Composers category: 3267 books

In a series of lively essays that tell us much not only about the phenomenon that was Franz Liszt but also about the musical and cultural life of nineteenth-century Europe, Alan Walker muses on aspects of Liszt's life and work that he was unable to explore in his acclaimed three-volume biography of...

Ir has been said that no music amplifies the french ideals of precision and good taste better than the work of Maurice Ravel, yet his background could scarecly have been more cosmopolitan. The son of a Swiss father and a Basque mother, he was born near St. Jean de Luz in 1875; he died in Paris at...

‘Sounds in the silent air’ takes it title from a song by Ivor Gurney (1890 –1937). He was one of a number of English composers who fought in the First World War, alongside Arthur Bliss and Ralph Vaughan Williams. How did their experience affect the music they wrote and what impact did it have...

Gerald Finzi is one of the best-known modern English composers. While he is especially famous as a song-writer, for his sensitive settings of poets such as Hardy and Wordsworth, he also wrote in other genres; notable works include the exquisite cantata Dies Natalis, and his cello concerto. He also...

Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered the course...

Quincy Jones (b. 1933) is one of the most prolific composers, arrangers, bandleaders, producers, and humanitarians in American music history and the recording and film industries. Among pop music fans he is perhaps most famous for producing Michael Jackson's album, Thriller. Clarence Bernard Henry...

This book traces the remarkable course of a creative career which spanned the drawing rooms of the Imperial Russia and the social ferment of 1960s America, and serve to establish Stravinsky not only as the most celebrated composer of his time but also as one of the defining forces of twentieth-century culture.

César Franck (1822–1890), Belgian born and French domiciled, was one of the most remarkable composers of the 19th century. A number of his works are commonly recorded—such as his Symphony in D Minor, Symphonic Variations, Violin Sonata, and the ever-popular Panis Angelicus—and yet 38 years...

The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age chronicles the career of the most significant castrato of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Through a coincidence of time and place, Gaetano Guadagni was on the forefront of the heroic opera reform, and many forward-thinking...

Frontier Figures is a tour-de-force exploration of how the American West, both as physical space and inspiration, animated American music. Examining the work of such composers as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Farwell, Beth E. Levy addresses questions...

Libby Larsen has composed award-winning music performed around the world. Her works range from chamber pieces and song cycles to operas to large-scale works for orchestra and chorus. At the same time, she has advocated for living composers and new music since cofounding the American Composers Forum...

Forced by a hand injury to abandon a career as a pianist, Robert Schumann went on to become one of the world's great composers. Among many works, his Spring Symphony (1841), Piano Concerto in A Minor (1841/1845), and the Third, or Rhenish, Symphony (1850) exemplify his infusion of classical forms...

Quincy Jones (b. 1933) is one of the most prolific composers, arrangers, bandleaders, producers, and humanitarians in American music history and the recording and film industries. Among pop music fans he is perhaps most famous for producing Michael Jackson's album, Thriller. Clarence Bernard Henry...

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque—and occasionally so intemperate? John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing...