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This book offers a study of how certain alliances of music and film are judged aesthetic failures. Based on a fascinating and wide-ranging body of film-music mismatches, and using contemporary reviews and histories of the turn to post-industrialization, the book expands the ways in which the union of the film and music businesses can be understood. Moving beyond the typical understanding of film music that privileges the score, the book also incorporates analyses of rock 'n' roll movies, composer biopics, and pop singers crossing over into acting. By doing this, it provides a fuller picture of how two successful entertainment sectors have sought out synergistic strategies, ones whose alleged “failures” have much to tell about the labor practices of the creative industries, as well as our own relationship to them and to work itself.

This book is a cultural history of the Philippines from 1898 to1998, outlining the role of music in defining nation and the influence of national-level politics on shaping musical expression. The work traces three themes that suffuse the musical articulation of nation and nationalism. The first is a broad concern with modernism as an impulse in the development of Philippine national character in a postcolonial setting and, more specifically, how modernism becomes apparent in music. The second theme is the inescapable condition of hybridity that pervades nationalistic expression as much as it does other aspects of individual, community, and national identity. The third theme deals with cultural politics, including the tensions between official statements and the multifarious expressions of artists that are variously in compliance with and in contestation against the aims of the state. The main topics of the book include nationalist composers of the early twentieth century; folkloric performance of the nation by the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company; the institutionalization of culture through the Cultural Center of the Philippines under the Marcos regime; the musical ambassadorship of the Philippine Madrigal Singers; alternate expressions of nationalism during the first People Power Revolution of 1986; and the products of musical nationalism created for the 1998 centennial of independence from Spain.

Although Mendelssohn was most famous during his lifetime as a composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor, he also enjoyed an enviable reputation as a highly skilled organist. The instrument had fascinated — one might almost say mesmerized — him from earliest youth, but aside from a year or so of formal training at the age of about 12 or 13, he was entirely self-taught. He never held a position as church organist, and never had any organ pupils. Nevertheless, the instrument played a uniquely important role in his personal life. In the course of his many travels, whether in major cities or tiny villages, he invariably gravitated to the organ loft, where he might spend hours playing the works of Bach or simply improvising. Although the piano clearly served Mendelssohn as an eminently practical instrument, the organ seems to have been his instrument of choice. He searched out an organ loft, not because he had to, but because he wanted to, because on the organ he could find catharsis. Indeed, as he once exclaimed to his parents after reading a portion of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, “I must rush off to the monastery and work off my excitement on the organ!” Mendelssohn's public performance on the organ in Germany was rare, and he gave but one public recital: in the Thomas-Kirche in Leipzig in 1840. In England, however, he evidently felt more comfortable on the organ bench and played there often before large crowds. Indeed, he performed as Guest Organist twice at the Birmingham Music Festivals in 1837 and 1842. Given Mendelssohn's profound affinity for the organ, it is remarkable that he composed but relatively little for the instrument, and assigned an Opus number to only two works: his Three Preludes and Fugues for Organ (Op. 37) and his Six Sonatas for the Organ (Op. 65). A small number of organ works, plus sketches and drafts, were scattered among his musical papers; most of these only gradually found their way into print, and it was not until the late 20th century that an edition of his complete organ works was finally published. This volume is intended as a companion to that edition.

This book investigates and analyzes the music of Billy Strayhorn. Over seventy musical examples, drawn from his original autograph scores, provide insight in the development of his style, in his advanced harmonic language and in his orchestral technique. The book traces the origins of Strayhorn’s music, rooted in European and American idioms, and uncovers hitherto unknown works which cast a new light on his development as a jazz composer and orchestrator. It addresses the mythical, thirty-year partnership of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. Through research on their autograph scores, it redefines their musical collaboration. The book argues that as opposed to general accepted views, Ellington and Strayhorn were not musical alter-egos, but two distinctively individual composers who worked from different musical perspectives. This book also details how those distinctions stem from the respective musical backgrounds of the two composers, and how that affected their collaboration. The differences between Ellington’s and Strayhorn’s music are clearly audible, yet have eluded most listeners since Ellington — as the main interpreter of his collaborator’s music — played a crucial role in our perception of Strayhorn’s work. The book untangles Strayhorn from Ellington’s shadow, identifies all of his contributions to the Ellington repertory, and points listeners to the most salient features that distinguish Strayhorn’s musical style from Ellington’s.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) was the last compositional prodigy to emerge from the Austro-German tradition of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was lauded in his youth by everyone from Mahler to Puccini and his auspicious career in the early 1900s spanned chamber music, opera, and musical theater. Today, he is best known for his Hollywood film scores, composed between 1935 and 1947. From his prewar operas in Vienna to his pathbreaking contributions to American film, this book provides a substantial reassessment of Korngold's life and accomplishments. Korngold struggled to reconcile the musical language of his Viennese upbringing with American popular song and cinema, and was forced to adapt to a new life after wartime emigration to Hollywood. The book examines Korngold's operas and film scores, the critical reception of his music, and his place in the milieus of both the Old and New Worlds. It also features numerous historical documents—many previously unpublished and in first-ever English translations—including essays by the composer as well as memoirs by his wife, Luzi Korngold, and his father, the renowned music critic Julius Korngold.

At once a royal secretary, a poet, and a composer, Guillaume de Machaut was one of the most protean and creative figures of the late Middle Ages. Rather than focus on a single strand of his remarkable career, the book encompasses all aspects of his work, illuminating it in a distinctively interdisciplinary light. It provides a comprehensive picture of Machaut's artistry; reviews the documentary evidence about his life; charts the different agendas pursued by modern scholarly disciplines in their rediscovery and use of specific parts of his output; and delineates Machaut's own poetic and material presentation of his authorial persona. The book details Machaut's central poetic themes of hope, fortune, and death, integrating the aspect of Machaut's multimedia art that differentiates him from his contemporaries' treatment of similar thematic issues: music. In restoring the centrality of music in Machaut's poetics, arguing that his words cannot be truly understood or appreciated without the additional layers of meaning created in their musicalization, the book makes a compelling argument that musico-literary performance occupied a special place in the courts of fourteenth-century France.

New York City witnessed a burst of creativity in the 1920s. This artistic renaissance is examined from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music who, along with writers, painters, and jazz musicians, were at the heart of early modernism in America. The book also illustrates how the aesthetic attitudes and institutional structures from the 1920s left a deep imprint on the arts over the 20th century. Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, Marion Bauer, and Dane Rudhyar were the leaders of a talented new generation of American composers whose efforts made New York City the center of new music in the country. They founded composer societies—such as the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts—to promote the performance of their music, and nimbly negotiated cultural boundaries, aiming for recognition in Western Europe as much as at home. This book provides a new perspective on the period and a compelling collective portrait of the figures, puncturing many longstanding myths. American composers active in New York during the 1920s are explored in relation to the “Machine Age” and American Dada; the impact of spirituality on American dissonance; the crucial, behind-the-scenes role of women as patrons and promoters of modernist music; cross-currents between jazz and concert music; the critical reception of modernist music (especially in the writings of Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld); and the international impulse behind neoclassicism. The book also examines the persistent biases of the time, particularly anti-Semitism, gender stereotyping, and longstanding racial attitudes.

This book is a full-length biography in English of Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824), one of the great violinist-composers in the history of music, and arguably the most influential violinist who ever lived. He rose from humble origins as a blacksmith's son in a village near Turin, Italy, and early studies with Gaetano Pugnani, to a triumphant international career, particularly in Paris and London. His multifarious career as concert performer, composer, teacher, opera theater director, and impresario was played out against the backdrop of a dramatically changing world: from the ancien régime patronage of an Italian prince and the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, to the commercial and box-office–centered institutions of the early 19th century. Viotti's life was intensely dramatic. He knew tragedy as well as success: he was forced to flee the French Revolution, he was exiled from England for an extended period, his attempt to establish himself in business met with failure, and he died heavily in debt. His correspondence with an English family, the Chinnerys, with whom he was intimately associated for the last half of his life, provides an unusually revealing glimpse into his personal life. Viotti's biography is not without its mysteries, among which is his renunciation, twice in his life, of public performance. This study is based on extensive documentary research, much of it here revealed for the first time. Viotti's works are considered in the context of his life. Eleven appendices include translations of various Viotti-related archival documents, and additional information on Viotti's siblings, his places of residence, his violins, his unfinished violin method, and financial matters.