Nicholas Reyland – författare

This comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective on the stories that art music has told since the start of the 20th century. Contributors challenge the broadly held opinion that the loss of tonality in some music after 1900 also meant the loss of narrative in that music. To the contrary, the editors and essayists in this book demonstrate how experiments in approaching narrative in other media, such as fiction and cinema, suggested fresh possibilities for musical narrative, which composers were quick to exploit. The new conceptions of time, narrative voice, plot, and character that accompanied these experiments also had a significant impact on contemporary music. The repertoire explored in the collection ranges across a wide variety of genres and includes composers from Charles Ives and the Pet Shop Boys to Thomas Adès and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Witold Lutoslawski was one of the most important composers of the twentieth century, whose significance extends far beyond his native Poland. His vita is just as captivating as his compositionally path-breaking music.Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) was one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. His significance extends far beyond his native Poland: his classical music was premiered by internationally renowned performers likethe LaSalle Quartet and Krystian Zimerman, and his symphonies, concertante, chamber, instrumental and vocal music are produced by the leading labels of the recording industry. Lutoslawski's vita is just as captivating as his compositionally path-breaking music. He lived through the Second World War and brutal German oppression of Poland, negotiated the challenges of Soviet influence and fluctuating local politics during Poland's post-war transition to communism, and finally strove for a new voice in the post-Stalin Thaw of the mid-1950s.Lutoslawski's Worlds is a landmark volume which looks at the multi-faceted spheres that informed the composer's life and works andrepresents a new departure in the study of his music. Throughout his life, he steered musicologists away from the connections between his extraordinary biography and concert music. He also sought to minimize scholarly attention to the many other spheres of creative activity - popular music, theatre music, film scoring, propaganda music, and educational music - that occupied him. In this volume, for the first time, the world's leading Lutoslawski scholars consider the full range of his musical output and the biographical, cultural and historical contexts in which those musics were created. It contends that all of Lutoslawski's worlds are equally worthy of study, because each represents an opportunity better to understand the life and music of a figure of paramount importance to the critical and cultural history of twentieth-century music.

The Palgrave Handbook to Music and Sound in Peak TV charts the transformation of television’s sonic storytelling during the new “golden age” of televisual narrative from the late 1990s to the early 2020s. Grounded in close analytical, critical, and theoretical work identifying the key traits of music and sound in this “peak TV” period, the book casts its critical net wider to develop interpretations of significance not just for screen music studies and musicology, but for screen and media studies too. By theorizing “peakness” with respect to sound and music, and by drawing together contributions from a diverse collection of prominent musicologists, media scholars, and practitioners, this handbook provides the authoritative guide to the role music has played in creating the success of some of the most culturally and commercially significant popular art of the early twenty-first century.The volume contains 25 essays in three main sections—Concepts and Aesthetics, Practices and Production, and Audiences and Interpretations. Topics discussed include peakness, complexity, ostentatious scoring, antiheroes, memory, franchises, worldbuilding, nostalgia, maternity, trauma, actor’s voices, title sequences, library music, branding, queer/camp scoring, kids TV, captioning, industry practices, HBO, and sound design. Shows examined include The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Battlestar Galactica, Westworld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stranger Things, The Bridge, Dexter, Killing Eve, Mad Men, American Horror Story, Rings of Power, Fargo, Peaky Blinders, Call the Midwife, Twin Peaks, and Twin Peaks: The Return.