Bøger i California Studies in 20th-Century Music serien

"A lucid and richly documented study of cultural hierarchy and of the changing social, institutional, and ideological forces shaping music education in mid-twentieth-century Britain. A very fruitful cross-pollination of musical and cultural histories."--Philip Rupprecht, author of British Musical Modernism "A highly important corrective to the existing narrative of British cultural history. Beautifully researched, insightfully contributing to debates about the nature of cultural hierarchies, the periodization of artistic trends, and the relationships between modernity, modernism, and the status of British music. Guthrie's keen ability as a close reader of both printed words and musical texts shines through."--Joan Shelley Rubin, author of The Making of Middlebrow Culture "Thoroughly researched and lucidly argued, The Art of Appreciation effectively grounds big questions about art music and mass culture in a set of more specific historical debates--about how people should listen and how the new media of mass culture should be harnessed for pedagogical purposes. In showing us how experts sought to manage new forms of musical consumption, it reveals a great deal about the promise they held, as well as the anxieties they provoked."--Heather Wiebe, author of Britten's Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction

"This book offers an intriguing perspective on Ravel, one that places the composer in dialogue with cultural trends not previously explored. The detailed and engaging discussion of specific passages in Ravel's works frequently proves enchanting."--W. Anthony Sheppard, author of Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater "A tremendously rich book, filled with extraordinary insights on Ravel's music and the intellectual climate in which it was created. Through the lenses of magic, machinery, science, and technology, we begin to appreciate Ravel's innovations from new perspectives."--Gurminder K. Bhogal, author of Details of Consequence: Ornament, Music, and Art in Paris and Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune

"Contains a wealth of new information and brings a fresh perspective to the subject."--Peter Laki, editor of Bartók and His World "Provides a critically sophisticated treatment of the Hungarian composer, musical ethnologist, and pedagogue Zoltán Kodály. Kodály emerges as more surprising, more flawed, more human, and more impressive than his besainted reputation in his native Hungary and his relative scholarly neglect elsewhere has allowed until now."--David E. Schneider, author of Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition

The "Treatise on Musical Objects" by Pierre Schaeffer is regarded as his most important work on music and its relationship with technology. Drawing on acoustics, physics, and physiology, but also philosophy and the relationship between subject and object, this book summarizes his theoretical and practical work in music composition.

Suitable for those interested in contemporary musicology or media history, this title offers translation of the author's pioneering work - at once a journal of his experiments in sound composition and a treatise on the raison d'etre of concrete music.

In May 1968, France teetered on the brink of revolution as a series of student protests spiraled into the largest general strike the country has ever known. This book examines the social, political, and cultural effects of May '68 on a variety of music in France, from the initial shock of 1968 through the 'long' 1970s.

Argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstuck in the 1920s generated the concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.

Explores the relationship between music and fashion, and discusses the importance of these arts to the rise of transatlantic modernism. This book demonstrates that aesthetic approaches were related to fashion in a manner that was perfectly attuned to the tastes of jazz-age sophisticates. It also considers the role played by the Ballets Russes.

Jewish Identities mounts a formidable challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about "e;Jewish music,"e; which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence that must manifest itself in art created by members of that group. Klara Moricz scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity and reorders ideas about twentieth-century "e;Jewish music"e; 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, Moricz describes a trajectory from paradigmatic nationalist techniques, through assumptions about the unintended presence of racial essences, to an abstract notion of Judaism.

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, Bela Bartok. She shows how a tense period of political transition plagued Bartok's music and imperiled those who took a stand on its aesthetic value in the emerging socialist state. Her fascinating investigation of Bartok's reception outside of Hungary demonstrates that Western composers, too, formulated their ideas about musical style under the influence of ever-escalating cold war tensions.Music Divided surveys Bartok's role in provoking negative reactions to "e;accessible"e; music from Pierre Boulez, Hermann Scherchen, and Theodor Adorno. It considers Bartok's influence on the youthful compositions and thinking of Bruno Maderna and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and it outlines Bartok's legacy in the music of the Hungarian composers Andras Mihaly, Ferenc Szabo, and Endre Szervanszky. These details reveal the impact of local and international politics on the selection of music for concert and radio programs, on composers' choices about musical style, on government radio propaganda about music, on the development of socialist realism, and on the use of modernism as an instrument of political action.

Making New Music in Cold War Poland presents a social analysis of new music dissemination at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, one of the most important venues for East-West cultural contact during the Cold War. In this incisive study, Lisa Jakelski examines the festival's institutional organization, negotiations among its various actors, and its reception in Poland, while also considering the festival's worldwide ramifications, particularly the ways that it contributed to the cross-border movement of ideas, objects, and people (including composers, performers, official festival guests, and tourists). This book explores social interactions within institutional frameworks and how these interactions shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with new music.

An aesthetic, historical, and theoretical study of four scores, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement is a groundbreaking and imaginative treatment of the important yet neglected topic of Russian opera in the Silver Age. Spanning the gap between the supernatural Russian music of the nineteenth century and the compositions of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, this exceptionally insightful and well-researched book explores how Russian symbolist poets interpreted opera and prompted operatic innovation. Simon Morrison shows how these works, though stylistically and technically different, reveal the extent to which the operatic representation of the miraculous can be translated into its enactment.Morrison treats these largely unstudied pieces by canonical composers: Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, Rimsky-Korsakov's Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, Scriabin's unfinished Mysterium, and Prokofiev's Fiery Angel. The chapters, revisionist studies of these composers and scores, address separate aspects of Symbolist poetics, discussing such topics as literary and musical decadence, pagan-Christian syncretism, theurgy, and life creation, or the portrayal of art in life. The appendix offers the first complete English-language translation of Scriabin's libretto for the Preparatory Act.Providing valuable insight into both the Symbolist enterprise and Russian musicology, this book casts new light on opera's evolving, ambiguous place in fin de siecle culture.

This lively history immerses the reader in San Francisco's musical life during the first half of the twentieth century, showing how a fractious community overcame virulent partisanship to establish cultural monuments such as the San Francisco Symphony (1911) and Opera (1923). Leta E. Miller draws on primary source material and first-hand knowledge of the music to argue that a utopian vision counterbalanced partisan interests and inspired cultural endeavors, including the San Francisco Conservatory, two world fairs, and America's first municipally owned opera house. Miller demonstrates that rampant racism, initially directed against Chinese laborers (and their music), reappeared during the 1930s in the guise of labor unrest as WPA music activities exploded in vicious battles between administrators and artists, and African American and white jazz musicians competed for jobs in nightclubs.

During the Cold War, thousands of musicians from the United States traveled the world, sponsored by the U.S. State Department's Cultural Presentations program. Performances of music in many styles-classical, rock 'n' roll, folk, blues, and jazz-competed with those by traveling Soviet and mainland Chinese artists, enhancing the prestige of American culture. These concerts offered audiences around the world evidence of America's improving race relations, excellent musicianship, and generosity toward other peoples. Through personal contacts and the media, musical diplomacy also created subtle musical, social, and political relationships on a global scale. Although born of state-sponsored tours often conceived as propaganda ventures, these relationships were in themselves great diplomatic achievements and constituted the essence of America's soft power. Using archival documents and newly collected oral histories, Danielle Fosler-Lussier shows that musical diplomacy had vastly different meanings for its various participants, including government officials, musicians, concert promoters, and audiences. Through the stories of musicians from Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson to orchestras and college choirs, Fosler-Lussier deftly explores the value and consequences of "e;musical diplomacy."e;

Joy H. Calico examines the cultural history of postwar Europe through the lens of the performance and reception of Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw-a short but powerful work, she argues, capable of irritating every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. Schoenberg, a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been one of the Nazis' prime exemplars of entartete (degenerate) music, immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, he wrote this twelve-tone piece about the Holocaust in three languages for an American audience. This book investigates the meanings attached to the work as it circulated through Europe during the early Cold War in a kind of symbolic musical remigration, focusing on six case studies: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Each case is unique, informed by individual geopolitical concerns, but this analysis also reveals common themes in anxieties about musical modernism, Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, anti-Semitism, dislocation, and the presence of occupying forces on both sides of the Cold War divide.

For the three forces competing for political authority in France during World War II, music became the site of a cultural battle that reflected the war itself. German occupying authorities promoted German music at the expense of French, while the Vichy administration pursued projects of national renewal through culture. Meanwhile, Resistance networks gradually formed to combat German propaganda while eyeing Vichy's efforts with suspicion. In The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, Leslie A. Sprout explores how each of these forces influenced the composition, performance, and reception of five well-known works: the secret Resistance songs of Francis Poulenc and those of Arthur Honegger; Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a German prisoner of war camp; Maurice Durufle's Requiem, one of sixty-five pieces commissioned by Vichy between 1940 and 1944; and Igor Stravinsky's Danses concertantes, which was met at its 1945 Paris premiere with protests that prefigured the aesthetic debates of the early Cold War. Sprout examines not only how these pieces were created and disseminated during and just after the war, but also how and why we still associate these pieces with the stories we tell-in textbooks, program notes, liner notes, historical monographs, and biographies-about music, France, and World War II.

In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by "e;experimental"e; in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time-New York City, 1964-Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic's disastrous performance of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis; Henry Flynt's demonstrations against the downtown avant-garde; Charlotte Moorman's Avant Garde Festival; the founding of the Jazz Composers Guild; and the emergence of Iggy Pop. Drawing together a colorful array of personalities, Piekut argues that each of these examples points to a failure and marks a limit or boundary of canonical experimentalism. What emerges from these marginal moments is an accurate picture of the avant-garde, not as a style or genre, but as a network defined by disagreements, struggles, and exclusions.

Frontier Figures is a tour-de-force exploration of how the American West, both as physical space and inspiration, animated American music. Examining the work of such composers as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Farwell, Beth E. Levy addresses questions of regionalism, race, and representation as well as changing relationships to the natural world to highlight the intersections between classical music and the diverse worlds of Indians, pioneers, and cowboys. Levy draws from an array of genres to show how different brands of western Americana were absorbed into American culture by way of sheet music, radio, lecture recitals, the concert hall, and film. Frontier Figures is a comprehensive illumination of what the West meant and still means to composers living and writing long after the close of the frontier.

In this pioneering, erudite study of a pivotal era in the arts, Walter Frisch examines music and its relationship to early modernism in the Austro-German sphere. Seeking to explore the period on its own terms, Frisch questions the common assumption that works created from the later 1870s through World War I were transitional between late romanticism and high modernism. Drawing on a wide range of examples across different media, he establishes a cultural and intellectual context for late Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as their less familiar contemporaries Eugen d'Albert, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Max von Schillings, and Franz Schreker.Frisch explores "e;ambivalent"e; modernism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as reflected in the attitudes of, and relationship between, Nietzsche and Wagner. He goes on to examine how naturalism, the first self-conscious movement of German modernism, intersected with musical values and practices of the day. He proposes convergences between music and the visual arts in the works of Brahms, Max Klinger, Schoenberg, and Kandinsky. Frisch also explains how, near the turn of the century, composers drew inspiration and techniques from music of the past-the Renaissance, Bach, Mozart, and Wagner. Finally, he demonstrates how irony became a key strategy in the novels and novellas of Thomas Mann, the symphonies of Mahler, and the operas of Strauss and Hofmannsthal.

It is well known that Bela Bartok had an extraordinary ability to synthesize Western art music with the folk music of Eastern Europe. What this rich and beautifully written study makes clear is that, contrary to much prevailing thought about the great twentieth-century Hungarian composer, Bartok was also strongly influenced by the art-music traditions of his native country. Drawing from a wide array of material including contemporary reviews and little known Hungarian documents, David Schneider presents a new approach to Bartok that acknowledges the composer's debt to a variety of Hungarian music traditions as well as to influential contemporaries such as Igor Stravinsky. Putting representative works from each decade beginning with Bartok's graduation from the Music Academy in 1903 until his departure for the United States in 1940 under critical lens, Schneider reads the composer's artistic output as both a continuation and a profound transformation of the very national tradition he repeatedly rejected in public. By clarifying why Bartok felt compelled to obscure his ties to the past and by illuminating what that past actually was, Schneider dispels myths about Bartok's relationship to nineteenth-century traditions and at the same time provides a new perspective on the relationship between nationalism and modernism in early-twentieth century music.

This complete edition of letters and documents between Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann brings together two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both of whom found refuge in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. Culminating in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, the correspondence, diary entries, and related articles provide a glimpse inside the private and public lives of these two great artists, the outstanding figures of the German-exile community in California. In the thicket of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make enemies of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters in this essential volume are complemented by rich primary source materials and an introduction by Germanic scholar Adrian Daub that contextualizes the impact the artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.

Explores the ways in which 'classical' music made its way into late twentieth-century American mainstream culture - in pop songs, movie scores, and print media. This book proposes a holistic musicology in which disparate musical elements might be brought together in dynamic and humane conversation.

Explores ritualized performance in twentieth-century music. This book uncovers the range of political, didactic, and aesthetic intents that inspired the creators of modernist music theater.