Muzyka

Morton Feldman (1926-1987) is today widely regarded as one of America's foremost experimental composers. His unique body of compositions, as well as his numerous writings and interviews, provide a vast amount of source material for scholarly research. Yet, few have seriously examined his work. This collection of essays will help rectify this situation.

This book begins with a brief work by John Cage written in honor of Morton Feldman. It is followed by a series of essays that challenge some views of Feldman's music and clarify many others. The collection concludes with a...

In January of 1972 the "Golden Age of Opera" series of the Edward J. Smith Recordings was succeeded by the "Unique Opera Records Corporation" (UORC) and released two-hundred and eighty numbered releases between 1972 and December, 1977. Smith's final private label, the "A.N.N.A. Record Company" (ANNA) released seventy-three numbered issues between 1978 and 1982. Interspersed between UORC and ANNA, and spanning the years 1954 to 1981, numerous special label issues were released under fugitive names. As a companion to the first volume, "EJS: Discography of the Edward J. Smith Recordings The...

Mozart wrote some of the greatest serenades for wind ensemble. He was not alone in writing works for wind sextet, octet, or larger ensembles--Over 12,000 works for wind harmony by over 2,200 composers are extant. Describing this new genre, Wind Harmony, which is far larger and more influential than ever recognized, this sourcebook includes biographical details, discusses many of the works, and presents country surveys. There is also a survey of the way wind instruments developed at the critical time, and of performance practices. Companion volumes, the DEGREESIWind Ensemble Catalog...

African-American women composers remain largely unknown despite their important musical contributions. Active in the United States since the late-19th century, several gained national and international recognition during their lifetimes, only to have their work neglected after their deaths. From Spirituals to Symphonies is a unique, extensively researched examination of the history and scope of musical composition by African-American women, focusing on the implications of race, gender, and class for their musical creativity, and demonstrating how this important, underappreciated...

Providing a general overview of comic music, this reference outlines the history of important comic musical genres, considers interconnections among seemingly disparate humorous repertory, and includes an extensive bibliography and discography. The narrative challenges the notion that serious works are more important than comic works. Many supposed tragic works include comic elements and abstract genres, such as the symphony or string quartet. The narrative discusses almost 1,000 works, each cross referenced to publication information. The bibliography includes over 800 books,...

Marc Blitzstein was one of the 20th century's most important American composers, lyricists, and critics, often credited with having virtually invented opera in the American vernacular. Called the father of American opera in the vernacular by luminaries Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, Blitzstein was a masterful pianist, coach, and accompanist, though, ironically, he made more money on the lyrics to one song--"Mack the Knife"--than on everything else he ever did. Blitzstein's brilliant career was cut short in 1964 when he died at the age of 58. This book catalogs Blitzstein's own...

This reference work includes an examination of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's selection process, a review of the annual induction ceremony, and provides career biographies of 149 Hall of Fame inductees from the artists and producers to the record company founders and deejays. It details the turbulent history of the museum's choice of locale and the internal politics involved in the induction process. The only work of its kind on the topic, this reference provides valuable information for the scholar, researcher, and rock enthusiast, and includes a comprehensive listing of each year's...

Bebop music is more than a jazz movement that seemed to have burst suddenly upon the jazz scene--it is an outgrowth of the sociocultural environment dating from the 1920s through the 1940s. In this consideration of the period and its music, noted jazz scholar Eddie S. Meadows traces the cultural and ideological context that produced Bebop and advocates that Cool Jazz was a reaction to Bebop, a natural outgrowth of its predecessor. Unlike most jazz research on the subject, DEGREESIBebop to Cool DEGREESR features insider perspectives on both the social context of the music and the music...

In the history of sound recording, the years from 1896 to 1926 mark the transformation of a carnival toy into a serious means of musical reproduction. This work documents for the first time an index of this transformation: the expansion of the repertoire from the marches and potpourris of the 1890s to the symphonic recordings of the late acoustical period. The data assembled bring together and organize materials that have lain scattered in archives, private collections, catalogues, trade journals, and in the research of more than three dozen discographers to provide as complete a survey of...

When pressed to name the most influential musician of the 20th century, many music historians will name Louis Satchmo Armstrong. Born in New Orleans in 1901 and recording into the 1970s, Armstrong is known as the father of jazz, the one figure most credited with moving the Western world from the age of classical music and Tin Pan Alley pop standards into an exciting new era of swing and hot jazz. Michael Meckna's book is the authoritative reference on Armstrong. Alphabetically arranged entries give detailed information on the many aspects of Armstrong's life and music. An appendix...

Libraries, musicologists, and Deadheads alike will want a copy of this comprehensive annotated bibliography that contains most of what has been written over the past 30 years about this legendary American musical institution and its fans, the Deadheads. The approximately 4,000 annotations serve as a chronolgical history, an aid to researchers, and a guide for fans and collectors. The Grateful Dead appeared on the San Francisco music scene in 1965, and over the course of their career inspired a wide array of writing. This work includes the entire spectrum.

The work includes every book...

An introduction to a new way of modeling musical surfaces for theorists and for generating precompositional relationships for composers, this unique music theory reference work introduces, classifies, and enumerates graph theoretical models for musical transformations in compositional and analytical applications. It also provides a practical application of musical applications for students of graph theory and could serve as an introduction to the further cross-integration of these two disciplines. Of interest to scholars, advanced music theory students, and composers, this work endeavors...

The six string quartets comprising Joseph Haydn's Opus 20 (composed in 1772) are the first works in the genre to have received consistent critical attention from writers on music. The twenty-two quartets Haydn wrote before this date, though rarely discussed by historians and theorists and seldom performed in public, are nevertheless fundamental to the development of the quartet and thus inseparable from Opus 20 itself. This thoughtful discussion provides a basis upon which to study the quartet by showing how the relationship among the four players can best be understood as a musical...

Although the choral arrangements of the African-American spirituals constitute the largest group of folk song arrangements in western literature, they have received little scholarly attention. This book provides the needed historical and stylistic information about the spirituals and the arrangements. It traces the history and cultural roots of the genre through its inception and delineates the African and European characteristics common to the original folk songs and arrangements. Ensembles that have perpetuated the growth of the spiritual arrangements--from Fisk Jubilee Singers of the...

Worldwide in scope and covering the second half of the 20th century, this work provides biographies and discographies of some 500 conductors and composers in many aspects of light and popular orchestral music, including film, show, theatre, and mood music. This is the first time the lives and recordings of such artists as Kostelanetz, Faith, Gould, as well as the orchestral recordings of such great popular composers as Gershwin, Kern, Porter, Rodgers, Berlin, and Coward, have been adequately documented and consolidated in an encyclopedic fashion. Almost 5,000 records and CDs are listed. Of...

Designed to aid the student, librarian, teacher, or professional singer, this annotated bibliography provides access to more than 500 books, journals, and electronic resources. Included as well are chapters listing dictionaries and encyclopedias for opera and musical theater, biographical sources, guides to vocal literature and repertoire, and resources for vocal pedagogy and for the stage. Equally helpful are sources that list plots and synopses, translations, diction, travel and education.

Providing ready access to a variety of topics and resources necessary for vocal study, this...

In this thorough research guide to the career and music of Bill Dixon the author has documented how Dixon refined a sonically unique pan-tonal language of trumpet playing. As a trumpeter, composer, educator, and theoretician, Bill Dixon has politically and musically influenced many phases of the development of Black music in the second half of the 20th century. This authoritative guide details information about the life and music of Bill Dixon. Bill Dixon comments throughout the text on the familiar and unfamiliar aspects of his career as it unfolds between performances and recordings. The...

Barbra Streisand has enjoyed worldwide artistic success for more than three decades, and her recordings are a consistent and integral part of her multifaceted professional life. As part of Greenwood's series, Companions to Celebrated Musicians, this volume explores the musical life and style of Barbra Streisand and places her in the context of American popular music of the second half of the 20th century. Attention is given to other aspects of her career as they relate to her recordings. Chapters proceed chronologically and trace Streisand's evolving musical career and her successes....

Wagner's "Ring," an important phenomenon of the German drama tradition, is situated and examined alongside other major works of the canon. Wagner defines tragedy as a mythological drama. The theoretical foundation of the "Ring" is a complex dialectic of history and myth. By contrasting the "Ring" with the dramas of Schiller, Hebbel, Hofmannsthal, and Brecht different facets of Wagner's work are uniquely highlighted beyond theoretical generalizations or broad overviews. This series of comparisons offers fresh insight into the interrelationships of the "Ring" with the previous German drama...