This comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective on the stories that art music has told since the start of the 20th century. Contributors challenge the broadly held opinion that the loss of tonality in some music after 1900 also meant the loss of narrative in that music. To the contrary, the editors and essayists in this book demonstrate how experiments in approaching narrative in other media, such as fiction and cinema, suggested fresh possibilities for musical narrative, which composers were quick to exploit. The new conceptions of time, narrative voice, plot, and character that accompanied these experiments also had a significant impact on contemporary music. The repertoire explored in the collection ranges across a wide variety of genres and includes composers from Charles Ives and the Pet Shop Boys to Thomas Adès and Dmitri Shostakovich.

MAKE A SOUND INVESTMENT IN CLASSICAL MUSIC Who are the ten most important classical composers? Who in the world was Palestrina? Why did Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" cause a riot? Which five of each important composer's works should you buy? What is a concerto and how does it differ from a sonata? Maybe you don't know the answers to these questions; author Phil Goulding certainly didn't. When Goulding first tried to learn about classical music, he found himself buried in an avalanche of technical terms and complicated jargon--so he decided to write the book he couldn't find. The result is a complete classical music education in one volume. Comprehensive, discriminating, and delightfully irreverent, Classical Music provides such essential information as: * Rankings of the top 50 composers (Bach is #1. Borodin is #50) * A detailed and anecdotal look at each composer's life and work * The five primary works of each composer and specific recommended CDs for each. * Further great works of each composer--if you really like him * Concise explanations of musical terminology, forms, and periods * A guide to the parts and history of the symphony orchestra "This book uses every conceivable gimmick to immerse readers in the richness of classical music: lists, rankings, sidebars devoted to lively anecdotes, and catchy leads." --The Washington Post "One terrific music appreciation book...The information is surprisingly detailed but concisely presented. Goulding's writing style is breezy yet mature....[He] has raised music appreciation from a racket to a service." --The Arizona Daily Star

His fascinating exploration takes you inside the rich music and colorful lives of the world’s greatest classical composers. From Bach to Stravinsky and beyond, you will learn how the unique life stories of these gifted composers are reflected in the musical masterpieces that we enjoy to this day. Designed as an introductory book on classical music, this comprehensive collection presents biographical snapshots of the major composers in the context of distinct historical and stylistic periods and in relation to their notable contemporaries. Special attention is given to recognizing their prominent musical works. The book delineates the many forms of instrumental and vocal music; and it explores the “basics” of tonality, musical structure, performance criteria, the orchestra and its instruments, orchestration, chamber music, and the cataloguing of musical works. As well, the newcomer to classical music will find advice on building a musical library. This book is an excellent source of information about classical music in a unique and entertaining format. It will help lay the foundation for a lifelong love of classical music, through the great musical heritage of these fine composers.

The debate over modernist music has continued for almost a century: from Berg's Wozzeck and Webern's Symphony Op.21 to John Cage's renegotiation of musical control, the unusual musical practices of the Velvet Underground, and Stanley Kubrick's use of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna in the epic film 2001. The composers discussed in these pages -- including Bartók, Stockhausen, Bernard Herrmann, Steve Reich, and many others -- are modernists in that they are defined by their individualism, whether covert or overt, and share a basic urge toward redesigning musical discourse. The aim of this volume is to negotiate a varied and open middle ground between polemical extremes of reception. The contributors sketch out the possible significance of a repertory that in past discussions has been deemed either meaningless or beyond describable meaning. With an emphasis on recent aesthetics and contexts -- including film music, sexuality, metaphor, and ideas of a listening grammar -- they trace the meanings that such works and composers have held for listeners of different kinds. None of them takes up the usual mandate of "educated listening" to modernist works: the notion that a person can appreciate "difficult" music if given enough time and schooling. Instead the book defines novel but meaningful avenues of significance for modernist music, avenues beyond those deemed appropriate or acceptable by the academy. While some contributors offer new listening strategies, most interpret the listening premise more loosely: as a metaphor for any manner of personal and immediate connection with music. In addition to a previously untranslated article by Pierre Boulez, the volume contains articles (all but one previously unpublished) by twelve distinctive and prominent composers, music critics, and music theorists from America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa: Arved Ashby, Amy Bauer, William Bolcom, Jonathan Bernard, Judy Lochhead, Fred Maus, Andrew Mead, Greg Sandow, Martin Scherzinger, Jeremy Tambling, Richard Toop, and Lloyd Whitesell. Arved Ashby is Associate Professor of Music at the Ohio State University.

To provide greater availability for a work of such importance, the original publishers secured from Gershwin a solo piano version wherein the orchestral parts are fused together with the solo piano part (PS0047). Due to concerns that the composer's arrangement presented too many technical demands to pianists not possessing the requisite technique, a modified arrangement was delicately solicited from pianists of the time. (Gershwin's untimely death precluded any modification from the composer himself.) Many attempts at technical modifications were rejected on ethical grounds until Herman Wasserman--who taught Gershwin to play the piano--submitted a manuscript which became this edition. Several prominent pianists who reviewed the score all attested to the amazing reduction in technical demands while retaining the clarity, sonority, and brilliance of the original. This edition is designed for Early Advanced pianists, although some sections, including the well-known Moderato middle section, are accessible to those performing at less-advanced levels.

This book recreates an exciting and productive period in which creative artists felt they were witnessing the birth of a new age. Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson all began their careers then, as did many of their less widely recognized compatriots. While the literature and painting of the 1920's have been amply chronicled, music has not received such treatment. Carol Oja's book sets the growth of American musical composition against parallel developments in American culture, provides a guide for the understanding of the music, and explores how the notion of the concert tradition, as inherited from Western Europe, was challenged and revitalized through contact with American popular song, jazz, and non-Western musics.

An overview of women's work in classical and popular music since 1900 as performers, composers, educators and music technologists.

This collection of new essays explores the many ways in which composers have been depicted in film and what audiences have taken away from such depictions. Beginning with some of the earliest silent film examples--including some of the first feature-length "bio-pics" ever produced--these essays range from the 12th century abbess Hildegard of Bingen to the great classical and romantic eras of Verdi, Wagner, Berlioz and Strauss, up to the 20th century's Elgar, Delius, Gershwin and Blitzstein.