Kategoria BISAC: Music >> Individual Composer & Musician

Though central to our concert and recording repertory, and crucial to the history of the symphony, the four symphonies of Johannes Brahms have proved surprisingly resistant to critical analysis. In this brief, elegant book, a premier musicologist conducts us through the Second Symphony to show us what is unique and remarkable about this particular work and what it reveals about the composer and his time.

Reinhold Brinkmann guides us through the symphony movement by movement, examining musical ideas in all their compositional facets and placing them in the context of major trends in...

Antonin Dvorak made his famous trip to the United States one hundred years ago, but despite an enormous amount of attention from scholars and critics since that time, he remains an elusive figure. Comprising both interpretive essays and a selection of fascinating documents that bear on Dvorak's career and music, this volume addresses fundamental questions about the composer while presenting an argument for a radical reappraisal.

The essays, which make up the first part of the book, begin with Leon Botstein's inquiry into the reception of Dvorak's work in German-speaking Europe,...

"It is a] fully illuminated story that Richard Taruskin, in the path-breaking essays collected here, unfolds around Modest Musorgsky, Russia's greatest national composer.... Taruskin's] tour de force comes with a frontal attack on all the Soviet-bred truisms that for a century have refashioned Musorgsky from what the evidence suggests he was--an aristocrat with an early clinical interest in true-to-life musical portraiture and a later penchant for drinking partners who were both folklore buffs and political reactionaries democrat."--From the foreword

Incorporating both new and...

Authoritative and gracefully written, The Music of Elliott Carter engages composers, performers, and critics, and speaks to concert-goers, whether attuned to or alarmed by...

The second volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt.

"You can't help but keep turning the pages, wondering how it will all turn out: and Walker's accumulated readings of Liszt's music have to be taken seriously indeed." D. Kern Holoman, New York Review of Books

"A conscientious scholar passionate about his subject. Mr. Walker makes the man and his age come to life. These three volumes will be the definitive work to which all subsequent Liszt biographies will aspire." Harold C. Schonberg, Wall Street Journal

"What distinguishes Walker...

Harry Freedman has been an important and respected figure in Canadian music for over half a century, and his productivity as a composer has been both prodigious and eclectic. Born in Poland in 1922 and raised in Winnipeg, Freedman studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music and played English Horn with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He resigned in 1970 to become the orchestra's first composer-in-residence, and has created some 175 works in a wide variety of genres including symphonies, concertos, string quartets, operas, ballets, film scores, popular songs, and jazz pieces.

In The...

Adams's music explores natural phenomena from the songs of birds, to the...