Arnold Schoenberg was a polarizing figure in twentieth century music, and his works and ideas have had considerable and lasting impact on Western musical life. A refugee from Nazi Europe, he spent an important part of his creative life in the United States (1933-1951), where he produced a rich variety of works and distinguished himself as an influential teacher. However, while his European career has received much scholarly attention, surprisingly little has been written about the genesis and context of his works composed in America, his interactions with Americans and other émigrés, and the substantial, complex, and fascinating performance and reception history of his music in this country. Author Sabine Feisst illuminates Schoenberg's legacy and sheds a corrective light on a variety of myths about his sojourn. Looking at the first American performances of his works and the dissemination of his ideas among American composers in the 1910s, 1920s and early 1930s, she convincingly debunks the myths surrounding Schoenberg's alleged isolation in the US. Whereas most previous accounts of his time in the US have portrayed him as unwilling to adapt to American culture, this book presents a more nuanced picture, revealing a Schoenberg who came to terms with his various national identities in his life and work. Feisst dispels lingering negative impressions about Schoenberg's teaching style by focusing on his methods themselves as well as on his powerful influence on such well-known students as John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Dika Newlin. Schoenberg's influence is not limited to those who followed immediately in his footsteps-a wide range of composers, from Stravinsky adherents to experimentalists to jazz and film composers, were equally indebted to Schoenberg, as were key figures in music theory like Milton Babbitt and David Lewin. In sum, Schoenberg's New World contributes to a new understanding of one of the most important pioneers of musical modernism.

Humans have always made music and this authoritative and lavishly illustrated guide is your companion to its fascinating history across the globe. Music - that mysterious alchemy of harmonies, lyrics, and rhythm - is a constant in our lives. Discover how music has evolved with human society, accompanying our leisure, religious rituals, and popular festivities. Watch its development during prehistory and before musical notation, when melodies were memorized or improvised. Enjoy galleries of historical instruments such as dulcimers, shawms, psalteries, and tabor pipes. The universal language of music is expressed in an astonishing number of styles today, and Music presents its evolution around the globe, including the classical European tradition of JS Bach, the passionate sounds of Spain's flamenco, and the sonic power of electronica and heavy rock. With spectacular timelines of key events and profiles of musicians from Amadeus Mozart to David Bowie, Music is an unrivaled and comprehensive reference. Whether you are into the Blues, Brahms, or Bhangra, it is essential reading and guaranteed to hit the right note.

Kenneth H. Marcus shows how Schoenberg played a vital role in Southern California Modernism through his pedagogy, compositions, and texts.

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters in this essential volume are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction by German studies scholar Adrian Daub that contextualizes the impact these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.

What role did music play in the United States during World War II? How did composers reconcile the demands of their country and their art as America mobilized both militarily and culturally for war? Annegret Fauser explores these and many other questions in the first in-depth study of American concert music during World War II. While Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrew Sisters entertained civilians at home and G.I.s abroad with swing and boogie-woogie, Fauser shows it was classical music that truly distinguished musical life in the wartime United States. Classical music in 1940s America had a ubiquitous cultural presence--whether as an instrument of propaganda or a means of entertainment, recuperation, and uplift--that is hard to imagine today, and Fauser suggests that no other war enlisted culture in general and music in particular so consciously and unequivocally as World War II. Indeed, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Group Theatre director Harold Clurman wrote to his cousin, Aaron Copland: "So you're back in N.Y. . . ready to defend your country in her hour of need with lectures, books, symphonies!" Copland was in fact involved in propaganda missions of the Office of War Information, as were Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, and Colin McPhee. It is the works of these musical greats--as well as many other American and exiled European composers who put their talents to patriotic purposes--that form the core of Fauser's enlightening account. Drawing on music history, aesthetics, reception history, and cultural history, Sounds of War recreates the remarkable sonic landscape of the World War II era and offers fresh insight to the role of music during wartime.

A global history of Jewish music from the biblical era to the present day, with chapters by leading international scholars.

Stravinsky in the Americas explores the “pre-Craft” period of Igor Stravinsky’s life, from when he first landed on American shores in 1925 to the end of World War II in 1945. Through a rich archival trove of ephemera, correspondence, photographs, and other documents, eminent musicologist H. Colin Slim examines the twenty-year period that began with Stravinsky as a radical European art-music composer and ended with him as a popular figure in American culture. This collection traces Stravinsky’s rise to fame—catapulted in large part by his collaborations with Hollywood and Disney and marked by his extra-marital affairs, his grappling with feelings of anti-Semitism, and his encounters with contemporary musicians as the music industry was emerging and taking shape in midcentury America. Slim’s lively narrative records the composer’s larger-than-life persona through a close look at his transatlantic tours and domestic excursions, where Stravinsky’s personal and professional life collided in often-dramatic ways.

This volume is a journey through musics that emerged at the turn of the 20th Century and were neither exclusively tonal nor serial. They fall between these labels as they are metatonal, being both with and after tonality, in their reconstruction of external codes and gestures of Common Practice music in new and idiosyncratic ways. The composers and works considered are approached from analytic, cultural, creative, and performance angles by musicologists, performers and composers to enable a deeper reading of these musics by scholars and students alike. Works include those by Frank Bridge, Ferruccio Busoni, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Rebecca Clarke, John Foulds, Percy Grainger, Mary Howe, Carl Nielsen, Franz Schreker, Erwin Schulhoff, Cyril Scott and Alexander Scriabin. In the process of engaging with this book the reader, will find an enrichment to their own understanding of music at the turn of the 20th Century.

Rieff articulates a comprehensive, typological theory of Western culture. Using visual illustrations, he contrasts the changing modes of spiritual and social thought that have struggled for dominance throughout Western history.

Speechsong is a work of imaginative musicology that addresses the engimas of Schoenberg and Gould, of singing and speaking, of Moses und Aron, of technology and being. Its point of departure is Gould's last public performance, given at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, where a number of Schoenberg's works were performed during his California exile. It is here, after that last performance, that Gould encounters a spectral Schoenberg in a staged conversation that explores Schoenberg's travails in rethinking the fundamentals of Western music. This first part of Speechsong recalls Schoenberg's operatic masterpiece, Moses und Aron, in which the divinely inspired Moses seeks the help of his brother to relate his vision: Moses speaks and Aron sings. Written as a twelve-tone composition, the opera produces an involution of harmonics that was Schoenberg's response to Richard Wagner's diatribes about synagogue noise. For Gould, Schoenberg's is a formalist revolution; Schoenberg's life, however, suggests that it was a search for personal and political freedom.The second half of Speechsong is a critical essay in twelve "moments" that re-articulates the staged conversation as an inquiry into the intersections of music and mediation. Gould's turn to the recording studio emerges as a post-humanist inquiry into recorded music as a repudiation of the virtuoso tradition and a liberation from unitary notions of selfhood. Schoenberg's exodus from musical tradition likewise takes his twelve-tone invention beyond musical performance, where it emerges, along with Gould's soundscapes, as a prototype of acoustic installations by artists such as Stephen Prina and Cory Arcangel. In these works, music abandons the concert hall and the exigencies of harmony for an acoustic space that embraces at once the recordings of Gould and the performances of Schoenberg that have found their home on the internet. Richard Cavell has written extensively on Marshall McLuhan and on media theory generally. He is the co-founder of the Media Studies program at the University of British Columbia and the curator of the website Spectres of McLuhan. Speechsong, his second critical performance piece, was preceded by Marinetti Dines with the High Command (2014).