Title: The American musical landscape 
Author: Crawford, Richard 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Music | Musicology | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: In this refreshingly direct and engaging historical treatment of American music and musicology, Richard Crawford argues for the recognition of the distinct and vital character of American music. What is that character? How has musical life been supported in the United States and how have Americans understood their music? Exploring the conditions within which music has been made since the time of the American Revolution, Crawford suggests some answers to these questions.Surveying the history of several musical professions in the United States - composing, performing, teaching, and distributing music - Crawford highlights the importance of where the money for music comes from and where it goes. This economic context is one of his book's key features and gives a real-life view that is both fascinating and provocative. Crawford discusses interconnections between classical and popular music, using New England psalmody, nineteenth-century songs, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin to illustrate his points.Because broad cultural forces are included in this unique study, anyone interested in American history and American Studies will find it as appealing as will students and scholars of American music.   [brief]
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Title: City culture and the madrigal at Venice 
Author: Feldman, Martha
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Music | Musicology | European History
Publisher's Description: Martha Feldman's exploration of sixteenth-century Venetian madrigals centers on the importance to the Venetians of Ciceronian rhetorical norms, which emphasized decorum through adherence to distinct stylistic levels. She shows that Venice easily adapted these norms to its long-standing mythologies of equilibrium, justice, peace, and good judgment. Feldman explains how Venetian literary theorists conceived variety as a device for tempering linguistic extremes and thereby maintaining moderation. She further shows how the complexity of sacred polyphony was adapted by Venetian music theorists and composers to achieve similar ends.At the same time, Feldman unsettles the kinds of simplistic alignments between the collectivity of the state and its artistic production that have marked many historical studies of the arts. Her rich social history enables a more intricate dialectics among sociopolitical formations; the roles of individual printers, academists, merchants, and others; and the works of composers and poets. City Culture offers a new model for situating aesthetic products in a specific time and place, one that sees expressive objects not simply against a cultural backdrop but within an integrated complex of cultural forms and discursive practices.   [brief]
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Title: Constructive dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the transformations of twentieth-century culture 
Author: Brand, Juliane
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Composers | Intellectual History | Art History
Publisher's Description: Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is a pivotal figure of musical modernism. The "father of serialism" has influenced nearly every major composer of this century, and the idea of Schoenberg, now wild-eyed radical, now embattled moralist, now lonely prophet, is woven into the mythos of modern art. What is more, the sites of his professional activity - fin de siècle Vienna, the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, and his "exile to paradise" in Los Angeles - bring home the representative quality of his life and works, which bear witness to some of the defining experiences of our time.This collection by leading Schoenberg scholars is an interdisciplinary examination of the historical, aesthetic, and intellectual issues that formed Schoenberg's creative persona and continue to influence our response to the modernist legacy of the first half of this century. The book's first section, "Contexts," investigates Schoenberg's sense of ethnic, religious, and cultural identity. The second section, "Creations," focuses on specific works and the interplay between creative impulse and aesthetic articulation. The final section, "Connections," addresses the relationship of Schoenberg's legacy to present-day thought and practice.   [brief]
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Title: The early works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893-1908 
Author: Frisch, Walter
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Music | Composers | Contemporary Music | Musicology
Publisher's Description: Here is the first full-scale account of Schoenberg's early tonal works, a rich repertory that music historians have tended to neglect or view as transitional to a mature atonal style.Between 1893 and 1908, Schoenberg created many genuine masterworks in the genres of Lieder, chamber music, and symphonic music. This book includes detailed critical analyses of such widely admired and performed compositions as Verklärte Nacht , Gurrelieder , and the First Chamber Symphony, as well as discussions of little-known but important songs and instrumental works from the earlier years.Drawing on original manuscript sources, on Schoenberg's musical environment, on a range of analytical methods, and on Schoenberg's own theories, Frisch traces the development of technique and aesthetic across this critical fifteen-year period of the composer's career.   [brief]
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Title: Italian music incunabula: printers and type 
Author: Duggan, Mary Kay Conyers
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Musical notation presented unusual challenges to the new craft of printing in the fifteenth century. Its demands were so difficult that the first impression of music from metal type was not made until a full twenty years after the first printed alphabetic texts. By the end of the century dozens of such fonts had appeared throughout Europe. The books that resulted were often impressive volumes of folio or large-folio size, printed in two colors, with woodcut illustrations.Mary Kay Duggan focuses on the technological processes developed in Italy to print music books. She begins by tracing the history and analyzing the techniques of casting and setting type and staves. She then identifies, classifies, and examines thirty-eight specific types. Finally, the author has compiled a descriptive bibliography of Italian music incunabula, including books containing either printed music or blank spaces for the insertion of manuscript music. Italian Music Incunabula marks a major advance in the study of the paleotypography of music. It greatly enhances our understanding of the impact of the printing press on music and the importance of music books in the work of early printers. Its meticulous bibliography of over 150 incunabula, concordances, and indices will make it the standard reference work for many years to come.   [brief]
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Title: Music as cultural practice, 1800-1900 
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Music | Musicology | European History | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: In Music as Cultural Practice , Lawrence Kramer adapts the resources of contemporary literary theory to forge a genuinely new discourse about music. Rethinking fundamental questions of meaning and expression, he demonstrates how European music of the nineteenth century collaborates on equal terms with textual and sociocultural practices in the constitution of self and society.In Kramer's analysis, compositional processes usually understood in formal or emotive terms reappear as active forces in the work of cultural formation. Thus Beethoven's last piano sonata, Op. 111, forms both a realization and a critique of Romantic utopianism; Liszt's Faust Symphony takes bourgeois gender ideology into a troubled embrace; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde articulates a basic change in the cultural construction of sexuality. Through such readings, Kramer works toward the larger conclusion that nineteenth-century European music is concerned as much to challenge as to exemplify an ideology of organic unity and subjective wholeness. Anyone interested in music, literary criticism, or nineteenth-century culture will find this book pertinent and provocative.   [brief]
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Title: Opera in seventeenth-century Venice: the creation of a genre 
Author: Rosand, Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Opera | European History
Publisher's Description: Ellen Rosand shows how opera, born of courtly entertainment, took root in the special social and economic environment of seventeenth-century Venice and there developed the stylistic and aesthetic characteristics we recognize as opera today. With ninety-one music examples, most of them complete pieces nowhere else in print, and enlivened by twenty-eight illustrations, this landmark study will be essential for all students of opera, amateur and professional, and for students of European cultural history in general.Because opera was new in the seventeenth century, the composers (most notably Monteverdi and Cavalli), librettists, impresarios, singers, and designers were especially aware of dealing with aesthetic issues as they worked. Rosand examines critically for the first time the voluminous literary and musical documentation left by the Venetian makers of opera. She determines how these pioneers viewed their art and explains the mechanics of the proliferation of opera, within only four decades, to stages across Europe. Rosand isolates two features of particular importance to this proliferation: the emergence of conventions - musical, dramatic, practical - that facilitated replication; and the acute self-consciousness of the creators who, in their scores, librettos, letters, and other documents, have left us a running commentary on the origins of a genre.   [brief]
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Title: Papal patronage and the music of St. Peter's, 1380-1513 
Author: Reynolds, Christopher A
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Music | Musicology | European History
Publisher's Description: A new picture of music at the basilica of St. Peter's in the fifteenth century emerges in Christopher A. Reynolds's fascinating chronicle of this rich period of Italian musical history. Reynolds examines archival documents, musical styles, and issues of artistic patronage and cultural context in a fertile consideration of the ways historical and musical currents affected each other.This work is both a historical account of performers and composers and an examination of how their music revealed their cultural values and educational backgrounds. Reynolds analyzes several anonymous masses copied at St. Peter's, proposing attributions that have biographical implications for the composers. Taken together, the archival records and the music sung at St. Peter's reveal a much clearer picture of musical life at the basilica than either source would alone. The contents of the St. Peter's choirbook help document musical life as surely as that musical life - insofar as it can be reconstructed from the archives - illumines the choirbook.   [brief]
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Title: Reflections of an American composer 
Author: Berger, Arthur 1912-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Music | American Music | Classical Music | Contemporary Music | Composers | Musicology
Publisher's Description: In this engrossing collection of essays, distinguished composer, theorist, journalist, and educator Arthur Berger invites us into the vibrant and ever-changing American music scene that has been his home for most of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and always entertaining, Berger describes the music scene in New York and Boston since the 1930s, discussing the heady days when he was a member of a tight-knit circle of avant-garde young composers mentored by Aaron Copland as well as his participation in a group at Harvard University dedicated to Stravinsky. As Virgil Thomson's associate on the New York Herald Tribune and founding editor of the prestigious Perspectives of New Music, Berger became one of the preeminent observers and critics of American music. His reflections on the role of music in contemporary life, his journalism career, and how changes in academia influence the composition and teaching of music offer a unique perspective informed by Berger's abundant intelligence and experience.   [brief]
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