| Contents |
Esthetic positions. Two letters to Ferruccio Busoni / Arnold Schoenberg ; From "Cock and Harlequin" / Jean Cocteau ; From Poetics of music / Igor Stravinsky ; "Experimental music" / John Cage ; "Who cares if you listen?" / Milton Babbitt ; "Who listens if you care?" / Evan Ziporyn -- Expanded sonic resources. From Sketch of a new esthetic of music / Ferruccio Busoni ; The art of noises / Luigi Russolo ; "Music and its future" / Charles Ives ; "The liberation of sound" / Edgard Varèse ; "Tendencies in recent music" / Pierre Boulez -- Compositional approaches. From "Composition with twelve tones" / Arnold Schoenberg ; From "The concept of unity in electronic music" / Karlheinz Stockhausen ; "Free stochastic music" / Iannis Xenakis ; From "Metamorphoses of musical form" / György Ligeti ; From Writings about music / Steve Reich -- Music, society, politics. "Shifts in musical production" / Kurt Weill ; Speech for the Düsseldorf Music Festival / Joseph Goebbels ; "Chaos instead of music" / Pravda ; Three commentaries / Sergey Prokofiev ; From Testimony / Dmitri Shostakovich ; From My Lord, what a morning / Marian Anderson ; From "A scratch orchestra: draft constitution" / Cornelius Cardew ; From Streaks of life / Ethel Smyth -- "'I recycle sounds': do women compose differently?" / Eva Rieger ; From "Horizons unlimited" / William Grant Still ; "The black American composer" / Olly Wilson -- Extending Western music's boundaries. Three articles for music journals / Claude Debussy ; From Two articles on the influence of folk music / Béla Bartók ; From Notes without music / Darius Milhaud ; "The return to the music of the past" / Wanda Landowska ; "Patterns of music" / Harry Partch ; From "Mozart and the ethnomusicological study of Western culture" / Bruno Nettl -- Concert life, reception, and the culture industry. From "Society for Private Music Performances in Vienna" / Alban Berg ; From "A social critique of radio music" / Theodor W. Adorno ; From Intermission talk for Toscanini's final radio concert / Lawrence Gilman ; "Musica practica" / Roland Barthes ; From Postmodernist culture / Steven Connor -- Pluralism. From "Memoirs of an amnesiac" / Erik Satie ; From Two interviews / Nadia Boulanger ; From Music ho! / Constant Lambert ; From Music, the arts, and ideas / Leonard B. Meyer ; From "The poetics of the open work" / Umberto Eco ; From "On the Third string quartet" / George Rochberg ; "Music--or musics?" / Carl Dahlhaus. |
| Abstract |
Twentieth-century music has been described as complex, vital, diverse, uncertain, experimental, self-conscious, innovative--the list is long and growing. Composers have been both credited with and accused of always searching for something "new," writing works that are mechanistic but romantic, meaningful but unskilled, beautiful but ugly! In this book, the editor helps us grasp the flavor of the era by presenting forty-five readings from the period, nearly all written by active participants in the musical developments of the time. Thus we tune in to the voices of some thirty composers--from Busoni to Babbitt, Ives to Xenakis, Satie to Stravinsky--and learn from performers Anderson and Landowska, philosopher-critics Adorno, Dahlhaus, and Meyer, and writers Cocteau, Barthes, and Eco. |
