New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 6th April 2020
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include an examination of Johann Sebastian Bach's creative process; an essay on the tendency of listeners to hear music as a projection of a composer's inner self; discussions of the music of Brahms, Offenbach, Verdi, and Berlioz; a reassessment of the music of Prokofiev in relation to its cultural context; a new musicological perspective on music after Debussy; a look at the world of Gilbert and Sullivan; an account of music in North Korea; an analysis of American fiddle music before the Civil War; and a biography of the extraordinary life of Frank Sinatra.
Classical Music
This companion volume to Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician delves deeply into Bach's rich collection of music and details the composer's creative process across various instrumental and vocal genres. Tracing his evolution as a composer, it compellingly illuminates the ideals and legacy of this giant of classical music in a new, refreshing light.
Available Format: Book
The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography
Mark Evan Bonds; Oxford University Press; Hardback
The Beethoven Syndrome is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer's inner self, a radically new way of listening that emerged only after Beethoven's death. This book traces the persistence of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present, revealing how perceptions of subjective expression have led to the present era of mixed paradigms of listening.
Available Format: Book
Covering Brahms's thirty-two song opuses published during four decades of song-writing, this book provides a wealth of information on the poets whose words he set. A substantial introduction, exploring the multiple meanings that song-poetry held for Brahms, is followed by essays on the forty-six poets whose verses he set. Each summarises the settings, Brahms's links to the poet, interconnections between the poets, and offers further context situating the poet within a wider literary, cultural and political landscape.
Available Format: Book
Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture
Laurence Senelick; Cambridge University Press; Paperback
This book, now available in a paperback edition, demonstrates the ways in which the phenomenon of Offenbach's operas took hold globally, with his work offering an irreverent, sexualised view of life which audiences found liberating. It argues that Offenbach's importance spread far beyond France, and that his provocative and entertaining works, often seen as being more style than substance, influenced numerous key artists, writers, and thinkers, and made a major contribution to the development of modern society.
Available Format: Book
The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz: Travels with the Orchestra
Inge van Rij; Cambridge University Press; Paperback
Although Berlioz frequently explored other worlds in his writings, from the imagined exotic enchantments of New Zealand to the rings of Saturn where Beethoven's spirit was said to reside, the settings for his musical works are more conservative, and his adventurousness has instead been located in his mastery of the orchestra. This book takes a new approach to Berlioz's treatment of the orchestra by exploring the relationship between the orchestra as abstract sound and as collective technology.
Available Format: Book
Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass
Yo Tomita, Robin Leaver, & Jan Smaczny (editors); Cambridge University Press; Paperback
Composed over the course of Johann Sebastian Bach's life, the Mass in B minor is considered by many to be his greatest and most complex work. The fourteen essays assembled in this volume originate from the International Symposium Understanding Bach's B Minor Mass, at which scholars from eighteen countries gathered to debate the latest topics in the field.
Available Format: Book
The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia
Roberta Montemorra Marvin (editor); Cambridge University Press; Paperback
Verdi's enduring presence on the opera stages of the world and as a subject for study by scholars in various disciplines has placed him as a central figure within modern culture. This book covers all aspects of his life, his music and his world, with appendices listing Verdi's known works, both published and unpublished, the characters in his operas and the singers who created them, as well as a chronology of his life.
Available Format: Book
Rethinking Prokofiev
Rita McAllister & Christina Guillaumier (editors); Oxford University Press; Paperback
More than sixty years after the composer's death, this book offers a reassessment of Prokofiev's music. It highlights the background and context of his work, delving into his relationship with nineteenth-century Russian traditions, Silver-Age and Symbolist composers and poets, the culture of Paris in the 1920s and '30s, and his later Soviet colleagues and younger contemporaries. It also investigates his reception in the West, his return to Russia, and the effect of his music on contemporary popular culture.
Available Format: Book
After Debussy: Music, Language, and the Margins of Philosophy
Julian Johnson; Oxford University Press; Hardback
Classical music shows a close relationship to language, and both musicology and philosophy have tended to approach music from that angle. This book turns that idea on its head, offering a new perspective on twentieth-century music that foregrounds a sensory logic of sound over quasi-linguistic ideas of structure or meaning. It argues that Debussy's music exemplifies this idea, and demonstrates his impact on composers from Fauré and Ravel to Dutilleux, Boulez, Grisey, Murail and Saariaho.
Available Format: Book
The Topsy Turvy World of Gilbert and Sullivan
Keith Dockray & Alan Sutton (editors); Fonthill Media; Paperback
No musical partnership has bequeathed a more enduring legacy in the mind of the public than that of Gilbert and Sullivan. Between 1877 and 1896, Gilbert wrote the librettos, and Sullivan the music, for no fewer than a dozen Savoy operas. Not only are the plots ingenious, the lyrics witty and the music compelling, the operas also present modern audiences with splendidly rich and satirical evocations of Victorian England and its society.
Available Format: Book
Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War
Jonathan Rosenberg; WW Norton; Hardback
Jonathan Rosenberg exposes the politics behind classical music, showing how German musicians were dismissed or imprisoned during World War I, while numerous German compositions were swept from American auditoriums. Rich with a stunning array of composers and musicians, this book delves into the volatile intersection of classical music and world politics to reveal a tumultuous history of twentieth-century America.
Available Format: Book
With five newly-written chapters and sizable additions to the nine original chapters, this second edition provides a welcome update to this essential guide. The new chapters offer insights beyond music and cognition including gender identity, sexual identity, and issues of cultural diversity not addressed in the first edition, also covering technology in instructional settings and including new references and updated student vignettes.
Available Format: Book
Popular, Traditional, & World Music
Songs for "Great Leaders": Ideology and Creativity in North Korean Music and Dance
Keith Howard; Oxford University Press; Hardback
This first book-length account of North Korean music in any language other than Korean moves from the first songs written in the northern part of the divided peninsula in 1946 to the performances in February 2018 by a North Korean troupe visiting South Korea for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. Through a wide range of sources, it explores old revolutionary songs and new pop songs, developments of Korean instruments, and mass spectacles, as well as dance and dance notation, and composers and compositions.
Available Format: Book
In the decades before the Civil War, American fiddling thrived mostly in oral tradition, but some fiddlers also wrote down versions of their tunes. Including more than 250 easy-to-read and clearly-notated fiddle tunes alongside biographies of fiddlers and careful analysis of their personal tune collections, this book tells the stories of two remarkable fiddlers who wrote down many hundreds of tunes, Charles M. Cobb and William Sidney Mount.
Available Format: Book
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