Music

This book addresses the needs of teacher-educators seeking to include composition pedagogy in music education curricula. Though several decades of scholarship have examined the processes and products of young composers and offered insight to their work, many teachers still report a significant degree of trepidation when asked to lead students in composition activities. This book provides guidance for developing pre-service and in-service teachers ability to confidently and effectively facilitate composition study in PreK-12 settings. Issues that frame the volume include why composition should be part of music education, and by extension, music teacher education; research bases in creativity and children's composition; and the changing nature of compositional practices in contemporary culture. Drawing on both research and practice, chapters provide models for leading composition study in elementary general music, choral and instrumental ensembles, and songwriting classes. Guidance is offered for those working with special needs populations and gifted-and-talented students, as well as those interested in expanding experiences beyond the classroom via technology. Moreover, specific programmatic approaches for addressing the professional development of pre-service and in-service teachers are offered in detail so that music teacher-educators may create environments where composition's potential to enliven and invigorate contemporary practices in music education can be fully embraced.

Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies anthologizes a wide range of subjects examined from dance-centered methodologies: modes of research that are emergent, based in relevant systems of movement analysis, use primary sources and rely on critical, informed observation of movement. The anthology fills a gap in current scholarship by emphasizing dance history and core disciplinary knowledge rather than theories imported from disciplines outside dance. Individual chapters serve as case studies further organized into three categories of significant dance activity: performance and reconstruction, pedagogy and choreographic process, and notational systems and other written forms that analyze and permit dance documentation. The breadth of the content reflects the richness and vibrancy of the dance field; each deeply informed examination serves as a window opening onto the larger world of dance. Conceptually, each chapter also raises concerns and questions that point to broadly inclusive methodological applications.

This book is the first-ever biography of one of Spain’s greatest musicians in the modern era. Composer, conductor, and impresario Federico Moreno Torroba (1891–1982) had a long and productive career, during which he witnessed many dramatic changes in the social, political, and cultural life of his homeland. And yet, despite the vicissitudes of Civil War, dictatorship, and the gradual return of democracy and prosperity, he remained firmly committed to his goal of composing Spanish music rooted in the fertile soil of regional folklore and the daily life of his fellow Spaniards, especially in his native city, Madrid. Torroba composed over seventy works for the stage and nearly a hundred works for the guitar, among a wide variety of other vocal and orchestral compositions. Not only was he prolific, but his works for the stage and the guitar have also found a permanent place in their respective repertories. Torroba’s music has enduring appeal precisely because it exhibits the passion and verve of the songs and dances that inspired it, whether a Cuban habanera, a Castilian seguidillas, or an Andalusian bulerías. And yet, despite its accessibility and popular appeal, Torroba’s music reveals consummate craftsmanship and a true maestro’s careful attention to dramatic and musical detail. This biography tells not only the story of Torroba’s life but also of his native land and its music during some of the most turbulent and intensely creative decades in Spanish history.

One legacy of the 1960s sexual revolution was the “adult” musical of the 1970s. Influenced by the overwhelming success in 1968 of Hair, as well as by a series of rulings on the nature of obscenity, adult musicals proliferated in New York's theaters at a time when the city was teetering toward bankruptcy and tourism was on the decline. Typically structured like old-fashioned revues, shows like Let My People Come, The Faggot, and the long-running Oh! Calcutta! relied on nudity and simulated sex to attract audiences. Adult musicals disappeared almost entirely by the early 1980s, as the city's economy improved and the country grew more socially conservative; they have since been largely dismissed as a silly fad befitting a silly decade. Yet adult musicals reflect aspects of 1970s American culture at their messiest and thus at their most honest. Specifically, they emulate the country's rapidly changing, often contradictory attitudes about gender and sexuality at a time when the sexual revolution had given way to the gay and women's liberation movements. Hard Times examines adult musicals as reflective of the socioeconomic mood of New York City in the 1970s, the socio-sexual mores of the country in the decade following the sexual revolution, and contemporary debates about obscenity and art.

This book is an investigation into Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions for the organ. It provides numerous new perspectives on the stylistic orientation and historical context of these masterpieces. The study opens with a consideration of recent scholarship, a discussion that culminates in an edition of a previously unpublished fugue by the Bach pupil Schübler. Based on Bach’s “Little” Fugue in G Minor, Schübler’s work suggests that the subject of Bach’s fugue is not an original melody but is borrowed from a folk song. The next chapter involves Bach’s use of the “varied Stollen” in over twenty of his chorale preludes, a hitherto unexplored topic that bears implications for the entire corpus of baroque organ chorales. The remainder of the book concerns the diverse ways in which Bach’s organ works have been received from the composer’s own lifetime to the present. Individual chapters are devoted to Felix Mendelssohn as a performer; to Robert Schumann as an editor and critic; to César Franck as a performer, pedagogue, and composer; and to Edward Elgar as a performer, critic, and transcriber. A final chapter explores the reception of particular pieces not only by various luminaries from the realm of classical music but also within such disparate contexts as film, literature, politics, and rock music.

In the late 15th century the newly built Sistine Chapel was home to a vigorous culture of musical composition and performance. Josquin des Prez stood at its center, singing and composing for the pope’s private choir. This book offers a new reading of Josquin’s Roman compositions in light of the repertory he and his fellow papal singers performed from the chapel’s singers’ box. Comprising the single largest surviving corpus of late 15th-century sacred music, these pieces served as a backdrop for elaborately choreographed liturgical ceremonies—a sonic analogue to the frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino, and their contemporaries that adorn the chapel’s walls. Josquin’s Rome uses a comparative approach to uncover this aesthetically and intellectually rich musical tradition. Through multidimensional analyses set forth in lively prose, Jesse Rodin confronts longstanding problems concerning the authenticity and chronology of Josquin’s music while also offering nuanced readings of scandalously understudied works by his contemporaries. He further contextualizes Josquin by locating intersections between his music and the wider soundscape of the Cappella Sistina. Central to Rodin’s argument is the idea that these pieces lived in performance; for this reason Josquin’s Rome is firmly tethered to a series of superb companion recordings by Cut Circle, an ensemble directed by the author.

Kinesthetic City takes as its premise the idea that moving bodies, place, history, and identity are mutually productive. Analyzing both everyday movement and contemporary concert dance in five Chinese urban sites – Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, New York's Chinatown, and the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles – this book explores transnational formations of Chineseness. Not definable by national boundaries, biological essences, central political systems, or even shared cultural norms, Chineseness is a mobile yet abiding idea. This book examines the ways that Chineseness is, at key historical moments, highly contested in each of these cities while paradoxically sustained as a collective consciousness across all of them. It argues that global communities can be studied through an investigation of dance and everyday movement practices as they are situated in particular places and times. This project claims choreography not only as an object of study, however. That is, it relies not merely upon movement analyses of concert dance in these Chinese cities, but also upon kinesthesia — one dancer-scholar's somatic sensation of movement — as a way to analyze these urban spaces. Choreography serves as both subject and method in this book. Kinesthetic City expands the fields of dance studies and Asian/Asian American studies by placing personal kinesthetic experience of city space in dialogue with a study of aesthetic movement practices in order to theorize the ways in which choreography, broadly conceived, is productively intertwined with processes of space, time, and community formation in a globalized era.

This is a study of the life and work of one of America’s most brilliant and inspiring composer-dramatists, Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964). A piano student of Alexander Siloti, and composition student of Rosario Scalero, Nadia Boulanger, and Arnold Schoenberg, Blitzstein innovatively combined serious and popular techniques and traditions in order to reach the large audience for radio, film, and Broadway shows, producing work, conditioned by Marxist perspectives, that spoke to the concerns of workers, immigrants, women, and minorities. His most successful works include the operas The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and Regina (1949, adapted from Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play, The Little Foxes), for which he wrote both the words and music, and his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which helped popularize that piece in English-speaking countries, and which yielded the hit song “Mack the Knife.” Other notable works include the opera No for an Answer, the Airborne Symphony for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, the ballet The Guests, and two late stage works, Reuben Reuben and Juno. Such works had, according to Leonard Bernstein, an “incalculable” influence on the American musical theater, and remain particularly noteworthy in terms of their musical prosody, their formal novelty, and their amalgam of serious and popular elements. This study considers other aspects of the composer’s life: his Jewish-Russian background and his childhood in Philadelphia; his activities as a pianist, critic, and translator; his marriage to the writer Eva Goldbeck and his relations with friends and colleagues; his involvement with various progressive social causes; his service in the Army as an entertainment specialist during World War II; his brush with anti-communist attacks; and his violent death in Martinique at age fifty-eight.

This book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the songs and scores written for the movie adventures of Ian Fleming's Agent 007 of the British Secret Service. The book looks at many aspects of the 50-year saga including the following: How the “James Bond Theme” was written at the last minute for Dr. No and how it became the subject of controversy, ending in a libel trial 40 years later in London's High Court. How Bond composer John Barry invented a new kind of action-adventure music for movies, and how despite writing immensely popular scores for Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and eight other Bond films, he never received a single Academy Award nomination for his Bond music. Why Monty Norman preceded Barry, and why Paul McCartney, Marvin Hamlisch, Bill Conti, Michael Kamen, Eric Serra and David Arnold succeeded him as composers (and details of the Burt Bacharach and Michel Legrand scores for the “unofficial” Bond films). How top artists like Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Nancy Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Carly Simon, Madonna and others were convinced to record for 007, and how Frank Sinatra and Amy Winehouse almost did. How changes in the Bond sound reflected what was happening in pop and rock circles, from the twangy guitar of the Sean Connery era to a more sedate sound for Roger Moore, synthesizers for George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton, and a more contemporary approach for Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. Each chapter also contains a “score highlights” box that examines each Bond score in detail, especially as relates to the commercially available soundtrack albums.

Drawing on archival research and including much new information, this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created the Broadway musical Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later directors, choreographers, and performers to the end of the twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered, plus five important London productions and four Hollywood versions. Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to the power of performers to remake the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat juxtaposed the talents of black and white performers and mixed the conventions of white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical. Bringing black and white onto the same stage—revealing the mixed-race roots of musical comedy—Show Boat stimulated creative artists and performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed in the American musical and, more broadly, with popular music and dance on the national stage during a century of profound social transformations.