Godfrey Sceats, 1888-1966, was an amateur musician (organist, composer) and by profession a linguist proficient in German, French and Spanish. He first heard Karg-Elert's music around 1910 when several accomplished Englishmen were starting to take note of it with enthusiasm. Many of the letters are published side by side, in German and English, and a comprehensive appendix completes the volume.

Translated and annotated by Harold Fabrikant, this volume contains letters sent by Sigfrid and Katharina Karg-Elert from their time in America (January to March, 1932). Both the original German and translated English texts are given on facing pages.

In Music from the Hilltop, Benjamin A. Kolodziej studies three significant academic musical figures to weave a narrative that not only details the role musical studies played in the development of Southern Methodist University but also relates a history of church music and pipe organs in Dallas, Texas. Bertha Stevens Cassidy (1876–1959), the first organ professor and the only woman on the faculty of the new university, established herself as a leader and veritable dean of the church music community, managing a career of significant performances and teaching. Her student and protégé, Dora Poteet Barclay (1903–1961), a Waco native, exhibited such musical potential that she was hired by SMU the day after her graduation. Taking over the organ program upon Cassidy’s retirement, Barclay broadened the pedagogical horizons for her students. The great French composer Marcel Dupré, with whom she briefly studied, extolled Barclay’s talents: “She is my best American student!” Many of her own students achieved great professional heights as performers and church musicians. With the hiring of Robert Theodore Anderson (1934–2009), SMU solidified its reputation as a school able to provide excellence not only in performance training but also in scholarship. A Chicago native who studied in New York and in Germany, Anderson represented a new, modern outlook to teaching and performance. He was intellectually able to bridge the gap between the theologians of the Methodist seminary and the performers at the Meadows School of the Arts. Through his example and guidance, organists were taught to think critically, whether about music or any other subject, and to attain excellence in the craft of organ performance. During the 1980s Anderson consulted with the Dallas Symphony to prepare for the installation of an organ in the new Meyerson Symphony Center, an organ that would influence concert hall instruments in subsequent decades. These three pedagogues played important roles in the development of the musical curriculum as well as the building of important organs on the SMU campus and around the city, each in their own ways nurturing the practice of sacred music in North Texas.

Sigfrid Karg-Elert was an important composer in the first decades of the 20th century. He was however largely ignored as a composer in his native Germany until the 1960s, but it was the English-speaking world which 'discovered' him in the early 1900s and realised that he was one of the most important organ-composers of his era. Arthur Nickson was a leading Australian-born musician, initially trained in Melbourne, and later in London. This book contains the letters from a bilateral correspondence, which started cautiously, formally, in 1913; it was interrupted by the Great War but recommenced in 1923. Nickson shared these letters with few others. Many had no idea of their content until the collection was published for the first time, solely in an English translation, in 1996. This is now the second edition of that same work, in which some translations are revised, more extensive annotations provided, and the entire original German text reproduced.

The first thorough examination of the most renowned and influential organist in early twentieth-century Germany and of his complex relationship to his country's tumultuous and shifting sociopolitical landscape.In the course of a multifaceted career, Karl Straube (1873-1950) rose to positions of immense cultural authority in a German musical world caught in unprecedented artistic and sociopolitical upheaval. Son of a German harmonium-builder and an intellectually inclined English mother, Straube established himself as Germany's iconic organ virtuoso by the turn of the century. His upbringing in Bismarck's Berlin encouraged him to develop intensive interests in world history and politics. He quickly became a sought-after teacher, editor, and confidante to composers and intellectuals, whose work he often significantly influenced. As the eleventh successor to J. S. Bach in the cantorate of St. Thomas School, Leipzig, he focused the choir's mission as curator of Bach's works and, in the unstable political climate of the interwar years, as international emissary for German art. His fraught exit from the cantorate in 1939 bore the scars of his Nazi affiliations and issued in a final decade of struggle and disillusionment as German society collapsed.Christopher Anderson's book presents the first richly detailed examination of Karl Straube's remarkable life, situated against the background of the dynamic and sometimes sinister nationalism that informed it. Through extensive examination of primary sources, Anderson reveals a brilliant yet deeply conflicted musician whose influence until now has been recognized, even hailed, but little understood.of the interwar years, as international emissary for German art. His fraught exit from the cantorate in 1939 bore the scars of his Nazi affiliations and issued in a final decade of struggle and disillusionment as German society collapsed.Christopher Anderson's book presents the first richly detailed examination of Karl Straube's remarkable life, situated against the background of the dynamic and sometimes sinister nationalism that informed it. Through extensive examination of primary sources, Anderson reveals a brilliant yet deeply conflicted musician whose influence until now has been recognized, even hailed, but little understood.of the interwar years, as international emissary for German art. His fraught exit from the cantorate in 1939 bore the scars of his Nazi affiliations and issued in a final decade of struggle and disillusionment as German society collapsed.Christopher Anderson's book presents the first richly detailed examination of Karl Straube's remarkable life, situated against the background of the dynamic and sometimes sinister nationalism that informed it. Through extensive examination of primary sources, Anderson reveals a brilliant yet deeply conflicted musician whose influence until now has been recognized, even hailed, but little understood.of the interwar years, as international emissary for German art. His fraught exit from the cantorate in 1939 bore the scars of his Nazi affiliations and issued in a final decade of struggle and disillusionment as German society collapsed.Christopher Anderson's book presents the first richly detailed examination of Karl Straube's remarkable life, situated against the background of the dynamic and sometimes sinister nationalism that informed it. Through extensive examination of primary sources, Anderson reveals a brilliant yet deeply conflicted musician whose influence until now has been recognized, even hailed, but little understood.he dynamic and sometimes sinister nationalism that informed it. Through extensive examination of primary sources, Anderson reveals a brilliant yet deeply conflicted musician whose influence until now has been recognized, even hailed, but little understood.

The book comprises a selection of some 750 letters of the composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, selected from an extant corpus of about 3,300. The letters are arranged chronologically and have been chosen to provide a cumulative pen-picture of the composer in his own words. In general the letters reflect VW's major preoccupations: musical, personal and political. It was not VW's way to discuss his inner creative processes but he does discuss his music, once it had been written: for example there is much to illustrate the process of 'washing the face' of his major pieces before, and after, they had reached the concert platform. There is correspondence with collaborators such as Gilbert Murray, Harold Child and Evelyn Sharpe who provided texts; with his publishers (mainly OUP) about printing scores and parts; with conductors such as Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli about performances. He was in regular correspondence with fellow composers such as Gustav Holst, George Butterworth, Gerald Finzi, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, Alan Bush and Rutland Boughton. There were his pupils: Elizabeth Maconchy and Cedric Thorpe Davie amongst others. A series of close personal friendships is well represented: his Cambridge contemporary and cousin Ralph Wedgwood, Edward Dent, and latterly Michael Kennedy. Above all there are insights on his lifelong devotion to his first wife, Adeline, and his growing friendship with Ursula Wood, who was to become his second wife.