New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 21st March 2022
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include a new biography of Rachmaninoff; a collection of essays exploring the life and work of Berlioz; an assessment of the choral works of Vaughan Williams; a collection of correspondence between John Cage and Peter Yates; an examination of the music of Mieczysław Weinberg; the history of the Royal College of Music; a study of the influence of the Scottish bard, Ossian, on composers such as Mendelssohn and Beethoven; activities designed to enrich and diversify primary school music; an exploration of The Beatles as a symbol of modernity in the early 60s; and a new edition of a classic textbook on psychology for musicians.
Unquestionably one of the most popular composers of classical music, Sergei Rachmaninoff has not always been so admired by critics. Detractors have long perceived him as part of an outdated Romantic tradition from a bygone Russian world. This book re-situates Rachmaninoff in the context of his time, bringing together the composer and his music within the remarkably dynamic era in which he lived and worked.
Available Format: Book
Berlioz in Time: From Early Recognition to Lasting Renown
Peter Bloom; University of Rochester Press; Paperback
Written for both music lovers and scholars, these essays probe some of Berlioz's major works, including the Symphonie fantastique, Les nuits d'été, the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, Les Troyens, and Béatrice et Bénédict. The essays consider anew Berlioz's relationships with Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, his travels in Germany, his appreciation of English literature and Shakespeare, and his major twentieth-century biographers.
Available Format: Book
The Choral-Orchestral Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams: Autographs, Context, Discourse
Stephen Town; Lexington Books; Paperback
This book combines contextual knowledge, a musical commentary, an inventory of the holograph manuscripts, and a critical assessment of the opus to create substantial and meticulous examinations of Ralph Vaughan Williams's choral-orchestral works. The contents include a choice of pieces from the various stages in the life of the composer, including A Sea Symphony, Five Tudor Portraits, Dona nobis pacem, Hodie, and many others.
Available Format: Book
John Cage and Peter Yates: Correspondence on Music Criticism and Aesthetics
Martin Iddon; Cambridge University Press; Paperback
The correspondence between John Cage and Peter Yates represents the third and final part of Cage's most significant exchanges of letters, following those with Pierre Boulez and with David Tudor. By bringing together more than 100 letters, beginning in 1940 and continuing until 1971, this book reveals the dialogue within which many of Cage's ideas were first forged and informed, with particular focus on his developing attitudes to music criticism and aesthetics.
Available Format: Book
Music behind the Iron Curtain: Weinberg and his Polish Contemporaries
Daniel Elphick; Cambridge University Press; Paperback
Mieczysław Weinberg left his family behind and fled his native Poland in September 1939. He reached the Soviet Union, yet he remained mindful of the nation that he had left. This book examines how Weinberg's works written in Soviet Russia compare with those of his Polish contemporaries; how one composer split from his national tradition and how he created a style that embraced the music of a new homeland, while those composers in his native land surged ahead in a more experimental vein.
Available Format: Book
The Royal College of Music and its Contexts: An Artistic and Social History
David C. H. Wright; Cambridge University Press; Paperback
Located between the great Victorian museums of South Kensington and the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal College of Music, founded in 1883, has been a central influence on British musical life ever since. This wide-ranging account places the College within its musical and educational environments. It argues that the RCM's significance lies not only in its famous performers and composers, but also the generations of its more anonymous former students who have done so much to improve the musical life of the localities in which they have worked as teachers and animateurs.
Available Format: Book
Beyond Fingal's Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination
James Porter; University of Rochester Press; Paperback
This is the first study in English of musical compositions inspired by the poems published in the 1760s and attributed to a purported ancient Scottish bard named Ossian. From around 1780 onwards, the poems stimulated poets, artists, and composers in Europe as well as North America to break away from the formality of the Enlightenment. This book traces the traditional sources used by James Macpherson for his epoch-making prose poems and examines crucial works by composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Massenet.
Available Format: Book
Listen & Celebrate: Activities to enrich and diversify primary music
Helen MacGregor & Nathan Holder; Collins Music; Paperback
This book offers a selection of fifteen pieces from a range of time periods, countries and styles, celebrating the people who wrote the music and offering an immersive experience through active listening and composing activities. As well as supporting National Curriculum objectives for Key Stages 1 and 2, it will help to bring breadth and depth to children's musical experience and understanding, featuring composers from a range of backgrounds and experiences.
Available Format: Book
Though the Beatles are nowadays considered national treasures, this book shows how and why they inspired phobia as well as mania in 1960s Britain. As symbols of modernity in the early sixties, they functioned as a stress test for British institutions and identities, at once displaying the possibilities and establishing the limits of change. Drawing upon a wealth of contemporary sources, this book offers a new understanding of the band as existing in creative tension with postwar British society.
Available Format: Book
A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance
Hanif Abdurraqib; Penguin Books; Paperback
At the March on Washington, Josephine Baker reflected on her life and her legacy. She had spent decades as one of the most successful entertainers in the world, but, she told the crowd, "I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too". Inspired by these words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a stirring meditation on Black performance in the modern age, in which culture, history and his own lived experience collide.
Available Format: Book
"Why Aren't They Talking?": The Sung-Through Musical from the 1980s to the 2010s
Alex Badue; Cambridge University Press; Paperback
In the American musical theatre, the most typical form of structuring musicals has been the book musical, in which songs interrupt spoken dialogue. After 1980, sung-through musicals challenged the balance between talking and singing in musical theatre in scripts that are entirely or nearly entirely sung. This book focuses on American sung-through musicals composed and premiered between 1980 and 2019 to demonstrate how the musical reinvented itself toward and in the twenty-first century.
Available Format: Book
Psychology for Musicians: Understanding and Acquiring the Skills (Second Edition)
Robert Henley Woody; Oxford University Press; Paperback
In recent years, research in music psychology has revealed how musicians acquire the ability to convey emotional intentions as sounded music, how listeners perceive it as feelings and moods, and how this powerful process relates to social and cultural dynamics. Now brought up-to-date in a second edition, this book expands outside the context of Western academic settings and draws on insights from recent research in music psychology.
Available Format: Book
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