Mastering the technical skills needed for fruitful music composition is relatively straightforward compared to the development of crucial creative-thinking strategies. While most introductory texts emphasize techniques, this affordable guide goes far beyond the initial stage of methods instruction to engage readers at a profound level. The author believes composers, as a first priority, must know what they are doing creatively and why they are doing it before segueing to learning the basic tools for the task. Unique yet practical, concise yet comprehensive, Essentials for Composers guides novice composers through a set of basic steps, examples, and concepts to help them work through stages of the creative process in manageable and stimulating ways. Middleton explains how to approach each topic (harmony, melody, counterpoint, orchestration, variation) and explore the creative process through experimentation by completing related exercises. Such direction, which prompts efforts toward defining, developing, discovering, and shaping one’s own creative process, unseals the essence of music composition. Relevant for students with interests ranging from film scoring to preparing music for digital games, Essentials for Composers is suitable for those who compose with or without the aid of technology. Bibliographies, score summaries, interviews with two composers, and analytical interludes prompt further investigation of topics.

Music, we are often told, is a language. But if music is a language, then who is speaking? The Composer's Voice tries to answer this obvious but infrequently raised question. In so doing, it puts forward a dramatistic theory of musical expression, based on the view that every composition is a symbolic utterance involving a fundamental act of impersonation. The voice we hear is not that of the composer himself, but of a persona--a musical projection of his consciousness that experiences and communicates the events of the composition. Developing his argument by reference to numerous examples ina wide variety of styles, Mr. Cone moves from song and opera through program music to absolute instrumental music. In particular, he discusses the implications of his theory for performance. According to the dramatistic view, not only every singer but every instrumentalist as well becomes a kind of actor, assuming a role that functions both autonomously and as a component of the total musical persona. In his analysis of the problems inherent in this dual nature of the performer's job, Mr. Cone offers guidance that will prove of practical value to every performing musician. He has much to say to the listener as well. He recommends an imaginative participation in the component roles of musical work, leading to a sense of identification with the persona itself, as the path to complete musical understanding. And this approach is shown to be relevant to a number of specialized kids of listening as well--those applicable to analysis, historical scholarship, and criticism. The dance, too, is shown to depend on similar concepts. Although The Composer's Voice involves an investigation of how music functions as a form of communication, it is not primarily concerned with determine, or interpreting, the "content" of the message. A final chapter, however, puts forward a tentative explanation of musical "meaning" based on an interpretation of the art as a coalescence of symbolic utterance and symbolic gesture. While not essential to the main lines of the argument, it suggests interesting possibilities for further development of the dramatistic theory. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

Christopher Palmer discusses the life and work of eleven great Hollywood composers -- Steiner, Korngold, Newman, Waxman, Tiomkin, Webb, Rozsa, Herrmann, North, Bernstein, and Rosenman -- analyzing the scores of many well-known films. Each chapter is written in clear non-technical language for the general reader as well as film and music enthusiasts.

Ramey, a composer and pianist, discusses Fine's brief teaching career in the 1940s at his alma mater, Harvard University - shadowed, Fine was convinced, by a malign tradition of tacit anti-Semitism - and his subsequent years at the newly opened Brandeis University, where he flourished, founding the music department and introducing a landmark performing arts festival."