Wagner and Wagnerism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic Provinces explores how Wagner's operas were performed and received in the theaters of Stockholm and other cities of the region and how excerpts from them were arranged for amateur performances in private homes. Wagner's music and his polemical writings aroused lively discussion around the Baltic, as they did everywhere else in the Western world. Thanks to detailed accounts in newspapers, journals, contemporary literature, and writings of music historians (including some by Sibelius's teacher and friend Martin...

Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life, by Alec Wilder, in a new, annotated edition with introduction and supplementary material by David Demsey, foreword by jazz pianist Marian McPartland, and photographs by Louis Ouzer. Alec Wilder is a rare example of a composer who established a reputation both as a prolific composer of concertos, sonatas, and operas, and as a popular songwriter (including the hit -I'll Be Around-). He was fearsomely articulate and had a wide and varied circle of friends ranging from Graham Greene to Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz. Letters I Never Mailed, hailed at its...

These twelve essays bring new breadth and depth to our knowledge of the life and work of the composer of the Symphonie fantastique. A distinguished international array of scholars here treat such matters as Berlioz's "aesthetics" and what it means to write about the meaning of his music; the political implications of his fiction and the affinities of his projects as composer and as critic; what the Germans thought of his work before his travels in Germany and what the English made of him when he visited their capital city; what he seems to have written immediately after encountering...

Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds offers new perspectives on the life and pioneering musical activities of American composer and folk music activist Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953). Ruth Crawford developed a unique modernist style with such now-esteemed works as her String Quartet 1931. In 1933, after marrying Charles Seeger, she turned to the work of teaching music to children and of transcribing, arranging, and publishing folk songs. This collection of studies by musicologists, music theorists, folklorists, historians, music educators, and women's studies scholars reveals how innovation and...

Schubert in the European Imagination: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna examines the composer's historical and cultural reception by Viennese modernists. By 1900, issues of gender had crossed with those of nationalism, especially in the city that came to consider Schubert as its favorite musical son. As Messing here explains and explores in rich detail, composers, writers, and visual artists manipulated the conventions of the composer and gender in ways that critiqued the very culture that had created this image. In order to expose the hypocrisy of social relationships, painter Gustav Klimt and writers...

Maurice Durufle The Man and His Music is a new biography of the great French organist and composer (1902-86), and the most comprehensive in any language. James E. Frazier traces Durufle's musical training, his studies with Tournemire and Vierne, and his career as an organist, church musician, composer, recitalist, Conservatoire professor, and orchestral musician. Frazier also examines the career and contributions of Durufle's wife, the formidable organist Marie-Madeleine Durufle-Chevalier. Durufle brought the church's unique language of plainsong into a compelling liaison with the secular...

In Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras, Scott Messing examines the historical reception of Franz Schubert as conveyed through the gendered imagery and language of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European culture. The concept of Schubert as a feminine type vaulted into prominence in 1838 when Robert Schumann described the composer's Madchencharakter (-girlish- character), by contrast to the purportedly more masculine, more heroic Beethoven. What attracted Schumann to Schubert's music and marked it as feminine is evident in some of Schumann's...

Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy offers the first comprehensive account of a widely recognized aspect of music history: the increasing use of pentatonic (-black-key scale-) techniques in nineteenth-century Western art-music. Pentatonicism in nineteenth-century music encompasses hundreds of instances, many of which predate by decades the more famous examples of Debussy and Dvorak. This book weaves together historical commentary with music theory and analysis in order to explain the sources and significance of an important, but hitherto only casually understood, phenomenon....

Within the history of European music, Carl Czerny (1791-1857) is simultaneously all too familiar and virtually invisible. During his lifetime, he was a highly successful composer of popular piano music, and his pedagogical works remain fundamental to the training of pianists. But Czerny's reputation in these areas has obscured the remarkable breadth of his activity, and especially his work as a composer of serious music, which recent performances and recordings have shown to hold real musical interest. Beyond "The Art of Finger Dexterity" explores Czerny's multifaceted career and its legacy...

This book is a new edition of the most comprehensive life-and-works study of the great Baroque-era organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637-1707), released to celebrate the tercentenary of the composer's death. Originally published in 1987 and long out of print, Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lubeck is considered by most musicologists to be the definitive biography. It also includes close description of Buxtehude's compositional output, from trio sonatas to the famed Abendmusiken: Buxtehude's yearly oratorio presentations. The young J. S. Bach traveled to Lubeck on foot in 1705...