This introduction briefly explores the relationship between compositional choice and stylistic expectation or ideology. With new music now a plethora of styles and approaches, how might we understand work that’s happening currently in the context of historical and social influence?

The relationship between context and prosody is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive ones in language. At the same time, it is one of the most difficult to describe because it is based on acoustic cues that only need milliseconds to create an image in our brain. However, speakers of a language can generally understand their interlocutors’ emotional and cognitive status through their prosodic realization. Prosodic pragmatics is the branch of pragmatics that attempts to identify the intentionality of the speaker’s meaning in a real context based on the analysis of the suprasegmental aspects of speech production. If prosody studies how an utterance is pronounced in unison with the perceptual features of pitch, length, and loudness, then prosodic pragmatics studies the acoustic and cognitive contextual parameters in conversation. The chapter will show the relationship between prosody, information, and context in communication. Starting from the essential acoustic parameters of speech, it will revise the most influential theories of intonation through the prosodic pragmatics lens to understand the cognitive adaptation of a message in a specific context.

Schoenberg’s family background might have suggested that he would have a career as a bank clerk or schoolteacher. Yet his early commitment to music, and pursuit of expert contacts who encouraged his ambitions, marked him out as someone determined to take risks and to avoid easy options. Five years after having shown his ability to compose an effective if derivative string quartet, Verklärte Nacht (1899) for string sextet – later arranged for string orchestra – was a decisive leap forward in which respect for tradition was set against the radical perception that chamber music and tone poetry need not be kept apart. Sources considering Verklärte Nacht’s genesis in detail, and exploring its processes in depth, are surveyed. The extent to which the young composer was prepared to challenge conventional boundaries was reinforced by the unfailing resourcefulness with which his music consistently reflects the style and form of its poetic source.

This chapter considers the history of serialism in the United States and Canada. After exploring US-based ultramodern composers that used series in their writing and early engagement with Schoenberg’s methods, this chapter contemplates the contexts for the significantly increased interest in serialism that occurred in these countries after the Second World War. Many factors were at play in this development, including the role of serialist giants who arrived as émigrés from Europe as teachers and role models, the influence of US-originating modernist movements, the changing university scene, and the cultural politics of the Cold War. While European serialist exiles like Schoenberg and Krenek were highly influential, this influence was not always direct. Moreover, while US composers using highly systematic approaches have drawn most attention, the majority of Americans and Canadians using serial methods combined them with other musical techniques to produce highly original, individualistic musical languages.

Alban Berg’s serial works (c. 1925–35) show his ability to use the twelve-tone method of composition as a form of exegesis for his personal, intellectual, and musical heritage in musical narratives suffused with apparent contradictions. In so doing, Berg combined what has been understood as antithetical ideas in an overarching system that brings together his modernistic aesthetics and the art of the past through textures in which twelve-tone serialism and tonality are interwoven. Problematising scholarship that attempts to understand Berg’s music based on Schoenberg’s compositional models, I argue that Berg followed the lead of Fritz Heinrich Klein and Theodor Adorno and embraced contradiction as a ‘category of thought’ in his compositional process. Berg’s approach is evident from the construction of the series to compositions such as the Violin Concerto (1935), which contains a web of musical and extra-musical significations that continues to challenge existing analytical models.

That Telemann’s annual cycles of church cantatas are differentiated from one through text, music, and scoring was first recognized in the previous century by Werner Menke and Wolf Hobohm. Subsequent studies by Ute Poetzsch-Seban, Christiane Jungius, and others have advanced our understanding of this phenomenon by considering several cycles in relation to others. The present author’s dissertation on Telemann’s Stolbergischer Jahrgang to poetry by Gottfried Behrndt provided the first comprehensive overview of one of the composer’s cycles, including perspectives on his strategies for establishing their individual profiles. This chapter pursues two goals: to offer insights and evaluations of the Stolbergischer Jahrgang in terms of the cantatas’ texts, tonality, scoring, and movement types; and to reflect on Telemann’s tendencies and motivations across his output of cantata cycles. Along the way, I formulate open questions and outline the present state of knowledge regarding Telemann’s efforts to give his cantata cycles distinct profiles.

The accident of parentage; impinging cultural, social, and political forces; unbidden encounters, events, and opportunities: these are not under a composer’s control, but can have a momentous impact on personal and compositional development. Consequence is not, however, inevitable. So for those trying to gain insight into a composer’s world, his or her decision-making is more important than mere factual circumstance: how they respond to the environment of which they are a part, and, not least, the myriad decisions undertaken in the creation of a compositional persona and in the course of actual composition. This chapter surveys the compositional environment in which Britten made his entrance. It took Britten a while to find the most powerful and ambitious means of employing simplicity, in pursuit of a complexity formed from the density and quality of relationships rather than the mere overlaying, entanglement, or busyness of complicatedness. This quest is traced with reference to some key works, while noting that Britten’s eclecticism refreshes a strong individual voice to the end of his career.

This chapter is an examination of Britten’s engagement with progressive musical and aesthetic thought. As a successful and popular composer, Britten is rarely identified as an ‘avant-garde’ artist, yet his career took note of progressive developments from 1930s neoclassicism to 1970s minimalism. For mid-century critics, Britten was a cosmpolitan figure; more recently, his commitment to tonality argues a ‘reactive modernism’, in dialogue with tradition. Britten’s relations to avant-garde thought involve successive historical contexts. In the 1930s, he sought to study with Berg, wrote experimental film soundtracks, and explored neoclassical parody, without abandoning key tonality. In the 1940s, Britten’s music developed greater metric complexity. Britten’s 1950s catalogue increasingly explores a personal twelve-tone thematic idiom, along with non-European percussion sonorities inspired by renewed encounters with Balinese gamelan. Criticising avant-garde ‘complication’ in the 1960s, Britten tempered public scepticism with personal support for British avant-gardists.

Thomas Adès described his compositions as the ‘organic, necessary’ linking of ‘tiny cells’ into larger structures by a ‘musical logic.’ This chapter demonstrates how successions of dyads in his two recent operas follow the logic of a specific musical transformation, retrograde-inversion chaining. This distinctively temporal process establishes cyclical patterns which can be realised, twisted or broken in various dramatic situations. In The Tempest, the cycles direct the music in ways that express Prospero’s power and Caliban’s resistance. Such logic, applied to different materials, also permeates The Exterminating Angel. On the surface, the retrograde-inversion chains represent the dissipation of the characters’ will. More deeply, though, the logic underwrites the tonality and form in the Act I lovers’ duet, the ‘Fugue of Panic’ and Leticia’s creative exuberance at a pivotal dramatic moment. These observations offer insight into how Adès controls musical time on the very largest scale.

The analogy between music and language is both problematic and essential for any rich understanding of musical Romanticism. Few commentators today would accept that music functions as a language; but the idea that music has poetic, literary, or dramatic substance is foundational to Romantic aesthetics and find expression in music as stylistically disparate as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Schumann’s Papillons. This chapter explores the musical languages of Romanticism, focusing both on the melodic, harmonic, and formal dimensions of musical practice and on the literary and linguistic labour they perform. It explores music from Beethoven and Field at the turn of the nineteenth century to Brahms and Mussorgsky at the century’s end, paying attention to the contrasted thematic cultures that Beethoven and Field instantiate, the harmonic innovations of Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, and Mussorgsky, and the intersections of form and narrative in Schumann’s Second Symphony.

We live in a post-translation world in which we are learning to extend our perception of what constitutes translational activity and its consequences. This chapter explores two aspects of the translational practice of poets of the 1890s: its suffusive nature and its prosodic experimentalism. By suffusive translation is meant a translation sourced in a roundabout way, relying on different kinds of formal and multi-sensory bricolage and filtering, such that the poems translated are re-metabolized, infused with new expressive colourings, as much as they are simply assimilated. At the same time, these translations explore a new prosodic range in their sensitivity to phrasal rhythms or cadence, to tonal shaping and to vocal inhabitation. Verlaine is the principal but by no means only French presence in this loosening and developing range of expression, and the examples discussed are drawn from the work of, among others, Lord Alfred Douglas, Arthur Symons, John Gray and Theodore Wratislaw. The chapter argues that the translations these poets undertook made a significant difference to the ways in which verse might be envisaged by the following generation of English-speaking poets.

This chapter analyzes both Wagner's formal processes and his harmonic and motivic structure in the Ring. The first half of the chapter focuses on the forms Wagner employed in these four operas, including such traditional operatic forms as arias and ensembles, as well as Wagner’s own theory of the "poetic-musical period" and the use of Stabreim, and various strophic and "symphonic" forms. The chapter's second half turns attention onto structure, which largely means Wagner's approach to handling tonality. Far from abolishing this system, as is sometimes supposed, Wagner worked exclusively within it. And yet the extreme way in which he sometimes pushed its logic explains in large part the magnetic effect he has had on radical artists and thinkers of the last century and a half.

I have been a die-hard fan of the band Blue Öyster Cult since a friend loaned me a copy of The Revolution by Night in the seventh grade. Donald Roeser (a.k.a. Buck Dharma) is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated guitarists in rock-and-roll history. Although many people might not recognize the name, they probably know his best-known song, “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” It was used in the original Halloween movie, and later—more prominently—during the opening credits of the television adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. It continues to enjoy steady rotation on classic rock radio, and experienced something of a renaissance at the turn of the millennium after being featured in the classic Saturday Night Live sketch “More Cowbell” starring Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken.