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What we think music is shapes how we hear it. This book traces the history of the idea of pure—“absolute”—music from Pythagoras to the present, with special emphasis on efforts to reconcile the irreducible essence of the art with its profound effects on the human spirit. The core of this study focuses on the period 1850–1935, beginning with the collision between Richard Wagner and the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick. Wagner, who coined the term “absolute music” in 1846, used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For him, music that was “absolute” was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. Hanslick considered this quality of isolation a guarantor of purity: music could be understood only in terms of itself. Hanslick had few followers among musicians during his lifetime (1825–1904). By 1920, however, absolute music was being endorsed by leading modernists, including both Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The key impetus for this change came from discourse not about music but rather about the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism.

Adaptive Strategies for Small-Handed Pianists brings together information from ergonomics, physics, biomechanics, anatomy, medicine, and piano pedagogy to focus on the subject of small-handedness. Chapter 1 presents an overview from historical, anatomical, and pedagogical perspectives and includes a discussion of small-handedness as a risk factor for piano-related injury. Chapter 2 establishes a basic understanding of work efficiency and the human anatomy, moves on to general observations about piano playing and the constraints of physics, and explains the principles of healthy movement at the piano. Chapter 3 is a focused analysis of piano technique as it relates to small-handedness. Chapters 4 to 7 deal with specific alternative approaches: redistribution, refingering, ways to maximize reach and power, and musical solutions for technical problems. Hundreds of examples taken from the standard intermediate and advanced piano literature show concrete applications of these strategies within appropriate musical contexts. Chapter 8 presents tables that pianists can use to diagnose and resolve commonly encountered problems and synthesizes the adaptive approaches outlined in the book. Reflective application points are provided as guides to further exploration. The book demonstrates that the specific physical and musical needs of the small-handed can be addressed in sensitive and appropriate ways and illuminates alternative paths to help pianists with small hands reach their musical goals.

Conceived as an introduction to a vast, immensely rich and diverse set of repertories, this book explores the sounding forms of Sub-Saharan African music. Aimed at a general musical readership, it describes the major dimensions of African music and the values upon which they are built. An opening chapter invites readers to sample the basic qualities of African music and reflect on the challenges of writing about African music. In subsequent chapters, the book discusses the place of music in society, musical instruments, the relationship between language and music, rhythm, melody, form, and harmony. A final chapter traces various appropriations of African music. In conveying the dynamics within each of the core dimensions, a broad orientation is typically supplemented by close readings of selected repertory items. These include an Ewe dirge, an Nkundo lullaby, an Aka Pygmy children’s song, an item of Central African entertainment music, an art song, and a piano etude. Although the focus throughout is on Africa’s “traditional” heritage, here regarded as the backbone of Africa’s musical thinking, a few items of popular and art music are included to demonstrate the range of African musical imagining. Frequent reference is made to the vast recorded legacy of African music, and readers are encouraged to explore them to gain a deeper appreciation of the music. The book illuminates both the structural and the expressive dimensions of black African music and is designed to engender dialogue between scholars of music and ethnographers, music analysts and composers.

This book dissects the oft-invoked myth of a romantic Golden Age of Pianism. It discusses the performance-style of great pianists from Liszt to Paderewski and Busoni, and delves into the far-from-inevitable development of the piano recital. The book recounts how classical concerts evolved from exuberant, sometimes riotous events into the formal, funereal trotting out of predictable pieces they can be today; how an often unhistorical “respect for the score” began to replace pianists' improvizations and adaptations; and how the clinical custom arose that an audience should be seen and not heard. The book chronicles why pianists of the past did not always begin a piece with the first note of the score, nor end with the last. It emphasizes that anxiety over wrong notes is a relatively recent psychosis, and that playing entirely from memory a relatively recent requirement. The book presents a vivid tale of how drastically different are the recitals of the present compared to concerts of the past, and how their own role has diminished from noisily active participants in the concert experience to passive recipients of artistic benediction from the stage. The book's broad message proclaims that there is nothing divinely ordained about our own concert-practices, programming, and piano-performance styles. Many aspects of the modern approach are unhistorical — some laudable, some merely ludicrous. They are also far removed from those fondly remembered as constituting a Golden Age.

After the Rite: Stravinsky’s Path to Neoclassicism (1914–25) traces the evolution of Stravinsky’s compositional process with excerpts from Rossignol, Three Pieces for String Quartet, Renard, Histoire du soldat, Étude for Pianola, Ragtime, Piano-Rag-Music, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Concertino, Pulcinella, Mavra, Octet, Cinq pièces monométriques, Concerto for Piano and Winds, Piano Sonata, the Serenade in A. One of the goals of this monograph is to illustrate how musical sketches help to inform music analysis. The use of original sources, diplomatic transcriptions, and diagrams illustrate: (1) the presence of melodic motives, such as anticipatory gestures that have a bearing on subsequent works, (2) the layering of imitative techniques that sometimes participate in the emergence of block form before transitioning into Stravinsky’s Neoclassical style, and (3) the incorporation of materials borrowed from the eighteenth century to create musical narrative, and so on. In addition to these visual representations of musical ideas, another goal is to consider the cultural complexities that established the framework for Stravinsky’s evolution as a composer, such as: (1) the cross-currents in literary circles around 1914 that were concerned with Shklovsky’s “Resurrection of the Word” and the notion of defamiliarization, (2) the swirling designs in artworks by painters who espoused the ideals of futurism and cubo-futurism, and (3) Fokine’s outline of the “New Ballet” that appeared in the Times (London) on July 6, 1914, just before the declaration of war on July 28, 1914, and that in a way paralleled the emergence of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism.

This book explores the Broadway legacy of choreographer Agnes de Mille, from the 1940s through the 1960s. Six musicals are discussed in depth—Oklahoma!, One Touch of Venus, Bloomer Girl, Carousel, Brigadoon, and Allegro. Carousel and Brigadoon were de Mille’s most influential and lucrative Broadway works. The other three shows exemplify aspects of her legacy that have not been fully examined, including the impact of her ideas on some of the composers with whom she worked; her ability to incorporate a previously conceived work into the context of a Broadway show; and her trailblazing foray into the role of choreographer/director. Each chapter emphasizes de Mille’s unique contributions to the original productions. Several themes emerge. First, character development remained at the heart of de Mille’s Broadway work. She often took minor characters, represented with minimal or no dialogue, and fleshed out their stories. Second, de Mille often came into conflict with her collaborators because of her strong views, but her dances added a layer of meaning that resulted in more complex final products. Finally, de Mille saw much of her choreography as an authorship and argued that she should be given the same rights as the librettist and the composer. Her work as an activist contributed to revisions in dance copyright law and the founding of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a theatrical union that protects the rights of directors and choreographers. Agnes de Mille

Few Mexican musicians in the twentieth century achieved as much notoriety or had such an international impact as the popular singer and songwriter Agustín Lara (1897–1970). Widely known as “el flaco de oro” (“the Golden Skinny”), this remarkably thin fellow was prolific across the genres of bolero, ballad, and folk. His most beloved “Granada,” a song so enduring that it has been covered by the likes of Mario Lanza, Frank Sinatra, and Placido Domingo, is today a standard in the vocal repertory. However, there exists very little biographical literature on Lara in English. This book's informed and informative placement of Lara's work in a broader cultural context presents a reading of the life of this significant musical figure. Lara's career as a media celebrity as well as musician provides an excellent window on Mexican society in the mid-twentieth century and on popular culture in Latin America. The book also delves into Lara's music itself, bringing to light how the composer's work unites a number of important currents in Latin music of his day, particularly the bolero.

Alan Jay Lerner was the lyricist of some of the most beloved musicals of all time, including My Fair Lady, Gigi, Brigadoon, and Camelot. Yet much of his work is less well known and his career has been overlooked in the scholarly literature on musicals. This book helps to bridge the gap by providing new insights into his working life through his professional correspondence with his colleagues and friends. The collection contains letters to Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, Frederick Loewe, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Leonard Bernstein, among many others. It also provides an extensive commentary outlining his early years and putting his career into context.

Albion’s Dance was inspired by the author’s memory of her childhood ballet teacher who danced in Britain during World War Two. Dancers’ memoirs and the writings of dance critics are central resources for this book that asks how ballet in Britain survived during the war and how the end of war resulted in a newly refined national ballet. Exploring the so-called ballet boom during World War Two, the larger story of this book is one of how art and artists thrive during conflict, and how they respond pragmatically and creatively to privation and duress. The way ballet participated in propagandistic discourse and answered to a public mood of pragmatism and idealism are part of this story. Also considered are the distinct roles of dance critics, male and female dancers, producers, audiences, and choreographers. Each population contributed to the creation of a uniquely British ballet identity. After the war, British ballet emerged on the international stage demonstrating superb qualities of dramatic acuity, musicality, and sensitivity to the classic ballets.

In 1975, the Broadway musical Chicago brought together a host of memes and myths, the gleefully subversive character of American musical comedy, the reckless glamor of the big-city newspaper, the mad decade of the 1920s, the work of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon—two of the greatest talents in the musical’s history—and the Wild West gangsterville that was the city of Chicago itself. The tale of a young woman who murders her departing lover and then tricks the jury into letting her off, Chicago seemed too blunt and cynical at first. Everyone agreed it was show biz at its brilliant best, yet the public still preferred A Chorus Line, with its cast of innocents and sentimental feeling. Nevertheless, the 1996 Chicago revival is now the longest-running American musical in history, and the movie version won the Best Picture Oscar. As this text looks back at Chicago’s various moving parts, including the original 1926 play that started it all, a sexy silent film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, a talkie remake with Ginger Rogers, the musical itself, and at last the movie of the musical, we see how the American theatre serves as a kind of alternative news medium, a town crier warning the public about the racy, devious interior contradictions of American society.

Alla Osipenko is one of history’s greatest ballerinas, a courageous rebel who paid the price for speaking truth to the Soviet state. At Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet, Osipenko’s lines, shapes, and movement both exemplified the venerable traditions of Russian ballet and projected those traditions into uncharted and experimental realms. Her sharp tongue and candid independence, as well as her almost reckless flouting of Soviet rules for personal and political conduct, soon found her all but quarantined in Russia. An internationally acclaimed ballerina at the height of her career, she had to persist against constant attempts by the Soviet state and the Kirov administration to humble her. Throughout the book, Osipenko talks frankly and freely in a way that few Russians of her generation have allowed themselves to do. The book chronicles her life to the age of eighty-two—a great-grandmother, still outspoken, and still a dynamic participant in the international world of ballet. A cast of characters drawn from all sectors of Soviet and post-perestroika society makes this biography as encyclopedic and encompassing as a great Russian novel.

This book is a full-length biography in English of Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824), one of the great violinist-composers in the history of music, and arguably the most influential violinist who ever lived. He rose from humble origins as a blacksmith's son in a village near Turin, Italy, and early studies with Gaetano Pugnani, to a triumphant international career, particularly in Paris and London. His multifarious career as concert performer, composer, teacher, opera theater director, and impresario was played out against the backdrop of a dramatically changing world: from the ancien régime patronage of an Italian prince and the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, to the commercial and box-office–centered institutions of the early 19th century. Viotti's life was intensely dramatic. He knew tragedy as well as success: he was forced to flee the French Revolution, he was exiled from England for an extended period, his attempt to establish himself in business met with failure, and he died heavily in debt. His correspondence with an English family, the Chinnerys, with whom he was intimately associated for the last half of his life, provides an unusually revealing glimpse into his personal life. Viotti's biography is not without its mysteries, among which is his renunciation, twice in his life, of public performance. This study is based on extensive documentary research, much of it here revealed for the first time. Viotti's works are considered in the context of his life. Eleven appendices include translations of various Viotti-related archival documents, and additional information on Viotti's siblings, his places of residence, his violins, his unfinished violin method, and financial matters.

This collection of essays analyzes diverse musical creations with reference to the contexts in which the music is created and performed. The authors explain the music as sound in process, through prose, diagrams, transcriptions, recordings, and (online) multimedia presentations, all intended to convey the richness, beauty, and ingenuity of their subjects. The music ranges across geography and cultures—court music of Japan and medieval Europe, pagode song from Brazil, solos by the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk and by the sitar master Budhaditya Mukherjee, form-and-timbre improvisations of a Boston sound collective, South Korean folk drumming, and the ceremonial music of indigenous cultures in North American and Australia. Thus the essays diversify and expand the scope of this book’s companion volume, Analytical Studies in World Music, to all inhabited continents and many of its greatest musical traditions. An introduction and an afterword point out common analytical approaches, and present a new way to classify music according to its temporal organization. Two special chapters consider the juxtaposition of music from different cultures: of world-music traditions and popular music genres, and of Balinese music and European Art music, raising questions about the musical encounters and fusions of today’s interconnected world.

This multiauthor collection, the first of an unprecedented four-volume series of analytical essays on music by women composers from Hildegard of Bingen to the twenty-first century, presents detailed studies of compositions written since 1960 by Ursula Mamlok, Norma Beecroft, Joan Tower, Sofia Gubaidulina, Chen Yi, Kaija Saariaho, Libby Larsen, and Elisabeth Lutyens. Each chapter opens with a brief biographical sketch of the composer written by the editors, followed by an in-depth analysis of a single representative composition linking analytical observations with broader considerations of music history, gender, culture, or hermeneutics. These essays, many by leading music theorists, are grouped thematically into three sections, the first focused on pitch design, the second on musical gesture, and the third on music and text. The collection is designed to challenge and stimulate a wide range of readers. For academics, these thorough analytical studies can open new paths into unexplored research areas in music theory and musicology. Postsecondary instructors may be inspired by the insights offered here to include new works in graduate or upper-level undergraduate courses in post-tonal theory, history, or women and music. Finally, for performers, conductors, and music broadcasters, these thoughtful analyses can offer enriched understandings of this repertoire and suggest fresh new programming possibilities to share with listeners—an endeavor of discovery for all those interested in twentieth-century music.

This multi-author collection, the second to be published in an unprecedented four-volume series of analytical essays on music by women composers from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries, presents detailed studies of compositions written up to 1900 by Hildegard of Bingen, Maddalena Casulana, Barbara Strozzi, Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, Marianna Martines, Fanny Hensel, Josephine Lang, Clara Schumann, and Amy Beach. Each chapter opens with a brief biographical sketch of the composer, followed by an in-depth analysis of one representative composition or a small number of comparable compositions, linking analytical observations with broader considerations of music history, gender, culture, or hermeneutics. These essays, many by leading music theorists, are grouped thematically into three sections, the first focused on early music for voice, the second on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century keyboard music, and the third on lieder and piano music. The collection is designed to challenge and stimulate a wide range of readers. For academics, these thorough analytical studies can open new paths into unexplored research areas in music theory and musicology. Post-secondary instructors may be inspired by the insights offered here to include new works in graduate or upper-level undergraduate courses in early music, theory, history, or women and music. Finally, for performers, conductors, and music broadcasters, these thoughtful analyses can offer enriched understandings of this repertoire and suggest fresh, new programming possibilities to share with listeners—an endeavor of discovery for all those interested in music composed before 1900.

Combining the approaches of ethnomusicology and music theory, this book offers perspectives for thinking about how musical sounds are shaped, arranged, and composed by their diverse makers worldwide. Eleven in-depth explanations of Iranian sung poetry, Javanese and Balinese gamelan music, Afro-Cuban drumming, Shanghai opera, flamenco, modern American chamber music, Central African group singing, Bulgarian dance tunes, South Indian song, and a Mozart piano concerto create a diverse compendium of music analyses. Through description of contexts of performance and creation, and especially compositional and formal construction, each chapter proposes stimulating ways to hear, conceive, and imagine these repertoires. Selections on the companion recordings are carefully matched with extensive transcriptions and illuminating diagrams in every chapter. Opening rich cross-cultural and comparative perspectives on music, this volume addresses the practical needs of students and scholars in the contemporary world of fusions, contact, borrowing, and curiosity about music everywhere.

Familiar entertainment icons, stories, and signs from the 1950s and 1960s continue to resonate within contemporary American society and culture. Both the political Left and Right invoke the events and memories of those decades, celebrating or condemning the competing social forces embodied in and unleashed during those years. In recent decades, the entertainment industry has capitalized on this trend with films and television shows that often look back on the 1950s and 1960s with a mixture of nostalgia and criticism.

This book looks at the musical, from The Beggar's Opera to Wicked. Looking at Star Comic and Sweetheart Heroine; the war between musical comedy and operetta; the rise of the sexy story in the 1920s; the wedding of ballet and hoofing in the 1930s; Oklahoma! and Carousel “musical plays” of the 1940s; Novelty Star in the 1950s, and other developments, this book looks at George Gershwin to Ethel Merman to Jerome Robbins to the director-choreographer and the offbeat contemporary show: Porgy and Bess, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof, Chicago, A Chorus Line, Grand Hotel, Grey Gardens, and Rent. The book emphasizes not only the writing of musicals but the performing of them. Considering the development of dance, the book follows it from zany hoofing in the nineteenth century through the tap “combinations” of the 1920s and the injection of ballet and modern dance in the 1930s and 1940s. Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse, and Gwen Verdon: theirs was a time when dance seemed as crucial as music by Richard Rodgers or lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The book examines also the changing role of the star, noting how such early-twentieth-century headliners as Fred Stone seldom varied their portrayals, whether as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz or Little Red Ridinghood's fatherly guardian in The Stepping Stones.

This book approaches George Gershwin’s iconic Rhapsody in Blue as an “arrangement”—a status it has held since its inception in 1924, yet one unconsidered until now. It shifts the emphasis away from a centralized composition and from the sole agency of a single composer, positing a broad vision of the Rhapsody. Based on a host of newly discovered manuscripts, this book significantly alters existing historical and cultural conceptions of the Rhapsody. Each chapter engages a different set of previously unknown documents, providing the reader with a dynamic and multifaceted reappraisal of this emblematic piece of American music. In the process of remapping the terrain of the Rhapsody, new light is shed on familiar and lesser-known musicians who each used arrangements of the piece to establish their musical identities: Ferde Grofé, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Larry Adler, and Anthony Brown. Also considered over the course of the book is the role of visual media in the enduring status of both Gershwin and the Rhapsody, including forays into film, television, and the commercial advertising of United Airlines. The overlapping, divergent, and otherwise hidden narratives that emerge reveal how arrangements of Rhapsody in Blue have shaped the development and approach of musicians throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The reader emerges from the process with new conceptualizations of the Rhapsody, George Gershwin, and music-making in America.

Fourteenth-century France witnessed the emergence of a new school of lyric, as the so-called formes fixes crystallized and the Ars nova revolutionized musical practice. Charting the emergence of this new lyric order from ca. 1300 to ca. 1380, The Art of Grafted Song demonstrates that despite these new departures, the long-established principle of borrowing within French lyric continued to inspire poets and composers. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, this study traces citation, quotation, allusion, and other kinds of appropriations in fourteenth-century lyrics with and without music to build a more intimate understanding of song at this time and of the shared experience of poetry and music. It argues that citational practice was integral to experiments in form, genre, and style that gave rise to the new tradition. Exploring textual and musical reminiscences enhances our understanding of how poets and composers devised their works and engaged one another and their audiences in formal contests or puys and in informal lyric displays, and casts light on the reception and circulation of individual works. It also provides valuable clues about when, where, and in which milieus the polyphonic chanson and its sister lyric forms emerged and flourished. It reveals that older works often persisted longer in the shared imagination than we tend to suppose; we learn, too, about attitudes to authorship and the importance of memory in this age of literacy. All this enables us to better contextualize the contribution of Guillaume de Machaut, who is traditionally viewed as the great pioneer of lyric composition in this period, shedding light on his compositional process, on what he learned from his predecessors, and how he honed his art in response to his contemporaries.