Musical Experience Of Composer Performer Listener

One of America's foremost contemporary composers, professor of music at the University of California, Roger Sessions here discusses the musical experience of the composer, the performer, the listener. He believes this experience to be shared, on in which all three participants play vital roles, and in this book he speaks especially to the listener. Mr. Sessions finds that the artist-public relationships has been shifted to that of producer and consumer in big business. But his reply to his own question about a threat to the future of music is both a challenge and an expression of hope. A fascinating little book that will be read with pleasure by people at all levels of musical education. Originally published in 1950. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

For more than half of his long life, composer Roger Sessions was a commanding figure on the American musical scene. He enjoyed the solid respect of his peers, and as a teacher of a generation of composers and author of compelling writings on his craft, his influence on musical thought remains profound. Yet, even in his lifetime, his music endured vastly disrespectful neglect. He was a "difficult" composer. Sessions was well aware of it. In a New York Times article, he wrote, "I have sometimes been told that my music is 'difficult' for the listener. There are those who consider this as praise, those who consider it a reproach. For my part I regard it as, in itself, neither one or the other...it is the way the music comes, the way it has to come." The way Sessions's music "had to come" is a recurrent focus of this biography. As the story is told, often in the composer's own words, the complex picture emerges of a remarkable man who, gradually and not very willingly, learned to accept his unexpected lot as a "difficult" composer. Frederik Prausnitz, an acquaintance of Sessions and conductor of his work, combines personal and musical insights to present this fascinating portrait of an influential, yet often overlooked, modernist composer.

Over the past fifty years Roger Sessions has developed, in articles, lectures, and addresses, various themes that reflect the stages of his own musical and intellectual growth. These themes form the basis of the present collection of essays. Many of the essays deal with specific problems that musicians, especially composers, have faced during the past five decades: problems related to new musical styles and techniques, to the position of composers in society, to their responsibilities as teachers, to their role during the period of the world wars, to the mutual reactions of composer and audience, and to the basic questions of musical form and expression. The collection also includes a set of critical essays on such seminal figures as Bloch, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Roger Sessions is the composer of a recently recorded cantata on Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" as well as numerous other works. He is the author of The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, and Listener (Princeton). Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book is an introductin to contemporary training and practice in music therapy.

Edward T. Cone was one of the most important and influential music critics of the twentieth century. He was also a master lecturer skilled at conveying his ideas to broad audiences. Hearing and Knowing Music collects fourteen essays that Cone gave as talks in his later years and that were left unpublished at his death. Edited and introduced by Robert Morgan, these essays cover a broad range of topics, including music's position in culture, musical aesthetics, the significance of opera as an art, setting text to music, the nature of twentieth-century harmony and form, and the practice of musical analysis. Fully matching the quality and style of Cone's published writings, these essays mark a critical addition to his work, developing new ideas, such as the composer as critic; clarifying and modifying older positions, especially regarding opera and the nature of sung utterance; and adding new and often unexpected insights on composers and ideas previously discussed by Cone. In addition, there are essays, such as one on Debussy, that lead Cone into areas he had not previously examined. Hearing and Knowing Music represents the final testament of one of our most important writers on music.

Contributors to this volume are Philip Alperson, Francis Sparshott, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Edward T. Cone, Peter Kivy, Jenefer Robinson, Joseph Margolis, Arnold Berleant, Morris Grossman, Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Davies, Martin Donougho, Roger Scruton, and Rose Rosengard Subotnik.