Carl Orff

How does creativity thrive in the face of fascism? How can a highly artistic individual function professionally in so threatening a climate? The final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that includes Different Drummers (OUP 1992) and The Twisted Muse (OUP 1997), this is a detailed study of the often interrelated careers of eight outstanding German composers who lived and worked amid the dictatorship of the Third Reich: Werner Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Noted historian Michael H. Kater weighs issues of accommodation and resistance to ask whether these artists corrupted themselves in the service of a criminal regime--and if so, whether this is evident in their music. He also considers the degrees to which the Nazis politically, socially, economically, and aesthetically succeeded in their treatment of these individuals, whose lives and compositions represent diverse responses to totalitarianism.

This series presents the music of the Western world to the nonspecialist in six original, strikingly illustrated volumes. In each one, an outstanding musicologist surveys the music of a specific period, discusses its major composers, and examines the forces that influenced and helped shape their oeuvre.

W. Anthony Sheppard considers a wide-ranging constellation of important musical works in this fascinating exploration of ritualized performance in twentieth-century music. "Revealing Masks "uncovers the range of political, didactic, and aesthetic intents that inspired the creators of modernist music theater. Sheppard is especially interested in the use of the "exotic" in techniques of masking and stylization, identifying Japanese Noh, medieval Christian drama, and ancient Greek theater as the most prominent exotic models for the creation of "total theater."

Drawing on an extraordinarily diverse--and in some instances, little-known--range of music theater pieces, Sheppard cites the work of Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Honegger, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harry Partch, and Leonard Bernstein, as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Madonna. Artists in literature, theater, and dance--such as William Butler Yeats, Paul Claudel, Bertolt Brecht, Isadora Duncan, Ida Rubenstein, and Edward Gordon Craig--also play a significant role in this study.

Sheppard poses challenging questions that will interest readers beyond those in the field of music scholarship. For example, what is the effect on the audience and the performers of depersonalizing ritual elements? Does borrowing from foreign cultures inevitably amount to a kind of predatory appropriation? "Revealing Masks "shows that compositional concerns and cultural themes manifested in music theater are central to the history of twentieth-century Euro-American music, drama, and dance.

Teaching Music in Secondary Schools is the accompaniment to its practical-based counterpart in this series Aspects in Teaching Secondary Music . Together they form a comprehensive resource for those engaged with Initial Teacher Training and Continuing Professional Development in Music. Through this reader, student teachers and practising teachers will be introduced to the big issues and ideas abounding in music teaching today. As Gary Spruce puts it himself: if this book were to have a subtitle it would be 'Ways of Thinking About Music'. Our conception of what music is is a crucial factor in defining what we consider important subject knowledge to be, and by implication affects how we design our curriculum, what we teach and the way we teach it. This key text will prove invaluable in the advancement of teachers' and subsequently pupils' understanding of music and its applications.

Is music removed from politics? To what ends, beneficent or malevolent, can music and musicians be put? In short, when human rights are grossly abused and politics turned to fascist demagoguery, can art and artists be innocent? These questions and their implications are explored in Michael Kater's broad survey of musicians and the music they composed and performed during the Third Reich. Great and small--from Valentin Grimm, a struggling clarinetist, to Richard Strauss, renowned composer--are examined by Kater, sometimes in intimate detail, and the lives and decisions of Nazi Germany's professional musicians are laid out before the reader. Kater tackles the issue of whether the Nazi regime, because it held music in crassly utilitarian regard, acted on musicians in such a way as to consolidate or atomize the profession. Kater's examination of the value of music for the regime and the degree to which the regime attained a positive propaganda and palliative effect through the manner in which it manipulated its musicians, and by extension, German music, is of importance for understanding culture in totalitarian systems. This work, with its emphasis on the social and political nature of music and the political attitude of musicians during the Nazi regime, will be the first of its kind. It will be of interest to scholars and general readers eager to understand Nazi Germany, to music lovers, and to anyone interested in the interchange of music and politics, culture and ideology.

Derived from the full Oxford Dictionary of Opera, this is the most authoritative and up-to-date dictionary of opera available in paperback. Fully revised for this new edition, with over 3,500 entries, it is designed to be accessible to all those who enjoy opera, whether at the opera-house or at home. Here opera buffs will have at their fingertips opera synopses and first performance details, bibliographies of works about opera, entries on singers (including their debuts and career highlights, with notes on voice type, style, and reputation), definitions and discussions of technical terms and operatic styles, and surveys of the history of opera worldwide. Included also are plot summaries and separate entries for well-know roles, arias, and choruses. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera provides a huge amount of information and learning packed conveniently in a single volume with helpful cross-references. It will be invaluable to all opera-goers, to those professionally concerned with opera, and to anyone needing reliable information on this fascinating subject.