Although Pierrot lunaire (1912) is technically more radical than Erwartung in some ways, with its pervasive use of ‘speech-song’ vocal technique, it requires only six performers and complements Night Music features with less expressionistic episodes. Since setting Stefan George’s vision of spiritual aspiration in the finale of the second quartet, then contemplating the musical legacy of Mahler and its exploration of transcendent spiritual states, Schoenberg brought consideration of his own relationship with Judaism into an ambitious plan for an oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter. As part of this characteristically far-seeing exercise in rethinking basic principles, he also moved towards the formulation of what became known in the 1920s as the twelve-tone method. Cultural attitudes changed greatly after World War I, and Schoenberg was not impervious to the neoclassical retreat from expressionism. Yet his motivic techniques (not least the variously ordered pitch-class collections formed from the letters of his own name) survived transformation from the pantonality of his earlier music into more systematically ordered twelve-tone compositions. Often making explicit allusions to tonal principles and traditional formal designs, he retained the textural flexibility and expressive intensity of the Night Music years. Elements of technique and ethos already implicit in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung found new purpose in compositions that left the post-Wagnerian spirit of Schoenberg’s Viennese years far behind.

Crooning emerged as a style that contemporaneous audiences, black and white, read as “white”: it wasn’t until the early 1930s that African American crooners appeared on record. This delay is unusual in American music, where innovations in vernacular music ordinarily have African American origins. That delay is explicable, however, once we recover what crooning signified for black audiences and how that signified meant something different to white audiences. More interesting still is the fact that crooning continues to play a role in contemporary African American music, long after white audiences abandoned it as old-fashioned. The apotheosis of this pattern can be heard in the 1963 record, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Trane then made his one record with a vocalist for fairly obvious reasons, but it is less clear why he chose to do so, not with a jazz singer, but a crooner.

In his original programme, Berlioz called the last two movements a dream – or nightmare. Despairing of the chances of a production of his opera Les Francs-juges, he took from it a ferocious ‘Marche des gardes’ – soldiers who, in the opera, are obedient to a tyrant. The orchestra is enlarged by additional brass (trombones and ophicleide or tuba) and percussion. The main theme is presented in many guises, with much harmonic and instrumental originality. To fit the March into the symphony Berlioz added a recollection of the idée fixe at the end, where the image of the beloved woman is brutally cut off; interrupted as the protagonist dreams of his own execution by guillotine.

Messiaen is famous for the length of his tenure as titular organist at Sainte-Trinité, which lasted from 1931 to his death in 1992. This chapter explores his appointment, details of his duties, and notable events during his career. It discusses the relationship between him and other prominent organist-composers during this period, including Franck, Tournemire, and Langlais. It deals in detail with the Cavaillé-Coll Grand Organ in La Trinité and how this may have influenced not only his organ compositions, but also his other works; it also refers to the importance of the recordings he made on the instrument, playing his own works.

This essay investigates the slang that emerged from jazz scenes during the twentieth century. A music history characterized by continual stylistic change and innovation is echoed in a corresponding ‘slanguage’ created by jazz musicians. Jazz slang permeates American culture and reflects the experience of Black musicians who created new worlds within language itself. Jazz slang has provided a venue for protesting white supremacy, exploring artistic playfulness, and expressing the energy of improvisation. This essay engages the reasons for jazz slang’s creation, scholarly and societal perceptions of the language, as well as some of the major conditions contributing to its dissemination.

Berlioz takes his protagonist to countryside that was surely inspired by the region of his birth in the Dauphiné: a plain, farmland (home to the quail whose call is, perhaps, imitated), and a distant prospect of mountains. The scene is prepared by a stylized ‘cattle-call’, known as ranz des vaches, played on another instrument rarely used up to this time in a symphony orchestra, the cor anglais (Berlioz did not risk ridicule by introducing an actual alphorn). The serene pastoral reverie that follows is disturbed by the idée fixe, arousing memories of the protagonist’s hopes and fears: could she love him? But now he is alone, and his isolation is emphasized when the ranz des vaches on cor anglais, formerly answered by an offstage oboe (another innovation!), is now heard amid the threat of distant thunder.

By the end of the nineteenth century, cakewalk and ragtime music had taken the world so much by storm that Europe’s major classical composers were composing ragtime and cakewalk inspired music. Both Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy sought to break from European classical traditions by investing in the African American vernacular forms that were introducing the Old World to New World rhythmic patterns and melodies. This interest in performance, nightlife, the circus, and café culture was shared by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Charles Demuth, and George Grosz, all of whom explored themes and aesthetics influenced by the confluence of African American performance culture and African art available in the Western cultural capitals of Paris, New York, and Berlin. By the time author F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s “the jazz age” in the United States, African American music had already been influencing the trajectory of visual culture in the United States for several decades. With its creative fluidity, investment in aesthetics, and ability to mine African diasporic cultures for its most innovative impulses, jazz has been poised to respond to visual culture’s search for new vocabularies of form.

This chapter examines the way in which the idea of a European avant-garde is formed in the wake of Messiaen’s thought and the ways in which this reflexively informed Messiaen’s own work. It focuses in particular on the theoretical achievements of Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Xenakis and how formed a new ways of thinking about music.

This chapter explores the role of intertextuality in jazz. I argue that major variants of intertextuality– in particular, post-structuralism and Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”– miss what is most important to jazz: the way jazz has served as a vehicle for both the transmission of tradition and a dialogue within it and with other genres. I suggest that Bakhtin’s dialogism illuminates those neglected intertextual features and show how jazz musicians intertextually “re-accent” or “signify” in their use of quotations, licks, style, and repertory. Players quote, use licks, affirm and cross genre boundaries, and improvise over standards in order both to contribute to a tradition and alter it by expressing their individuality. In Jason Moran’s recent work engaging with Thelonious Monk and Fats Waller, he uses stylistic, generic, and repertory-based intertextuality to make the case for jazz as a far reaching but ultimately unified continuum. He thus connects with a larger tradition, but at the same time through recontextualization and re-accenting uses those utterances for self-expression and pushes against cultural– and, by implication, social and political– boundaries. Thus intertextual jazz performances simultaneously express the musicians themselves and engage with the larger whole(s) of which they are a part.

Since the death of Pierre Boulez in 2016, the historiography of contemporary music has begun to confront the completion of one of the most remarkable careers affecting the character and context of musical life since 1945. This chapter examines the changing nature of the relationship between Messiaen and his most distinguished student. It examines Boulez’s critiques of Messiaen, and it creates a dialogue between aspects of classicism and modernism in the thinking of both composers, establishing their distinctiveness and relevance to the continuing evolution of compositional practice in the present day.

Chapter 1 sketches the generic contexts for Schumann’s Piano Concerto. It evaluates important theories of concerto form from Donald Francis Tovey to James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, and identifies a disconnect between these theories, which typically take Mozart as their point of orientation and trace a subsequent history through Beethoven and Mendelssohn to Brahms, and the milieu with which Schumann engaged, which was saturated with the practices of the virtuoso concerto and the models advocated by Hummel, Field, Kalkbrenner, Moscheles, Herz and others. Taking these influences as its starting point, this chapter builds an approach to the analysis of the Romantic piano concerto, which is put into action in Chapters 4 and 5.

This chapter examines Messiaen’s pianistic techniques and virtuosity in Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus (1944). In particular, it focusses on Yvonne Loriod, who gave the first performance of the work at the Salle Gaveau in March 1945 at the age of only twenty-one, and whose phenomenal virtuosity enabled Messiaen to explore new complexities of musical thought and pianistic expression. It demonstrates how Messiaen’s pianistic style can be understood as part of a tradition reaching back to Chopin, Liszt, and Mussorgsky, while also exploring its parallels in Albéniz and Ravel.

This Introduction configures Messiaen’s life and works, and the culture, aesthetics, and legacy of his art in terms of various kinds of images. In particular, this chapter focuses on the complexity and construction of these images, which are sometimes surprising and contradictory, to reveal the ‘contexts’ that inform this book.

This introduction establishes the wide variety of cultural and historical contexts that Jazz and American Culture covers by revisiting five moments across the past century. Beginning with the first recording by a Black woman in 1920 and moving to the pandemic summer of 2020, these five vignettes present us not with a straight line through American history but instead offer a series of nodes that suggest the complicated ways jazz has been entangled with American politics, aesthetic upheavals, technological and economic changes, and the lived experience of the everyday. Most importantly, these select moments across the history of jazz and American culture– spanning Jim Crow to George Floyd– remind us how the music’s development out of African American expressive culture is key to understanding both its ongoing response to the violence of American racism and its incisive critique of American democracy’s failures.