by interviews and conversations with John C. Tibbetts (2010)
Schumann: A Chorus of Voices is a significant contribution to Schumann's 200th-birthday year, 2010. In these hitherto unpublished interviews and conversations, more than thirty biographers, musicians, critics, and commentators offer their own unique perspectives on Schumann's life, work, controversies, and place in the history of Romantic music. Gathered by Schumann scholar John C. Tibbetts during more than thirty years of travel and research, these intimate and informal talks take the reader "backstage" to the rehearsal hall, scholar's study, archive, and music festival. Included are musicians Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Erich Leinsdorf, Jörg Demus, Emanuel Ax, Elly Ameling, Thomas Hampson, Steven Isserlis, Marin Alsop; scholars and biographers Jacques Barzun, Nancy B. Reich, Peter Ostwald, Leon Plantinga, and Larry Todd; critics and commentators Martin Bookspan, Eugenia Zuckerman, and Maurice Sendak; and archivists Gerd Nauhaus, Ute Baer, and Joachim Draheim. The accompanying disc features Van Cliburn Gold Medalist Jose Feghali performing and discussing Schumann's Carnaval, Opus 9, and pianist Ronald Brautigam performing the complete Noveletten, Opus 21 [Publisher description].
Roy Hemming
Lavishly illustrated with 162 photos, this book covers 16 songwriters: Arlen, Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, McHugh, Porter, Rainger, Rodgers, Warren, Whiting, Brown, Carmichael, Loesser, Schwartz, Styne, and Van Heusen. Includes complete listings of over 800 movies and 200 songs.
Percy A. Scholes
Includes over 3,000 alphabetically arranged definitions of music terms, examples of music, and biographical sketches of famous composers and musicians.
David Hajdu
Heroes and Villains is the first collection of essays by David Hajdu, award-winning author of The Ten-Cent Plague, Positively 4th Street, and Lush Life. Eclectic and controversial, Hajdu's essays take on topics as varied as pop music, jazz, the avant-garde, comic books, and our downloading culture. The heart of Heroes and Villains is an extraordinary new piece of cultural rediscovery, original to this book. It tells the untold story of one of the most important—and, ultimately, one of the most tragic—figures in American popular music, Billy Eckstine. Through exhaustive new research, Hajdu shows how this great, forgotten singer, once more popular than Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, transformed American music by combining sex appeal, sophistication, and black machismo—in the era of segregation. The cost, for Eckstine, was his career—and nearly his life. Other essays in this expansive book deal with topical and surprising subjects like Beyonce, Bobby Darin, Kanye West, Marjane Satrapi, Woody Guthrie, Will Eisner, the White Stripes, Elmer Fudd, Elvis Costello, Harry Partch, Ray Charles, Joni Mitchell, and more.
George Perle
George Perle takes us into the composer's workshop as he reevaluates what we call "twentieth-century music"--A term used to refer to new or modern or contemporary music that represents a radical break from the tonal tradition, or "common practice," of the preceding three centuries. He proposes that this music, in the course of breaking with the tonal tradition, presents coherent and definable elements of a new tradition. In spite of the disparity in their styles, idioms, and compositional methods, he argues, what unites Scriabin, Stravinsky, Bartok, and the Viennese circle (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) is more important than what separates them. If we are to understand the connections among these mainstream composers, we also have to understand their connections with the past. Through an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of a single piece by Varese, Density 21.5 for unaccompanied flute, Perle shows how these composers refer not only to their contemporaries but also to Wagner, Debussy, and Beethoven. Perle isolates the years 1909-10 as the moment of revolutionary transformation in the foundational premises of our musical language. He asks: What are the implications of this revolution, not only for the composer, but also for the listener? What are the consequences for the theory and teaching of music today? In his highly original answers, Perle relates the role of intuition in the listening experience to its role in the compositional process. Perle asserts that the post-Schoenbergian serialists have preoccupied themselves with secondary and superficial aspects of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method that have led it to a dead end but he also exposes the speciousness of current alternatives such as chance music, minimalism, and the so-called return to tonality. He offers a new and more comprehensive definition of "twelve-tone music" and firmly rejects the notion that accessibility to the new music is reserved for a special class of elite listeners [Publisher description].