By Annegret Fauser (NHC Fellow, 2015–16) 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 … Continued
By Philip Rupprecht (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) British Musical Modernism explores the works of eleven key composers to reveal the rapid shifts of expression and technique that transformed British art music in the post-war period. Responding to radical avant-garde developments in post-war Europe, the Manchester Group composers – Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Harrison Birtwistle … Continued
By Tom Beghin (NHC Fellow, 2002–03) Haydn is the last major composer whose music was regularly discussed by his contemporaries in terms derived from the classical tradition of rhetoric. Within a generation of his death, that discourse had fallen from favor, but the historical relationship between Haydn and the rhetorical tradition endured. In this volume, a … Continued
By Robin D. Moore (NHC Fellow, 2004–05) Music and Revolution provides a dynamic introduction to the most prominent artists and musical styles that have emerged in Cuba since 1959 and to the policies that have shaped artistic life. Robin D. Moore gives readers a chronological overview of the first decades after the Cuban Revolution, documenting the … Continued
By Carol Ann Muller (NHC Fellow, 1999–00) Musical Echoes tells the life story of the South African jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin. Born in Cape Town in the 1930s, Benjamin came to know American jazz and popular music through the radio, movies, records, and live stage and dance band performances. She was especially moved by the … Continued
Edited by Annegret Fauser (NHC Fellow, 2015–16) and Michael A. Figueroa 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 … Continued
By Narayana V. K. Menon (NHC Fellow, 1985–86)
By Robert L. Kendrick (NHC Fellow, 1998–99) In this book, a follow-up to his 1996 monograph Celestial Sirens, Robert Kendrick examines the cultural contexts of music in early-modern Milan. This book describes the churches and palaces that served as performance spaces in Milan, analyzes the power structures in the city, discusses the devotional rites of the … Continued
By Tim Carter (NHC Fellow, 2015–16)
By Christian Thorau (NHC Fellow, 2008–09) “What is still a description in any other art is already a metaphor in the art of music.” Eduard Hanslick already pointed out the special role of metaphors in understanding music in his work Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854). From sound to metaphor takes up the metaphor-theoretical discussions of the 20th and … Continued