The varied forms of Leonard Bernstein's musical creativity have been recognized and enjoyed by millions. These lectures, Mr. Bernstein's most recent venture in musical explication, will make fascinating reading as well. Virgil Thomson says of the lectures: "Nobody anywhere presents this material so warmly, so sincerely, so skillfully. As musical mind-openers they are first class; as pedagogy they are matchless". Mr. Bernstein considers music ranging from Hindu ragas through Mozart and Ravel, to Copland, suggesting a worldwide, innate musical grammar. Folk music, pop songs, symphonies, modal, tonal, atonal, well-tempered and ill-tempered works all find a place in these discussions. Each, Mr. Bernstein suggests, has roots in a universal language central to all artistic creation. Using certain linguistic analogies, he explores the ways in which this language developed and can be understood as an aesthetic surface. Drawing on his insights as a master composer and conductor, Mr. Bernstein also explores what music means below the surface: the symbols and metaphors which exist in every musical piece, of whatever sort. And, finally, Mr. Bernstein analyzes twentieth century crises in the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, finding even here a transformation of all that has gone before, as part of the poetry of expression, through its roots in the earth of human experience. Phonograph records are included in this book, with Mr. Bernstein's own speaking and playing of certain sections, in which musical sounds are crucial for understanding. These talks, written and delivered when Leonard Bernstein was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, are the newest of the author's literary achievements. In addition to a distinguished career as conductor, pianist, and composer, Mr. Bernstein is the recipient of many television Emmys for the scripts of his Young People's Concerts, Omnibus programs, and others, and is the author of The Infinite Variety of Music and The Joy of Music, for which he received the Christopher Award.

Istvan Anhalt, himself a composer of many vocal works, has written an interdisciplinary study of the innovative vocal and choral music that has emerged in Europe and North America since the Second World War. This music has amazed, confused, sometimes shocked, and often deeply moved its listeners, and the author probes its very roots. Anhalt sketches briefly the antecedents of this revolutionary music and then illustrates the subject by looking closely at works by three of the greatest composers of modern vocal and choral music: Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III for female solo voice, Gyӧrgy Ligeti's Nouvelles Aventures for three solo voices and small instrumental ensemble, and Witold Lutoslawski’s Trois Poèmes d’Henri Michaux for large chorus and orchestra. The author next seeks to formulate a conceptual framework to explain post-war vocal composition. He discusses relationships between poetry and music, speaking and singing, theatre and music, and composers and performers. He identifies and examines recurring themes in his corpus, including hallowed and cursed names, repetition as a mythical and/or mystical technique, the arcane, magical elements in music and language, and music as spectacle or celebration and as a search for the past. Anhalt also considers the structural elements and compositional procedures used in creating this type of music. The complex associations with other creative activities that typify modern vocal composition help to make it, as Anhalt shows clearly, an extraordinary rich mosaic of alternative voices.