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What we think music is shapes how we hear it. This book traces the history of the idea of pure—“absolute”—music from Pythagoras to the present, with special emphasis on efforts to reconcile the irreducible essence of the art with its profound effects on the human spirit. The core of this study focuses on the period 1850–1935, beginning with the collision between Richard Wagner and the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick. Wagner, who coined the term “absolute music” in 1846, used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For him, music that was “absolute” was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. Hanslick considered this quality of isolation a guarantor of purity: music could be understood only in terms of itself. Hanslick had few followers among musicians during his lifetime (1825–1904). By 1920, however, absolute music was being endorsed by leading modernists, including both Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The key impetus for this change came from discourse not about music but rather about the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism.

This book dissects the oft-invoked myth of a romantic Golden Age of Pianism. It discusses the performance-style of great pianists from Liszt to Paderewski and Busoni, and delves into the far-from-inevitable development of the piano recital. The book recounts how classical concerts evolved from exuberant, sometimes riotous events into the formal, funereal trotting out of predictable pieces they can be today; how an often unhistorical “respect for the score” began to replace pianists' improvizations and adaptations; and how the clinical custom arose that an audience should be seen and not heard. The book chronicles why pianists of the past did not always begin a piece with the first note of the score, nor end with the last. It emphasizes that anxiety over wrong notes is a relatively recent psychosis, and that playing entirely from memory a relatively recent requirement. The book presents a vivid tale of how drastically different are the recitals of the present compared to concerts of the past, and how their own role has diminished from noisily active participants in the concert experience to passive recipients of artistic benediction from the stage. The book's broad message proclaims that there is nothing divinely ordained about our own concert-practices, programming, and piano-performance styles. Many aspects of the modern approach are unhistorical — some laudable, some merely ludicrous. They are also far removed from those fondly remembered as constituting a Golden Age.

Few Mexican musicians in the twentieth century achieved as much notoriety or had such an international impact as the popular singer and songwriter Agustín Lara (1897–1970). Widely known as “el flaco de oro” (“the Golden Skinny”), this remarkably thin fellow was prolific across the genres of bolero, ballad, and folk. His most beloved “Granada,” a song so enduring that it has been covered by the likes of Mario Lanza, Frank Sinatra, and Placido Domingo, is today a standard in the vocal repertory. However, there exists very little biographical literature on Lara in English. This book's informed and informative placement of Lara's work in a broader cultural context presents a reading of the life of this significant musical figure. Lara's career as a media celebrity as well as musician provides an excellent window on Mexican society in the mid-twentieth century and on popular culture in Latin America. The book also delves into Lara's music itself, bringing to light how the composer's work unites a number of important currents in Latin music of his day, particularly the bolero.

Alan Jay Lerner was the lyricist of some of the most beloved musicals of all time, including My Fair Lady, Gigi, Brigadoon, and Camelot. Yet much of his work is less well known and his career has been overlooked in the scholarly literature on musicals. This book helps to bridge the gap by providing new insights into his working life through his professional correspondence with his colleagues and friends. The collection contains letters to Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, Frederick Loewe, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Leonard Bernstein, among many others. It also provides an extensive commentary outlining his early years and putting his career into context.

This book is a full-length biography in English of Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824), one of the great violinist-composers in the history of music, and arguably the most influential violinist who ever lived. He rose from humble origins as a blacksmith's son in a village near Turin, Italy, and early studies with Gaetano Pugnani, to a triumphant international career, particularly in Paris and London. His multifarious career as concert performer, composer, teacher, opera theater director, and impresario was played out against the backdrop of a dramatically changing world: from the ancien régime patronage of an Italian prince and the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, to the commercial and box-office–centered institutions of the early 19th century. Viotti's life was intensely dramatic. He knew tragedy as well as success: he was forced to flee the French Revolution, he was exiled from England for an extended period, his attempt to establish himself in business met with failure, and he died heavily in debt. His correspondence with an English family, the Chinnerys, with whom he was intimately associated for the last half of his life, provides an unusually revealing glimpse into his personal life. Viotti's biography is not without its mysteries, among which is his renunciation, twice in his life, of public performance. This study is based on extensive documentary research, much of it here revealed for the first time. Viotti's works are considered in the context of his life. Eleven appendices include translations of various Viotti-related archival documents, and additional information on Viotti's siblings, his places of residence, his violins, his unfinished violin method, and financial matters.

This collection of essays analyzes diverse musical creations with reference to the contexts in which the music is created and performed. The authors explain the music as sound in process, through prose, diagrams, transcriptions, recordings, and (online) multimedia presentations, all intended to convey the richness, beauty, and ingenuity of their subjects. The music ranges across geography and cultures—court music of Japan and medieval Europe, pagode song from Brazil, solos by the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk and by the sitar master Budhaditya Mukherjee, form-and-timbre improvisations of a Boston sound collective, South Korean folk drumming, and the ceremonial music of indigenous cultures in North American and Australia. Thus the essays diversify and expand the scope of this book’s companion volume, Analytical Studies in World Music, to all inhabited continents and many of its greatest musical traditions. An introduction and an afterword point out common analytical approaches, and present a new way to classify music according to its temporal organization. Two special chapters consider the juxtaposition of music from different cultures: of world-music traditions and popular music genres, and of Balinese music and European Art music, raising questions about the musical encounters and fusions of today’s interconnected world.

Combining the approaches of ethnomusicology and music theory, this book offers perspectives for thinking about how musical sounds are shaped, arranged, and composed by their diverse makers worldwide. Eleven in-depth explanations of Iranian sung poetry, Javanese and Balinese gamelan music, Afro-Cuban drumming, Shanghai opera, flamenco, modern American chamber music, Central African group singing, Bulgarian dance tunes, South Indian song, and a Mozart piano concerto create a diverse compendium of music analyses. Through description of contexts of performance and creation, and especially compositional and formal construction, each chapter proposes stimulating ways to hear, conceive, and imagine these repertoires. Selections on the companion recordings are carefully matched with extensive transcriptions and illuminating diagrams in every chapter. Opening rich cross-cultural and comparative perspectives on music, this volume addresses the practical needs of students and scholars in the contemporary world of fusions, contact, borrowing, and curiosity about music everywhere.

Familiar entertainment icons, stories, and signs from the 1950s and 1960s continue to resonate within contemporary American society and culture. Both the political Left and Right invoke the events and memories of those decades, celebrating or condemning the competing social forces embodied in and unleashed during those years. In recent decades, the entertainment industry has capitalized on this trend with films and television shows that often look back on the 1950s and 1960s with a mixture of nostalgia and criticism.

This book looks at the musical, from The Beggar's Opera to Wicked. Looking at Star Comic and Sweetheart Heroine; the war between musical comedy and operetta; the rise of the sexy story in the 1920s; the wedding of ballet and hoofing in the 1930s; Oklahoma! and Carousel “musical plays” of the 1940s; Novelty Star in the 1950s, and other developments, this book looks at George Gershwin to Ethel Merman to Jerome Robbins to the director-choreographer and the offbeat contemporary show: Porgy and Bess, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof, Chicago, A Chorus Line, Grand Hotel, Grey Gardens, and Rent. The book emphasizes not only the writing of musicals but the performing of them. Considering the development of dance, the book follows it from zany hoofing in the nineteenth century through the tap “combinations” of the 1920s and the injection of ballet and modern dance in the 1930s and 1940s. Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse, and Gwen Verdon: theirs was a time when dance seemed as crucial as music by Richard Rodgers or lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The book examines also the changing role of the star, noting how such early-twentieth-century headliners as Fred Stone seldom varied their portrayals, whether as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz or Little Red Ridinghood's fatherly guardian in The Stepping Stones.

This book approaches George Gershwin’s iconic Rhapsody in Blue as an “arrangement”—a status it has held since its inception in 1924, yet one unconsidered until now. It shifts the emphasis away from a centralized composition and from the sole agency of a single composer, positing a broad vision of the Rhapsody. Based on a host of newly discovered manuscripts, this book significantly alters existing historical and cultural conceptions of the Rhapsody. Each chapter engages a different set of previously unknown documents, providing the reader with a dynamic and multifaceted reappraisal of this emblematic piece of American music. In the process of remapping the terrain of the Rhapsody, new light is shed on familiar and lesser-known musicians who each used arrangements of the piece to establish their musical identities: Ferde Grofé, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Larry Adler, and Anthony Brown. Also considered over the course of the book is the role of visual media in the enduring status of both Gershwin and the Rhapsody, including forays into film, television, and the commercial advertising of United Airlines. The overlapping, divergent, and otherwise hidden narratives that emerge reveal how arrangements of Rhapsody in Blue have shaped the development and approach of musicians throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The reader emerges from the process with new conceptualizations of the Rhapsody, George Gershwin, and music-making in America.