Esteemed California music professor David Whealy is drawn to the other side of the country to investigate the circumstances behind his unexpected inheritance. As David probes deeper into the secrets of his benefactor, James Burton West, he finds more than just a wealth of unpublished music on the order of the great composers. David’s benefactor knew precious little about his own estate that had been in continuous family hands since 1724. He knew nothing about his colonial ancestor, a Thomas of historic import, nor the origins of that ancient iron key which held a secret even West knew nothing about. A secret which may well have redrawn the map of the United States.

"With unprecedented access to the archives at the Beethoven House in Bonn, ... Beethoven conductor and scholar Jan Caeyers ... weaves together a deeply human and complex image of Beethoven--his troubled youth, his unpredictable mood swings, his desires, relationships, and conflicts with family and friends, the mysteries surrounding his affair with the 'immortal beloved, ' and the dramatic tale of his deafness. Caeyers also offers new insights into Beethoven's music and its gradual transformation from the work of a skilled craftsman into that of a consummate artist"--Publisher marketing.

The most up-to-date contribution to the research on one of the most important and internationally famous composers of the Renaissance.

In Bach's Legacy: The Music as Heard by Later Masters, renowned Bach scholar Russell Stinson examines how four of the greatest composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, and Elgar - engaged with the musical legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach.

This collection of essays offers a historical reappraisal of what musical modernism was, and what its potential for the present and future could be. It thus moves away from the binary oppositions that have beset twentieth-century music studies in the past, such as those between modernism and postmodernism, between conceptions of musical autonomy and of cultural contingency and between formalist-analytical and cultural-historical approaches. Focussing particularly on music from the 1970s to the 1990s, the volume assembles approaches from different perspectives to new music with a particular emphasis on a critical reassessment of the meaning and function of the legacy of musical modernism. The authors include scholars, musicologists and composers who combine culturally, socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways.

Music Divided explores how political pressures affected musical life on both sides of the iron curtain during the early years of the cold war. In this groundbreaking study, Danielle Fosler-Lussier illuminates the pervasive political anxieties of the day through particular attention to artistic, music-theoretical, and propagandistic responses to the music of Hungary’s most renowned twentieth-century composer, Béla Bartók. She shows how a tense period of political transition plagued Bartók’s music and imperiled those who took a stand on its aesthetic value in the emerging socialist state. Her fascinating investigation of Bartók’s reception outside of Hungary demonstrates that Western composers, too, formulated their ideas about musical style under the influence of ever-escalating cold war tensions. Music Divided surveys Bartók’s role in provoking negative reactions to "accessible" music from Pierre Boulez, Hermann Scherchen, and Theodor Adorno. It considers Bartók’s influence on the youthful compositions and thinking of Bruno Maderna and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and it outlines Bartók’s legacy in the music of the Hungarian composers András Mihály, Ferenc Szabó, and Endre Szervánszky. These details reveal the impact of local and international politics on the selection of music for concert and radio programs, on composers’ choices about musical style, on government radio propaganda about music, on the development of socialist realism, and on the use of modernism as an instrument of political action.

Today, Claude Debussy's position as a central figure in twentieth-century concert music is secure, and scholarship has long taken for granted the enduring musical and aesthetic contributions of his compositions. Yet this was not always the case. Unknown to many concert-goers and music scholars is the fact that for years after his death, Debussy's musical aesthetic was perceived as outmoded, decadent, and even harmful for French music. In Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation, Marianne Wheeldon examines the vicissitudes of the composer's posthumous reception in the 1920s and 30s, and analyzes the confluence of factors that helped to overturn the initial backlash against his music. Rather than viewing Debussy's artistic greatness as the cause of his enduring legacy, she considers it instead as an effect, tracing the manifold processes that shaped how his music was received and how its aesthetic worth was consolidated. Speaking to readers both within and beyond the domain of French music and culture, Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation enters into dialogue with research in the sociology of reputation and commemoration, examining the collective nature of the processes of artistic consecration. By analyzing the cultural forces that came to bear on the formation of Debussy's legacy, Wheeldon contributes to a greater understanding of the inter-war period--the cultural politics, debates, and issues that confronted musicians in 1920s and 30s Paris--and offers a musicological perspective on the subject of reputation building, to date underrepresented in recent writings on reputation and commemoration in the humanities. Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation is an important new study, groundbreaking in its methodology and in its approach to musical influence and cultural consecration.