Many would recognize those among his compositions that have become a part of standard concert repertory, but few are familiar with the full, rich life this son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants led. In Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, 20th-century music scholar Howard Pollack traces the composer's life and career from the streets of Brooklyn to his studies in Paris, his involvement with Harold Clurman's Group Theatre, his work in Hollywood in the '30s and '40s, his adoption of the twelve-tone method of composition, and his struggle with debilitating disease in his final years.

    Gifted by his god with a bow that would always shoot true to the mark and indispensable to his fellow Greeks, he was marked by the same god with an odious wound that made him hateful and hated. Sophocles' powerful insight is that those blessed by the gods and indispensable to men are visited as well with great vulnerability and suffering.Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art traces some of Wagner's extraordinary influence for good and ill on a century of art and politics - on Eliot and Proust as well as on Adolf Hitler - and discusses in detail Wagner's Tannhouser, the work in which the composer first dramatised the Faustian struggle of a creative artist in whom 'two souls dwell.' In the course of this penetrating study, Father Lee argues that Wagner's ambivalent art is indispensable to us, life-enhancing and ultimately healing.

    Harrison, a musician, discusses the magnitude of the problem of musicians' injuries with reference to statistical surveys and discusses the emotional and psychological impact of injury on the individual musician. Paull, an orthopedic physiotherapist describes, in layman's terms, the athletic approach to a musician's injuries. Each commonly injured area is examined in turn, from neck, back and shoulder pain to arm, wrist and hand problems. For each area, the anatomy is described, followed by an explanation of what causes the injury and how to avoid or prevent the injury from occurring. Musicians should regard themselves as elite "musical athletes" and protect themselves from injury by following athletic training protocols. The authors present appropriate stretching regimes and postural corrections for both on and off stage, as well as ergonomic changes to instrument and playing positions. The text is amply illustrated with sketches for every exercise and stretch, photographs of musicians demonstrating playing postures, and unique anatomical drawings of musicians. The Athletic Musician presents research-based, scientific material in a format that is relevant, clear, and practical for all musicians. The combination of a medical and musical perspectives makes it an indispensable guide for all musicians and the health care professionals who aspire to help them.

    The result is a fresh interpretation of Mozart's genius, as Robert Gutman shows the great composer in a new light. With an informed and sensitive handling, Mozart emerges as an affectionate and generous man with family and friends, self-deprecating, witty, and winsome but also an austere moralist, incisive and purposeful. The major genres in which Mozart worked-chamber music, liturgical, theater and keyboard compositions, concertos, operas, symphonies, and oratorios-are unfolded to reveal a man of luminous intellect. Mozart is an extraordinary portrait of a man and his times and a brilliant distillation of musical thought.

    It addresses all parts of his life and work-- symphonies, songs and song-cycles (each of which is discussed individually), his conducting activities, compositional habits, and aesthetic development--and sets these within the cultural and political context of his time. In addition, it responds to the global spread of this remarkable composer's music, and an almost universal fascination with it, by attempting to give an account of the reception of Mahler's music in many of the countries in which it eventually came to flourish, eg. Holland, France, Japan, Russia, England, and the United States. This particular series of chapters reveals that the 'Mahler Phenomenon' earned its description principally in the years after the Second World War, but also that the Mahler revival was already well under way pre-war, perhaps especially in England and the States, and most surprisingly of all, Japan. The selection of contributors, who between them cover all Mahler's musical output, shows that here too this volume significantly crosses national boundaries. The very diverse approaches, analyses and commentaries, amply illustrated with music examples, are evidence of the uniquely rich and complex character of a music that spans more than one culture and more than one century. The volumes includes the most significant and up-to-date Mahler research and debate, and illumines some hitherto unexplored areas of Mahler's life eg. his visit to London in 1892, his sculptor daughter, Anna, and the hall in which the Seventh Symphony was first performed in Prague in 1908.It has often been claimed that Mahler, born in 1860, was in fact a prophet of much that was to come in the 20th century. His later works undeniably anticipate, often with dazzling virtuosity, many of the principal techniques and aesthetics of the new century, only the first decade of which he lived to see. Small wonder that among his earliest admirers was a collective of some of the most important and innovative composers of our time, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Their successors (Copland, Shostakovich, and Britten, to name a few) were to range across contrasting cultures and national frontiers.Drawing on the best resources and the most up-to-date information about the composer, this volume fulfils the need in Mahler literature for a genuinely comprehensive guide to the composer and will be the authoritative guide for Mahler enthusiasts for years to come.