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This book is about composer biographies in the likes of Amadeus, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Swanee River, and Rhapsody in Blue. Even before movies had sound, filmmakers dramatized the lives of composers. Movie biographies—or biopics—have depicted composers as diverse as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George M. Cohan, Stephen Foster, and George Gershwin. This book surveys different styles and periods from the Hollywood of the 1920s and 1930s to the international cinema of today, exploring the role that film biographies play in our understanding of history and culture. It delves into such questions as: How historically accurate are composer biopics? How and why have inaccuracies and distortions been perpetrated? What strategies have been used to represent visually the creative process? The book examines the films in several contexts and considers their role in commodifying and popularizing music.

This anthology of jazz criticism casts a wide net. Discussing nearly seventy major jazz figures and many of the genre's key stylistic developments, the book sees jazz as a unique perpetual narrative—one in which musicians, their audiences, and the evolving music itself are intimately intertwined. Because jazz arose from the collision of specific peoples under particular conditions, it says, its development has been unusually immediate, visible, and intense. The book reacts to and judges the music in a similarly active, attentive, and personal manner. The book contains chapters that analyze the supposed return to tradition that the music of Wynton Marsalis has come to exemplify; provide accounts of the careers of Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Bill Evans, and Lennie Tristano; and explore jazz's relationship to American popular song and examine the jazz musician's role as actual and would-be social rebel.

From colonial times to the present, American composers have lived on the fringes of society and defined themselves in large part as outsiders. This book considers the tradition of maverick composers and explores what these mavericks reveal about American attitudes toward the arts and about American society itself. It starts by examining the careers of three notably unconventional composers: William Billings in the eighteenth century, Anthony Philip Heinrich in the nineteenth, and Charles Ives in the twentieth. All three had unusual lives, wrote music that many considered incomprehensible, and are now recognized as key figures in the development of American music. The book investigates the proliferation of eccentric individualism in all types of American music—classical, popular, and jazz—and how it has come to dominate the image of diverse creative artists from John Cage to Frank Zappa. The history of the maverick tradition, it shows, has much to tell us about the role of music in American culture, and about the tension between individualism and community in the American consciousness.

This book draws on his intimate knowledge of Prokofiev's work to guide music lovers and pianists through the composer's nine piano sonatas. These cherished works, composed between 1910 and 1951, are today considered an indispensable part of the repertoire of every serious concert pianist. The book, written with a deep appreciation of Prokofiev's style and creativity, looks at the sonatas within the context of Prokofiev's complete oeuvre. For each sonata, the book provides general information about the work and a discussion of the composition's details and features, and in a section entitled “Master Class” it offers suggestions for interpretation and specific advice for performing. The book also corrects for the first time various misprints in published scores and includes a glossary of musical terms.

Arnold Schoenberg's close involvement with many of the principal developments of twentieth-century music, most importantly the break with tonality and the creation of twelve-tone composition, generated controversy from the time of his earliest works to the present day. This new collection of Schoenberg's essays, letters, literary writings, musical sketches, paintings, and drawings offers insights into the composer's life, work, and thought. The documents reveal the relationships between various aspects of Schoenberg's activities in composition, music theory, criticism, painting, performance, and teaching. They also show the significance of events in his personal and family life, his evolving Jewish identity, his political concerns, and his close interactions with such figures as Gustav and Alma Mahler, Alban Berg, Wassily Kandinsky, and Thomas Mann. Extensive commentary places the documents and materials in context and traces important themes throughout Schoenberg's career, from turn-of-century Vienna to Weimar Berlin, to 1950s Los Angeles.

This is a book-length study of Shostakovich's Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues for piano, Opus 87. It explains the cultural context in which Shostakovich composed, relates the cycle to piano works (by Bach, Hindemith, and others), and offers individual commentaries on each of the Preludes and Fugues.

This concise analysis of rock music explores the features that make this internationally popular music distinct from earlier music styles. The author offers a guided tour of rock music from the 1950s to the present, emphasizing the theoretical underpinnings of the style and systematically focusing not on rock music's history or sociology, but on the structural aspects of the music itself. What structures normally happen in rock music? What theoretical systems or models might best explain them? The book addresses these questions and more in chapters devoted to phrase rhythm, scales, key determination, cadences, harmonic palette and succession, and form. Each chapter provides richly detailed analyses of individual rock pieces from groups including Chicago; The Beatles; Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; Kansas; and others. The author shows how rock music is stylistically unique, and demonstrates how the features that make it distinct have tended to remain constant throughout the past half-century and within most substyles.