Full-color display posters of famous composers. Each composer portrait measures 16 x 20, is printed on high-quality varnished stock, and includes a short, informative biography of the composer printed on the back. Each portrait set contains 20 posters and a separate booklet with biographies. The modern composers set contains: Debussy * R. Strauss * Sibelius * Rachmaninoff * Schoenberg * Ives * Ravel * Bartók * Villa-Lobos * Stravinsky * Prokofieff * Grofé * Hindemith * Thompson * Gershwin * Copland * Menotti * Britten * Shostakovich * Hanson.

Barry Moser is generally and justly regarded as the most important book artist of the past quarter-century, a tradition begun in this country by N.C. Wyeth, extended by Rockwell Kent, and furthered by artists as diverse as Jim Dine and Leonard Baskin. Moser's watercolors, woodcuts, and wood engravings have informed and adorned more than a hundred books, many of them central to the English-speaking canon, by writers such as Melville, Shelley, Welty, and Twain. In all his efforts, it is his preoccupation with the character of the creator that is manifest and dominant. Here, in a selection of one hundred portraits, fifty of them created especially for this book, we see the full range of his genius in portrayals of writers (Dante, Dickens, O'Connor, Willard, Oates), musicians and composers (Chopin, Handel, Wagner), artists (Whistler, Rembrandt, Shahn), and even politicians (Lincoln, King, Webster).

How does creativity thrive in the face of fascism? How can a highly artistic individual function professionally in so threatening a climate? The final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that includes Different Drummers (OUP 1992) and The Twisted Muse (OUP 1997), this is a detailed study of the often interrelated careers of eight outstanding German composers who lived and worked amid the dictatorship of the Third Reich: Werner Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Noted historian Michael H. Kater weighs issues of accommodation and resistance to ask whether these artists corrupted themselves in the service of a criminal regime -- and if so, whether this is evident in their music. He also considers the degrees to which the Nazis poetically, socially, economically, and aesthetically succeeded in their treatment of these individuals, whose lives and compositions represent diverse responses to totalitarianism.

Joshua S. Walden's study of the genre of musical portraiture since 1945 focuses on significant composers of the period, including Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, and György Ligeti. Grounding his exploration in key works, Walden uncovers contemporary understandings of music's capacity to depict identity, and of intersections between music, literature, theater, film, and the visual arts.