"Although Aaron Copland (1900-1990) is often credited with creating an unmistakably American musical style, he was strongly attracted to the music of Gustav Mahler. Drawing extensively on archival and musical materials, this is the first detailed exploration of Copland's multifaceted relationship with Mahler's music and its lasting consequences for music in America. Matthew Mugmon demonstrates that Copland, inspired by Mahler's example, blended modernism and romanticism in shaping a vision for American music in the twentieth century, and that he did so through his multiple roles as composer, teacher, critic, and orchestral tastemaker. Copland's career-long engagement with Mahler's music intersected with Copland's own Jewish identity and with his links to such towering figures in American music as Nadia Boulanger, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein"--

"Although Aaron Copland (1900-1990) is often credited with creating an unmistakably American musical style, he was strongly attracted to the music of Gustav Mahler. Drawing extensively on archival and musical materials, this is the first detailed exploration of Copland's multifaceted relationship with Mahler's music and its lasting consequences for music in America. Matthew Mugmon demonstrates that Copland, inspired by Mahler's example, blended modernism and romanticism in shaping a vision for American music in the twentieth century, and that he did so through his multiple roles as composer, teacher, critic, and orchestral tastemaker. Copland's career-long engagement with Mahler's music intersected with Copland's own Jewish identity and with his links to such towering figures in American music as Nadia Boulanger, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein"--

A pioneering study of how American composer Aaron Copland helped shape the sound of the Hollywood film industry and introduced the moviegoing public to modern musical styles.

A wide-ranging introduction to one of the twentieth century's most famous cultural icons: pianist, conductor, composer and educator Leonard Bernstein.

Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 1700s, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. In his series The Symphonic Repertoire, the late A. Peter Brown explored the symphony in Europe from its origins into the 20th century. In Volume V, Brown's former students and colleagues continue his vision by turning to the symphony in the Western Hemisphere. It examines the work of numerous symphonists active from the early 1800s to the present day and the unique challenges they faced in contributing to the European symphonic tradition. The research adds to an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur. This much-anticipated fifth volume of The Symphonic Repertoire: The Symphony in the Americas offers a user-friendly, comprehensive history of the symphony genre in the United States and Latin America.

The first feminist analysis of some of the most performed works in the American-opera canon, emphasizing the voices and perspectives of the sopranos who brought these operas to life. In the 1950s, composers and librettists in the United States were busy seeking to create an opera repertory that would be deeply responsive to American culture and American concerns. They did not break free, however, of the age-old paradigm so typically expressed in European opera: that is, of women as either saintly and pure or sexually corrupt, with no middle ground. As a result, in American opera of the 1950s, women risked becoming once again opera's inevitable victims. Yet the sopranos who were tasked with portraying these paragons of virtue and their opposites did not always take them as their composers and librettists made them. Sometimes they rewrote, through their performances, the roles they had been assigned. Sometimes they used their lived experiences to invest greater authenticity in the roles. With chapters on The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden, this book analyzes some of the most performed yet understudied works in the American-opera canon. It acknowledges Catherine Clément's famous description of opera as "the undoing of women," while at the same time illuminating how singers like Beverly Sills and Phyllis Curtin worked to resist such undoing, years before the official resurgence of the American feminist movement. In short, they ended up helping to dismantle powerful gendered stereotypes that had often reigned unquestioned in opera houses until then.

Mahler in Context explores the institutions, artists, thinkers, cultural movements, socio-political conditions, and personal relationships that shaped Mahler's creative output. Focusing on the contexts surrounding the artist, the collection provides a sense of the complex crosscurrents against which Mahler was reacting as conductor, composer, and human being. Topics explored include his youth and training, performing career, creative activity, spiritual and philosophical influences, and his reception after his death. Together, this collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide-ranging investigation of the ecology surrounding Mahler as a composer and a fuller appreciation of the topics that occupied his mind as he conceived his works. Readers will benefit from engagement with lesser known dimensions of Mahler's life. Through this broader contextual approach, this book will serve as a valuable and unique resource for students, scholars, and a general readership.