Music M656 Reserves

Music M656
Music Since 1900:
Modernism, Tradition, and the Avant-Garde

Spring 2008

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

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Books on Reserve and in Reference

Table of Contents


Background and Reference

Austin, William W. Music in the 20th Century: From Debussy through Stravinsky. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. ML 197 .A93
Dated, but covers composers ignored elsewhere.

Cook, Nicholas, and Anthony Pople. The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ML 197 .C26
A collection of essays on various repertoires and groups of composers.

Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music: The Avant Garde Since 1945. New York: George Braziller, 1981. ML 197 .G74 M68
Among the best books on the post-war avant-garde.

Morgan, Robert P., ed. Modern Times: From World War I to the Present. Music and Society. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993. ML 197 .M72 1993
A social history of music since 1918, useful as a counterpoint to our focus on composers in this class.

Morgan, Robert P. Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. ML 197 .M83
An excellent text.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. REFERENCE ML 100 .G92
The New Grove is the first place to look for information about anyone and anything having to do with music. Read the articles on composers; refer to the lists of works at the back of each article; see articles on concepts (such as "Twelve-note composition"), nations, and cities; and become familiar with this encyclopedia as a whole. This is the musician's single most useful reference tool. The 2nd edition is also online.

Nicholls, David. American Experimental Music, 1890-1940. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ML 200.5 .N55
A cogent history of the experimental tradition in American composition from Charles Ives and Henry Cowell to the Second World War.

Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ML 197 .N996 1999
A survey of experimental music since the 1950s.

Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. ML 197 .R76
A fascinating new look at twentieth-century classical music and its impact on modern culture, by the music critic of The New Yorker.

Salzman, Eric. Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2002. ML 197 .S17 2002
A good basic text, very inclusive for its relative brevity.

Slonimsky, Nicolas. Music Since 1900. 5th ed. New York: Schirmer Books, 1994. REFERENCE ML 197 .S62 1994
A delightful book, with a time-line of music from 1900 to 1969, listing premieres, publications, riots, lots of useful things; fully indexed (look up the Beatles). It has two sets of fine appendices: documents (including manifestos, letters, speeches, and trial transcripts--look up the HUAC hearings for Eisler and Copland) and a dictionary of terms, many of Slonimsky's invention (such as pandiatonicism, abecedenarianism, infra-modern music, and sonic exuviation).

Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Music. Vol. 4, The Early Twentieth Century, and Vol. 5, The Late Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ML 160 .T18 v.5 and v.6
A detailed, enlightening, and opinionated survey of music and its social contexts.

Watkins, Glenn. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994. ML 197 .W29
Argues that collage, the juxtaposition of disparate elements, is a central thread of modern music and art.

Watkins, Glenn. Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century. New York: Schirmer Books, 1988. ML 197 .W3
An excellent and very rich survey text.

On Individual Composers

Block, Geoffrey, and J. Peter Burkholder, eds. Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. ML 410 .I95 C35
A collection of essays that argue that Ives's music is rooted in the European tradition and parallels the music of his European contemporaries in significant ways.

Brand, Juliane, and Christopher Hailey, eds. Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. ML 410 .S28 C66
A collection of essays on Schoenberg, his music, and his impact on modern culture.

Burkholder, J. Peter, ed. Charles Ives and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. ML 410 .I95 C33
Essays and documents on Ives and his music.

Cooke, Mervyn. Britten: War Requiem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ML 410 .B83 C76
A guide to Britten's War Requiem and its background.

Frisch, Walter, ed. Schoenberg and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. ML 410 .I95 C33
Essays and documents on Schoenberg and his music.

Gable, David, and Morgan, Robert P. Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. ML 410 .B47 A59
Papers from the Berg centennial conference held in Chicago in 1985.

Pleadings and Polemics

Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. New York: Seabury Press, 1973. ML 197 .A3
Adorno is brilliant, difficult, infuriating, and probably wrong as often as right. This book defends Schoenberg and attacks Stravinsky. He may be barking up the wrong tree, but Adorno is full of vital thinking.

Albright, Daniel, ed. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ML 197 .M73
A useful anthology of readings, parallel to the Morgan collection.

Boulez, Pierre. Notes of an Apprenticeship. Ed. Paule Thévenin. Trans. Herbert Weinstock. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. ML 60 .B762
Writings from early in Boulez's career, when he was among the leaders of the new generation of composers in France and one of the heros of the Darmstadt school.

Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. ML 60 .C13
Cage opposes art as a category separate from life, and suggests that what is most important is our experience of what is happening now. This is his first book of writings and is probably read more widely than his music is heard. If he interests you, he has several more collections covering the next three decades.

Debussy, Claude. Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer. Ed. François Lesure, trans. Richard Langham Smith. New York: Knopf, 1977. ML 60 .D2 D2
A compilation of Debussy's journalistic criticism and interviews, revealing many of his attitudes about music and musical life.

Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. ML 197 .F54
Fink argues that "minimal" contemporary music embodies an "excess of repetition" that reflects the repetitiveness of America's mass consumer culture.

Hubbs, Nadine. The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. ML 200.5 .H83
Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, and other gay composers created the distinctive sound of American Music. Hubbs examines how their sexuality shaped their music and thus has had a profound effect on American culture.

Ives, Charles. Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings. Ed. Howard Boatwright. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970. PS 3517 .V3 E78 1970
Ives's Essays Before a Sonata were an attempt to explain what he was after in his Concord Sonata, but they include his most compelling statement of his aesthetic point of view. A portion of the "Epilogue" is required.

Lipman, Samuel. Music After Modernism. New York: Basic Books, 1979. ML 197 .L65
Music is in a bad way, what do we do now? Chapters on Copland, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg are provocative, and the one on Mahler is recommended to anyone who thinks Mahler is a great composer. How would you answer Lipman?

Pleasants, Henry. The Agony of Modern Music. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. ML 197 .P72
A classic: the first open-minded, well-argued, bitter polemic against all modern music. Pleasants's arguments must be considered and refuted, not merely ignored, in any defense of twentieth-century classical music.

Rochberg, George. The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music. Ed. and with an introduction by William Bolcom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. ML 60 .R62 A3
Writings spanning three decades, from the mid-1950s, when Rochberg was a disciple of twelve-tone music, to the early 1980s, when he had become an opponent of modernism and was writing music that sounds like Beethoven.

Rockwell, John. All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. ML 200.5 .R62
Rockwell, a music critic for The New York Times, scans the scene of music in the 1970s and early 1980s from Milton Babbitt and John Cage to Stephen Sondheim and the Talking Heads.

Schoenberg, Arnold. Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Ed. Leonard Stein, with translations by Leo Black. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. ML 60 .S33 1975
Schoenberg has many interesting things to say, defending and explaining his own music, extolling composers like Brahms and Mahler, attacking his attackers, and so on. His essays are at times witty, at times painful, often fun, always intelligent.

Schwartz, Elliott, and Childs, Barney, eds. Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967. ML 197 .S398
Simms, Bryan R., ed. Composers on Modern Musical Culture: An Anthology of Readings on Twentieth-Century Music. New York: Schirmer Books, 1999. ML 197 .C6775
Both are collections of writings by composers, similar to the Morgan collection.

Straus, Joseph N. Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. ML 197 .S787
Applies Harold Bloom's theory of "the anxiety of influence" to music and shows how Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Berg, and Webern responded to and reinterpreted the music of the past.

Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. ML 410 .S93 A122
Stravinsky's Norton lectures at Harvard 1939-40, detailing his aesthetics.

Webern, Anton. The Path to the New Music. Ed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black. Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser, 1963. ML 197 .W373
A brief outline of Webern's view of music history in the form of transcripts of two lecture series, "The Path to the New Music" and "The Path to Twelve-Note Composition."

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