Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (Expanded Edition)

This anthology of essays, interviews, and autobiographical pieces provides an invaluable overview of the evolution of contemporary music—from chromaticism, serialism, and indeterminacy to jazz, vernacular, electronic, and non-Western influences. Featuring classic essays by Stravinsky, Stockhausen, and Reich, as well as writings by lesser-known but equally innovative composers such as Jack Beeson, Richard Maxfield, and T. J. Anderson, this collection covers a broad range of styles and approaches. Here you will find Busoni's influential "Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music"; Partch's exploration of a new notation system; Babbitt's defense of advanced composition in his controversial "Who Cares If You Listen?"; and Pauline Oliveros's meditations on sound. Now updated with fifteen new composers including Michael Tippet, György Ligeti, Gunther Schuller, Ben Johnston, Sofia Gubaidulina, and William Bolcom, this important book gathers together forty-nine pieces—many out of print and some newly written for this volume—which serve as a documentary history of twentieth-century music, in theory and practice. Impassioned, provocative, and eloquent, these writings are as exciting and diverse as the music they discuss.

Elliott Schwartz has been a featured guest composer throughout the U.S. and Europe, and has held extended residencies at the University of California, Ohio State University, and Cambridge University. He is the author of Music Since 1945: Issues, Materials, and Literature (with Daniel Godfrey) and is the Robert K. Beckwith Professor of Music at Bowdoin College. Barney Childs is the cofounder of Advance Recordings, former poetry editor of Genesis West, and a contributor to Perspectives of New Music and other journals. His music has been performed at the ONCE Festival and Tanglewood. He is Professor Emeritus at Johnston College, University of Redlands. Jim Fox is a Los Angeles-based composer and co-publisher of Silman-James Press.