The Nantucket Diary Of Ned Rorem 1973 1985

Selections from the diaries of the American composer share his thoughts on music, current events, literature, friends, and fellow composers

DIVDIVThe acclaimed author of The Paris Diary, Pulitzer Prize–winning American composer Ned Rorem offers readers a mellow, thoughtful, and candid chronicle of his life, work, and contemporaries/divDIV One of our most revered contemporary musical artists—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and declared “the world’s best composer of art songs” by Time magazine—Ned Rorem writes that he is “a composer who writes, not a writer who composes.” Despite this claim, Rorem’s published diaries, memoirs, essay collections, and other nonfiction works have all received resounding acclaim for their lyricism, bold honesty, and insightful social commentary./divDIV /divDIVHis Nantucket Diary, covering the years 1973 through 1985, reveals a more mature and graceful Ned Rorem, a man who has experienced great loss and serious illness yet has lost none of his acute observational skills and keenly opinionated nature. His wit remains bracing and his candor refreshing as he offers sharp critiques on the state of modern classical music and its creators. His accounts of times shared with luminaries and legends, musical and otherwise (including Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, Virgil Thomson, and Stephen Sondheim) are consistently enthralling and delightful. The outspoken hedonist of The Paris Diary may be older and more subdued now, but his incisive observations and unique outlook on life, both personal and creative, remain an unforgettable reading experience./div/div

Surveys large choral-orchestral works written between 1900 and 1972 that contain some English text. Green examines eighty-nine works by forty-nine composers, from Elgar's Dream of Gerontius to Bernstein's Mass.

A magnificent collection of essays, opinions, and reflections on life, culture, art, love, and music—always lyrical, witty, and brazenly provocative—from one of the most acclaimed contemporary American composers Time magazine has called Ned Rorem “the world’s best composer of art songs.” But his genius does not end in the realm of classical music. Rorem has a rare gift for writing, as well, and the wide acclaim that has greeted his memoirs, essay collections, and published diaries attest to this fact. An Absolute Gift is a cornucopia of Roremisms—essays, reviews, and opinions on a vast array of fascinating subjects, from music to film to drama to sex. Here also are candid diary entries, displaying the frankness and remarkable insight for which Rorem is known. Whether he’s lambasting or celebrating the world’s great musical works and their creators (and, according to Stephen Sondheim, “He is one of the best writers about music that I have ever read”), offering intensely personal musings on death and love, or brilliantly dissecting the artist’s craft, Ned Rorem is always fascinating, always provocative, and enormously entertaining.

New in Paperback 2004. Probably the most comprehensive work on the American art song ever available, this book considers the lives and contributions of 144 significant composers in the field, including many for whom information has been extremely scarce. Most composers' entries consist of a biographical sketch; a brief discussion of his or her song writing characteristics (with emphasis on performers' concerns); a partial or complete listing of annotated songs; recording information; and the composer's individual bibliography. Song annotations include poet, publisher, date of composition (when known), voice type, range, duration, tempo indication, mood, subject matter, vocal style, special difficulties, general impression, artists who have recorded the song, and any other pertinent information. Thirty composers whose contributions are deemed of lesser import are summarized in brief essays. Appendixes include a supplement of recommended songs; a listing of American song anthologies and their contents; and the most recent information regarding publishers cited in the guide. There is also a general discography, a general bibliography, and indexes for both titles and poets. Documenting the most important 110 years in the development of American art song, this book is an indispensable tool for singers, teachers, coaches, accompanists, and libraries.

Choral-Orchestral Repertoire: A Conductor’s Guide, Omnibus Edition offers an expansive compilation of choral-orchestral works from 1600 to the present. Synthesizing Jonathan D. Green’s earlier six volumes on this repertoire, this edition updates and adds to the over 750 oratorios, cantatas, choral symphonies, masses, secular works for large and small ensembles, and numerous settings of liturgical and biblical texts for a wide variety of vocal and instrumental combinations. Each entry includes a brief biographical sketch of the composer, approximate duration, text sources, performing forces, available editions, and locations of manuscript materials, as well as descriptive commentary, a discography, and a bibliography. Unique to this edition are practitioner’s evaluations of the performance issues presented in each score. These include the range, tessitura, and nature of each solo role and a determination of the difficulty of the choral and orchestral portions of each composition. There is also a description of the specific challenges, staffing, and rehearsal expectations related to the performance of each work. Choral-Orchestral Repertoire is an essential resource for conductors and students of conducting as they search for repertoire appropriate to their needs and the abilities of their ensembles.

An annotated reference guide to Barber's life, works and achievements, it will prove valuable for anyone seeking information on him.

A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could “give the dead a voice, make them sing” (Hilton Als, The New Yorker). Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death. Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.” Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself. Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s life: his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.

When the first edition of Queering the Pitch was published in early 1994, it was immediately hailed as a landmark and defining work in the new field of Gay Musicology. In light of the explosion of Gay Musicology since 1994, a new edition of Queering the Pitch is timely and needed. In this new work, the editors are including a landmark essay by Philip Brett on Gay Musicology, its history and scope. The essay itself has become a cause celebre, and this will be its first full appearance in print. Along with this new historical essay, the editors are contributing a new introduction that outlines the changes that have occurred over the last decade as Gay Musicology has grown.

The multimedia artist, poet and novelist Brion Gysin may be the most influential cultural figure of the twentieth century that most people have never heard of.Gysin (1916–1986) was an English-born, Canadian-raised, naturalized American of Swiss descent, who lived most of his life in Morocco and France. He went everywhere when the going was good. He dabbled with surrealism in Paris in the 1930s, lived in the “interzone” of Tangier in the 1950s and traveled the Algerian Sahara with Sheltering Sky author Paul Bowles before moving into the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris. Gysin’s ideas influenced generations of artists, musicians and writers, among them David Bowie, Keith Haring, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, Genesis P-Orridge, John Giorno and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. None was touched more profoundly than William S. Burroughs, who said admiringly of Gysin: “There was something dangerous about what he was doing. ”It was Gysin who introduced the Rolling Stones to the exotica of Morocco and took Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones to Jajouka where he recorded the tribal musicians performing the Pipes of Pan. It was Gysin who provided the hashish fudge recipe published in Alice B. Toklas’ cookbook, promising “ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes.” It was Gysin who introduced Burroughs to an automatic writing method called the cut-up, a literary progenitor to sampling. And it was Gysin who developed—with Ian Sommerville, the Dream Machine—a device that allowed people, with the flick of a switch, to access altered states of consciousness without drugs.Working with the authorization of Gysin’s literary executor, William S. Burroughs, John Geiger has produced the first-ever biography of the painter, poet, piper Brion Gysin.