Touch and Technic (Technique), Op. 44 - William Mason (1829-1908)

Conversing with Cage - R. Kostelanetz - 1988

Conversing with Cage draws on over 150 interviews with John Cage conducted over four decades to draw a full picture of his life and art. Filled with the witty aphorisms that have made Cage as famous as an esthetic philosopher as a composer, the book offers both an introduction to Cage's way of thinking and a rich gathering of his many thoughts on art, life, and music.
John Cage is perhaps this century's most radical classical composer. From his famous "silent" piece (4'33") to his proclamation that "all sound is music," Cage stretched the aesthetic boundaries of what could be performed in the modern concert hall. But, more than that, Cage was a provocative cultural figure, who played a key role in inspiring scores of other artists-and social philosophers-in the second half of the 20th century. Through his life and work, he created revolutions in thinking about art, and its relationship to the world around us.

Stravinsky (1882-1971): A Composers' Memorial - Perspectives of New Music - 2009

Alexei Haieff, Elliott Carter, Walter Piston, Ernst Krenek, Darius Milhaud, Paul Fromm, Roger Sessions, Dmitri Shostakovitch, Soulima Stravinsky, Ben Johnston, Wolfgang Fortner, Peter Mennin, Ross Lee Finney, George Rochberg, Michael Tippett, Humphrey Searle, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Goffredo Petrassi, Robert Palmer, Ben Weber, David Diamond, Franco Evangelisti, Seymour Shifrin, Goddard Lieberson, Carlos Chavez, Andrew Imbrie, Edward T. Cone, Milton Babbitt, Claudio Spies, Vincent Persichetti, Lukas Foss, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Donald Martino, Hugo Weisgall, Karl Kohn, Peter Racine Fricker, Kenneth Gaburo, Harvey Sollberger, Arthur Berger, Paul des Marais, Louise Talma, Leo Smit, Robert Moevs, Donald Harris, Joel Spiegelman, Charles Wuorinen, Luciano Berio, Iannis Xenakis, Mel Powell, Otto Luening, J. K. Randall, Henri Pousseur, Herbert Brün, Iain Hamilton, Hugh Wood, Leo Kraft, Meyer Kupferman, Benjamin Boretz, John Heiss and David Hamilton

Stravinsky Inside Out - C. M. Joseph - 2001

Popularly known during his lifetime as the world's greatest living composer, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) not only wrote some of the twentieth century's most influential music, he also assumed the role of cultural icon. This book reveals Stravinsky's two sides - the public persona, preoccupied with his own image and place in history, and the private composer, whose views and beliefs were often purposely suppressed. Charles M. Joseph draws a richer and more human portrait of Stravinsky than anyone has done before, using an array of unpublished materials and unreleased film trims from the composer's huge archive at the Paul Sacher Institute in Switzerland. Focusing on Stravinsky's place in the culture of the twentieth century, Joseph situates the composer among the giants of his age. He discusses Stravinsky's first American commission, his complicated relationship with his son, his professional relationships with celebrities ranging from T. S. Eliot to Orson Welles, his flirtations with Hollywood and television, and his love-hate attitude toward the critics and the media. In a close look at Stravinsky's efforts to mould a public image, Joseph explores the complex dance between the composer and his artistic collaborator, Robert Craft, who orchestrated controversial efforts to protect Stravinsky and edit materials about him, both during the composer's lifetime and after his death.

A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life - J. Auner - 2003

Arnold Schoenberg's close involvement with many of the principal developments of 20th-century music, most importantly the break with tonality and the creation of 12-tone composition, generated controversy from the time of his earliest works to the 21st century. This 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 activities in composition, music theory, criticism, painting, performance, and teaching. They also show the significance of events in his personal and family life, his evolving Jewish identity, his political concerns, and his close interactions with such figures as Gustav and Alma Mahler, Alban Berg, Wassily Kandinsky, and Thomas Mann. Extensive commentary by Joseph Auner places the documents and materials in context and traces important themes throughout Schoenberg's career from turn-of-century Vienna to Weimar Berlin to 1950s Los Angeles.

Schoenberg (Master Musicians) - M. MacDonald - 2008

In this completely rewritten and updated edition of his long-indispensable study, Malcolm MacDonald takes advantage of 30 years of recent scholarship, new biographical information, and deeper understanding of Schoenberg's aims and significance to produce a superb guide to Schoenberg's life and work. MacDonald demonstrates the indissoluble links among Schoenberg's musical language (particularly the enigmatic and influential twelve-tone method), his personal character, and his creative ideas, as well as the deep connection between his genius as a teacher and as a revolutionary composer.

Britten's Musical Language (Music in the Twentieth Century) - P. Rupprecht - 2002

Blending insights from linguistic and social theories of speech, ritual and narrative with music-analytic and historical criticism, Britten's Musical Language offers interesting perspectives on the composer's fusion of verbal and musical utterance in opera and song. It provides close interpretative studies of the major scores (including Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, War Requiem, Curlew River and Death in Venice) and explores Britten's ability to fashion complex and mysterious symbolic dramas from the interplay of texted song and a wordless discourse of motives and themes. Focusing on the performative and social basis of language, Philip Rupprecht replaces traditional notions of textual 'expression' in opera with the interpretation of topics such as the role of naming and hate speech in Peter Grimes; the disturbance of ritual certainty in the War Requiem; and the codes by which childish 'innocence' is enacted in The Turn of the Screw.