Analyzing the Music of Living Composers (and Others) is a collection of essays that grew out of the 2010 annual meeting of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis. The stated purpose was to apply traditional music-analytic techniques, as well as new, innovative techniques, to describing the music of composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The goal was to take steps toward making the music of our time a bit less impenetrable for our colleagues, students and other listeners by showing how it follows, varies, and sometimes controverts the organizational schemes of older music. This collection includes chapters analyzing music of older eras as well, including a number that throw light on the analysis of recent music in unexpected ways, and there are also several chapters that propose innovative analytic approaches to recent popular music and jazz.

Jack Boss takes a unique approach to analyzing Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, adapting the composer's notion of a 'musical idea' - problem, elaboration, solution - as a framework and focusing on the large-scale coherence of the whole piece. The book begins by defining 'musical idea' as a large, overarching process involving conflict between musical elements or situations, elaboration of that conflict, and resolution, and examines how such conflicts often involve symmetrical pitch and interval shapes that are obscured in some way. Containing close analytical readings of a large number of Schoenberg's key twelve-tone works, including Moses und Aron, the Suite for Piano Op. 25, the Fourth Quartet, and the String Trio, the study provides the reader with a clearer understanding of this still-controversial, challenging, but vitally important modernist composer.

Form and Process in Music, 1300–2014: An Analytic Sampler draws together papers delivered at the 2014 meeting of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis. The conference spanned an unusually wide spectrum of musical styles, including papers on European twelve-tone music after the Second World War, fourteenth-century music, pop music and jazz, the music of living composers, narrative and characterization, and the history of music theory. The title of the book reflects the large span of musical cultures that are represented within, but also accounts for the common thread through all of these essays, a strong emphasis on understanding the forms and processes of music through analysis. The reader will find within it a compendium of analytic techniques for numerous musical styles.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Musical Portraits : Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers" by Paul Rosenfeld. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Winner of the 2022 Vincent H. Duckles Award, Music Library Association John Adams: A Research and Information Guide offers the first comprehensive guide to the musical works and literature of one of the leading American composers of our time. The research guide catalogs and summarizes materials relating to Adams’s work, providing detailed annotated bibliographic entries for both primary and secondary sources. Covering writings by and interviews with Adams, books, journal articles and book chapters, newspaper articles and reviews, dissertations, video recordings, and other sources, the guide also contains a chronology of Adams’s life, a discography, and a list of compositions. Robust indexes enable researchers to easily locate sources by author, composition, or subject. This volume is a major reference tool for all those interested in Adams and his music, and a valuable resource for students and researchers of minimalism, contemporary American music, and twentieth-century music more broadly.

In this well-written work, the author argues that the present situation regarding the music of the classical tradition is fundamentally untenable. While change is, of course, inevitable, the author posits that teachers of the classical music tradition, nonetheless, have a moral responsibility to do as much as possible to advocate and work toward goals that will hasten and most positively influence the direction of change. The author believes that the present relationship between the music of the Western classical tradition and the culture of the present is an unhealthy one. The music of dead composers comprises the overwhelming preponderance of music heard today, especially in the larger venues such as symphony halls and opera houses. Specifically, the author argues that we must promote and provide for (at least) an equal place in our teaching, recordings, and performances for the music of composers who are living at the time we undertake these activities. He further advocates that this is not simply a matter of currency, it is a matter of cultural vibrancyeven survivaland it is an ethical and aesthetic concern toward which we must direct our most serious attention and effort. As both a singer and a teacher, the author delivers a resounding perspective in this book. He also brings the important insights of others from other fields such as literature, philosophy, and theater. The authors discussions revolve around the situation of classical music, a situation that in many ways exemplifies the gradual transformation of the rationalization of the world, into the radical commodification of the world. This outcome will be shown to be intimately linked to ethical and aesthetic issues, whichwill be developed by means of an extended consideration of the conflict between the rational and the a-rational as it plays itself out in contrasts between music, art, and literature, and science and philosophy. The book delves into the problem of teaching music, particularly the problems commonly dealt with in the teaching studio. Teachers of the Western music tradition have developed tried and true techniques for dealing with these problems as they occur in teaching, generally by helping students toward an understanding of historical, musical, technical and stylistic problems, among a host of others. These common problems of teaching are, however, symptomatic of very deep, complicated, and endemic philosophical issues that have, so far, been insufficiently discussed in a form that might be useful to teachers, performers, and lovers of the music of the Western classical music tradition. The most unique contribution of these discussions is the investigation into what is not discussed to any depth in pedagogy bookswhat lies behind or beneath these commonly experienced problems. This is a critical book for collections in music.