The renowned American composer George Rochberg (1918-2005) distilled a lifetime of insights about Western music across some three hundred years in A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language . In A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language , the renowned American composer George Rochberg distilled a lifetime of insights about Western music across some three hundred years. Rochberg describes how the asymmetrical tonal language of the late eighteenth century--the era of Haydn and Mozart--evolved through the gradual incursion of symmetry into a system based on the juxtaposition of tonal and atonal, asymmetrical and symmetrical--as seen in notable composers such as Webern, Prokofiev, and Rochberg himself. A Dance of Polar Opposites takes us inside the composer's studio, reveals how he assessed his and our musicalpast, and paints a picture of what he believed our musical future may be. George Rochberg (1918-2005), one of the most respected composers and writers about music in the second half of the twentieth century, was a finalist twice for the Pulitzer Prize and longtime professor at University of Pennsylvania. His writings include The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music (which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award);the memoir Five Lines, Four Spaces ; and a volume of letters. Jeremy Gill was a student of George Rochberg and is a composer, conductor, and pianist.

Finished just weeks before his death, George Rochberg's eloquent memoir offers a detailed look at his fruitful life as a composer, publisher, and teacher of music. The volume traces a life immersed in music, with early study under George Szell and Gian Carlo Menotti and later long-term collaborations with the Concord Quartet and commissions for major orchestras and opera companies. Rochberg takes care to describe the intellectual and aesthetic changes that led him down certain paths as a composer, often challenging the conventions of the day. Reflecting on music, aesthetics, colleagues, and the life of the creative mind, Rochberg's memoir captures not only the spirit but also the intellectual climate of the second half of the twentieth century. Rochberg's life as a composer was marked by an ongoing search for his artistic place between tradition and the avant-garde, with an extensive oeuvre comprising over one hundred works including chamber ensembles, string quartets, symphonies, solo pieces, songs, and an opera. In addition to his importance as an American composer, he was also a central figure in academia and publishing. He served as chair of the University of Pennsylvania's music department, and as an editor and director of publications at the Theodore Presser Company, he helped marshal the company into one of the premier American musical publishing houses. Through the course of the book, Rochberg reveals the thought processes that led him in unexpected directions as he pursued the independent path of his career. This is the story of a creative mind developing, at times struggling, and constantly growing.--Publisher's description.

This is very much not an academic book, though it is, as one would expect, throughout infomed by Steiner's vast and polyglot reading, from the classics through to contemporary science, across fiction, poetry, theology and philosophy It is rather in a genre of its own, littered with entertaining anecdotes, and the closest we will get to an autobiography.

Eight essays by the literary critic probe the history and formal structure of inward speech as well as the relationship between linguistics and poetics and between language and literature

Text: English, French (translation)

This volume brings together twelve essays, eleven of which have been published in various books and periodicals over the past two decades. "The Opera of Stanislaw Moniuszko" is published here for the first time. The other essays in this collection are: "Russian Song," "Czechoslovakian Song," "Polish Song," "The Operas of Serov," "Pskovityanka: The Original Version of Rimsky-Korsakov's First Opera," "Vladimir Stasov: Man and Critic," "Some Eighteenth-Century Polish Symphonies," "Satire and Symbolism in The Golden Cockerel," "Heine, Cui, and William Ratcliff," "Arab Melodies in Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin," and "The Early Development of Opera in Poland." An appreciation of Abraham's work has been contributed by Denis Arnold.

Book by Abrahams, Gerald

Feldman, Gerald D.

(Boosey & Hawkes Scores/Books). This arrangement of Finzi's perennially popular work for clarinet and piano was made to mark the centenary of the composer's birth on 14 July 2001.

Inside the Promised A Personal View of Today's Israe

Originally published in 1982 Cheats at Work looks at occupations from an anthropological point of view, using a similar format to analysis of cultures in the study of anthropology. The author uses an extensive set of quotations drawn from over a hundred informants at all social levels. The interviews reveal a distinct set of ideologies and attitudes from various occupations. The book looks specifically at cheating, lying and deception in various occupations, and the interviews reveal how and why people cheat, and deceive their customers and clients, how they learn the concealed tricks and professions and how they justify this.