Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Music
  4. Music Criticism
  5. Content Listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

289 results in Music Criticism

Page 1 of 15

Yugoslav Avant-Garde Music, 1945–1991
  • Laura Emmery
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Informed by fascinating interviews, photographs, and previously unexamined archival materials, this book reveals a compelling story of Yugoslav avant-garde and experimental music from 1945 until 1991, ending with the year when all artistic activities came to a sudden halt with the start of the Yugoslav wars. It examines the political, social, and cultural events that gave rise to the flourishing avant-garde scene in the country and follows the emergence and development of Yugoslav cultural programs in the postwar period that made the republic a magnet for cultural exchange, through to the sudden and violent dissolution of those programs with the collapse of the political state. The book is the first full-length book in English on the subject, and provides an indispensable, interdisciplinary resource that will contribute to the preservation of this legacy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Cambridge History of Music in Spain
  • Edited by Walter A. Clark, Ana Llorens, Álvaro Torrente
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Spain's musical history has often resided on – or been consigned to – the margins of historical narratives about mainstream European culture. As a result, Spanish music is universally popular but seldom well understood outside Iberia. This volume offers, for the first time in English, a comprehensive survey of music in Spain from the Middle Ages to the modern era, including both classical and popular traditions. With chapters from a group of leading music scholars, the book reevaluates the history of music in Spain, from devotional works of the Middle Ages and Renaissance to masterpieces of the postwar avant-garde. It surveys a deep legacy of classical music as well as a rich heritage of folklore comprising songs and dances from Spain's many regions, especially but not exclusively Andalusian flamenco. Folklore in turn informed the nationalist repertoire with which music lovers are most familiar, including pieces by Albéniz, Granados, Falla, Rodrigo, and many others.

The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price
  • Edited by Samantha Ege, Alexandra Kori Hill
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • Active in Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century, Florence B. Price was an African American composer, pianist, organist and music teacher, and a central figure in the first generation of Black composers of art music in the US. Price's aesthetic engaged with Black music of the enslavement period, and her gendered racial identity deserves careful consideration, while her geography and era distinguish her trajectory from those of her European and Anglo-American counterparts. This Companion introduces readers to archives and sources on Price, the style and genre of her music, and her artistic communities, and reception. It contextualizes Price's music and life in relation to the sociocultural climate of her time, the Black classical scene to which she belonged, and the compositional aesthetics that informed her craft. It offers an alternative view of music's capacity to uplift and amplify underrepresented voices.

Vienna
  • A Musical History
  • Edited by Simon P. Keefe
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • What is behind Vienna's world-wide reputation as a 'city of music'? Vienna's images of itself and outside opinions of its significance as a musical city capture internal and external preoccupations with the intricate details and ambitious visions that collectively articulate its unique ambience and status, This wide-ranging study of Viennese music, musicians, traditions, institutions and cultures provides a historical background and conceptual framework for understanding the centuries of musical accomplishments that underlie the city's mystique. The book explores questions of identity and place, and local traditions and practices, before considering musical networks, organizations, associations and businesses, and the musicians who thrived in them. Encompassing classical music from medieval liturgy to Mozart, Beethoven's symphonies to Strauss's waltzes, from Schubert to Schoenberg, the city is also well known for its musical theatre, live music in cafes and hostelries, klezmer, jazz, pop, rock, and hip-hop. The story continues.

George Frideric Handel
  • Collected Documents
  • Edited by Donald Burrows, Helen Coffey, John Greenacombe, Anthony Hicks
  • Published online:
    23 December 2025
    Print publication:
    29 January 2026
  • The life and career of George Frideric Handel, one of the most frequently performed Baroque composers, are thoroughly documented in a wide variety of contemporary sources. This multi-volume publication, the most up-to-date, fully annotated collection of these documents, presents them chronologically, providing an essential resource for anyone interested in Handel and his music. The collection also gives insights into broader topics such as court life, theatre history, public concerts, and music publishing. Volume 5 begins with the composition of Handel's last original scores for his London oratorio seasons – The Choice of Hercules and Jephtha. The death of the Prince of Wales curtailed his 1751 season and deteriorating eyesight delayed the completion of Jephtha. Nevertheless, his annual Lenten oratorios and Messiah performances at the Foundling Hospital continued. At the same time, his music was increasingly heard in the provinces and referred to in the new literary genre of the novel.

Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context
  • Edited by Thomas Schmidt, Benedict Taylor
  • Published online:
    19 December 2025
    Print publication:
    08 January 2026
  • Brimming with fresh insights, this volume offers a comprehensive overview of the personal, cultural, intellectual, professional, political and religious contexts in which immensely gifted brother and sister Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn) and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy lived and worked. Based on the latest research, it explores nineteenth-century musical culture from different yet complementary perspectives, including gender roles, private vs public music-making, cultural institutions, and reception history. Thematically organised, concise chapters cover a broad range of topics from family, friends and colleagues, to poetry, art and aesthetics, foreign travel, celebrity and legacy. With contributions from a host of Mendelssohn and Hensel experts as well as leading scholars from disciplines beyond musicology it sheds new light on the environments in which the Mendelssohns moved, promoting a deeper understanding their music.

Debussy Studies 2
  • Edited by Barbara L. Kelly, David J. Code
  • Published online:
    15 November 2025
    Print publication:
    06 November 2025
  • Over a century after his death, Debussy remains prominent in concert programmes and international scholarly research. This collection showcases the latest developments in the field. It reflects new preoccupations in aesthetics, using an array of archival sources to piece together Debussy's literary tastes and influences, and drawing on philosophy and contemporaneous ideas about perception and cognition to explore the perceived links between Debussy's music, emotion and nature. The volume is notable for its embrace of the composer's earliest and latest works, which are often seen as unrepresentative of the 'real' Debussy. Its fresh approaches to analysis give new focus, in particular, to rhythm, metre, and the dance. It also reflects the current musicological preoccupation with performance and recording. Debussy Studies 2 ends with an assessment of the ways in which the scholarly debates immediately after his death have continued to influence our understanding one hundred years on.

Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor
  • Mark A. Pottinger
  • Published online:
    06 November 2025
    Print publication:
    23 October 2025
  • Donizetti's opera, based on Walter Scott's novel, is a staple of the bel canto operatic repertoire and famed above all for its vocally challenging and frequently reinterpreted 'mad scene' that precedes the lead character's death. This handbook examines the impact Lucia has had on opera and investigates why, of all of Donizetti's seventy operas, this particular work has inspired so much enthusiastic interest among scholars, directors and singers. A key feature is the sheer mutability of the character Lucia as she transforms from a lyric bel canto figure to a highly charged coloratura femme fatale, fascinating not just to opera historians but also to those working on sound studies, literary theories of horror and the gothic, the science of the mind, gender theory and feminist thought. The book places Lucia within the larger contexts of its time, while underlining the opera's central dramatic elements that resonate in the repertoire today.

Louise Farrenc: Nonet for Winds and Strings
  • Marie Sumner Lott
  • Published online:
    23 October 2025
    Print publication:
    23 October 2025
  • As well as being a virtuoso pianist, Louise Farrenc became the first woman to hold a permanent position as Professor at the Paris Conservatoire while continuing to compose symphonic and chamber music. This handbook introduces readers to Farrenc and her contemporaries with a focus on professional women musicians in nineteenth-century Paris. Farrenc's music was much admired by her contemporaries including Robert Schumann and Hector Berlioz. The acclaimed Nonet (1849) incorporated playful dialogue within the ensemble, virtuosic display, and an artful balance of newer and older compositional methods, garnering critical and artistic success and official recognition for the composer. Its performance history shows how musicians managed the logistics of professional life: forming and sustaining relationships, organizing concerts and tours, and promoting their work in the musical press. The book's nuanced analytical approach and historical insights will allow students, performers and listeners a fresh appreciation of Farrenc's work.

A History of Music in the Czech Lands
  • Edited by Martin Nedbal, Kelly St. Pierre, Hana Vlhová-Wörner
  • Published online:
    21 October 2025
    Print publication:
    16 October 2025
  • In a collection of essays from prominent music scholas both in the Czech Republic and abroad, this book provides a nuanced overview of major topics connected to the history of musical culture in the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia) from the Middle Ages to the present. Whereas most previous English-language musicological scholarship on the Czech lands focused solely on music that was understood as ethnically Czech, this book also considers musical cultures of non-Czech groups that lived, and sometimes still live, in the geographical area, most importantly people of German, Jewish, and Romani backgrounds. Spanning over a thousand years, this book combines innovative approaches to present nuanced perspectives on a complicated musical tradition. This is the first overview of music in the Czech lands to provide such an inclusive view of the region's musical developments.

Haydn Studies 2
  • Edited by Nancy November
  • Published online:
    18 October 2025
    Print publication:
    16 October 2025
  • Haydn scholarship has mirrored recent trends in musicological research with an increased interest in the cultural context and reception of his music, though he has not received the sustained consideration given to other canonical figures. Over the past decade, more consideration has been paid to Haydn's operas and oratorios which previously tended to be eclipsed by his chamber and orchestral music. These new perspectives are the focus of this collection which showcases recent approaches and allows us to re-evaluate the long-held notion that Haydn's era marked the rise of the concept of autonomous musical works. This book enriches understanding of cultural contexts in which Haydn's music is being understood, providing models for future contextual studies and allows for a more historically responsive understanding of his works. It includes analysis of less well-known compositions, especially the oratorio Il Ritorno di Tobia, Orfeo and the late canons, but also of works like the London Symphonies and The Creation.

Bach: The Cello Suites
  • Edward Klorman
  • Published online:
    02 October 2025
    Print publication:
    11 September 2025
  • Originally dismissed as curiosities, J. S. Bach's Cello Suites are now understood as the pinnacle of composition for unaccompanied cello. This handbook examines how and why Bach composed these highly innovative works. It explains the characteristics of each of the dance types used in the suites and reveals the compositional methods that achieve cohesion within each suite. The author discusses the four manuscript copies of Bach's lost original and the valuable evidence they contain on how the Suites might be performed. He explores how, after around 1860, the Cello Suites gradually entered the concert hall, where they initially received a mixed critical and audience reception. The Catalan cellist Pablo Casals extensively popularized them through his concerts and recordings, setting the paradigm for several generations to follow. The Cello Suites now have a global resonance, influencing music from Benjamin Britten's Cello Suites to J-pop, and media from K-drama to Ingmar Bergman's films.

Haydn's Minuets and Eighteenth-Century Dance
  • Joseph Fort
  • Published online:
    12 September 2025
    Print publication:
    02 October 2025
  • Audiences in eighteenth-century Vienna attended the city's popular public balls, where they danced the minuet. This book explores the public dance culture of Vienna in the late eighteenth century as an essential context in which to understand minuet composition from this period, focusing on the music of Haydn, and restores the array of kinaesthetic associations and expectations that eighteenth-century audiences brought to the listening experience through their knowledge of the dance. It reconstructs the choreography of the minuet as it was performed in the Viennese dance halls and examines the repertoire of minuets composed specifically for dancing, bringing new perspectives to the minuet genre. This recovered bodily knowledge allows the author to put forward an analytical method of 'somatic enquiry' and apply it to Haydn's symphonic minuets from the 1790s, revealing previously hidden features in this music that come to light when listening with an understanding of the dance.

Schoenberg in Context
  • Edited by Alexander Carpenter
  • Published online:
    04 September 2025
    Print publication:
    04 September 2025
  • Contradictory and paradoxical, Schoenberg was responsible for explosively radical innovations in composition - including atonality and the twelve-tone method - that changed the face of music in the twentieth century. This volume explores Schoenberg's life, work and world, offering contributions from internationally recognized musicologists, music theorists, cultural historians, literary scholars and more. Chapters examine the different places where Schoenberg lived, his various approaches to composition, the people and institutions that shaped his life and work, and the big issues and ideas that informed his worldview, including religion, gender, technology and politics. This book is essential for students and educators but also accessible to a general audience interested in the intersections of music, modernity, society and culture, offering a variety of fresh, multi-disciplinary perspectives on Schoenberg and his richly variegated world.

Anton Webern at the Dawn of Modernism
  • Sebastian Wedler
  • Published online:
    21 August 2025
    Print publication:
    04 September 2025
  • Anton Webern is recognised as one of the pivotal figures of atonality and precursors to post-war serialism. However, his earlier, tonal works have been largely neglected and shrouded in clichés. A study of both the generative elements of Webern's aesthetic imagination, and the philosophical signatures of musical modernity, this first book-length account of Webern's tonal music explores the complex and variegated ways in which the young composer engaged with, and sought to contribute to, the cultural discourses of fin-de-siècle modernism, well before he self-consciously embarked upon his famous 'path' to the New Music. While acknowledging the rapid stylistic transformation that Webern's musical language underwent, the author suggests that earliness in Webern is not simply a chronological term but is rather best understood in terms of a constitutive tension between phenomenological and dialectical modes of musical thought.

Boulez in Context
  • Edited by Edward Campbell
  • Published online:
    08 July 2025
    Print publication:
    24 July 2025
  • Pierre Boulez was a towering figure in contemporary music from the 1940s and 1950s to his death in 2016. This volume demonstrates his distinctive impact on new music and situates him within a wide range of contexts to enhance appreciation of the cultural embeddedness of his work. Successive sections consider his early life and education, his engagements with cultural, musical, literary and artistic modernism, his relationships with his modernist predecessors and contemporaries, and the intersections of his work with literature, visual art, mathematics, philosophy and technology. Contributors explore his various roles as composer, conductor, recording artist, writer, teacher and systems builder, as well as his role in French cultural politics, his move to Germany and the time he spent in the United States. This book is essential for students and educators but also accessible to a general audience interested in Boulez's legacy and his unique position in recent music history.

The Art of Counterpoint from Du Fay to Josquin
  • Jesse Rodin
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • This book transforms our understanding of a fifteenth-century musical revolution. Renaissance composers developed fresh ways of handling musical flow in pursuit of intensifications, unexpected explosions, dramatic pauses, and sudden evaporations. A new esthetics of opposition, as this study calls it, can be contrasted with smoother and less goal-oriented approaches in music from before – and after – the period ca. 1425–1520. Casting wide evidentiary and repertorial nets, the book reinterprets central genres, theoretical concepts, historical documents, famous pieces, and periodizations; a provocative concluding chapter suggests that we moderns have tended to conceal the period's musical poetics by neglecting central evidence. Above all the book introduces an analytical approach sensitive to musical flow and invites new ways of hearing, performing, and thinking about music from Du Fay to Josquin.

Romantic Music Aesthetics
  • Creating a Politics of Emotion
  • Matthew Pritchard
  • Published online:
    22 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • This book reassesses the place of politics and emotion within Romantic music aesthetics. Drawing together insights from the history of emotions, cultural history, and studies of philosophical idealism, 'affective relationality' – the channelling of emotion through music's social and cultural synergies – emerges as key to Romantic aesthetic thought. Now familiar concepts such as theatrical illusion, genius, poetic criticism, and the renewed connection of art to mythology and religion opened new spaces for audiences' feelings, as thinkers such as Rousseau, Herder, Germaine de Staël, Joseph Mainzer, Pierre Leroux and George Sand sought alternatives to the political status quo. Building on the sentimental tradition in eighteenth-century art and politics, the Romantics created ways of listening to music imbued not just with melancholic longing for transcendence but also with humour, gothic fantasy, satire, and political solidarity. The consequences have extended far beyond the classical concert hall into numerous domains of popular culture from melodrama, romances and political songwriting to musical theatre and film.

The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers
  • Edited by Matthew Head, Susan Wollenberg
  • Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • Moving beyond narratives of female suppression, and exploring the critical potential of a diverse, distinguished repertoire, this Companion transforms received understanding of women composers. Organised thematically, and ranging beyond elite, Western genres, it explores the work of diverse female composers from medieval to modern times, besides the familiar headline names. The book's prologue traces the development of scholarship on women composers over the past five decades and the category of 'woman composer' itself. The chapters that follow reveal scenes of flourishing creativity, technical innovation, and (often fleeting) recognition, challenging long-held notions around invisibility and neglect and dismissing clichés about women composers and their work. Leading scholars trace shifting ideas about composers and compositional processes, contributing to a wider understanding of how composers have functioned in history and making this volume essential reading for all students of musical history. In an epilogue, three contemporary composers reflect on their careers and identities.

Musical Modernism in Global Perspective
  • Entangled Histories on a Shared Planet
  • Björn Heile
  • Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • In the first study of the global dimensions of musical modernism, Björn Heile proposes a novel theory according to which musical modernism is constituted by a global diasporic network of composers, musicians and institutions. In a series of historical and analytical case studies from different parts of the world, this book overcomes the respective limitations of both Eurocentric and postcolonial, revisionist accounts, focusing instead on the transnational entanglements between the West and other world regions. Key topics include migration, the transnational reception and transfer of musical works and ideas, institutions such as the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and composers who are rarely discussed in Western academia, such as the Nigerian-born Akin Euba and the Korean-German Younghi Pagh-Paan. Influenced by the interdisciplinary notion of 'entangled histories', Heile critiques established dichotomies, all the while highlighting the unequal power relations on which the existing global order is founded.

Page 1 of 15