ENH245 - J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: Battling Modernism: Composers

Over three decades, Paul Griffiths's survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War. Pierre Boulez's music and life is described in chapter "1945".

John Cage has been described as the most influential composer of the last half of the twentieth century. His work and ideas - about silence, indeterminacy, nonintention, art's role in bringing the everyday object to our attention, the singularity of performance - have had influence not only in the world of music but also in dance, painting, printmaking, video art, and poetry. As an exponent of Zen Buddhism since the early fifties, he has had an important role in introducing Zen spirituality to the American artworld and general culture. Among his friends and collaborators have been longtime associate Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Those who have acknowledged his influence in their work range from minimalist composer Philip Glass to rock musicians David Byrne and Brian Eno. The Roaring Silence is the first full-length biography of John Cage. Written with Cage's full cooperation, it documents his life in unrivaled detail, interweaving a close account of the evolution of his work with an exploration of his aesthetic and philosophical ideas. David Revill never assumes specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, but sets Cage's work in the context of his personal development and contemporary culture. He draws on numerous interviews with Cage and his associates. Paying due attention to Cage's inventions, such as the prepared piano, and his pioneering use of indeterminate notation and chance operations in composition (utilizing the I Ching), Revill also illuminates Cage the performer, printmaker, watercolorist, expert amateur mycologist, game show celebrity, and political anarchist, and discusseshis pronouncements on social and environmental issues. The biography includes comprehensive chronologies of his musical and visual works. Arnold Schoenberg once called Cage, his former student, "not a composer but an invent

Rodeo. Four dance episodes. Buckaroo holiday ; Corral nocturne ; Saturday night waltz ; Hoe-down.

Philip Smith, trumpet ; Thomas Stacy, english horn (in 2nd work) ; New York Philharmonic ; Leonard Bernstein, conductor.

A candid and fascinating portrait of the American composer. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Aaron Copland (1900-1990) became one of America's most beloved and esteemed composers. His work, which includes Fanfare for the Common Man, A Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring, has been honored by a huge following of devoted listeners. But the full richness of Copland's life and accomplishments has never, until now, been documented or understood. Howard Pollack's meticulously researched and engrossing biography explores the symphony of Copland's life: his childhood in Brooklyn; his homosexuality; Paris in the early 1920s; the Alfred Stieglitz circle; his experimentation with jazz; the communist witch trials; Hollywood in the forties; public disappointment with his later, intellectual work; and his struggle with Alzheimer's disease. Furthermore, Pollack presents informed discussions of Copland's music, explaining and clarifying its newness and originality, its aesthetic and social aspects, its distinctive and enduring personality.

Carl Orff's Biography

"Masterworks of 20th-Century Music" introduces more than one hundred of the greatest compositions by world-renowned composer that have entered the standard orchestral repertory. There is a chapter dedicated to Carl Orff

L'Histoire du soldat (24:10) -- Pulcinella : excerpts (10:47) -- Violin concerto in D (19:58) -- Jeu de cartes (21:11).

Performed by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics CircleAward for Criticism ANew York Times Book ReviewTop Ten Book of the Year Timemagazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book WorldBest Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic forThe New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture.The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Popularly known during his lifetime as the world's greatest living composer, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) not only wrote some of the twentieth century's most influential music, he also assumed the role of cultural icon. This book reveals Stravinsky's two sides - the public persona, preoccupied with his own image and place in history, and the private composer, whose views and beliefs were often purposely suppressed. Charles M. Joseph draws a richer and more human portrait of Stravinsky than anyone has done before, using an array of unpublished materials and unreleased film trims from the composer's huge archive at the Paul Sacher Institute in Switzerland. Focusing on Stravinsky's place in the culture of the twentieth century, Joseph situates the composer among the giants of his age. He discusses Stravinsky's first American commission, his complicated relationship with his son, his professional relationships with celebrities ranging from T. S. Eliot to Orson Welles, his flirtations with Hollywood and television, and his love-hate attitude toward the critics and the media. In a close look at Stravinsky's efforts to mould a public image, Joseph explores the complex dance between the com