This text explores aspects of Olivier Messiaen's spiritually committed musical language, drawing on his own remarks in subheadings and prefaces, his biblical and theological citations, his allusions to works of visual art, and on the language spoken directly by the musical tropes themselves.

This work seeks to explore the early part of the composer's life and career, concentrating on the pre-chance period between 1933 and 1950 that is crucial to understanding his later work. The essays consider Cage's influences, his evolving aesthetic, and his movement toward ideology that would later shape his work.

Disruptive Divas focuses on four female musicians: Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Me'Shell Ndegeocello and P. J. Harvey who have marked contemporary popular culture in unexpected ways have impelled and disturbed the boundaries of "acceptable" female musicianship.

This collection brings together essays on postmodernism and music, covering a wide range of musical styles including concert music, jazz, film scores and popular music. The topics in the book include: the importance of technology and marketing in postmodern music; the appropriation and reworking of Western music by non-Western bands; postmodern characteristics in the music of Gorecki, Rochberg, Zorn and Bolcom as well as Bjork and Wu Tang Clan; issues of music and race; and comparisons of postmodern architecture to postmodern music.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Arnold Schoenberg's close involvement with many of the principal developments of twentieth-century music, most importantly the break with tonality and the creation of twelve-tone composition, generated controversy from the time of his earliest works to the present day. This authoritative new collection of Schoenberg's essays, letters, literary writings, musical sketches, paintings, and drawings offers fresh insights into the composer's life, work, and thought. The documents, many previously unpublished or untranslated, reveal the relationships between various aspects of Schoenberg's...