In this book, Daniel Albright, one of today's most intrepid and vividly communicative explorers of the border territory between literature and music, offers insights into how composers of genius can help us to understand Shakespeare. Musicking Shakespeare demonstrates how four composers -- Purcell, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten -- respond to the distinctive features of Shakespeare's plays: their unwieldiness, their refusal to fit into interpretive boxes, their ranting quality, their arbitrary bursts of gorgeousness. The four composers break the normal forms of opera -- of music altogether -- in...

The essays in Music Theory and Mathematics: Chords, Collections, and Transformations define the state of mathematically oriented music theory at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The volume includes essays in diatonic set theory, transformation theory, and neo-Riemannian theory -- the newest and most exciting fields in music theory today. The essays constitute a close-knit body of work -- a family in the sense of tracing their descent from a few key breakthroughs by John Clough, David Lewin, and Richard Cohn in the 1980s and 1990s. They are integrated by the ongoing dialogue they...

This collection of new essays examines the relationships between discourses of French national and regional identity, political alignment, and creative practice during one of France's most fascinating eras: the Third Republic. The authors, from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, explore the ways in which the architects of the Third Republic (re)constructed France culturally and artistically, in part through artful use of the press and (at the 1889 Paris World's Fair) new technologies. The chapters also investigate changing attitudes toward Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande, attempts by...

In Beethoven's Century: Essays on Composers and Themes, world-renowned musicologist Hugh Macdonald draws together many of his richest essays on music from Beethoven's time into the early twentieth century. The essays are here revised and updated, and some are printed in English for the first time. Beethoven's Century addresses perennial questions of what music meant to the composer and his audiences, how it was intended to be played, and how today's audiences can usefully approach it. Opening with a revealing analysis of Beethoven's not always generous regard for his listeners, the essays...

Philip II of Spain founded the great Spanish monastery and royal palace of El Escorial in 1563, promoting within it a musical foundation whose dual function as royal chapel and monastery in the service of a Counter Reformation monarch was unique; this volume explores the performance and composition of liturgical music there from its beginnings to the death of Charles II in 1700. It traces the ways in which music styles and practices responded to the the changing functions of the institution, challenging notions about Spanish musical patronage, scrutinising musical manuscripts, uncovering the...

Charles Rosen, the pianist and man of letters, is perhaps the single most influential writer on music of the past half-century. While Rosen's vast range as a writer and performer is encyclopedic, it has focused particularly on the living "canonical" repertory extending from Bach to Boulez. Inspired in its liveliness and variety of critical approaches by Charles Rosen's challenging work, Variations on the Canon offers original essays by some of the world's most eminent musical scholars. Contributors address such issues as style and compositional technique, genre, influence and modeling, and...

Richard Wagner had a longstanding love affair with the city of Venice. His sudden death there in 1883 also initiated a process through which Wagner and his reputation were integrated into Venice's own cumulative cultural image. In Wagner and Venice, John Barker examines the connections between the great composer and the great city. The author traces patterns of Wagner's visits to Venice during his lifetime, considers what the city came to mean to Wagner, and investigates the details surrounding his death. Barker also examines how Venice viewed Wagner, by analyzing the landmark presentation of...

What is it about Bolero, Gaspard de la nuit, and Daphnis et Chloe that makes musicians and listeners alike love them so? Stephen Zank here illuminates these and other works of Maurice Ravel through several of the composer's fascinations: dynamic intensification, counterpoint, orchestration, exotic influences on Western music, and an interest in multisensorial perception. Connecting all these fascinations, Zank argues, is irony. His book offers an appreciation of Ravel's musical irony that is grounded in the vocabularies and criticism of the time and in two early attempts at writing up a...

An engaging study -- the first ever -- of the principles used by noted scholars to unravel the masterpieces of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and other modernists.

Dane Rudhyar (1895-1985) was a unique figure in twentieth-century American culture: a composer, thinker, painter, poet, novelist, and expert on astrology. His thought and work transcended disciplinary boundaries, integrating perspectives that were, and often still are, generally pursued in isolation from each other. Rudhyar's musical compositions -- such as the remarkable Three Paeans for piano -- were often described at the time as ultramodern and deeply philosophical. Noted music critic Nicolas Slonimsky described Rudhyar's music as -searching and challenging . . . the explanation of a...