst, Allen Forte, Áine Heneghan, Yoko Hirota, Elaine Keillor, Don McLean, Christian Meyer, Severine Neff, Bryan Proksch, and James Wright the book presents new historical, theoretical, biographical, and semiotic perspectives on Schoenberg's chamber music, aesthetics, teaching, and persona. The links between his chamber music and earlier traditions, as well as its impact on subsequent generations of composers internationally, are among the areas of focus. The book features an Introduction written by Lawrence Schoenberg, the composer's son.