Wilfrid Mellers is a composer, musician and author. Honorary Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. This is his classic book on Beethoven.

Beethoven and the Voice of God

Biographies & Memoirs

MELLERS, Wilfrid

Arts & Literature

Oxford University Press

One of the most original and insightful surveys of American music is now available in a revised edition. Published to wide acclaim in 1965, Music in a New Found Land, in its original edition, selectively reviewed the development of American musical traditions from the 1600s to the early 1960s. With the addition of a new afterword and a revised bibliography, Wilfrid Mellers brings his book up to date, discussing the important developments in American music in the past 20 years. A British musical scholar and composer, Wilfrid Mellers brings to this work not only his musical scholarship but the objectivity of a European writing about American music. "As an outsider," he writes, "I may see and hear things that cannot be experienced from within the American context." Mellers explores the development of unique musical traditions within the confines of America's shores, dividing his work into two parts, the first concentrating on "serious" art-music, the second on "popular" music, jazz, and show tunes. Beginning with the "primitives" (the New England hymnodists), the section on "serious" music shows how the styles of all the great American classical composers developed. Mellers uses as examples only those composers whose work he considers to have had a lasting effect on the history of American music. Among these are Charles Ives, "the first authentic American composer"; Carl Ruggles; Aaron Copland, "the first artist to define precisely, in sound, an aspect of our urban experience"; Charles Griffes; and John Cage, who took abstraction to an extreme, considering each sound an audible event, with no past and no future. He also examines the importance of Samuel Barber and Virgil Thomson, decidedly non-avant-garde 20th-century composers, whose works are popular, he claims, because they appeal to Americans' regressive tendencies. The second section charts the development of "pop" music, jazz, and musicals from parlor songs, work songs, and spirituals. Here, Mellers examines the appeal of Stephen Foster, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and John Philip Sousa; tells the fascinating story of Tin Pan Alley; and traces the development of jazz from its beginnings in the smoke-filled bars of Storeytown to a music that encompassed barrelhouse piano, piano rag, and blues and was played in Chicago, New York, and the Far West. George Gershwin, Mark Blitzstein, and Leonard Gernstein all receive their due, as do the jazz greats, band leaders, and showmen. Mellers weaves into his study of American music discussion of American intellectual traditions, including Puritanism, transcendentalism, abstraction, and Dadaism--so that we have a history not only of American music, but of the way that music has fit into the intellectual preoccupations of the country. Also included are excerpts from American literature, samples of musical scores, references to specific recordings, and a selected bibliography. Updated through the 1980s, Music in a New Found Land now offers a new generation of scholars and music lovers an absorbing and authoritative study of the development of American music.

Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music

Arts & Photography

Music

Percy Grainger (Oxford Studies of Composers)

Percy Grainger, if not a great composer, was a phenomenon. A man of extraordinary charisma, he was at once a legendary virtuoso pianist, a composer of highly original music, an arranger and disher up' of folk music who pierced to the music's heart, and a figure of some historical significance in relation to ethnomusicology and music education. This book is a study of this paradoxical figure. It looks at the musical influence on his compositions of folk-song and of Grieg, and of those apparent polar opposites, Delius and Bach. It examines some of his more significant pieces in detail considers his work in recreating traditional material and the music of others sees him as a champion and transcriber of what is now known as Early Music and looks at his sometimes alarmingly eccentric notions as to music's nature and purpose. Overriding barriers between art, folk, and pop music, Grainger is difficult to categorize, and may be, in the story of music, unique. Ultimately, his importance may lie in what he suggests about the potential functions of music in a rapidly changing world. This book is intended for devotees of the music of Grainger and his English contemporaries.

A man of extraordinary charisma, Percy Grainger was at once a legendary virtuoso pianist, a composer of highly original music, an arranger, and a "disher up" of folk music who pierced to the music's heart, and figure of some historical significance in relation to ethnomusicology and music education. A study of the music of this paradoxical figure, this book looks at the musical influence on his compositions of folk-song and of Grieg, and of those apparent polar opposites, Delius and Bach. It examines some of his more significant pieces in detail; considers his work in recreating traditional material and the music of others; sees him as a champion and transcriber of what is now known as Early Music; and looks at his sometimes alarmingly eccentric notions as to music's nature and purpose. Overriding barriers between art, folk, and pop music, Grainger is difficult to categorize, and is, in the history of music, unique.

Once considered as little more than the froth in the wake of the First World War, a witty boy-hedonist who, in the giddy Twenties, tweaked the noses of moribund establishmentarians, Poulenc has in fact proved unexpectedly durable--more so than any of his colleagues among Les Six, including those who developed more grandiose ambitions. Here is a survey of Poulenc's music, based on careful selection of his works, and written by an authoritative guide. After placing Poulenc in the context of French life and society after the First World War and considering him in relation to his masters and mentors, especially Satie and Chabrier, Mellers turns to Poulenc's Diaghilev ballet, Les Biches, to important sequels to it, such as Concert champêtre and Aubade, and to works of transition, such as the Concerto for two pianos and orchestra. The next section discusses the "social" music of Poulenc's middle years--especially the music for piano (for Poulenc a domestic instrument), written during the Thirties, and the centrality of song in his work; some account is offered of his relationship with his main poets, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, and Louise de Vilmorin. Mellers next considers the impact on Poulenc of the Second World War, especially as manifest in the great choral work Quatre Motets de Pénitence and the Organ Concerto. Adopting a broadly chronological approach, Mellers traces Poulenc's development as a composer from enfant terrible to a mature composer both for secular society and for the liturgy of the Catholic Church; in so doing he points to the reasons for the durability and pertinacity of his appeal. Mellers further assesses Poulenc's place in the French tradition, and, in a Postlude, pays tribute to the warm regard with which Poulenc was held by so many of his fellow musicians.

Francis Poulenc (Oxford Studies of Composers)

Once considered as little more than the froth in the wake of the First World War, a witty boy-hedonist who, in the giddy Twenties, tweaked the noses of moribund establishmentarians, Poulenc has in fact proved unexpectedly durable--more so than any of his colleagues among Les Six, including those who developed more grandiose ambitions. Here is a survey of Poulenc's music, based on careful selection of his works, and written by an authoritative guide. After placing Poulenc in the context of French life and society after the First World War and considering him in relation to his masters and mentors, especially Satie and Chabrier, Mellers turns to Poulenc's Diaghilev ballet, Les Biches, to important sequels to it, such as Concert champêtre and Aubade, and to works of transition, such as the Concerto for two pianos and orchestra. The next section discusses the "social" music of Poulenc's middle years--especially the music for piano (for Poulenc a domestic instrument), written during the Thirties, and the centrality of song in his work; some account is offered of his relationship with his main poets, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, and Louise de Vilmorin. Mellers next considers the impact on Poulenc of the Second World War, especially as manifest in the great choral work Quatre Motets de Pénitence and the Organ Concerto. Adopting a broadly chronological approach, Mellers traces Poulenc's development as a composer from enfant terrible to a mature composer both for secular society and for the liturgy of the Catholic Church; in so doing he points to the reasons for the durability and pertinacity of his appeal. Mellers further assesses Poulenc's place in the French tradition, and, in a Postlude, pays tribute to the warm regard with which Poulenc was held by so many of his fellow musicians.

Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Development in the History of American Music

KNOPF

Man and his music: the story of music experience in the West, volume 4: Romanticism and the twentieth century

Barrie Jenkins

Harmonious Meeting

Dennis Dobson

Displaying the broad erudition and intellectual agility that have informed a lifetime of scholarship, Wilfrid Mellers offers a set of diverse reflections on how western art music illuminates the shifting relationship between humankind and the natural world. Beginning with two turn-of-the-century operas - Frederick Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet and Claude Debussy's Pellas et Mlisande - that present humankind as lost in a tangled wood that is at once internal and external, Mellers develops the theme of wilderness in sociological, psychological, ecological, and even geological terms. He discusses Leos Jan ek's Cunning Little Vixen ( the ultimate ecological opera ) as a parable of redemption and explores the delicate yet dangerous equilibrium between civilization and the dark forest in works by Charles Koechlin and Darius Milhaud. Elements of wilderness and the city combine to infuse the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos and Carlos Chvez with a blend of primitivism and sophistication, while a creative tension between desert landscape and industrial mechanization inspires the works of Carl Ruggles, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Australia's Peter Sculthorpe. Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. By suggesting how the musicking of ecological issues articulates twinned perspectives on music and our place in the world, Mellers raises intriguing questions about the links among tradition, talent, learning, and instinct. Brimming over with fresh ideas and unexpected cross-pollinations, Singing in the Wilderness is a stimulating addition to the oeuvre of a distinguished and inventive scholar.

Singing in the Wilderness: Music and Ecology in the Twentieth Century

University of Illinois Press

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Books by MELLERS, Wilfrid

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MELLERS, Wilfrid. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Beethoven and the Voice of God

Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music

Percy Grainger (Oxford Studies of Composers)

Percy Grainger (Oxford Studies of Composers)

Francis Poulenc (Oxford Studies of Composers)

Francis Poulenc (Oxford Studies of Composers)

Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Development in the History of American Music

Man and his music: the story of music experience in the West, volume 4: Romanticism and the twentieth century

Harmonious Meeting

Singing in the Wilderness: Music and Ecology in the Twentieth Century