An incisive exploration of two works whose revival is a milestone in modern musical life: Margaret Bonds's Montgomery Variations and Credo - now receiving the recognition long denied them. This brief, yet informative, appraisal introduces readers to masterworks that, though originating in the mid-twentieth century, speak directly to our own age.

In her lifetime, African American composer Margaret Bonds was classical music's most intrepid social-justice activist. Furthermore, her Montgomery Variations (1964) and setting of W.E.B. Du Bois's iconic Civil Rights Credo (1965-67) were the musical summits of her activism. These works fell into obscurity after Bonds's death, but were recovered and published in 2020. Since widely performed, they are finally gaining a recognition long denied. This incisive book situates The Montgomery Variations and Credo in their political and biographical contexts, providing an interdisciplinary exploration that brings notables including Harry Burleigh, W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abbie Mitchell, Ned Rorem, and – especially – Langston Hughes into the works' collective ambit. The resulting brief, but instructive, appraisal introduces readers to two masterworks whose recovery is a modern musical milestone – and reveals their message to be one that, though born in the mid-twentieth century, speaks directly to our own time.

Library Journal praises the book as "an excellent one-volume ready reference resource for students, researchers, and others interested in music history." Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music, Second Edition covers the persons, ideas, practices, and works that made up the worlds of Western music during the long 19th century (ca. 1780–1918). It’s the first book to recognize that Romantic music was very nearly a global phenomenon. It includes more women, more Black musicians and other musicians of color, and more exponents of musical Romanticism from Central and South America as well as Central and Eastern Europe than any other single-volume study of Romantic music—thus challenging the conventional hegemony of musical Romanticisms by men and by Western European nations. This book includes entries on topics including anti-Semitism, sexism, and racism that were pervasive and defining to the worlds of musical Romanticism but are rarely addressed in general studies of that subject. It includes Romantic musicians who were not primarily composers, as well as topics such as the Haitian Revolution, spirituals, and ragtime that were more important for music in the long 19th century than is generally acknowledged. The result is an expansive, inclusive, diverse, and more richly textured portrayal of Romantic music than is elsewhere available. Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, an extensive bibliography, and a dictionary section with more than 600 cross-referenced entries on traditions, famous pieces, persons, places, technical terms, and institutions of Romantic music. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Romantic music.

Situates Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique within French Romanticism and considers influences, literary as well as musical, that shaped its conception.

Offers an introduction to one of the most important and influential piano concertos in the history of Western music. It combines an account of the work's genesis with a detailed yet accessible analysis of each movement and new research into its reception and performance history.

The String Quartet in E flat major (1834) by Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn, is one of the most important works by a female composer written in the nineteenth century. Composed at a turning point in her life (as Hensel was not only grappling with her own creative voice but also coming to terms with her identity as a married woman, and the role her family expected of her), the quartet is significant in showing a woman composing in a genre that was then almost exclusively the domain of male artists. Benedict Taylor's illuminating book situates itself within developing scholarly discourse on the music of women composers, going beyond apologetics – or condemnation of those who hindered their development – to examine the strength and qualities of the music and how it responded to the most progressive works of the period.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) is often portrayed as a composer who began as a heart-on-sleeve late Romantic only to evolve during the First World War into an austere, mathematically-obsessed deviser of musical puzzles. Yet to claim that in his music he replaced tonality with its absolute opposite, atonality, as the twelve-tone method swept away all trace of traditional harmonic and thematic processes, is as misleading as to argue that romantic warmth and humanity morphed into the purest and most austerely modernistic spirituality. This handbook refocuses the wealth of recent research into two of Schoenberg's major compositions; the expressive character of those relatively early works which centre on nocturnal images of darkness and despair is at its most original and powerful in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung, where the dramatic interplay between stabilising continuities and disorientating fragmentations reveals the elements of a modernist aesthetics that remained fundamental to Schoenberg's musical thought.

The Mass in B Minor is arguably Bach's greatest single work. John Butt gives an absorbing account of the work's genesis, its historical context, and its reception by later generations.