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Unsettled Scores treats the Hollywood activities of Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler, who were among the earliest modernist composers to negotiate the collision of the high/low dichotomy within these two cultural realms. The social and political crises provoked by capitalism and war profoundly affected these ideals and, in turn, the men’s cultural and aesthetic thinking. Confronting and living through social crisis (Eisler during the instability of Weimar Germany and Copland through America’s Depression years), both composers experimented with new artistic forms and values, shaping their musical perspectives. Eventually, they turned to Hollywood, where they found possibilities to negotiate their distinct modernist aesthetics and political beliefs. The book approaches Copland’s and Eisler’s Hollywood activities through a dual study, pairing interpretations of their writings on the subject with close examination of their first film scores: Copland’s music for Lewis Milestone’s 1939 film Of Mice and Men and Eisler’s 1943 score for Hangmen Also Die!, directed by Fritz Lang. This study examines how the highly politicized and topical nature of these films appealed to each composer’s political ideologies concerning society and the human condition. Their scores became agents for political expression as they transformed their individual styles into the commercial sphere.

Music in World War I played an important role in cementing the transatlantic alliance among Anglophone and Francophone allies. Chapters 1–5 consider responses to the war by five individuals from three countries: Frank Bridge, Charles Ives, Claude Debussy, John Philip Sousa, and Irving Berlin. Chapters 6–10 gradually expand the focus to ever larger groups of people: women theatre organists in the United States, the Longleat community in England, the greater citizenry of Canada, the service flag and Gold Star mother movements throughout the United States, and the global population devastated by the influenza epidemic. A “prelude,” “interlude,” and “postlude,” which provide context and supplemental material, are co-authored by the three editors, who speak as representatives of England, Canada, and the United States. The whole demonstrates not only the importance of musical exchanges and influences in shaping transatlantic support for the war effort but also the range of contributions made—from unknown amateurs to major composers, from local communities to international populations, and from regions that span a third of the globe.

American musical theater is often dismissed as frivolous or kitschy entertainment. But what if musicals actually mattered a great deal? What if perhaps the most innocuous musical genre in America actually defined the practices of Mormonism--America’s fastest-growing religion? Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America is an interdisciplinary study of voice, popular music, and American religion that analyzes the unexpected yet dynamic relationship between two of America’s most iconic institutions, Mormonism and American musical theater. This book argues that Mormonism and early American musical theater were cut from the same ideological cloth--formed in the early nineteenth century out of Jacksonian principles of self-fashioning, white supremacy, and broader understandings of the democratic principles of vicariousness. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mormons gravitated toward musicals as a common ideological platform, using musicals not only to practice a theology of voice but also to transition from outlier polygamist sect to become by the mid-twentieth century emblems of white, middle-class respectability in America. In an effort to become gods themselves, Mormons use the musical stage to practice transforming into someone they are not, modeling closely the theatrical qualities of Jesus and other spiritual leaders in Mormon mythology. Thus, learning to vicariously voice another person on the musical stage actually draws the faithful closer to godliness. Looking outward from the shared ideological roots of Mormonism and musical theater, this book offers a compelling study of how the ways Americans sound determine the paths of their belonging.

The book provides a short but thorough introduction to twelfth-century composer and visionary St. Hildegard of Bingen, creator of seventy-seven plainchant melodies (her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum) as well as a complete play set to music, the Ordo virtutum. Six chapters chronicle her eventful life, incorporating information about her compositions in the Dendermonde and Riesencodex manuscripts as appropriate: enclosure at the monastery of Disibodenberg; the catalytic vision that spurred her multifaceted creativity; her founding of the convent at Rupertsberg; preaching tours and exorcisms; clashes with priests, prelates, popes, and the Holy Roman Emperor; punishment by interdict; and final vindication. These chapters also explore her many nonmusical creations (three major theological treatises, Gospel homilies and smaller religious writings, scientific and medical works, two hagiographies, an invented language and accompanying alphabet, and her extensive correspondence). A seventh chapter traces continued awareness of her achievement after her death, her canonization and recognition as Doctor of the Church, and the belated rebirth of her music. The final three chapters are devoted to her music, beginning with a general overview and followed by a chapter each on shorter and longer genres, with the former providing basic liturgical information. Ancillary material includes a dozen illustrations (including several iconic images), a works list, and a selected bibliography and discography.

This volume investigates topics surrounding Johann Sebastian Bach and his five musically gifted sons. Robert Marshall takes on a deeply psychological perspective by examining how each of the Bach sons personally dealt with Sebastian’s imposing legacy. Mary Oleskiewicz investigates the Bach family’s connections to historical keyboard instruments and musical venues at the Prussian court of Frederick “the Great.” David Schulenberg argues that Emanuel Bach’s most significant contribution to European music is the large and diverse body of keyboard music he composed for harpsichord, fortepiano, organ and the clavichord. Evan Cortens’s chapter takes a detailed view of Emanuel Bach’s singers, vocal performance materials, and pay records in Hamburg and concludes that, as in most other parts of Germany at that time, one singer per part was the norm for Emanuel’s liturgical music after 1767. Finally, Christine Blanken’s essay continues research into Breitkopf’s publishing firm. Her discovery of unknown manuscripts by several members of the Bach family demonstrates much about what we can still learn about musical transmission, performance practice, and concert life in Bach’s Leipzig.

This book examines the nature and style of pastoralism, one of twentieth-century England’s most widespread and influential musical movements. Long dismissed as provincial, escapist, and reactionary, pastoral music in fact represents a distinctively English approach to modernist composition during the early twentieth century, adapting and transforming established musical and aesthetic conventions to reflect the experiences of British composers and audiences. Covering a wide expressive range—from songs of praise to symphonies of commemoration, lush Arcadian dramatic scenes to bleak neotonal landscapes—English pastoral music encompasses an array of applications, meanings, and stylistic inflections that oblige us to reassess its cultural and idiomatic significance. The book opens with a survey of pastoral music’s critical, theoretical, and stylistic foundations before moving on to examine its specific manifestations in the contexts of Arcadia, war, landscape, and the Utopian imagination. Works by well-known figures such as Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and Benjamin Britten are considered, as well as pieces by lesser-known composers such as E. J. Moeran, Ivor Gurney, Constant Lambert, and John Ireland, among others. Their diverse approaches to pastoralism not only reveal the breadth of its stylistic influence, but the depth of its philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings.

This book investigates the musical life of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Germany from the perspectives of those who lived in it. The men, women, and children of the era are treated here not as extras in the life of a famous composer but rather as protagonists in their own right. The primary focus is on keyboard music, from those who built organs, harpsichords, and clavichords, to those who played keyboards recreationally and professionally, and those who supported their construction through patronage. Examples include: Barthold Fritz, a clavichord maker who published a list of his customers; Christiane Sibÿlla Bose, an amateur keyboardist and close friend of Bach’s wife; the Countesses zu Epstein, whose surviving library documents the musical interests of teenage girls of the era; Luise Gottsched, who found Bach’s music less appealing than that of Handel; Johann Christoph Müller, a keyboard instructor who fell in love with one of his aristocratic pupils; and Carl August Hartung, a professional organist and fanatical collector of Bach’s keyboard music. The book draws on published novels, poems, and visual art as well as manuscript account books, sheet music, letters, and diaries. For most music lovers of the era, J. S. Bach himself was an impressive figure whose music was too challenging to hold a prominent place in their musical lives.

This book examines the music available to musical consumers in the nineteenth century, and what that music tells us about their tastes, priorities, and activities. The book's social history of chamber music performance places the works of canonic composers such as Schubert, Brahms, and Dvořák in relation to lesser-known but influential peers. The book explores the dynamic relationships among the active agents involved in the creation of Romantic music and shows how each influenced the others' choices in a rich, collaborative environment. In addition to documenting the ways companies acquired and marketed sheet music, the book reveals how the publication and performance of chamber music differed from that of ephemeral piano and song genres or more monumental orchestral and operatic works. Several distinct niche markets existed within the audience for chamber music, and composers created new musical works for their use and enjoyment. The book revises prevailing views of middle-class influence on nineteenth-century musical style and presents new methods for interpreting the meanings of musical works for musicians both past and present.

This book presents a transatlantic history of folk's midcentury resurgence that juxtaposes the related but distinct revivals that took place in the United States and Great Britain. After setting the stage with the work of music collectors in the nineteenth century, the book explores the so-called recovery of folk music practices and performers by Alan Lomax and others, including journeys to and within the British Isles that allowed artists and folk music advocates to absorb native forms and facilitate the music's transatlantic exchange. The book places the musical and cultural connections of the twin revivals within the decade's social and musical milieu and grapple with the performers' leftist political agendas and artistic challenges, including the fierce debates over “authenticity” in practice and repertoire that erupted when artists like Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio carried folk into the popular music mainstream. From work songs to skiffle, from the Weavers in Greenwich Village to Burl Ives on the BBC, the book offers a frank and wide-ranging consideration of a time, a movement, and a transformative period in American and British pop culture.

This is the first full-length introduction to the life and works of American composer Marga Richter (born 1926), who has written more than a hundred works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, dance, opera, voice, chorus, piano, organ, and harpsichord. Still actively composing in her eighties, Richter is particularly known for her large-scale pieces performed by ensembles such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and for other pieces performed by prominent artists including pianist Menahem Pressler, conductor Izler Solomon, and violinist Daniel Heifetz. Interspersing consideration of Richter's musical works with discussion of her life, her musical style, and the origins and performances of her works, the book documents a successful composer's professional and private life throughout the twentieth century. The book covers Richter's formative years, her influences, and the phases of her career from the 1950s to the present. Drawing extensively on interviews with Richter herself, the book also provides detailed descriptions of Richter's scores and uses reviews and other secondary sources to provide contexts for her compositions, including their relationship to modern dance, to other musical styles, and to 1970s feminism.