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Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life
by John Adams
Faber & Faber
£18.99 (Hardback) pp 352
ISBN: 9780571231157

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A book unlike anything ever written by a composer, part-memoir and part-description of the creative process, Hallelujah Junction is an absorbing journey through the musical landscape of the life and times of John Adams, one of today’s most admired and oft-performed composers. Hallelujah Junction is not only a deeply personal memoir, but also a first-hand encounter with the many emblematic themes and personalities that constitute our current musical life. Here you will find cogent, incisive and often very witty commentaries on people and events ranging from Richard Nixon and Allen Ginsberg to the Beatles, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, John Cage, Steve Reich and Frank Zappa.

> Further information on John Adams
 
Boosey & Hawkes: The Publishing Story
by Helen Wallace
RRP £12.99
ISBN 978-0-85162-514-0

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Rather than wage a price war, Leslie Boosey and Ralph Hawkes chose to
merge their rival businesses in 1930, expanding from their London base
to build a worldwide operation. Signing Bartók and Strauss and investing
in young composers like Britten and Copland, the company fully came of
age with the acquisition of Serge Koussevitzky’s Russian catalogue with
its masterpieces by Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and Prokofieff. Journalist and broadcaster Helen Wallace charts the company’s progress through boom years and unexpected financial threats, drawing on archive correspondence, press reports and interviews with composers and employees, past and present.

"Rivalry, romance, jealousy, generational change: the Boosey story is a ripping yarn worthy of a novel, if not a grand opera… Wallace's racy digest shows us how backroom businessmen continue to shape musical history."
Financial Times Magazine

 
Letters from a Life: Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten vol. 4 (1952-57)
ed. by Philip Reed, Mervyn Cook and Donald Mitchell
Boydell Press
£45.00 (hardback) 784 pp
ISBN 978-1-843383-382-6

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The volume charts Britten's growing stature as a major figure of the European musical establishment as composer, conductor and pianist, and his continuing involvement with the Aldeburgh Festival, the English Opera Group, and Covent Garden. Correspondents include librettists William Plomer (Gloriana) and Myfanwy Piper (The Turn of the Screw), and friends and collaborators such as Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster, Basil Coleman, Imogen Holst, Francis Poulenc, Lennox Berkeley, the Earl of Harewood and Britten's partner and principal interpreter, Peter Pears.

 



"Reading this fourth selection of Benjamin Britten's letters is to turn the pages of a history of mid-20th century English music-in-the-making… The volume is (like its companions) beautifully edited, footnoted and presented."
Gramophone


> Further information on Benjamin Britten
 
Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters & Documents
ed. by Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler
Boydell Press
£25.00 (hardback) 380 pp
ISBN: 978-1-84383-404-5

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The book traces the biographical, intellectual, and artistic evolution of a composer who, building on American modernism and interacting with the latest developments in Europe, has forged a distinctive, highly sophisticated musical language, and captures his friendships with fellow musicians and friends such as Charles Ives, Nadia Boulanger, John Kirkpatrick, Aaron Copland, Nicolas Nabokov, and more recently, Pierre Boulez, Oliver Knussen, Heinz Holliger, Daniel Barenboim, and James Levine.

Published in cooperation with the Paul Sacher Foundation.



> Further information on Elliott Carter
 
Elgar the Music Maker
by Diana McVeagh
Boydell & Brewer £16.99 (hardcover)
978 1 184383 295 9

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In 1955 Diana McVeagh published a pioneering study of Edward Elgar. In Elgar the Music Maker she harvests five decades of thoughts about his music, scrutinizing the biographical details that have since been discovered. Each of Elgar's works is discussed, balancing information and appraisal, from his juvenilia to his unfinished Third Symphony.



> Further information on Edward Elgar
 
Robin Holloway - Essays & Diversions vol. 2
Continuum Books
£40.00 (hardback) 304 pp
ISBN: 978-0-8264-9728-4

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Following the success of On Music, Vol. 1, this second volume of Robin Holloway's collection of writings covers a wealth of new ground. Gathered from a wealth of published and unpublished work, including the popular Spectator columns, Robin Holloway brings together some of his highly entertaining accounts of travelling around the world with his music; of travel in America and Europe, a kaleidoscope of festivals and of life as a Professor of Music at Cambridge University.



> Further information on Robin Holloway
 
Écrits d'André Jolivet
ed. Christine Jolivet-Erlih
en 2 Volumes
Éditions Delatour France 52,00 EUR

L’Association des amis d’André Jolivet vous informe de la parution des écrits du compositeur. Les textes, rédigés entre 1921 et 1974, ont été transcrits, présentés et annotés par Christine Jolivet-Erlih.

> Further information on André Jolivet

 
OLGA NEUWIRTH
Zwischen den Stühlen

A Twilight-Song auf der Suche nach dem fernen Klang
ed. Stefan Drees
with texts by Olga Neuwirth, Stefan Drees, Bernhard Günther, Elfriede Jelinek, Gerald Matt, Max Nyffeler, Reinhard Schulz, Helga Utz, Jean-Noël von der Weid and others; with many photos and CD
ISBN 978-3-7025-0582-0, 384pp, EUR 32.00

> Further information on Olga Neuwirth
 
Pause. Schweigen. Stille.
Dramaturgien der Abwesenheit im postdramatischen Musik-Theater
by Regine Elzenheimer
(Würzburger wissenschaftliche Schriften 581)
Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2008
ISBN 978-3-82-60-3441-1, 273p, Pb, EUR 34.80
with a chapter on Oehring/ter Schiphorst
Available at www.verlag-koenigshausen-neumann.de

> Further information on Helmut Oehring
 
Jacques Offenbach en España, Italia y Portugal
by Jacobo Kaufmann
Libros Certeza, Zaragoza 2007
355pp, Pb, ISBN 84-96219-90-8
Available at www.certeza.com

> Further information on Jacques Offenbach
 
Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1907-1914
by Sergey Prokofieff
transl. Anthony Phillips
Faber & Faber £25.00

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When he left Russia following the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer’s death, to be kept in a special, closed section of the Russian State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev’s son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. Volume 1 covers the bulk of Prokofiev’s years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire ending with his triumphant graduation. Taken as a whole, the Diaries constitute both an indispensable and an entertaining source of reference for all scholars and lovers of Prokofiev’s music.



> Further information on Serge Prokofieff
 
Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1915-1922: behind the mask
by Sergey Prokofieff
transl. Anthony Phillips
Faber & Faber £25.00
ISBN: 9780571226306

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The second volume of Sergey Prokofiev’s recently uncovered Diaries extends from 1915 to 1922 - a momentous epoch in European history, in the personal story of Prokofiev’s life, and in the development of his art. The Diaries describe in detail the genesis and, all too often, the problematical path to performance, of major works in the canon. A period of sustained creative endeavour, therefore, interspersed with the life of a touring virtuoso pianist, all the more remarkable considering the life-changing experiences of living, working and travelling in war-torn and revolutionary Russia, his decision to leave Russia and embark on the precarious life of an artist in the mythic America.



> Further information on Serge Prokofieff
 
Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas
by Boris Berman
Yale University Press £25
ISBN: 9780300114904

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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, Berman provides general information about the work and a discussion of the composition’s details and features, and in a section entitled “Master Class” he offers suggestions for interpretation and specific advice for performing. Berman also corrects for the first time various misprints in published scores and includes a helpful glossary of musical terms.



> Further information on Serge Prokofieff
 
Stravinsky Dances: Re-visions across a Century
by Stephanie Jordan
Dance Books Ltd. £50.00
ISBN-13: 978-1852731250

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Stephanie Jordan's ground-breaking survey and close examination of a range of Stravinsky dances - some familiar, others less so - sheds new, unexpected light upon a composer central to Western artistic tradition and increasingly important to an emerging world culture. Her book, is essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of dance, music and interdisciplinary studies, as well as lay readers interested in the work of one of the twentieth-century's greatest composers.



> Further information on Igor Stravinsky
 
Pause. Schweigen. Stille.
Dramaturgien der Abwesenheit im postdramatischen Musik-Theater
by Regine Elzenheimer
(Würzburger wissenschaftliche Schriften 581)
Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2008
ISBN 978-3-82-60-3441-1, 273p, Pb, EUR 34.80
with a chapter on Oehring/ter Schiphorst
Available at www.verlag-koenigshausen-neumann.de

> Further information on Iris ter Schiphorst
 
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