This book contains the full Labanotation score of "Soiree Musicale" with detailed study and performance notes, historical background and photographs. The first Tudor ballet to be made available in published form, "Tudor's Soiree Musicale" marks the first step towards preserving the work of this internationally celebrated choreographer, who pointed the way to a deeper psychological insight into the art of ballet. "Soiree Musicale" is a charming, lively piece which is suited to classroom study and stage performance. Although technically demanding when performed to full tempo, the dances allow for a degree of personal interpretation which can surmount technical problems. Ann Hutchinson Guest was a founder and for twenty years director of the New York City Dance Notation Bureau. She has been at the forefront of the development and use of Labanotation, spearheading new ideas in teaching methods incorporating notation. She is presently director of the Lan

In 1844, Mrs. Frederick Widder held a soirée musicale in her lavish Toronto home. Both the music and program were standard fare for the time but, for the author, it has implications beyond a single drawing-room extravaganza. Through the study of this elaborate domestic concert, the author reveals the way musical life affected and reflected contemporary values, thoughts and beliefs of the distinct categories of class and gender in pre-Confederation Canadian society.

In the summer of her 28th year, Edna Pontellier and her children, along with the wives and families of other prospective businessmen, spend the summer in an idyllic coastal community away from their husbands and the sweltering heat of 1890s' New Orleans. Aware of deep yearnings that are unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood, Edna plunges into an illicit liaison that reawakens her long dormant desires, inflames her heart, and eventually blinds her to all else.

Studies of concert life in nineteenth-century America have generally been limited to large orchestras and the programs we are familiar with today. But as this book reveals, audiences of that era enjoyed far more diverse musical experiences than this focus would suggest. To hear an orchestra, people were more likely to head to a beer garden, restaurant, or summer resort than to a concert hall. And what they heard weren’t just symphonic works—programs also included opera excerpts and arrangements, instrumental showpieces, comic numbers, and medleys of patriotic tunes. This book brings together musicologists and historians to investigate the many orchestras and programs that developed in nineteenth-century America. In addition to reflecting on the music that orchestras played and the socioeconomic aspects of building and maintaining orchestras, the book considers a wide range of topics, including audiences, entrepreneurs, concert arrangements, tours, and musicians’ unions. The authors also show that the period saw a massive influx of immigrant performers, the increasing ability of orchestras to travel across the nation, and the rising influence of women as listeners, patrons, and players. Painting a rich and detailed picture of nineteenth-century concert life, this collection will greatly broaden our understanding of America’s musical history.

Edward MacDowell’s European Piano Music is a critical study of the piano music that MacDowell composed during his European sojourn (1876–1888), steeped in reception history and with a special emphasis of programmaticism. The book expands current knowledge of MacDowell’s childhood in four of the chapters based on his previously uninvestigated sheet music collection, thereby achieving a better balance among the stages of MacDowell’s life than is evident in most books of the life-and-works variety. Prolific contemporaneous music criticism, meticulously preserved in MacDowell’s scrapbooks, is likewise undervalued in the MacDowell literature, but it furnishes penetrating observations about the expressive and programmatic content of numerous compositions, especially as it was revealed to critics when MacDowell performed his own works. Lastly, the book offers explanations for why MacDowell immersed himself in European culture for decades and then, at a crucial juncture in his career, embraced diverse American heritages and worked toward a conception of a pluralistic music that was American “in a creative sense.” The book’s content and methodology would appeal most directly to specialists within the broad fields of musicology and music theory, particularly within American art music and its composers; nineteenth-century music; program music; reception history; and piano literature.