Public commemorations of various kinds are an important part of how groups large and small acknowledge and process injustices and tragic events. Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma looks at the roles music can play in public commemorations of traumatic events that range from the Armenian genocide and World War I to contemporary violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the #sayhername protests. Whose version of a traumatic historical...

Appalachian Spring, with music by Aaron Copland and choreography by Martha Graham, counts among the best known American contributions to the global concert hall and stage. In the years since its premiere-as a dance work at the Library of Congress in 1944-it has become one of Copland's most widely performed scores, and the Martha Graham Dance Company still treats it as a signature work. Over the decades, the dance and the music have taken on a range of meanings that have transforme...

This volume explores the way in which composers, performers, and critics shaped individual and collective identities in music from Europe and the United States from the 1860s to the 1950s. Selected essays and articles engage with works and their reception by Richard Wagner, Georges Bizet (in an American incarnation), Lili and Nadia Boulanger, William Grant Still, and Aaron Copland, and with performers such as Wanda Landowska and even Marilyn Monroe. Ranging in context from the opera house ...

What role did music play in the United States during World War II? How did composers reconcile the demands of their country and their art as America mobilized both militarily and culturally for war? Annegret Fauser explores these and many other questions in the first in-depth study of American concert music during World War II. While Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrew Sisters entertained civilians at home and G.I.s abroad with swing and boogie-woogie, Fauser shows it was classical...

When Igor Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered during the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, its avant-garde music and jarring choreography scandalized audiences. Today it is considered one of the most influential musical works of the twentieth century. In this volume, the ballet finally receives the full critical attention it deserves, as distinguished music and dance scholars discuss the meaning of the work and its far-reaching inf...

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at

A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own.With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff—pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization—unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and ...

The story of a revolution in music and technology, told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian BachIn Reinventing Bach, his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach's music new in our time, at once restoring Bach as a universally revered composer and revolutionizing the ways that music figures into our lives.As a musician in eighteenth-century Germany, Bach was ...

A TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2012A New Yorker Best Book of the YearLos Angeles Magazine's #1 Music Book of the YearA unique and revelatory book of music history that examines in great depth what is perhaps the best-known and most-popular symphony ever written and its four-note opening, which has fascinated musicians, historians, and philosophers for the last two hundred years.Music critic Matthew Guerrie...

Joel Sachs offers the first complete biography of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American music. Henry Cowell, a major musical innovator of the first half of the century, left a rich body of compositions spanning a wide range of styles. But as Sachs shows, Cowell's legacy extends far beyond his music. He worked tirelessly to create organizations such as the highly influential New Music Quarterly, New Music Recordings, and the Pan-American Association of C...

In the 1930s, Aaron Copland began to write in an accessible style he described as "imposed simplicity." Works like El Salón México, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring feature a tuneful idiom that brought the composer unprecedented popular success and came to define an American sound. Yet the cultural substance of that sound--the social and political perspective that might be heard within these familiar pieces--has until now been largely overlooked. Wh...

The Orchestra: A Very Short Introduction considers the structure, roots, and day-to-day functioning of the modern philharmonic society. Far from an anachronistic organization that cannot long survive, it is shown to be powerful political and social force, occupying critical positions in cultural diplomacy, national identity, and civic pride.