Mark Carroll - Böcker

Shortly before his death, Percy Grainger (1882-1961) lodged over twenty unpublished sketches in his Australian Museum. Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger draws exclusively from these sketches, revealing for the first time an illuminating portrait of the composer's life. With such titles as "The Aldridge-Grainger-Strom Saga," "Thunks," "Ere-I-Forget," "The Love-Life of Helen and Paris," and "Anecdotes," these manuscripts were intended as precursors to Grainger's autobiography, My Wretched Tone-Life, which he only commenced in his final years. Expertly shaping these sketches, the editors have created a "self-portrait" along the lines that Grainger himself had intended. The volume first introduces Grainger's forebears, parents, friends, wife, and himself before moving on to his views on composition, performance, and the musical world. In these sketches, Grainger addresses such topics as racial and national identity, the meaning of work, physical culture, language reform, sexual practice, and artistic patronage. Grainger also probes the nature of musical genius, discussing a broad range of composers including Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Beecham, Frederick Delius, Edvard Grieg, Charles Stanford, Cyril Scott, Fritz Kreisler, Donald Tovey, Ferruccio Busoni, and Balfour Gardiner. Among the works of his own that Grainger most featured are his The Warriors --Music for an Imaginary Ballet, Colonial Song, the Lincolnshire Posy series of band pieces, his greatest "hit" Country Gardens, and his many settings of English folk-music. Written in Grainger's own self-created "Nordic English" as well as translated from Danish, the language of his most intimate confessions, Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger sheds light on some of the most revealing details of the composer's life. The sketches trace Grainger's changing self-perception, from the romantically tinged, even lustful, views of his forties and fifties, through a period of wistfulness in his sixties, to the bitterness and self-loathing of his old age. The volume also includes several of Grainger's own drawings as well as both public and private photographs. A fascinating and revealing collection of vignettes, this extraordinary book will appeal to instructors, students, and enthusiasts in musicology, music history, cultural studies, and Australian, British, and American history.

This book places the radicalization of art music in early post-war France in its broader socio-cultural and political context. It pursues two general and intersecting lines of inquiry. The first details the stances towards musical conservatism and innovation adopted by cultural strategists representing Western and Soviet ideological interests at the onset of the Cold War. The second, which draws upon the commentaries of Theodor Adorno and Jean-Paul Sartre, recognizes that the Cold War generated a heightened political awareness amongst French musicians at the very time when the social relevance of avant-garde music had become the subject of widespread debate. The study considers the implications of the performance at L'Oeuvre du XXe siècle, an international arts festival staged in Paris in 1952 with the intention of discrediting socialist realism by means of two opposing musical types: neo-classicism (represented by Stravinsky's Symphony in C) and serialism (Boulez's Structures 1a).

This volume gathers together a cross-section of essays and book chapters dealing with the ways in which musicians and their music have been pressed into the service of political, nationalist and racial ideologies. Arranged chronologically according to their subject matter, the selections cover Western and non-Western musics, as well as art and popular musics, from the eighteenth century to the present day. The introduction features detailed commentaries on sources beyond those included in the volume, and as such provides an invaluable and comprehensive reading list for researchers and educators alike. The volume brings together for the first time seminal articles written by leading scholars, and presents them in such a way as to contribute significantly to our understanding of the use and abuse of music for ideological ends.

This volume gathers together a cross-section of essays and book chapters dealing with the ways in which musicians and their music have been pressed into the service of political, nationalist and racial ideologies. Arranged chronologically according to their subject matter, the selections cover Western and non-Western musics, as well as art and popular musics, from the eighteenth century to the present day. The introduction features detailed commentaries on sources beyond those included in the volume, and as such provides an invaluable and comprehensive reading list for researchers and educators alike. The volume brings together for the first time seminal articles written by leading scholars, and presents them in such a way as to contribute significantly to our understanding of the use and abuse of music for ideological ends.

Like all fields of creative endeavour, music has long been caught up - voluntarily and otherwise - in matters political. Music has been used and abused, claimed and disowned, for propaganda purposes, as a vehicle for protest, as a means of articulating national, racial and sexual identities, and in the name of religious, courtly, party political and commercial imperatives. Scholarly interest in the political dimensions of music and music making has increased greatly in recent decades to the point where a consolidated overview has become indispensable to furthering our understanding of the forces at play. This timely four volume series brings together classic essays addressing the intersection of music and politics, in the broad sense of the word, written by leading international scholars over the past few decades. The essays, which encompass art and vernacular musics in western and non-western cultures, ancient and modern, are grouped together under the headings of patronage, ideology, protest and identity politics. Each volume is edited by a recognized authority in their field and includes a select bibliography and an introduction which offers an authoritative overview of research in the area. This four-volume series offers a significant benefit to students, lecturers and libraries as it brings together leading articles in the field from disparate journals which are often difficult to locate and of limited access. Students are thus able to study leading articles side by side for comparison whilst lecturers are provided with an invaluable ’one-stop’ teaching resource.