Details

ISBN-10: 1419753568
ISBN-13: 9781419753565
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Publish Date: 11/15/2022
Dimensions: 8.60" L, 6.20" W, 1.90" H

Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century

Hardcover

Price: $30.00

Overview

Sound Within Sound presents an alternative history of 20th-century composers–nearly all of them women or composers of color–by a leading international music critic.

Think of a composer right now. Was it a white man? Perhaps in old-fashioned clothing and wild hair? The music history we’re taught is one dominated by men, and even then, only a select few enter the zeitgeist. This conventional history perpetuates the myth of “great works” created by “genius” artists. Men who enjoyed institutional privilege during their lifetimes and have since been enshrined by an industry of publishers and record labels. But just because we haven’t heard of spectacular female composers doesn’t mean they weren’t creating music all the same.

Profiling a dozen pioneering 20th-century composers–including American modernist Ruth Crawford Seeger (mother of Pete and Peggy Seeger), French electronic artist Éliane Radigue, Soviet visionary Galina Ustvolskaya, and Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou–acclaimed journalist and BBC broadcaster Kate Molleson reexamines the canon while bringing to life largely forgotten sonic revolutionaries whose dramatic lives and bursts of creativity played out against a backdrop of seismic geopolitical and social change. These composers, working at a remove from London, Paris, Vienna, and New York, were sidelined and ignored for systemic, structural reasons. This is a landmark alternative history of 20th-century composers; a radical, new, and truly global work of revisionist history. It is a campaigning book that challenges the status quo while introducing you to a world of groundbreaking music.

Includes Black-and-White Photographs

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Reviews
"The vividness and passion of Molleson's portraits of these extraordinarily gifted, exasperating, headstrong individuals is wonderfully engaging. It sends you running off to YouTube to discover their music–which one imagines is exactly what she would have wanted."–The Telegraph
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Details

ISBN-10: 1419753568
ISBN-13: 9781419753565
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Publish Date: 11/15/2022
Dimensions: 8.60" L, 6.20" W, 1.90" H
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