The Brazilian multi-instrumentalist, composer, and bandleader Hermeto Pascoal produces music that is unmistakably individual, drawing on a kaleidoscopic variety of influences, including contemporary jazz and the popular musical styles of the Northeast of Brazil, such cocos, emboladas and repentes, as well as baiao, frevo and choro, with results verging on contemporary art music. His complex compositions are highly demanding of the performer, with use of dissonant harmonies, polyrhythms, unconventional timbres, atonal improvisations, aleatory techniques and more. He became known to American...

The chatty and highly informative memoirs of the musician and composer Giacomo Gotifredo Ferrari (1763-1842) have remained inaccessible to the English-reading public since their original appearance in Italian in 1830, although there were two republications in Italy in the 20th century. This is the first translation into any other language. Ferrari was the son of a silk merchant in northern Italy, and went south to Naples to study composition with Paisiello and Latilla. From there he headed northwards, arriving first in Paris, where he met Dussek and Steibelt, and played for the unfortunate...

Although Marx is not often acknowledged as such, he remains Western music's single most influential theorist, as the person who gave Sonata Form its name and codified its elements. Above a certain level of proficiency, there is not a single musician in the Western Classical tradition who does not know Sonata Form: they know Marx's legacy, if not his name. Further awareness of Marx as a man is especially important. The naming of Sonata form, and the discussion of its elements, was invested with convictions about music that Marx was among the very first to hold, and which we continue to value:...