When I was asked to prepare the 6th edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Music, I was asked to concentrate on three areas: popular music and non-Western music (which had almost no coverage in the previous edition) and contemporary music (which was quickly falling out of date). For the last of these, I had room to add around 100 new entries on contemporary composers. Drawing that list up was one of the most enjoyable, but trickiest parts of the whole process. One hundred composers sounds like a lot, but there are more composers working in the Western classical tradition today than ever before. And they are working in more styles and come from more countries.  Continue reading →

J.S. Bach: A Life in Music  Peter Williams Cambridge University Press: 978-0-521-30683-6 / 405pp / £16.99

The Journal of the London Bach Society has already described Peter Williams’ ‘innovative biography as ‘imaginative and fresh’, and Williams (himself an acclaimed scholar and performer) has illuminated new aspects of the composer’s life, utilising (among other things) a new examination of Bach’s obituary, integrating recently discovered information.

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Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute  Peter Dickinson University of Rochester Press Many  middle-aged music lovers with a taste for powerful tonal orchestral music remember all too well the orthodoxy that ruled unshakeably throughout the 1960s. Such music was felt to be deeply unfashionable, and only rebarbative twelve-tone pieces (or compositions heavily influenced by this hegemony) held sway. The BBC under Sir William Glock was, of course, a bastion of this unyielding thinking, and composers such as Malcolm Arnold were shamefully neglected. A somewhat similar prejudice held sway in the United States, and few composers suffered this implacable demand for new fashion more than Samuel Barber. But how things have changed – and how unimportant such prejudices now seem, given that composers such as Barber and Arnold are now recognised as the Masters that they always were, while much of the once-fashionable music has fallen away. Continue reading →

Many a forest has been felled to produce unnecessary books on music, but that is most definitely not the case with this utterly fascinating volume from the ever-reliable Tom Service. It’s difficult to know what to praise first: the fashion in which Service conjures the very different (and often difficult) characters of the conductors involved in the variety of musical odysseys represented here. But it is not just the star names which are illuminated by Service’s lively prose – economical but vivid characterisation of everyone involved is the order of the day here. Also evoked with great skill, inter alia, is the experience of listening to great music, which is of course the raison d’être of the journeys described. But most of all it is the controversial and provocative question of just how great conductors achieve the incandescent results that they achieve with their orchestras which is the centre of the narrative here. How does Simon Rattle work with the Berlin Philharmonic? Or Mariss Jansons with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam? Or how does Claudio Abbado work his wonders every year with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra? Tom Service (who writes about music for the Guardian, and broadcasts on the subject for radio) attempts to supply the answers in this valuable book.

Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras Tom Service Faber, £18.99 hardback, £14.99 ebook

Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America’s Musical Life by Stephen Swayne/Oxford University Press £27.50

Several decades ago, a performance of a relatively modern symphonic work took place at London’s Royal Festival Hall, which created something of a stir (at least as much of a stir as a classical concert is wont to do). The piece was In Praise of Shahn by a then-living American composer, William Schuman. Continue reading →