Cambridge Composer Studies – serie

Michael Tippett (1905-98) was one of the major figures of British music in this century. This volume of essays provides the first substantial writing on the composer for over a decade and includes the work of established scholars as well as several new voices. Essays encompass a range of genres and style periods, but a number of recurring themes may be detected. Broadly speaking, the book moves between technical discussion focused on individual works and wider questions of context - the 'external' factors that shaped the composer's musical production such as his relationship to the past, his fascination with ancient Greece and his pursuit of the transcendent. What emerges from this book is a rich portrait of a composer whose work reflects the century's triumphs and tragedies with particular intensity and who, at the end of his composing career, was increasingly acknowledged by younger composers as a major influence and example.

This book is the first major publication devoted to the music of Janácek, now widely regarded as one of the most important composers of the early twentieth century. The essays, all by leading scholars, deal with a broad range of subjects relating to opera, symphonic poem, instrumental music, cultural context and reception. Some topics, such as the sources of Janácek's musical expressivity, questions of narrative, Janácek as musical analyst and Janácek as realist, are considered seriously for the first time, whilst other more conventional topics, such as 'speech melody' and Janácek's ethnographic activities, are reappraised. A transcription of Janácek's analytical study of 'Jeux de vagues' from Debussy's La mer is published for the first time, and this document is considered in the light of Janácek's theory of music as a whole and of the reception of La mer.

Few composers' posthumous reputations have grown as steadily as Shostakovich's. Yet outside the concert hall the focus of attention seems to have been on the extraordinary circumstances of his life rather than on the music itself. This book seeks to show that the power of his work stems as much from its craftsmanship as from its political and personal context. The theoretical chapters lay the foundation for a proper understanding of Shostakovich's musical language for the first time in the West. The social context is not neglected, however, and alongside many new insights spread through the book, a substantial and provocative chapter considers the issues surrounding the composition of the Fifth Symphony. The eleven essays in the volume draw together some of the finest scholars of Russian music in Europe, Russia and America.

The second volume of studies based on the work of Heinrich Schenker, now recognised as the twenty-first century's most influential figure in the areas of music theory and analysis. The first section of the book contains three archival studies that derive from the contents of Schenker's Nachlass, recently made available to scholars. Schenker's unpublished papers also supplement several of the analytical studies in the second, larger section of the book. Eleven essays fall into four groups: studies in the Classic and Romantic repertory, studies in twentieth-century music, rhythmic studies and studies in the theory of Schenker's fundamental analytical constructs, the Urline and the Ursatz.

The advances in Haydn scholarship would have been unthinkable to earlier generations, who honoured the composer more in word than in deed. Haydn Studies deals with many aspects of a composer who is perennially fresh, concentrating principally on matters of reception, style and aesthetics and presenting many interesting readings of the composer's work. Haydn has never played a major role in accounts of cultural history and has never achieved the emblematic status accorded to composers such as Beethoven, Debussy and Stravinsky, in spite of his radical creative agenda: this volume broadens the base of our understanding of the composer.

This volume contains nine substantial essays by the world's leading Berlioz scholars. They cover various aspects of Berlioz's life and works and represent an important contribution to Berlioz research. The book includes essays based on documents, both biographical and musical, that give us, among other things, a portrait of the artist as a young man and a revealing view of an important but little-studied work of his maturity. There are readings of Romeo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust that wrestle anew with the problems of the relationships between literature and music and - as Berlioz's music nearly always requires - with the problems of genre. Two views of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'été are presented which ask when and why the work was conceived, and how the work coheres. The practical question of Berlioz's metronome marks are here thoroughly studied for the first time. The volume closes with a novel piece, in dialogue form, by the elder statesman of Berlioz scholars, Jacques Barzun, who treats with exceptional grace the profound issues raised by Berlioz the man and musician.

The life and works of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy are enjoying a considerable resurgence of interest. This volume presents the most recent trends in Mendelssohn research, covering three broad categories - reception history, historical and critical essays, and case studies of particular compositions. Much of the book depends on a wealth of primary nineteenth-century documents, including little-known autograph manuscripts, letters, and sketches of the composer. Four studies consider various facets of Mendelssohn reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Friedhelm Krummacher considers the abiding popularity of Mendelssohn's music in England, while Peter Ward Jones reviews Mendelssohn's business dealings with English publishers; Donald Mintz examines the composer's posthumous reputation from the perspective of the revolutionary agenda of mid-nineteenth-century Germany; and Lawrence Kramer considers dynamic multiple layers of meaning in the Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture and The First Walpurgisnacht. Four essays, by Judith Silber-Ballan, J. Rigbie Turner, Wm. A. Little, and David Brodbeck, treat Mendelssohn's relationships with A. B. Marx, E. Devrient, Franz Liszt, and Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Finally, two studies by R. Larry Todd and Christa Jost focus on two major piano works, the Preludes and Fugues op. 35 and the Variations serieuses op. 54.

This symposium celebrates the 450th anniversary of the birth of William Byrd, one of the greatest English composers. Twelve scholars contribute essays which together cover all the genres of Byrd's prolific output. Topics discussed in this collection include authentication of the canon, applications of technology to Byrd research, Byrd's relationship to earlier English traditions and his influence on his successors. There are studies concerned with manuscript sources and aspects of performance and the final contribution is a comprehensive listing of Byrd recordings made between 1923 and 1988. The essays in this volume show a variety of approaches to musical analysis and some of the conclusions are controversial, or offer revisions of earlier opinions.

The tercentenary of Henry Purcell's death fell in 1995, and this 1995 volume of specially commissioned essays was collected to celebrate Purcell's music in his tercentenary year. The essays are representative of the best research and deal mainly with the autograph manuscripts, Purcell's compositional technique, the relationship between Purcell and his teacher John Blow, a reassessment of Purcell court odes, performance practice and wordsetting, and eighteenth-century reception history, particularly regarding King Arthur. The volume is well illustrated with music examples and photographs of important manuscripts. It also analyses Purcell's compositional techniques through detailed study of his manuscripts and reports on the discovery of two important autograph manuscripts. The book opens with an assessment of Purcell's illusive personality.

Mahler Studies comprises ten innovative essays on topics spanning the range of Mahler research. Blaukopf's inquiry into critical influences on Mahler's student years provides background for Reilly's reassessment of sources for 'Opus 1', Das klagende Lied. McClatchie introduces Mahler's previously inaccessible correspondence with family members, while Feder presents insightful psychoanalytic perspectives on Mahler's relationships to his sister Justine and other women in his life before Alma. Mitchell and La Grange explore the complex issue of quotation and allusion in Mahler's oeuvre. The long-restricted Seventh Symphony sketchbook provides detailed glimpses of that Mahlerian 'world' emerging in its earliest stages, as documented by Hefling. Issues of tonal structure and coherence are addressed by Agawu and Williamson, while Franklin on Adorno's Mahler provides a clear explication of that author's dialectic engagement with the composer.

This book, first published in 2001, presents a portrait of Jean Sibelius as composer and man, a figure of national and international significance, patriot, husband and father. Three introductory articles explore Sibelius's reception in Finland, performance practice and recording history, and Sibelius's aesthetic position with regard to modernity. The second group of essays examines issues of ideology, sexuality and mythology, and their relationship to musical structure and compositional genesis. Studies of the Second, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies are presented in the concluding section. Collectively, these articles address historical, theoretical and analytical issues in Sibelius's most important works. The analyses are supported by investigations of Sibelius's compositional process as documented by the manuscripts and sketches primarily in the Sibelius Collection of the Helsinki University Library. Exploring Sibelius's innovative approach to tonality, form and texture, the book delineates his unique brand of modernism, which has proven highly influential in the late twentieth century.

This second volume of essays in Chopin Studies contains Chopin research by twelve leading scholars. Three main topics are addressed: reception history, aesthetics and criticism, and performance studies. The first four chapters investigate certain images associated with Chopin during his lifetime and after his death: Chopin as classical composer, as salon composer, as modernist, as 'otherwordly', as androgyne. The next four essays contextualize and define aspects of his musical language, including narrative stuctures, baroque affinities, progressive tendencies and functional ambiguity. The last four deal with analysis and source study as related to performance, structure and expression, tempo rubato and 'authentic' interpretation. The book ends with a thumbnail sketch of Chopin as revealed in a recently discovered diary for 1847-8.

Bruckner Studies, first published in 1997, presents musicological and theoretical research on the life and music of Anton Bruckner. It is one of the most important English-language books on the composer since Robert Simpson's The Essence of Bruckner. The essays provide fresh biographical insights into his enigmatic personality, working procedures, and circle of students and friends; consider the fascinating history of the dissemination of his music during his lifetime and in this century, including its reception in Nazi Germany; and provide analytical perspectives on his musical style and its origins. The volume challenges the reader to reassess the man and his music in a fresh light, unencumbered by decades of special interest and propaganda which have coloured perceptions of Bruckner for more than a century.

This collection of essays on Vaughan Williams brings together leading British and American scholars and covers a wide range of topics and approaches, exploring musical language, cultural context, biography, manuscript sources and reception history. Despite Vaughan Williams' seminal importance in British music, international stature as a symphonist, and wider significance as an icon of Englishness, very little new research on his life or music has been published since the mid-1960s. The ten essays presented here examine diverse subjects such as the place of Vaughan Williams in the construction of English national identity this century, the role of rhythm in his symphonies, music for propaganda films, and his unpublished early orchestral pieces; major works such as the Tallis Fantasia and the Fifth Symphony are analysed in depth.

When Shostakovich Studies was published in 1995, archival research in the ex-Soviet Union was only just beginning. Since that time, research carried out in the Shostakovich Family Archive, founded by the composer's widow Irina Antonovna Shostakovich in 1975, and the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture has significantly raised the level of international Shostakovich studies. At the same time, scholarly understanding of Soviet society and culture has developed significantly since 1991, and this has also led to a more nuanced appreciation of Shostakovich's public and professional identity. Shostakovich Studies 2 reflects these changes, focusing on documentary research, manuscript sources, film studies and musical analysis informed by literary criticism and performance. Contributions in this volume include chapters on Orango, Shostakovich's diary, behind-the-scenes events following Pravda's criticisms of Shostakovich in 1936 and a new memoir of Shostakovich by the Soviet poet Evgeniy Dolmatovsky, as well as analytical studies from a range of perspectives.

Over the course of an astonishingly long career, Elliott Carter has engaged with many musical developments of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries - from his early neo-classic music of the interwar period, to his modernist works of conflict and opposition in the 1960s and 1970s, to the reshaping of a modernist aesthetic in his latest compositions. Elliott Carter Studies throws new light on these many facets of Carter's extensive musical oeuvre. This collection of essays presents historic, philosophic, philological and theoretical points of departure for in-depth investigations of individual compositions, stylistic periods in Carter's output and his contributions to a variety of genres, including vocal music, the string quartet and the concerto. The first multi-authored book to appear on Carter's music, it brings together research from a distinguished team of leading international Carter scholars, providing the reader with a wide range of perspectives on an extraordinary musical life.

The historical importance of composer Jean-Baptiste Lully has long been recognised. Regarded as the founder of French opera, as the embodiment of Baroque musical style and a key figure in the development of court ballet, his work enjoys popularity and scholarly interest. This volume presents the best research on Lully's life, his work and his influence. Eleven essays by American and European scholars address a wide range of topics including Lully's genealogy, the Tragédie Lyrique, Lully's Palais Royal theatre, the collaboration with Molière, the transmission of Lully's work away from the Ile-de-France, and an unexplored link with Marcel Proust. Illustrated with musical examples and photographs, the volume also contains surprising archival discoveries about the composer's early life in Tuscany and new information about his manuscript sources. It will interest all those involved in the music of Lully and his time, whether musicologists, historians, performers or listeners.

This collection of essays looks at the music of Webern from several different perspectives. Webern scholarship, based on the sketches and other primary material now owned by the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel and the Library of Congress in Washington, has emphasised Webern's lyricism, and this is a theme running through Webern Studies. Most of the essays are the result of work with primary material. The volume includes entries from Webern's diaries, and all of the row tables for his twelve-note music. A comprehensive Webern bibliography covers thoroughly the period since Zoltan Roman's bibliography of 1978.

C. P. E. Bach Studies collects together nine wide-ranging essays by leading scholars of eighteenth-century music. Offering fresh perspectives on one of the towering figures of the period, the authors explore Bach's music in its cultural contexts, and show in diverse and complementary ways the reciprocal relationship between Bach's work and contemporary literary, theological, and aesthetic debates. Topics include Bach's relation to theories of sensibility and the sublime; the free fantasy and concepts of self and being; and Bach's engagement with music history and the legacy of his predecessors. Wider questions of C. P. E. Bach reception also play an important part in the book, which explores not only the interpretation of Bach's music in his time, but also its reception over the two centuries since his death.

Our knowledge of Debussy's life and music has increased considerably during the last decade or so, largely through the efforts of those working on the long overdue complete edition of his music. Many of the contributors to this volume, first published in 1997, have worked on various pieces in the complete edition and the significance of their research is apparent here. Topics include an examination of Debussy's working methods, his visual tastes and his response to literature, his reception in England, as well as aspects of performance practice. It also includes a close study of Debussy's relationship to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. An appendix reproduces a discarded scene from Maeterlinck's 'Pelléas' for the first time, and the book is particularly rich in previously unpublished facsimiles and other little-known illustrative material.

The French composer Olivier Messiaen is one of the major figures of twentieth-century music. This collection of scholarly essays offers new cultural, historical, biographical and analytical perspectives on Messiaen's musical oeuvre from 1941 to 1992. The volume includes: a fascinating snapshot of Messiaen's life in occupied France; a study of the Surrealist poetics of Messiaen's song cycle Harawi; a chapter on Messiaen's iconoclastic path to the avant-garde heritage that he bequeathed to his pupils; discussion on Messiaen's place in twentieth-century music; and detailed analysis of specific works, including his opera St François d'Assise. The chapters provide fresh insights on the origins, style and poetics of Messiaen's music, and therefore provide an inspiration and foundation for future scholarship. Reflecting and expanding upon the broad range of Messiaen's own interdisciplinary interests, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of music, art, literature and theology.

2009 marked the 75th birthday of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, an occasion that presented an opportunity for reflection upon, and appreciation of, a period of compositional achievement that extends from the 1950s to the present. This book forms part of that reflection through a statement of the current condition of research on Maxwell Davies's music. Detailed analytical discussions of individual works, such as the opera Taverner and the First Symphony, coexist with broader issues and perspectives, including Davies's own writings about music, his engagement with sonata form, the compositional source, problems of text, and the situating of this music within and in relation to 'modern times'. The book describes selected works from all periods of Davies's rich and diverse career, resulting in a portrait of the music that, while it may be incomplete, reveals the essence of this remarkable composer and his music.

This symposium celebrates the 450th anniversary of the birth of William Byrd, one of the greatest English composers. Twelve scholars contribute essays which together cover all the genres of Byrd's prolific output. Topics discussed in this collection include authentication of the canon, applications of technology to Byrd research, Byrd's relationship to earlier English traditions and his influence on his successors. There are studies concerned with manuscript sources and aspects of performance and the final contribution is a comprehensive listing of Byrd recordings made between 1923 and 1988. The essays in this volume show a variety of approaches to musical analysis and some of the conclusions are controversial, or offer revisions of earlier opinions.

This volume contains nine substantial essays by the world's leading Berlioz scholars. They cover various aspects of Berlioz's life and works and represent an important contribution to Berlioz research. The book includes essays based on documents, both biographical and musical, that give us, among other things, a portrait of the artist as a young man and a revealing view of an important but little-studied work of his maturity. There are readings of Romeo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust that wrestle anew with the problems of the relationships between literature and music and - as Berlioz's music nearly always requires - with the problems of genre. Two views of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'été are presented which ask when and why the work was conceived, and how the work coheres. The practical question of Berlioz's metronome marks are here thoroughly studied for the first time. The volume closes with a novel piece, in dialogue form, by the elder statesman of Berlioz scholars, Jacques Barzun, who treats with exceptional grace the profound issues raised by Berlioz the man and musician.

This second volume of essays in Chopin Studies contains Chopin research by twelve leading scholars. Three main topics are addressed: reception history, aesthetics and criticism, and performance studies. The first four chapters investigate certain images associated with Chopin during his lifetime and after his death: Chopin as classical composer, as salon composer, as modernist, as 'otherwordly', as androgyne. The next four essays contextualize and define aspects of his musical language, including narrative stuctures, baroque affinities, progressive tendencies and functional ambiguity. The last four deal with analysis and source study as related to performance, structure and expression, tempo rubato and 'authentic' interpretation. The book ends with a thumbnail sketch of Chopin as revealed in a recently discovered diary for 1847-8.

The life and works of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy are enjoying a considerable resurgence of interest. This volume presents the most recent trends in Mendelssohn research, covering three broad categories - reception history, historical and critical essays, and case studies of particular compositions. Much of the book depends on a wealth of primary nineteenth-century documents, including little-known autograph manuscripts, letters, and sketches of the composer. Four studies consider various facets of Mendelssohn reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Friedhelm Krummacher considers the abiding popularity of Mendelssohn's music in England, while Peter Ward Jones reviews Mendelssohn's business dealings with English publishers; Donald Mintz examines the composer's posthumous reputation from the perspective of the revolutionary agenda of mid-nineteenth-century Germany; and Lawrence Kramer considers dynamic multiple layers of meaning in the Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture and The First Walpurgisnacht. Four essays, by Judith Silber-Ballan, J. Rigbie Turner, Wm. A. Little, and David Brodbeck, treat Mendelssohn's relationships with A. B. Marx, E. Devrient, Franz Liszt, and Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Finally, two studies by R. Larry Todd and Christa Jost focus on two major piano works, the Preludes and Fugues op. 35 and the Variations serieuses op. 54.

The tercentenary of Henry Purcell's death fell in 1995, and this 1995 volume of specially commissioned essays was collected to celebrate Purcell's music in his tercentenary year. The essays are representative of the best research and deal mainly with the autograph manuscripts, Purcell's compositional technique, the relationship between Purcell and his teacher John Blow, a reassessment of Purcell court odes, performance practice and wordsetting, and eighteenth-century reception history, particularly regarding King Arthur. The volume is well illustrated with music examples and photographs of important manuscripts. It also analyses Purcell's compositional techniques through detailed study of his manuscripts and reports on the discovery of two important autograph manuscripts. The book opens with an assessment of Purcell's illusive personality.

Few composers' posthumous reputations have grown as steadily as Shostakovich's. Yet outside the concert hall the focus of attention seems to have been on the extraordinary circumstances of his life rather than on the music itself. This book seeks to show that the power of his work stems as much from its craftsmanship as from its political and personal context. The theoretical chapters lay the foundation for a proper understanding of Shostakovich's musical language for the first time in the West. The social context is not neglected, however, and alongside many new insights spread through the book, a substantial and provocative chapter considers the issues surrounding the composition of the Fifth Symphony. The eleven essays in the volume draw together some of the finest scholars of Russian music in Europe, Russia and America.

Our knowledge of Debussy's life and music has increased considerably during the last decade or so, largely through the efforts of those working on the long overdue complete edition of his music. Many of the contributors to this volume, first published in 1997, have worked on various pieces in the complete edition and the significance of their research is apparent here. Topics include an examination of Debussy's working methods, his visual tastes and his response to literature, his reception in England, as well as aspects of performance practice. It also includes a close study of Debussy's relationship to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. An appendix reproduces a discarded scene from Maeterlinck's 'Pelléas' for the first time, and the book is particularly rich in previously unpublished facsimiles and other little-known illustrative material.