From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin ), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In "Untwisting the Serpent, " Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, even though many of the most important artistic experiments of the Modernists were collaborations involving several media Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" is a ballet, Gertrude Stein's "Four Saints in Three Acts" is an opera, and Pablo Picasso turned his cubist paintings into costumes...

This work offers not only important statements by composers and critics, but also musical speculations by poets, novelists, philosophers, and others - all of which combine with Daniel Albright's commentary to place modernist music in the context of a broader intellectual history.

Quantum Poetics examines the Modernist appropriation of scientific metaphors as part of a general search for the preverbal origins of poetry. The poetic possibilities offered by developments in scientific discourse intrigued Yeats, Eliot and Pound, writers intent on remapping the general theory of poetry. Using models supplied by physicists, Yeats sought for the basic units of poetic force, both through his sequence A Vision and through his belief in, and defense of, the purity of symbols. Daniel Albright demonstrates how Modernists created a whole new way of thinking about poetry and science...

Quantum Poetics examines the Modernist appropriation of scientific metaphors as part of a general search for the preverbal origins of poetry. The poetic possibilities offered by developments in scientific discourse intrigued Yeats, Eliot and Pound, writers intent on remapping the general theory of poetry. Using models supplied by physicists, Yeats sought for the basic units of poetic force, both through his sequence A Vision and through his belief in, and defense of, the purity of symbols. Daniel Albright demonstrates how Modernists created a whole new way of thinking about poetry and science...

As a young man, Samuel Beckett (1906-89) hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world. Instead, he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett sought escape through allegories of artistic frustration and the art of non-representation and estrangement. Albright depicts Beckett experimenting with the concept that an artistic medium might be made to speak. Engaging with radio, film, television, prose and drama, Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very...

The 12 new essays in this volume explore the relationship between text and music in Alban Berg's works. The book examines the biographical issues that made such expressive choices attractive to the composer, and explores ways in which works not involving explicit verbal texts create signification, allusion, and reference.

Nearly everyone who addresses T.S. Eliot's imaginative and critical work must acknowledge the importance of music in thematic and formal terms. This volume explores this aspect of his work from a number of perspectives.

This work studies two works that are among the most challenging of the entire Romantic Movement, not least because they assault the notion of genre: they take place in a sort of limbo between symphony and opera, and try to fulfill the highest goals of each simultaneously. Berlioz was a composer who strenuously resisted any impediments that stood in the way of complete compositional freedom. Most of his large-scale works nevertheless obey the strictures of some preexistent form, whether opera or symphony or mass or cantata; it is chiefly in these two experiments that Berlioz allowed himself to...

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...

From Daniel Albright, author of Musicking Shakespeare and Berlioz's Semi-Operas, comes a collection of essays on music and on dance, probing the problems of articulating the meaning(s) of music; the larger question of how music and language interact; how text-setting highlights certain areas of meter, theme, or ironic undertone, and leaves others in darkness; how a musical composition can behave as a critique of a previous composition; and how one might rehabilitate certain underappreciated or much-scorned figures, such as Meyerbeer, by showing that the very terms of invective used against...