The Muse That Sings is a unique behind-the-scenes look at both twentieth-century music and the nuts and bolts of creative work. Here, twenty-five of America's leading composers--from Adams to Zorn, from Bolcom to Vierk--talk candidly about their craft, their motivations, their difficulties, and how they how proceed from musical idea to finished composition. While focusing on the process and the stories behind specific works, the composers also touch on topics that will interest anyone involved in creative work. They discuss teachers and mentors, the task of revision, relationships with performers, and the ongoing struggle for a balance between freedom and discipline. They reveal sources of inspiration, artistic goals, and the often unexpected ways their musical ideas develop. Some describe personal tonal systems; others discuss the impact of computers and other electronic tools on their work; still others reflect philosophically on the inner impulses and outer influences that continue to drive them. While serious music has a reputation for being difficult and inaccessible, The Muse That Sings provides a powerful antidote. The composers in this book speak clearly and thoughtfully in response to key questions of concern to all readers interested in contemporary music. Each interview has been edited to stand alone as a concise meditation on muse and technique, and the book includes selected discographies as well as brief biographical sketches. Anyone with an interest in twentieth-century music or in the creative process will find this lively collection a valuable source of inspiration and insight.

The Muse that Sings: Composers Speak about the Creative Process

Arts & Photography

McCutchan, Ann

Music

Oxford University Press

A comprehensive and engaging biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the beloved classic The Yearling. Washington, DC, born and Wisconsin educated, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an unlikely author of a coming-of-age novel about a poor central Florida child and his pet fawn--much less one that has become synonymous with Florida literature writ large. Rawlings was a tough, ambitious, and independent woman who refused the conventions of her early-twentieth-century upbringing. Determined to forge a literary career beyond those limitations, she found her voice in the remote, hardscrabble life of Cross Creek, Florida. There, Rawlings purchased a commercial orange grove and discovered a fascinating world out of which to write--and a dialect of the poor, swampland community that the literary world had yet to hear. She employed her sensitive eye, sharp ear for dialogue, and philosophical spirit to bring to life this unknown corner of America in vivid, tender detail, a feat that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Her accomplishments came at a price: a failed first marriage, financial instability, a contentious libel suit, alcoholism, and physical and emotional upheaval. With intimate access to Rawlings's correspondence and revealing early writings, Ann McCutchan uncovers a larger-than-life woman who writes passionately and with verve, whose emotions change on a dime, and who drinks to excess, smokes, swears, and even occasionally joins in on an alligator hunt. The Life She Wished to Live paints a lively portrait of Rawlings, her contemporaries--including her legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins, and friends Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald--and the Florida landscape and people that inspired her.

The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

W.W.Norton&Company

Drawing on five years of research and well over 100 interviews with students, colleagues, and family members of flutist Marcel Moyse, author McCutchan distills a truthful, vital portrait of this charismatic, complex, and sometimes puzzling man.

Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute (Amadeus)

Amadeus

A comprehensive and engaging biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the beloved classic The Yearling. 
Washington, DC, born and Wisconsin educated, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an unlikely author of a coming-of-age novel about a poor central Florida child and his pet fawn―much less one that has become synonymous with Florida literature writ large. 
Rawlings was a tough, ambitious, and independent woman who refused the conventions of her early-twentieth-century upbringing. Determined to forge a literary career beyond those limitations, she found her voice in the remote, hardscrabble life of Cross Creek, Florida. There, Rawlings purchased a commercial orange grove and discovered a fascinating world out of which to write―and a dialect of the poor, swampland community that the literary world had yet to hear. She employed her sensitive eye, sharp ear for dialogue, and philosophical spirit to bring to life this unknown corner of America in vivid, tender detail, a feat that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Her accomplishments came at a price: a failed first marriage, financial instability, a contentious libel suit, alcoholism, and physical and emotional upheaval. 
With intimate access to Rawlings’s correspondence and revealing early writings, Ann McCutchan uncovers a larger-than-life woman who writes passionately and with verve, whose emotions change on a dime, and who drinks to excess, smokes, swears, and even occasionally joins in on an alligator hunt. The Life She Wished to Live paints a lively portrait of Rawlings, her contemporaries―including her legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins, and friends Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald―and the Florida landscape and people that inspired her. 31 illustrations

Louisiana's Atchafalaya River Basin, the heart and soul of Acadiana, or Cajun country, is the focus of this compelling narrative by Ann McCutchan. A masterful weaving of cultural and environmental history, River Music also tells the life story of Louisiana musician, naturalist, and sound documentarian Earl Robicheaux. With Robicheaux as her guide, McCutchan embarks on a musical, visual, literary, and historical tour of the Atchafalaya, where bayous, swamps, marshes, and river delta country have long sustained nature and culture, even as industry has changed both the landscape and the people. Along the way, she and Robicheaux pay homage to distinctive voices of the region's singular soundscape, including Acadian and Native American elders, birds, frogs, alligators, wind, water, and weather, which Robicheaux chronicles in archival recordings and musical compositions for museum exhibits, radio programs, and repositories such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. A CD of Robicheaux's soundscapes is included with the book. In counterpoint, McCutchan recounts Robicheaux's remarkable struggles as a jazz and classical artist, Katrina victim, cancer survivor, and steadfast son of the Basin devoted to remembering, preserving, and sounding out the ecological and cultural riches of his home. An original blend of nature writing, music history, biography, journalism, and memoir, River Music: An Atchafalaya Story eloquently celebrates the one-and-half-million watery acres that have shaped the lives of the people there--and been transformed by them in return. An epilogue written in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the disastrous oil spill that followed provides a fitting and poignant coda to this memorable book. (20110707)

River Music: An Atchafalaya Story (Volume 20) (Gulf Coast Books, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)

Texas A&M University Press

When you lose your parents just as you have left home for graduate school--glad to finally be away from a life and a place you found stifling--how do you make your way in a world with no home to go back to? For Ann McCutchan, whose parents died in a car accident when she was twenty-three, the answer was to keep moving, away from the dream her mom and dad had so hopefully embraced in her childhood and away from the locus of that dream, the state of Florida in the 1960s. In this coming-of-age memoir, McCutchan, a writer and musician, returns to Florida to reconcile with the life she had there. Reconnecting with old friends and with long-forgotten places, she confronts the transformation of the wetland real estate she knew as a child into south Florida suburbs and the booming Space Coast--a transformation her father enthusiastically if not altogether successfully promoted. She revisits the frustrations and ambitions of her youth and musical awakening, comes to a deeper understanding of the meaning of the cultural shifts she experienced in the sixties, and achieves a new appreciation of the history and aspirations of the two people who meant the most to her.

Where's the Moon?: A Memoir of the Space Coast and the Florida Dream (The Seventh Generation: Survival, Sustainability, Sustenance in a New Nature)

Historical

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

Books by McCutchan, Ann

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

The Muse that Sings: Composers Speak about the Creative Process

The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling

Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute (Amadeus)

The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling

River Music: An Atchafalaya Story (Volume 20) (Gulf Coast Books, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)

Where's the Moon?: A Memoir of the Space Coast and the Florida Dream (The Seventh Generation: Survival, Sustainability, Sustenance in a New Nature)