Prokofieff, Arr. Macleod: Five Melodies Op. 35bis for Flute and Piano
Macmillan: Violin Concerto No. 2 Violin and Piano
(Boosey & Hawkes Chamber Music). Composed in 2021 and dedicated to the soloist Nicola Benedetti, this work was written as a memorial tribute to the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, who died the previous year and was a major musical influence on the composer, particularly during his formative creative years. MacMillan writes, "One of the co-commissioners for Violin Concerto no 2 was Polish and I was keen that there be some acknowledgment of the late Penderecki in some way in the new work. I was happy to oblige with a dedication to a composer I have greatly admired from an early age." He describes creating a new work for Nicola Benedetti: "I've worked with Nicola on her recording of the Mendelssohn concerto and on tour with her on the Mozart G Major concerto, and have absorbed a lot from these experiences. I composed From Ayrshire for her some years ago which is a short piece that can be performed with either piano or small orchestral accompaniment. I also wrote a short work for her and some singers of The Sixteen for the very first Cumnock Tryst festival in 2014. All this has been important in the way I have built my relationship with Nicola, and in my approach for this concerto." Adopting a more compact format than MacMillan's first violin concerto from 2009, the second employs a medium-sized orchestra and plays continuously in a single through-composed movement of 25 minutes' duration.
Symphonic Spectacles
Symphonic music of the early twentieth century reflects the complex, cosmopolitan world it inhabited. In a time of waning empire, rising nationalism, and heightened sexual politics, composers in Germany, Britain, and America drew upon the compositional resources of tradition to create intensely personal symphonic spectacles. The hybrid symphonic works that flourished in this period mixed musical forms and genres freely, adapting compositional procedures for their rhetorical potential. Symphonic Spectacles investigates large-scale formal mixture in six case studies that juxtapose works of the Austro-German symphonic canon with lesser-studied pieces by a diverse array of composers, including Strauss, Beach, Ellington, and Mahler. Sam Reenan proposes a creative analytical framework rooted in the analogy between formal hybridity and intersectional identity, which affords new interpretive possibilities that integrate formal analysis with critical consideration of compositional design, reception history, and subjectivity. Considering influential scholarship from the new Formenlehre, literary genre studies, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality, Reenan's analytical approach favors playfully creating new stories over gatekeeping bygone ones. This book combines manuscript evidence, composer commentary, historical and biographical details, and published music criticism, all factors which contribute to comprehensive formal interpretations. Symphonic Spectacles represents not only a collection of studies in hybrid symphonic form, but also a model for countercanonic means of knowledge production in the field of music analysis.
Entangled Histories
Through a wealth of archival documents and printed materials, Entangled Histories shows how, over the first half of the nineteenth century, opera helped redefine questions of collective identity in the Austrian empire, serving as a testing ground for, among others, theories of language and education, notions of fatherland and citizenship, artistic expressions of cultural hybridity, new forms of managing economic and cultural capital, and practices of collective memory. By emphasizing the entanglements between opera's aesthetics, its social function, and the ideology underpinning its system of production in different institutional and urban contexts, this book places opera at the intersection of a broad set of political and cultural relationships that for several decades connected Vienna and prominent Italian operatic centers, contributing to a transnational historiography of the art form in the nineteenth century. It also argues that new modes of production and dissemination of opera between Vienna and the Italian states contributed to official cultural policies promoting a supranational identity of the Austrian empire-one that acknowledged, but ultimately transcended cultural differences. As the state emerged victoriously yet completely transformed from over two decades of wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, opera-with its long tradition of impresarios, composers, librettists, and performers on the move-became a key tool for bringing some of the different cultural traditions of the Austrian empire into a fruitful mutual dialogue.
Music Lessons
Now in paperback to celebrate the centenary of Pierre Boulez's birth in 2025. A groundbreaking group of writings by French composer Pierre Boulez, his yearly lectures prepared for the Coll癡ge de France. Music Lessons marks the first publication in English of Pierre Boulez's Coll癡ge de France lectures, written while he held the chair of Invention, Technique and Language in Music at the Coll癡ge between 1976 and 1995. Representing Boulez's most significant writings from the period, the lectures offer a sustained intellectual engagement with one of the dominant figures of twentieth-century music, a consummate composer-conductor who remained central to the conversation around contemporary music until his death in 2016. Boulez explores, among other topics, the process through which a musical idea is realized in a full-fledged composition, the complementary roles of craft and inspiration and the degree to which the memory of other musical works can influence and change the act of creation. Boulez also gives a penetrating account of problems in classical music that are still present today, such as the conservatism of a musical community fixated on the repertory of the past. Woven into the discussion are stories of his own compositions and those of fellow composers whose work he engaged with in his many roles as teacher, thinker, and conductor: from Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Var癡se, from Bart籀k to Berg, Debussy to Mahler and Wagner, and all the way back to his beloved J. S. Bach. Including a foreword by semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who was for years close to the composer, this edition is also enriched by an illuminating preface by Jonathan Goldman. With an authoritative translation retaining Boulez's fierce convictions, cutting opinions and signature wit, Music Lessons is an essential and entertaining volume.
The Resounding Revolution
Far from being bounded by the timeframe of the 1960s, freedom song continues to evolve as a tool both of historical memory and of present activism. Stephen Stacks looks at how post-1968 freedom song helps us negotiate our present relationship to the era while at the same time sustaining the contemporary struggle inspired by it. Stacks's analysis shifts the focus of attention from genre--freedom song--to process and practice--freedom singing. As he shows, freedom singing after 1968 generates multilayered meanings. It can reinforce, or resist, consensus memories or dominant narratives. Stacks illuminates freedom singing's diversity by examining it in three contexts: performance, protest, and within documentary sound recording/film. Insightful and vividly detailed, The Resounding Revolution examines sixty years of Black music to challenge and reshape the entrenched story of the Civil Rights Movement.
