Music: 20th/21st Century

This comprehensive, accessible guide to Bartók and his music contains up-to-date research by a new generation of Bartók scholars. Part I sets the cultural, social and political background in Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century, and considers Bartók's research into folk music. Part II surveys his compositional output in all genres, relating changes in style to broad aesthetic issues, his folk music studies, and his activities as a pianist, music editor and teacher. The final part considers various aspects of reception and the variety of responses to Bartók's music in Europe and the United States.

This is a comprehensive guide to Britten's work, aimed both at the nonspecialist and the music student. It sheds light on both the composer's stylistic and personal development, offering new interpretations of his operatic works and discussing his characteristic working methods. A distinguished team of contributors include some who worked with the composer during his lifetime, as well as leading representatives of the younger generation of Britten scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.

John Cage (1912-1992) defined a radical practice of composition that changed the course of modern music and shaped a new conceptual horizon for postwar art. Famous for his use of chance and "silence" in musical works, a pioneer in electronic music and the nonstandard use of instruments, Cage was one of the most influential composers of the last century. This volume traces a trajectory of writings on the artist, from the earliest critical reactions to the scholarship of today. If the first writing on Cage in the American context, often written by close associates with Cage's involvement, seemed lacking in critical distance, younger scholars--a generation removed--have recently begun to approach the legacy from a new perspective, with more developed theoretical frameworks and greater skepticism. This book captures that evolution. The texts include discussions of Cage's work in the context of the New Music scene in Germany in the 1950s; Yvonne Rainer's essay looking back on Cage and New York experimentalism of the 1960s; a complex and original mapping of Cage's place in a wider avant-garde genealogy that includes Le Corbusier and Moholy-Nagy; a musicologist's account of Cage's process of defining and formalizing his concept of indeterminacy; and an analysis of Cage's project that considers his strategies of self-representation as key to his unique impact on modern and postmodern art.

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) is generally considered the most popular and well-known composer of American art music, and yet little scholarly attention has been paid to Copland since the 1950s. This volume begins with a portrait of the composer and an evaluation of significant research trends which is intended to fill a void and to suggest directions for further research. The guide also provides a section discussing Copland's interdisciplinary interests, such as ballet and film work, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of writings about Copland and his music.

In this welcome addition to the immensely popular Yale Broadway Masters series, Larry Starr focuses fresh attention on George Gershwin’s Broadway contributions and examines their centrality to the composer’s entire career. Starr presents Gershwin as a composer with a unified musical vision—a vision developed on Broadway and used as a source of strength in his well-known concert music. In turn, Gershwin’s concert-hall experience enriched and strengthened his musicals, leading eventually to his great “Broadway opera,” Porgy and Bess. Through the prism of three major shows—Lady Be Good (1924), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Porgy and Bess (1935)—Starr highlights Gershwin’s distinctive contributions to the evolution of the Broadway musical. In addition, the author considers Gershwin’s musical language, his compositions for the concert hall, and his movie scores for Hollywood in the light of his Broadway experience.

Paul Hindemith: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a musician and teacher.

This is the only comprehensively annotated guide to all the significant literature on American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954), and is the latest addition to the invaluable Routledge Music Bibliographies series. It includes English and foreign-language books, monographs, articles, chapters, dissertations and masters' theses.

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is a unique voice in today's music. Using a tonal idiom based on a mixture of scales and triads, Pärt created a style called "tintinnabuli." In this first full-length study, Paul Hillier draws on his own considerable experience working with Pärt and his music to explore the famous tintinnabuli works in depth. Hillier covers the music of Pärt's earlier, somewhat neglected serial period as well, and sheds valuable light on the development of Pärt's music by looking at Pärt's biography and at the influences of Russian Orthodox spirituality, minimalism, and early music.

With the increasing popularity of recording and performing Pärt's music, Hillier's own thoughts on performance issues will be especially welcome in the world of contemporary music.

The book includes appendices containing a discography, a bibliography, and a list of works.

Arnold Schoenberg - composer, theorist, teacher, painter, and one of the most important and controversial figures in twentieth-century music. This Companion presents engaging essays by leading scholars on Schoenberg's central works, writings, and ideas over his long life in Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Challenging monolithic views of the composer as an isolated elitist, the volume demonstrates that what has kept Schoenberg and his music interesting and provocative was his profound engagement with the musical traditions he inherited and transformed, with the broad range of musical and artistic developments during his lifetime he critiqued and incorporated, and with the fundamental cultural, social, and political disruptions through which he lived. The book provides introductions to Schoenberg's most important works, and to his groundbreaking innovations including his twelve-tone compositions. Chapters also examine Schoenberg's lasting influence on other composers and writers over the last century.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) is frequently considered the most significant American female composer in this century. Joining Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell as a key member of the 1920s musical avant-garde, she went on to study with modernist theorist and future husband Charles Seeger, writing her masterpiece, String Quartet 1931, not long after. But her legacy extends far beyond the cutting edge of modern music. Collaborating with poet Carl Sandburg on folk song arrangements in the twenties, and with the famous folk-song collectors John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s, she emerged as a central figure in the American folk music revival, issuing several important books of transcriptions and arrangements and pioneering the use of American folk songs in children's music education. Radicalized by the Depression, she spent much of the ensuing two decades working aggressively for social change with her husband and stepson, the folksinger Pete Seeger.

This engrossing new biography emphasizes the choices Crawford Seeger made in her roles as composer, activist, teacher, wife and mother. The first woman to win a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in music composition, Crawford Seeger nearly gave up writing music as the demands of family, politics, and the folk song movement intervened. It was only at the very end of her life, with cancer sapping her strength, that she returned to composing. Written with unique insight and compassion, this book offers the definitive treatment of a fascinating twentieth-century figure.

As the Soviet Union's foremost composer, Shostakovich's status in the West has always been problematic. Regarded by some as a collaborator, and by others as a symbol of moral resistance, both he and his music met with approval and condemnation in equal measure. The demise of the Communist state has, if anything, been accompanied by a bolstering of his reputation, but critical engagement with his multi-faceted achievements has been patchy. This Companion offers a new starting point and a guide for readers who seek a fuller understanding of Shostakovich's place in the history of music. Bringing together an international team of scholars, the book brings up-to-date research to bear on the full range of Shostakovich's musical output, addressing scholars, students and all those interested in this complex, iconic figure.

In this compact introduction to the life and work of eminent African American composer William Grant Still (1895-1978), Catherine Parsons Smith tracks the composer's interrelated careers in popular and concert music. Still merged both musical traditions in his work, studying composition with George W. Chadwick at the New England Conservatory, collaborating with Langston Hughes on Troubled Island, and working as a commercial arranger and composer on Broadway and radio during the Harlem Renaissance. Still also played in the pit band for Shuffle Along, served as recording director for the first black-owned record label, Black Swan, and arranged music for artists such as Sophie Tucker, Paul Whiteman, and Artie Shaw. Best known for his Afro-American Symphony and other works that drew heavily on black American musical heritage, Still struggled against financial hardship and declining attention to his work, which he attributed to political and racist conspiracies. This "dean of Afro-American composers" created his own, unique version of musical modernism, influencing commercial music, symphonic music, and opera in the process.

Stravinsky's work spanned the major part of the twentieth-century and was engaged with nearly all its principal compositional developments. Reflecting the breadth of his phenomenal achievement, this Companion contains a wide range of essays in three broad sections covering the contexts within which Stravinsky worked--Russian, modernist and compositional, with his key compositions--Russian, neoclassical and serial, and with the reception of his ideas--through performance, analysis and criticism. The volume concludes with an interview with the composer Louis Andriessen and a major re-evaluation of "Stravinsky and us" by Richard Taruskin.

The Austrian composer Anton Webern (1883-1945) is one of the major figures of musical modernism. His mature works comprise two styles: the so-called free atonal music composed between 1907 and 1924, and the twelve-tone serial music that began in 1924 and extended through the remainder of his creative life. In this book an eminent music theorist presents the first systematic and in-depth study of the early atonal works, from the George Lieder, opus 3, through the Latin Canons, opus 16.

Drawing on music-analytical procedures that he and other scholars have developed in recent years, Allen Forte argues that a single compositional system underlies all of Webern's atonal music. Forte examines such elements as pitch, register, timbre, rhythm, form, and text setting, showing how Webern displaced the functional connections of traditional tonality to create a totally new sonic universe. Although the main thrust of the study is music-analytical in nature, Forte also considers historical context and significant biographical aspects of the individual works, as well as word-music relations in the music with text.

Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, modern composers living in Vienna near the turn of the 20th century, are examined in a broad artistic context illustrating how their works grew from earlier Viennese musical developments. Presenting a coherent analysis of a central school of modern musical composition, the essays compare the artists' music to that in the nonmusical arts in Vienna at the time. A prominent musical phenomenon during the period, the Second Viennese School of Music would exert a profound impact on European and American composers in the decades following World War II. The recent discoveries and critical perspectives on the composers discussed in these essays detail new information on central aspects of their work, including the origins of atonal composition, the 12-tone method, and the literary models that often inspired their works. Coherent and current, this collection of essays offers unique insight into the personalities and artistic accomplishments of these three major figures who intoduced modernism to music.

Contributing to the continuing fascination with the modern culture produced in Vienna and other European cities near the turn of the century, these clear, accessible writings on the Second Viennese School will appeal to musicians and scholars alike. Each chapter, written by a different specialist, focuses on the artistic milieu of these three composers, avoiding a particular hypothesis and offering instead a broad, multifaceted discussion. This selection of new knowledge about aspects of the composers' work complements the valuable information also detailed about their music.

This collection of essays on French musical history examines the lives and work of the group of early twentieth century composers known as Les Six. The group, made up of George Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre, influenced the development of modern classical music and is credited with bringing outsider and popular themes into the genre. Chapters explore the biographies of each of the artists in turn and additional papers discuss their impact on the French music scene and collaborative projects. Contributors are academics, musicologists, and journalists working in the world of French music cultural history.