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282 results in Music Criticism

Page 1 of 15

A History of Music in the Czech Lands
  • Edited by Martin Nedbal, Kelly St Pierre, Hana Vlhová-Wörner
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    30 November 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.

Louise Farrenc: Nonet for Winds and Strings
  • Marie Sumner Lott
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 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.

Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor
  • Mark A. Pottinger
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 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.

Anton Webern at the Dawn of Modernism
  • Sebastian Wedler
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 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.

Haydn's Minuets and Eighteenth-Century Dance
  • Joseph Fort
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 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.

Haydn Studies 2
  • Edited by Nancy November
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 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
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    31 August 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.

Schoenberg in Context
  • Edited by Alexander Carpenter
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 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.

Boulez in Context
  • Edited by Edward Campbell
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 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.

Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland
  • Media, Mobility, and Christianity at the Margins
  • Ying Diao
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 May 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2023
  • Illuminates how voice, faith, and hearing become intertwined with technologies of sound reproduction and mobility amid the rapidly transforming religious landscape of China's ethnic borderland.

Vaughan Williams in Context
  • Edited by Julian Onderdonk, Ceri Owen
  • Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024
  • Challenging residual doubts about Vaughan Williams's role and significance within twentieth-century music and culture, this book places and explores his life and music in their broad musical, cultural, social, and political contexts. Chapters by scholars from a range of disciplines re-evaluate the composer's life and career within a world marked by both rapid change and refigured traditions. Building on scholarship that has established Vaughan Williams as aesthetically and politically progressive, the book furthers a revisionist perspective by broadening understandings of the nature of his responses to the twentieth century. This portrait of a modern composer emerges not merely by focusing on under-represented interests and pursuits, but also by contextualizing those activities that have been misrepresented as conservative or backward-looking.

Music, Morality and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain
  • Paul Watt
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 February 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2023
  • A pioneering work which delves into and reveals the links between music, moral instruction and social reform.

Mahler's Nietzsche
  • Politics and Philosophy in the Wunderhorn Symphonies
  • Leah Batstone
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 February 2024
    Print publication:
    24 January 2023
  • Examines how Nietzschean ideas influenced the composition of Mahler's first four, so-called Wunderhorn, symphonies.

Yorùbá Music in the Twentieth Century
  • Identity, Agency, and Performance Practice
  • Bode Omojola
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 January 2024
    Print publication:
    30 June 2014
  • Drawing on extensive field research conducted over the course of two decades, Bode Omojola examines traditional and contemporary Yorùbá genres of music.

Opera and the Politics of Tragedy
  • A Mozartean Museum
  • Katharina Clausius
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    10 January 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2023
  • A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the 'Telemacomania' scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes.

Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein
  • A Study of Influence
  • Rebecca Schmid
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    10 January 2024
    Print publication:
    20 June 2023
  • The first study to explore the crucial influence of Kurt Weill on operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein.

Page 1 of 15