...The chapter illustrates the criticisms on music made by composer-critic Virgil Thomson. Thomson was hired to work for the Boston Evening Transcript. In America composer-critics are frowned upon, since it is assumed the critic's own tendency as a composer will create a bias. But almost all critics...

...This chapter appraises the relevance of proposing and asserting meanings that are grounded in an inside awareness of the cultural conditions under which homosexual composers have functioned, which helps in identifying the symbolic and transhistorical significance of music, from a well-defined lens...

... space; but if Beethoven is the author, then it leaves Liszt with an uncertain position. Over the years, it has become virtually axiomatic that the “realtime” performance of classical compositions undermines the concept of a fixed musical work whose composer is its author. Performance goes beyond...

... sure that things were done in a timely manner, no matter what kind of pressure had built up. He knew how to handle the heaviest of situations without showing worry. Duke had originally hired Strays as a lyricist when he was very young and found out that he was a great arranger and composer and loaded...

...This chapter discusses the works and career of Robert Schumann as music composer. Some music conductors have come to realize that Schumann was not a hopeless bumbler but was rather a good composer. Leonard Bernstein in the 1960s had faith in the rightness of Schumann's own instrumentation...

...This chapter analyzes the style, history, and form of Russian composer Nikolai Myaskovsky, who has always been the collectors' cult composer par excellence. What made him nevertheless copious was his freakishly prolific output. Despite a late start after a first career as a military engineer...

...This chapter portrays the great composer Dmitry Shostakovich as a fictional hero. The catastrophic loss of prestige since the 1960s has made it harder for composers of contemporary classical music to indulge the old canard that serious artists live only in history, not in society. There is a new...

...This chapter examines the qualities of English composer William Byrd as a traditionalist and innovator. It explains that while Byrd completely assimilated Continental techniques, he also strove to preserve various advantageous elements of insularity. He was a rather stubborn traditionalist...

... as strongly as possible the pre-eminence of Weelkes the madrigalist. The chapter also offers a partial explanation for some of the composer's structural tendencies that links him more firmly to the native tradition of William Byrd. Brown David Church music Anglican Liturgy Anglican Madrigals English...

...This chapter proposes one instance of the musical vitality of the Chapel Royal. It provides an example of a composer's responding to the demands of a particular occasion with some brilliance by weaving a new and fresh musical tapestry out of diverse threads spun inevitably in the recesses of his...

... that this relationship is not fantastic, incidental, or inessential to musicology and that it can and should be a primary source of knowledge about the performed work of art. It also asserts that carnal musicology bears witness to a genuinely reciprocal relationship between performer and composer. Boccherini Luigi works...

...This study describes the history of foreign support afforded to American experimental music from 1945 to 1990, particularly West Germany. It explains that during the second half of the twentieth century, American composer-performers and West German cultural institutions contributed...

...This book gathers together essays on the great British composer. These essays opened the door to gay studies in music, reinvigorated the study of Britten's work, and inspired a generation of scholars to imagine “the new musicology.” Addressing questions of how an artist's sexual, cultural...

...The debate about the extent to which Bloch was a “Jewish” or a “universalistic” composer intensified as a response to Bloch's Sacred Service. Paradoxically, it was the Sacred Service, the only composition Bloch wrote to a Jewish liturgical text, that represented...

...This introductory chapter explains the theme of this volume, which is about the works of Italian composer and cellist Luigi Boccherini. It analyzes the striking qualities of Boccherini's music including its virtuosity, repetitiveness, obsessively nuanced dynamics, delicate sonorities and rich...

...Igor Stravinsky's declaration about Bartók wasn't made under oath, so it may not rise to the level of an impeachable offense. But it was a half-truth at best. By 1959, a dozen years into the cold war, Stravinsky was following the herd and trying to establish credentials as a twelve-tone composer...

...This chapter explores the works and achievement of the music composer Dmitry Shostakovich. The achievement was not his alone, but was the convolute result of the enormous talent that he was dealt, the all-too-interesting times in which he lived, the nature of the medium in which he worked, and his...

... Strauss Johann Jr Behrman S N Caesar Irving DeSylva B G “Buddy” Gershwin Ira Israel “Izzy” brother Goldberg Isaac Heyward DuBose George Gershwin composer music studies Irving Berlin Rhapsody in Blue American in Paris Twentieth-century depictions of Gershwin tended toward one...

...This section is devoted to Nono's characteristic expressions as a “political” composer of the 1960s and 1970s. It considers the urgency of grounding the work of composition in an understanding of the historical emergence of social configurations, and represents the logical development...

...This introductory chapter discusses William Grant Still, an African American composer best known for his work, the Afro-American Symphony. It takes a look at the Harlem Renaissance and Still's aesthetic development within the context of the largely contested personal, professional...