Overview

Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century builds on the foundations of Music since the First World War (first published 1977, revised edition 1988). It updates and reshapes the original text and places it in the wider context of twentieth-century serious music before 1918 and after 1975. The focus is on matters of compositional technique, with sections of detailed analytical comment framed by more concise sketches of a range of twentieth-century composers from Fauré to Wolfgang Rihm. Extensive music examples reinforce this technical focus. Though in no sense a history of music concerned primarily with the institutional and critical climate within which composers live and work, nor an encyclopedia dealing with every significant composer, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century offers a critical engagement with that confrontation between tradition and innovation to which twentieth-century composers have responded with resourcefulness and vitality.

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9780198166832

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The text is shot through with genuine and telling insights into the compositional process, and the author's observations are expressed throughout with a polished clarity that demands that the book be recommended as an essential preliminary read for all would-be students of twentieth-century classical music. Musical Letters, vol. 82, no. 3 The discussion of Nielsen's Fifth Symphony is especially fine, and sufficiently compelling in content and enthusiastic in tone as to send the reader directly off to listen to the music. Musical Letters, vol. 82, no. 3 A valuable aspect of Whittall's book is ... its intelligent assessment of Soviet commposers on the evidence of their musical skills rather than merely considering their relationship to their cultural context. Musical Letters, vol. 82, no. 3 a magisterial account of a phenomenally broad range of musical styles, distinguished by clarity of expression, comprehensiveness of coverage, sustained analytical insights and first-rate presentation. As a readable and highly informative introduction to the compositonal techniques of 'serious' music of the last century, it is likely to remain a standard text, its grasp of essential aesthetic trends ensuring that both the complexity and humanity of the modern composer's art are vividly conveyed. Musical Letters, vol. 82, no. 3 Whittall's emphasis on polarity is a superb way of describing the structure of musical language The Musical Times

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