Margaret Bonds’s upbringing and education inculcated in her a profound sense of pride in her racial and familial heritage and an equally profound sense of obligation to “go farther” than those who came before her in using her art for the betterment of the lives of others. Moving from her youth through her years as a struggling musician in New York and Los Angeles during the Depression and World War II, through her ascendance to national and international fame, this chapter traces the development of these themes in her personal philosophy and compositional work over the period ca. 1939–63 in works including the incidental music to Shakespeare in Harlem, The Ballad of the Brown King, and Simon Bore the Cross, leading to their coalescence in The Montgomery Variations (1963–64). The Variations thus emerges as the summit of Bonds’s works centered on the theme of racial justice up to that point.

The modern usage of cool was developed by jazz musicians as part of their in-group slang in post-World War II New York City. This linguistic fact remains unrecognized within scholarship on jazz, etymology, and popular culture. For jazz musicians, cool signified a calm state of mind, a relaxed style of performance, embodied composure, and a melodic low-key musical aesthetic. The roots for these meanings of cool are to be found in West African languages and drumming practices, rather than English language precedent. During the Cold War, European authors embraced jazz as a key element of rebellion against totalitarianism, with the jazz musician elevated as a literary figure of American existentialism. The cool musical aesthetic became a global style through Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Chet Baker, and then through the bossa nova. Once the term and concept was adapted and appropriated by white writers and jazz fans, “cool” became a generalized emblem and synonym for rebellion.

Bonds’s setting of the Du Bois Credo continues and extends the series of musical appeals for racial justice that had led to The Montgomery Variations, just as the revised version of Credo published at the head of his first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, in 1920 extends the ideas that had led to the original 1904 version of Du Bois’s text. This chapter frames both the Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s musical setting thereof as articulations of the themes and issues of the works’ respective biographical contexts and, taken together, a dyadic lens into their creators’ perspectives on the societal upheavals of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. Then, after demonstrating why, and how, the Credo was effectively silenced during Margaret Bonds’s lifetime despite its obvious importance, timeliness, and musical genius – including conversation with the publisher who insisted that the work could not be published unless its text were altered – the chapter closes by exploring the work’s first posthumous performances and documenting the ringing endorsement of Shirley Graham Du Bois, widow of the poet, for this “work of art that is eternal.”

Providing strong contrast with the previous movements, the finale initially seems tonally and formally unambiguous, starting out as a (sonata-) rondo structure. However, the new episode introduced in the development section threatens to take over the design, and the overemphatic use of C minor here points back to unresolved intermovement elements. Indeed, the movement is characterised by an increasing freedom from generic form, with the desynchronising of harmonic and thematic recapitulation points, the secondary material being not recapitulated, and the reprise effectively becoming a culminatory coda. This exhilarating movement reveals some precedent in the finale of Mendelssohn’s Octet (also in E flat, 1825) but takes its own direction.

The brief introduction situates Hensel’s String Quartet within the course of her compositional development, showing its significance here and its implications for understanding her modern reception. The string quartet genre held an enormous prestige in Hensel’s time, and the creation of this composition was implicitly a gesture showcasing her worth outside the ‘feminine’ sphere of solo lied and piano miniature. I also explain the position of this book within current, developing positions in the discussion of the music of female composers. This issue is especially pointed in this instance given the intimate relation and two-way interaction between the music of Fanny Hensel and her younger brother, Felix Mendelssohn. Hensel’s quartet makes an intriguing case study: its absence of significant reception history forces us to concentrate more on the actual music rather than what has been said about it.

Messiaen is arguably more acclaimed in China’s art music circles than many of his contemporaries. Chen Qigang (b. 1951), a private student of Messiaen, stands out as a torchbearer among this generation of Chinese composers. That Chen was a student of Luo Zhongrong (b. 1924), one of the most revered Beijing-based composers, further connects the two vastly different musical worlds. What contributed to Messiaen’s stature in China may also be traced back through a monograph on Messiaen by Yang Liqing (1942#–2013), president of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and also an eminent composer, to Yuri Kholopov’s O tryokh zarubezhnïkh sistemakh garmonii of 1966.

This chapter fills in the background to the composition of the string quartet in 1834. First, we look at Hensel’s early musical education, her intimate creative ties with her brother Felix Mendelssohn, their mutual use of music as a form of intimate communication, and the asymmetrical career path that resulted from her being a woman in contemporaneous society. In parallel to this sibling influence runs the Mendelssohns’ reception of late Beethoven in the 1820s, whose influence on their works of the later 1820s is clear and also has a major bearing on Hensel’s quartet. A final case study showcasing both the interaction with her brother and the music of Beethoven is provided by a brief analysis of the ‘Easter’ Sonata of 1828, which points forward to many features of the string quartet.

While the history of jazz and the biographies of the music’s practitioners have long enjoyed the attention of critics and audiences, the jazz musicians’ life stories, told in writing and from their personal perspectives, remain an understudied area of jazz scholarship and autobiography studies. This chapter surveys the genre of jazz autobiography by identifying its major styles, forms, and narrative patterns and tracing its century-long history from the 1920s to the 2020s. Assessing works by famous musician-writers such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Anita O’Day, and Artie Shaw, the chapter outlines the diversity of jazz autobiography, focusing on questions of narrative perspective, written and oral style, musical influences, as well as raced, classed, and gendered experiences. The chapter suggests that this diversity is nonetheless encapsulated by a common genre poetics of the jazz life as told from the musician’s vantage point.

Schumann’s essay on Symphonie fantastique was an extended critique. Much of it he admired and defended from an earlier critic, but he took exception to other aspects, including the programme and the music of the final movement. He discusses the form of the first movement Allegro, viewing it as a valid alternative structure related, but not identical, to ‘the traditional model’. The debate about the validity or otherwise of Berlioz’s procedures (which were not born of ignorance or ineptitude, as some have supposed) may never reach a conclusion agreed upon by every critic and theorist, despite the music’s positive reception by audiences; the conclusion must be that whatever its eccentricities compared to academically approved models, it ‘works’ in performance.

The chapter examines the work of a composer Jean-Louis Florentz, whose work has perhaps a greater affinity to that of Messiaen than works by the more well-known triumvirate of spectralists (Grisey, Murail, and Levinas). Florentz’s works are distinguished by their originality and are notable for their use of world music, in particular Ethiopian liturgical music. The study evaluates the connections between the two men, the proximity and distance of their techniques, their musical aesthetics, and the spiritual approaches of these composers.

Messiaen’s relationship with the press and, to some extent, with the wider musical culture within which he lived and worked, can be divided into the period before, and after, ‘Le Cas Messiaen’ in 1945#–6, in which critical responses to his Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine and Vingt Regards sur L’enfant-Jésus sharply divided critical and popular opinion. In this chapter, I explore Messiaen’s early reception in the French press of the 1930s an‘ early ’40s, up to and including ‘Le Cas’, paying particular attention to two particular concerns: the way the critics of the time chose to understand his music as a feature in the landscape of the French music of the time, and the way his public persona, including his own journalism, intersected with that understanding.