num_pages: 510
description: This anthology of essays, interviews and autobiographical pieces provides an invaluable overview of the evolution of contemporary music—from chromaticism, serialism, and indeterminacy to jazz, vernacular, electronic, and non-Western influences. Featuring classic essays by Stravinsky, Stockhausen and Reich, as well as writings by lesser-known but equally innovative composers such as Jack Beeson, Richard Maxfield, and T. J. Anderson, this collection covers a broad range of approaches. Here you will find Busoni's influential "Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music;" Partch's exploration of a new notation system; Babbitt's defense of advanced composition in his controversial "Who Cares If You Listen?" and Pauline Oliveros's meditations on sound. Now updated with fifteen new composers including Michael Tippet, György Ligeti, Gunther Schuller, Ben Johnston, Sofia Gubaidulina, and William Bolcom, this important book gathers together forty-nine pieces—many out of print and some newly written for this volume—which serve as a documentary history of twentieth-century music, in theory and practice. Impassioned, provocative, and eloquent, these writings are as exciting and diverse as the music they discuss.
language: English
title: Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music
titlecomplete: Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music
genres: Music, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 48
publisher: Da Capo Press