This kaleidoscopic collection reflects on the multifaceted world of classical music as it advances through the twenty-first century. With insights drawn from leading composers, performers, academics, journalists, and arts administrators, special focus is placed on classical music’s defining traditions, challenges and contemporary scope. Innovative in structure and approach, the volume comprises two parts. The first provides detailed analyses of issues central to classical music in the pres...

A collection of essays and documents illuminating the work of Bohuslav Martinů, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival.Bohuslav Martinů was one of the most extraordinary and prolific composers of the twentieth century. Martinů and His World offers a portrait of the composer in all his complexity. Born in the present-day Czech Republic, Martinů was rendered stateless as a result of events around World War II and the Communist takeover of Cze...

This volume is a bold and original meditation on how we interpret art, music, and culture—and what it means to listen, see, and feel differently from others. Drawing on Czech history and aesthetics, the book moves from filmmaker Hugo Haas’s coded tributes to his murdered brother, to the haunting ex libris designs of Josef Váchal, to the deeply personal resonances of Schubert’s chamber music, Dvořák’s cello concerto, and Gideon Klein’s tragic Terezín Trio. Across these vivid case studies, t...

“Tripod” is a children’s picture book about a three-legged dog who feels inadequate. He goes off on a quest to find his fourth leg and realizes that he can do things on three legs that other dogs can’t do on four. Self-confidence gained, inadequate feeling gone.

The Kaprálová Companion, edited by Karla Hartl and Erik Entwistle, is a collection of biographical and analytical essays on Czech composer Vítezslava Kaprálová [1915–1940]. Accompanied by an annotated catalog of works, annotated chronology of life events, bibliography, discography, and a list of published works, The Kaprálová Companion is an essential, comprehensive guide to the composer's life and music. It is also the first book published on Kaprálová in English.

The grand narratives of European music history are informed by the dichotomy of placements and displacements. Yet musicology has thus far largely ignored the phenomenon of displacement and underestimated its significance for musical landscapes and music history. Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond constitutes a pioneering volume that aims to fill this gap as it explores the interactions between music and displacement in theoretical and pract...

From My Life, the autobiography of the famed music critic Eduard Hanslick, appeared toward the end of his life, in 1894, when it went through three printings. It was republished in 1911, and again, more recently, in 1987, by Bärenreiter, and in 2011, by Taschenbuch. Born in Prague, Hanslick studied piano with Tomaschek, and though, like other compatriots and contemporaries, he studied law and became a government functionary, he went on to become the most noted and honored music cr...

No nineteenth-century composer had more diverse ties to his contemporary world than Franz Liszt (1811-1886). At various points in his life he made his home in Vienna, Paris, Weimar, Rome, and Budapest. In his roles as keyboard virtuoso, conductor, master teacher, and abbé, he reinvented the concert experience, advanced a progressive agenda for symphonic and dramatic music, rethought the possibilities of church music and the oratorio, and transmitted the foundations of modern pianism.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The world teems with different kinds of music - traditional, folk, classical, jazz, rock, pop - and each type of music tends to come with its own way of thinking. Drawing on a wealth of accessible examples ranging from Beethoven to Chinese zither music, this Very Short Introduction considers the history of music and thinking about music, focussing on its social and cultural dimensions. Nicholas Cook balances the Wester...

**Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for CriticismA New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the YearTime magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007A Washington Post Book World** Best Book of 2007In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its m...

This book brings together research at the intersection of music, cultural industries, management, antiracist politics and gender studies to analyse music as labour, in particular highlighting social inequalities and activism.Providing insights into labour processes and practices, the authors investigate the changing role of manifold actors, institutions and technologies and the corresponding shifts in the valuation and evaluation of music achievements that have shaped the relations...

Alex Ross’s sweeping history of twentieth-century classical music, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, is a gripping account of a musical revolution.The landscape of twentieth-century classical music is a wild one: this was a period in which music fragmented into apparently divergent strands, each influenced by its own composers, performers and musical innovations. In this comprehensive tour, Alex Ross, music critic for the ‘New Yorker’, explores the people and places that sha...