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Das Leben von René Leibowitz (1913–1972) ist von zahlreichen Konfrontations- und Verwerfungslinien durchzogen: Im französischen Untergrund verfasste er Bücher über Arnold Schönberg und die Zwölftontechnik, die ihm nach 1945 eine richtungsweisende Position verschafften. In den Auseinandersetzungen der Pariser Existenzialisten, als Musikschriftsteller, aber vor allem als komponierender und dirigierender Musikpraktiker wirkte Leibowitz als ebenso einflussreicher wie aufopferungsvoller Missionar der Moderne. Das Verhältnis von Leibowitz zum bewunderten Vorbild Arnold Schönberg war eng, wenn auch konfliktreich. Leibowitz galt als europäischer Brückenkopf und Herold Schönbergs, musste...
Music Divided explores how political pressures affected musical life on both sides of the iron curtain during the early years of the cold war. In this groundbreaking study, Danielle Fosler-Lussier illuminates the pervasive political anxieties of the day through particular attention to artistic, music-theoretical, and propagandistic responses to the music of Hungary’s most renowned twentieth-century composer, Béla Bartók. She shows how a tense period of political transition plagued Bartók’s music and imperiled those who took a stand on its aesthetic value in the emerging socialist state. Her fascinating investigation of Bartók’s reception outside of Hungary demonstrates that Western...
This book, first published in 2001, presents a portrait of Jean Sibelius as composer and man, a figure of national and international significance, patriot, husband and father. Three introductory articles explore Sibelius's reception in Finland, performance practice and recording history, and Sibelius's aesthetic position with regard to modernity. The second group of essays examines issues of ideology, sexuality and mythology, and their relationship to musical structure and compositional genesis. Studies of the Second, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies are presented in the concluding section. Collectively, these articles address historical, theoretical and analytical issues in Sibelius's most important works. The analyses are supported by investigations of Sibelius's compositional process as documented by the manuscripts and sketches primarily in the Sibelius Collection of the Helsinki University Library. Exploring Sibelius's innovative approach to tonality, form and texture, the book delineates his unique brand of modernism, which has proven highly influential in the late twentieth century.
Jewish Identities mounts a formidable challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about "Jewish music," which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence that must manifest itself in art created by members of that group. Klára Móricz scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity and reorders ideas about twentieth-century "Jewish music" in three case studies: first, Russian Jewish composers of the first two decades of the twentieth century; second, the Swiss American Ernest Bloch; and third, Arnold Schoenberg. Examining these composers in the context of emerging Jewish nationalism, widespread racial theories, and utopian tendencies in modernist art and twentieth-century politics, Móricz describes a trajectory from paradigmatic nationalist techniques, through assumptions about the unintended presence of racial essences, to an abstract notion of Judaism.
Olivier Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques is arguably the first of Messiaen's major works to create a successful synthesis between his music and his passion for ornithology. Messiaen regarded birdsong as music--a belief that led for a time to an obsession with truth-to-nature. Here, Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone provide the background to Oiseaux exotiques, discussing Messiaen's relations with the 1950s avant garde and his involvement with the concerts of the Domaine musical, for which Oiseaux exotiques was composed. The authors analyse Messiaen's compositional methods in unprecedented detail and trace step-by-step the evolution of musical ideas from first notation to finished score.
Presents thirteen studies that engage with the notion of formal function in a variety of ways
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.
From the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 composer Igor Stravinsky and poet W. H. Auden collaborated on the opera The Rake's Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived that Stravinsky and Auden were confronting the central crisis of the Modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all opera. In The Last Opera, Chandler Carter weaves together three interlocking stories. The central and most detailed story explores the libretto and music of The Rake's Progress. The second positions the opera as a focal point...
This new volume incorporates all entries from the previous editions by Arthur Wenk, expanding to cover writings drawn from periodicals, theses, dissertations, books, and Festschriften from 1940 to 2000. Over 9,000 references to analyses of works by over 1,000 composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are included.
"A gathering chiefly of talks given either by invitation or at conferences throughout the world over the last quarter century. The topics range widely, but recurrent themes include the place of classical music in contemporary society and culture, the fraught relationship between aesthetics and ethics, and the responsibilities of scholarship in an age of spin"--