Reproduction of the original: Castellinaria by Henry Festing Jones

Focusing on Messiaen’s relation to history - both his own and the history he engendered - the Messiaen Perspectives volumes convey the growing understanding of his deep and varied interconnections with his cultural milieux. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences examines the genesis, sources and cultural pressures that shaped Messiaen’s music. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception analyses Messiaen’s compositional approach and the repercussions of his music. While each book offers a coherent collection in itself, together these complementary volumes elucidate how powerfully Messiaen was embedded in his time and place, and how his music resonates ever more today. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception explores Messiaen’s imprint on recent musical life. The first part scrutinizes his compositional technique in terms of counterpoint, spectralism and later piano music, while the second charts ways in which Messiaen’s influence is manifest in the music and careers of Ohana, Xenakis, Murail and Quebecois composers. The third part includes case studies of Messiaen’s reception in Italy, Spain and the USA. The volume also includes an ornithological catalogue of Messiaen’s birds, collates information on the numerous ’tombeaux’ pieces he inspired, and concludes with a Critical Catalogue of Messiaen’s Musical Works.

The author Henry Festing Jones was the friend and posthumous biographer of Samuel Butler. He won the inaugural James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 1919. This is an interesting novel about a Victorian tourist's time in Sicily and his friendship with the locals.

This first book in English on the French composer André Jolivet (1905–1974) investigates his music, life and influence. A pupil of Varèse and colleague of Messiaen in La Jeune France, Jolivet is a major figure in French music of the twentieth century. His music combines innovative language with spirituality, summarised in his self-declared axiom to ‘restore music’s ancient original meaning when it was the magic and incantatory expression of the sacred in human communities’. The book’s contextual introduction is followed by contributions, edited by Caroline Rae, from leading international scholars including the composer’s daughter Christine Jolivet-Erlih. These assess Jolivet’s output and activities from the 1920s through to his last works, exploring creative process, aesthetic, his relationship with the exotic and influences from literature. They also examine, for the first time, the significance of Jolivet’s involvement with the visual arts and his activities as conductor, teacher and critic. A chronology of Jolivet’s life and works with details of first performances provides valuable overview and reference. This fascinating and comprehensive volume is an indispensable source for research into French music and culture of the twentieth century.

After a century of trial-and-error in the task of defining itself, the discipline of musicology had gradually gained a hard-won place on American university campuses. Now the musicological curriculum is being challenged by such phenomena as political correctness, questioning the canon, and ethnomusicological expansions or contractions of the traditional boundaries of historical musicology. These challenges are caused, says the author of this book, by the most powerful social force of our time-namely, the ambition to foster or restore individual cultural, ethnic, and political identities. Step by step, Professor Helm has shown the importance of upgrading undergraduate music programs. Graduate training in musicology would make a quantum leap ahead if `undergraduate' curricula in music were properly overhauled to make room for that rare undergraduate who is gifted as both musician and scholar.... If the current E-mail of American musicologists is any indication, the topic of the musical canon is hotter than ever.