Preface. PART 1: VIENNA: 1885-1915. 1. The German Romantic Legacy. 2. Schoenberg to 1909: Extending Traditions. 3. Webern: Opus 1 to Opus 12. 4. Alban Berg Before Wozzeck. PART TWO: PARIS: 1885-1915. 5. Debussy: Impressionism and Symbolism. 6. Maurice Ravel to the Mallarme Songs (1913). 7. Exoticism: Importations from Abroad. 8. Symbolist Reverberations Abroad (I): Decadent Symbolism. 9. Symbolist Reverberations Abroad (II): Synesthetic Symbolism. PART THREE: EMEBLEMS OF CRISIS: 1909-1914. 10. Expressionism: The Path to Pierrot. 11. Primitivism: The Road to the Rite. 12. Futurism: Manifestos and Machines. 13. The New Simplicities: France. 14. The New Simplicities: Germany. 15. Toward Neoclassicism. 16. Zemlinsky''''s Lyric Symphony: Against the Tide. 17. Berg: Wozzeck and the Violin Concerto. 18. Weberns Path to the New Music. PART FIVE: EMERGING NATIONAL ASPIRATIONS: 1910-1945. 19. Hungary: Bela Bartok. 20. Russians Abroad and At Home. 21. The Twentieth-Century Spanish and English Renaissance. 22. An American" Music for America. PART SIX: BEYOND NATIONALISM: 1920-1950. 23. Rituals, Liturgies, and Voices of War. PART SEVEN: POSTWAR SERIALISM AND THE RISE OF AN INTERNATIONAL AVANT-GARDE. 24. Europe: In Search of a Common Practice. 25. The United States of America. 26. Serialism and the European Old Guard. 27. The International Avant-Garde: Choice and Chance.PART EIGHT: THE QUEST FOR NEW SOUNDS. 28. Electronics and Explorations of Duration, Timbre, and Space. 29. The New Virtuosity. PART NINE: PAST IMPERFECT-FUTURE SUBJUNCTIVE. 30. Users of the Past: A Synthesis. 31. Users of the Past: The Generic Revivals. 32. Envoi.Notes. Index."

Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century

Arts & Photography

Watkins, Glenn

Music

Schirmer Books

Gesualdo: The Man and His Music

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (1560-1613), is equally celebrated as the composer of madrigals of great power and tortured complexity and as the murderer of his wife and her lover. His life and compositions are not unconnected. His neurotic sensibility found an ideal outlet in the Mannerist tendencies of late Renaissance music, and his works are the most extreme examples of these tendencies.

Gesualdo: The man and his music

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Oxford University Press

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, is equally celebrated as the composer of madrigals of great power and tortured complexity and as the murderer of his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto. His life and compositions are not unconnected. His neurotic sensibility found an ideal outlet in the mannerist tendencies of late Renaissance music, and his works are the most extreme examples of those tendencies. Watkins's extended study of Gesualdo's life and works was originally published in 1973. Alongside detailed analysis of Gesualdo's remarkable madrigals and of the few works in other genres, it contained much new biographical material, particularly on the latter part of the composer's life. This new edition has been extensively updated, and contains a new chapter covering the research of recent years. The preface to the first edition, by Igor Stravinsky is reprinted.

Gesualdo: The Man and His Music (Clarendon Paperbacks)

Stravinsky, Igor

Clarendon Press

A riveting investigation of one of the most provocative musicians of the Renaissance, who continues to captivate composers, artists, and audiences today. In this vivid tale of adultery and intrigue, witchcraft and murder, Glenn Watkins explores the fascinating life of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo―a life suffused with scandal and bordering on the fantastical. An isolated prince, Gesualdo had a personal life that was no less eccentric and bewildering than the music he composed; his biography has often clouded our perception of his oeuvre, which music scholars have periodically dismissed as a late Renaissance deformation of little consequence. Today, however, Gesualdo’s music, once deemed so strange as to be unperformable, stands as one of the most vibrant legacies of the late Italian Renaissance with an undeniable impact on a host of twentieth-century musicians and artists. The incendiary details of Gesualdo’s life recede, and his grip on our musical imagination comes to the fore. Watkins challenges our preconceptions of what has become a nearly mythic persona, weaving together the cumulative experience of some of the most vibrant artists of the past century from Stravinsky and Schoenberg to Abbado and Herzog. Beyond questions of mere influence, however, The Gesualdo Hex offers a profound meditation on cultural memory and historical awareness: how composers attempt to shape the legacy they will bequeath to the world, and how music and history inevitably take on a new guise as they are revisited by subsequent generations and reinterpreted in light of contemporary experience. In examining Gesualdo’s life, music, myth, and memory intertwine with one another to reveal an uncanny affinity with our own time. With his elegant and engaging prose, Watkins asks us to grapple with our understanding not only of art and the artists who create it but also of history itself. 25 illustrations

The Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth, and Memory

W.W.Norton&Company

Carols floating across no-man's-land on Christmas Eve 1914; solemn choruses, marches, and popular songs responding to the call of propaganda ministries and war charities; opera, keyboard suites, ragtime, and concertos for the left hand—all provided testimony to the unique power of music to chronicle the Great War and to memorialize its battles and fallen heroes in the first post-Armistice decade. In this striking book, Glenn Watkins investigates these variable roles of music primarily from the angle of the Entente nations' perceived threat of German hegemony in matters of intellectual and artistic accomplishment—a principal concern not only for Europe but also for the United States, whose late entrance into the fray prompted a renewed interest in defining America as an emergent world power as well as a fledgling musical culture. He shows that each nation gave "proof through the night"—ringing evidence during the dark hours of the war—not only of its nationalist resolve in the singing of national airs but also of its power to recall home and hearth on distant battlefields and to reflect upon loss long after the guns had been silenced. Watkins's eloquent narrative argues that twentieth-century Modernism was not launched full force with the advent of the Great War but rather was challenged by a new set of alternatives to the prewar avant-garde. His central focus on music as a cultural marker during the First World War of necessity exposes its relationship to the other arts, national institutions, and international politics. From wartime scores by Debussy and Stravinsky to telling retrospective works by Berg, Ravel, and Britten; from "La Marseillaise" to "The Star-Spangled Banner," from "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" to "Over There," music reflected society's profoundest doubts and aspirations. By turns it challenged or supported the legitimacy of war, chronicled misgivings in miniature and grandiose formats alike, and inevitably expressed its sorrow at the final price exacted by the Great War. Proof through the Night concludes with a consideration of the post-Armistice period when, on the classical music front, memory and distance forged a musical response that was frequently more powerful than in wartime.

Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Includes CD)

University of California Press

A pyramid in front of the Louvre. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and The Rite of Spring. Schoenberg and Shirley Temple. Just as the odd juxtapositions of Modernism produced a new way of seeing, so now collage, in the hands of Glenn Watkins, offers a new perspective on the art of our age. A rich and revealing picture of twentieth-century music and the arts, Watkins' work shows us what our present Postmodern aesthetic owes to our Modernist past. 
 Behind the many guises of Modernism we find an appetite for opposing impulses: the exotic and the home-grown, high and low, black and white, the passionate and the cool, the cerebral and the instinctive. Watkins shows us these oppositions at play in the music of Stravinsky and Ravel, Debussy and Schoenberg, Ives, Satie, Hindemith, Ellington, and Gershwin, in the art of Picasso and the Cubists, Cocteau, Léger, Brancusi and Noguchi, in the anthologies of Nancy Cunard and Main Locke, in the ballet companies of Sergei Diaghilev and Rolf de Math, and in the performances of josephine Baker. Throughout, collage asserts its power to enlighten through juxtaposition, resist resolution, sponsor pluralism, and promote understanding of an order that eludes all edicts. 
 The masks of Oskar Schlemmer, of japanese No drama, and of the commedia dell'arte, the mythologies attendant to the retrieval of folk traditions and the emergence of jazz, and the mass relocation of artists in a time of war-all have a place in this depiction and assessment of the legacy of Modernism. A heady exploration of questions surrounding Primitivism, Orientalism, and technology as they surface at either end of our century, this book exposes the millennial preoccupations mutually invested in our search for "first times" and our convictions about "the end of culture"

Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists

History & Criticism

Belknap Press

The University of North Carolina Press

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Books by Watkins, Glenn