The description is commendably clear, well-written and wide-ranging in its references, placing works and events within their global cultural, social, and political contexts ... A milestone in the publication of music reference books. John Robert Brown, Classical Music

EACH CHAPTER BEGINS WITH A TIMELINE AND ENDS WITH A SUMMARY, STUDY QUESTIONS, AND A LIST OF KEY TERMS; 1. : The First Literate Repertory in Western Music: Gregorian Chant; Theories of Music; Historical Imagination; Christian Beginnings, As Far As We Know Them; The Legend of St. Gregory; The Development of the Liturgy: The Offices; The Mass; Writing It Down: Neumes; Guido of Arezzo; Modal Theory; Psalmody in Practice: The Office and the Mass; The Mass; Frankish Additions to the Chant Repertory; Hymns, Tropes, and Liturgical Drama; Marian Antiphons; How to Do Polyphony; Symphonia and Its Modifications; Organum and Discant; Literate Music and the Persistence of Oral Traditions; 2. : Secular and Cathedral Music in the High Middle Ages; Troubadours; Performance and Oral Culture; Music for Elites: Trobar Clus; Trouveres; Adam de La Halle and the Formes Fixes; Geographical Diffusion; A Note on Instruments; Polyphony in Aquitanian Monastic Centers; The Cathedral-University Complex; Piecing the Evidence Together; Measured Music; Organum with Another Voice; Conductus at Notre Dame; The Motet: Music for an Intellectual and Political Elite; "Franconian" Notation; A New Trobar Clus?; The "Petronian" Motet; 3. : The Ars Nova: Musical Developments in the Fourteenth Century; Music from Mathematics; Music about Music; Establishing the Prototype: The Roman de Fauvel; Isorhythm; Machaut: Poet and Musician; Musica Ficta; Machaut and the Art of Courtly Song; The Top-Down Style; Machaut's La Messe de Nostre Dame; Canons; Subtilitas; "A Pleasant Place": Trecento Vernacular Music; The "Wild Bird" Madrigals; Landini and Ballata Culture; The Motet As Political Show; Du Fay's Nuper rosarum flores; Periodization; 4. : Island and Mainland: Toward a Pan-European Style; Fragmentary Remains; Kings and the Fortunes of War; Dunstable and the Contenance Angloise; Du Fay and Fauxbourdon; Du Fay and Binchois; The Internationalism of the Upper Crust; The Cyclic Mass; "Caput" and the Beginnings of Four-Part Harmony; Patterns of Emulation; The Man at Arms; "Pervading Imitation"; High, Middle, and Low; The English Keep Things High; The Milanese Go Lower Still; Love Songs; Instrumental Music Is Printed; 5. : A Perfected Art: Church Polyphony in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries; A Poet Born, Not Made; Josquin's Career; A Model Masterpiece; Imitations; Facts and Myths; All Is Known; The "Post-Josquin" Generation; Adrian Willaert; The New Instrumental Music; Palestrina and the Ecumenical Tradition; Continuing the Tradition; Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli and the Bishops; Freedom and Constraint; "Stairway to Parnassus"; Alternatives to Perfection; The Recusant William Byrd; The First English Cosmopolite; The Music of Defiance; The Peak (and Limit) of Stylistic Refinement; 6. : After Perfection: Pressures for Change; The Protestant Reformation; The Lutheran Chorale; The Catholic Response: The Counter-Reformation; Polychoral and "Concerted" Music; The Art of Orchestration Is Born; Music Printers and Their Audiences; Vernacular Song in Italy; The "Parisian" Chanson and the Music of Description; Lasso: The Cosmopolite Supreme; The Literary Revolution and the Return of the Madrigal; Paradox and Contradiction: Late Italian Madrigalists; Music for the Eyes; Back over the Mountains: The English Madrigal; 7. : Humanism and the Birth of Opera; The Pressure of Humanism; The Representational Style; Intermedii; The Monodic Revolution; Madrigals and Arias Revisited; Favola in Musica; Operatic Conventions: Heard and Unheard Music; Monteverdi: From Court to Commerce; L'Orfeo: The Quintessential Princely Spectacle; Monteverdi in Venice; Opera and Its Politics; The Carnival Show: L'incoronazione Di Poppea; 8. : Music Travels: Trends in Italy, Germany, France, and England; Master Organists: Frescobaldi, Sweelinck, and Others; Lutheran Adaptations: The Chorale Partita and Chorale Concerto; Ruin: Germany, the Thirty Years War, and Heinrich Schutz; The "Luxuriant Style"; Back to Germany at War; Giacomo Carissimi: Oratorio and Cantata; Barbara Strozzi: Performer and Composer; The French Taste: Sense and Sensuousness; Tragedie Lyrique: The Politics of Patronage; Drama as Court Ritual; Lully's Atys, the King's Opera; Jean-Philippe Rameau; Jacobean England: Masques and Consort Music; Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and the Question of "English Opera"; 9. : The Height of Italian Dominance: Opera Seria and the Italian Concerto Style; Opera Seria and Its Makers; Opera and Its Many Reforms: Neoclassicism; Metastasio; Metastasio's Musicians; Operatic Culture and Politics; Arcangelo Corelli and New Tonal Practices; Antonio Vivaldi's Five Hundred; Music Imitating Nature: Vivaldi's The Four Seasons; 10. : Class of 1685 (I): The Instrumental Music of Bach and Handel; Careers and Lifestyles: Handel First; Bach's Career; The Chorale Prelude; The Fugue; The Well-Tempered Keyboard; Bach's Imported Roots: Froberger and Others; Bach's Suites; "Agrements" and "Doubles": The Art of Ornamentation; Stylistic Hybrids: The "Brandenburg" Concertos; The Fifth Brandenburg Concerto; Handel's Instrumental Music; 11. : Class of 1685 (II): The Vocal Music of Handel and Bach; Lofty Entertainments; Handel's Messiah; "Borrowing"; Bach's Cantatas; Death Set to Music; What Music Is For; Bach's "Testaments"; Cursed Questions; Domenico Scarlatti, at Last; 12. : Mid-Eighteenth-Century Stylistic Changes: From Bach's Sons to the Comic Style; The Younger Bachs; Empfindsamkeit: C. P. E. Bach; Transcending Words--And Putting Them Back; The London Bach: Johann Christian; Sociability in Music; Intermission Plays; The "War Of The Buffoons"--Giovanni Battista Pergolesi; Novels Sung on Stage-Niccolo Piccinni; Noble Simplicity--Christoph Willibald Gluck; What Was the Enlightenment?; 13. : Concert Life Lifts Off: Haydn; Modern Concert Life Is Born; The Mannheim Orchestra: "An Army of Generals"; Haydn: The Perfect Career; Haydn's Years with the Esterhazy Family; Expectations and Deviations: Creating Musical Meaning; String Quartets and Concertos; The Symphony Composer; Sonata Form; The "London" Symphony No. 104; The Culminating Work: The Creation; 14. : The Composer's Voice: Mozart; The Early Operas; The "Da Ponte" Operas; Mozart's Two Last Operas; Art for Art's Sake?--Mozart's Symphonies; The "Symphonic" Concerto Is Born; Mozart in the Marketplace: The Piano Concertos; The Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453; Public and Private Genres; 15. : The Emergence of Romanticism; The Beautiful and the Sublime; The Coming of Museum Culture; Beethoven versus "Beethoven"; The Sacralization of Music; The Music Century; Nationalism: I, We, and They; German Musical Values as Universal Values; 16. : Beethoven; Life and Works, Periods and Styles; Early Beethoven; Disaster; The Eroica; Fidelio; The Fifth Symphony and Fate; "More Expression of Feeling Than Tone Painting": The Pastoral Symphony; Concert Life in Beethoven's Vienna; Struggle and Victory; Rising Fame and Decreasing Productivity; Late Beethoven; The Ninth Symphony; Inwardness: The Late String Quartets; 17. : Opera in the Age of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Weber; The Popularity of Rossini; Rossinian Conventions: The Overture; Imbroglio: The Comic Finale; Heart Throbs: The Serious Aria; Vincenzo Bellini and Bel Canto; Gaetano Donizetti; German Romantic Opera: Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz; 18. : Private Art: Schubert and Inwardness; The Lied Grows Up; Herder, Language, and the Nation; Folk Song, Folklore, and Folk Tales; Lyric and Ballad; Schubert and Goethe; Salon Culture and Schubertiades; Schubert: A Life in Art; Disaster; What Contemporaries Knew of Schubert's Music; Crossing the Edge; Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony; After Beethoven; Schubert's Last Two Songs; 19. : Romantic Spectacles: From Virtuosos to Grand Opera; The Devil's Violinist: Niccolo Paganini; "The Paganini of the Piano": Franz Liszt; Transforming Music Through Arrangements; The Lisztian Concert; Spectacle on the Parisian Stage; Auber's Mute; Opera and Revolution; Bourgeois Kings; Vagaries of Reception; 20. : Literary Musicians; Berlioz's Literary Trinity; Berlioz's Fantastic First Symphony; Following the Idee Fixe; Discriminating Romanticisms; The Prodigious Mendelssohn; Mendelssohn's Paulus and Civic Nationalism; Nationalism Takes a Racial Turn; Schumann and Literature; Music of Letters; Schumann's Fantasie, Op. 17; Schumann's "Year of Song"; Schumann's Last Years; Genius Restrained: Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Wieck Schumann; 21. : Music Imported and Exported; Chopin's Career: From Warsaw to Paris; The Pinnacle of Salon Music; The Chopinesque Miniature; Nationalism as a Medium; America Joins In; Art and Democracy; Russia: The Newcomer; National Markings and Folk Tunes; Mikhail Glinka; Acquiring Brains and Beauty; How the Acorn Took Root; 22. : Musical Politics at Midcentury: Historicism and the New German School; Historicism and the Hegelian Dialectic; The New German School; "The Music of the Future"; Absolute Music; Liszt's Symphonic Poems; But What Does It Really Mean?; The Concerto Transformed; Genre Trouble: Berlioz Again; 23. : Class of 1813: Wagner and Verdi; Art and Revolution: Wagner's Early Career; The Artwork of the Future, Modeled on the Imagined Past; From Theory into Practice: The Ring of the Nibelung; Wagnerian Leitmotifs; Words, Orchestra, and Theater; The Ultimate Experience: Tristan und Isolde; How Far Can You Stretch a Dominant?; Life and Art: Beyond Good and Evil; The Last Opera: Parsifal; Verdi: Upholding the Italian Tradition; Early Verdi: The Galley Years; "Viva Verdi!": Risorgimento Politics; The Popular Style: "Va, Pensiero"; Tragicomedy in the Shakespearean Manner; Il Trovatore and La Traviata; Rigoletto: Opera as Modern Drama; A Job Becomes a Calling; Masterly Amusement: Falstaff; 24. : Slavic Harmony and Disharmony; A Czech Abroad; Ma Vlast; The Fate of a Tune: From Folk Song to Anthem; Competing Reputations at Home and Abroad; Slavic Disharmony; Kuchka Music; Musorgsky's Realism; Art and Autocracy; The Coronation Scene in Boris Godunov; Revising Boris Godunov; Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; Russian Symphonies; Autobiography in Music?; 25. : The Musical Museum and the Return of the Symphony; New Halls and New Orchestras; The Triumph of Museum Culture; New Paths: Johannes Brahms; Symphonic Attempts; Brahm's Chamber Music and "Developing Variation"; Choral Fame; Inventing Tradition; Victory Through Critique; Reconciliation and Backlash; The Symphony as Sacrament; Antonin Dvorak; Dvorak in the New World; An American Response; War Brings Symphonies to France; 26. : Dramatic Alternatives: Exoticism, Operetta, and Verismo; Stereotyping the Other: "Orientalism"; Bizet's Carmen; Russian Orientalism; Gounod's Opera Lyrique; Jacques Offenbach and Opera about Opera; Johann Strauss II--The Waltz King and Viennese Operetta; England's Gilbert and Sullivan; Italian Verismo; Innovation and Popularity--"Canon" versus "Repertory"; Giacomo Puccini's Ascent; 27. : Early Austro-German Modernism: Mahler, Strauss, and Schoenberg; The Modern Condition; Maximalism; Gustav Mahler: Conductor and Composer; Mahler's Lieder; From Symphonic Poem to First Symphony; Maximalizing the Symphony; "Down with Programs!"; The Late Works; Richard Strauss; Maximalizing Opera; Schoenberg; A New Synthesis; Expression Becomes and "ism"; "Emancipation of Dissonance"; Atonality: "The Air of Another Planet"; Erwartung; At the Opposite Extreme: Atonal Miniatures; 28. : Modernism in France; Wagnerian Hommages and Exorcisms; Getting Rid of the Glue: Erik Satie; Claude Debussy's Early Years; Voiles: Sales and/or Veils; Impressionism and Symbolism; Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande; "Essentially French": Faure and Melodie; Maurice Ravel; New Possibilities for Women; Ballet: A Missing Genre; Ballet Finds Its Theorist; Stravinsky's The Firebird and Petrushka; The Rite of Spring; Scandalized Reactions; 29. : National Monuments; Jean Sibelius; England; Spain; Folk and Modernist Synthesis: Bela Bartok; Folk Ways; Karol Szymanowski and George Enescu; The Oldest Modernist: Leos Janacek; Speech Tunelets; Alexander Scriabin: From Expression to Revelation; Mysterium and the Ultimate Aggregate Harmonies; Charles Ives; Terms of Reception; "Manner" and "Substance": The Concord Sonata; Nostalgia; Societal Commitments; 30. : Neoclassicism and Twelve-Tone Music; Neoclassicism; Igor Stravinsky's Neoclassical Path; The Music of Stravinsky's Octet; Some Ideas about the Octet; The Ivory Tower; In Search of Utopia: Schoenberg and Twelve-Tone Technique; Giving Music New Rules; Back Again to Bach; Alban Berg's Twelve-Tone Romanticism; Epitome: Anton Webern; 31. : Interwar Currents: The Roaring Twenties; European "Jazz": Parisians in America; In Search of the "Real" America: Americans in Paris; Tin Pan Alley and Musicals; Gershwin's "Experiment in Modern Music"; Surrealism: Satie's Parade; New Fashions: Les Six; From Subject to Style: Surrealist "Classicism"; American Surrealism; Music in the Weimar Republic; Alban Berg's Wozzeck; Music for Political Action; From Vienna to Hollywood: The Death of Opera?; 32. : Music and Totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Western Europe; The Rise of the Soviet Union; Music in the Soviet Union; The Doctrine of Socialist Realism; Dmitry Shostakovich; Contested Readings: The Fifth Symphony; Back in the USSR: Sergey Prokofiev; Italian Fascism; Toscanini and Music-Making in the New Italy; Music in Nazi Germany; Varieties of Emigration; Youth Culture; Shades of Gray: Hartmann, Webern, and Strauss; 33. : Music and Politics in America and Allied Europe; Edgard Varese; Microtones: Splitting the Semitone; New Sounds, New Instruments, New Tunings; Ferment on the American Left; Copland and Politics; American Patriotic Works; The Great American Symphony; Accessible Alternatives; Opera in Mid-Century; Benjamin Britten; A Modern Anti-Hero: Britten's Peter Grimes; "The Composer's Duty"; Olivier Messiaen: "The Charm of Impossibilities"; Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time; Faith, Nature, Color, and Rhythm; 34. : Starting from Scratch: Music in the Aftermath of World War II; Zero Hour: The Impact on the Arts; Total Serialism: Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensites; Darmstadt; Indeterminacy: John Cage and the "New York School"; Music for Prepared Piano; Silence; "Permission": Cage's Influence; Preserving the Sacrosanct: Morton Feldman; Conversions; Academicism, American Style; Electronics: An Old Dream Comes True; Musique Concrete, Versus Elektronische Musik; The New Technology Spreads; Electronics and Live Music; Music in History: Elliott Carter; Carter's Later Career; "Who Cares if You Listen?"; 35. : Changes in the Sixties and Seventies; The Music of Youth: Rock 'n' Roll; The British Invasion: The Beatles; A New Challenge; Rock 'n' Roll Becomes Rock; The Rise of Minimalism; La Monte Young; Riley's In C; "Classical" Minimalism: Steve Reich; Phase Music; Reich's Music for 18 Musicians; Philip Glass; Einstein on the Beach; Game Changer; The Holy Minimalists; 36. : "Many Streams": Millennium's End; Competing Visions; The Cold War Ends; The Postmodern Condition; Collage and Pastiche; Aesthetics of Pastiche; Across Time and Space: George Crumb; Conversions in Reverse; The End of Soviet Music; Senior Statesmen; The Digital Revolution; Performance Art; The Alleged Death of Classical Music; John Adams and Nixon in China; A New Spirituality; NOTES; FOR FURTHER READING; GLOSSARY; INDEX