This chapter identifies certain interesting threads of development in Messiaen criticism from a wide range of published sources, as the challenge of responding to the remarkably original and forthright character of Messiaen's compositions was confronted in the highly unstable context of musical life between 1930 and 1990. This chapter acts to confirm perceptions about Messiaen's central position during those decades, within France and beyond it, and to explain the continuing interest in his life and work during the years since his death.

The American Songbook has been a fruitful source of improvisation for jazz musicians, either through artists interpreting those songs themselves, or crafting new songs from their chord changes as bebop musicians did prolifically in the 1940s. This chapter investigates this influence, beginning with the debt that jazz improvisers owe to Tin Pan Alley composers, before turning that relationship around to consider how the success of those same songwriters depended on an ongoing attempt to identify what made jazz appealing to American listeners and distil aspects of that enigmatic essence into the commercially viable object of popular song. In examples like Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather,” Irving Berlin’s “Putting on the Ritz,” or any number of Cole Porter compositions, we see the workmanlike creators of Tin Pan Alley incorporating not just musical elements associated with jazz, but also a more general “sensibility,” intended to recreate the music’s blues-informed world-weariness or performative impertinence.

This chapter provides a neuropsychological account of Messiaen’s well-known sound-to-colour synaesthesia. It offers an overview of the perceptual, cognitive, and neurological mechanisms underlying the condition, with reference to Messiaen’s own experience and to scientific understandings of this phenomenon.

Scat and vocalese are two approaches to jazz vocality. This essay intervenes into dominant narratives of their history, value, and functions and encourages us to conceptualize a broader, contradictory view of what they have been and done. This view both acknowledges the narrative of Louis Armstrong giving birth to scat in 1926 and that scat was widespread far earlier; it points to how scat has occupied both sides of Lindon Barrett’s binary of the singing/signing voice, variously functioning as institutionalized vocality that claims authority by Othering certain music as nonmusical and marginalized vocality denied legibility by hegemonic musical norms. Alongside these reflections on the cultural politics of jazz voice, the reader is guided through explorations of the scat existing before scat; the less-celebrated recordings of the most-celebrated scat singer, Ella Fitzgerald; and the ways scat’s meanings are reshaped by poetry and by lesser-known singers of the past and present.

The decade (1899–1909) separating Verklärte Nacht from Schoenberg’s second major contribution to Night Music, the monodrama Erwartung, was typically turbulent and productive. Based mainly in Vienna, he established himself as a competent conductor, and also as the revered teacher of talented young composers such as Berg and Webern. The ambitious scale of Schoenberg’s major compositions from these years confirmed his determination to distance himself technically from admired contemporaries like Strauss, Busoni and Mahler. In pursuit of greater intensity and concentration, romanticism gave way to expressionism, as chordal dissonances were freed from their traditional need to resolve. And although critics were often hostile, Schoenberg retained the admiration and respect of performers as well as of friends such as Zemlinsky and Mahler. The affair between his wife Mathilde and the painter Richard Gerstl (ending in uneasy reconciliation after Gerstl’s suicide) fuelled the fierce musical outbursts of important compositions like the Second String Quartet, as well as of Erwartung.

Matthew Schellhorn, who attended lessons with Loriod in the 2000s, discusses her background and her personal and artistic involvement with Messiaen. He examines her as an artist in her own right, discussing her discography, her own compositions, and her activities as a teacher, and thereby brings her character into focus.

Some of the major influences on Berlioz were the new experiences that he likened to a thunderbolt. Literary influences came from Britain and Ireland (Thomas Moore, Walter Scott, and especially Shakespeare); from Germany (Goethe); and from France (Victor Hugo). The coup de foudre were performances of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, with Harriet Smithson (1827). He was mainly brought up on French music – songs and extracts from operas. Once in Paris, he came to admire the French operas of Gluck, and Weber’s Der Freischütz affected him strongly. However, the musical coup de foudre was Beethoven, whose example led him to cast his ideas in symphonic form. Once completed, the work must be performed; and when Berlioz took to conducting his own music and promoting it outside France, Symphonie fantastique, or selections from it, featured in many of his concerts.

The Montgomery Variations and Credo were not just timely musical masterpieces; they were also large-scale compositions dealing with racial justice and global equality that were penned by an African American woman, an individual to whom the doors of the classical music performance and publishing establishments were closed because of race and sex. Both works may thus be understood as compositions tendered from within a double application of the “veil” or “double-consciousness” that Du Bois had seminally discussed in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk – one application is that of race; the other, that of sex. Keenly aware of both of her doubly veiled existence and of the near-total absence of Black folk and women in orchestras, as well as their disproportionately small presence in choruses and audiences, Margaret Bonds undertook a gambit of dual perspective. She used the rhetoric of White Euro-American classical music to valorize contemporary African Americans and others who bravely fought against the system with which most performers and audiences of that music normally identified. The chapter closes with a reflection on the crucial role played by Bonds’s personal and professional affinities with Langston Hughes in inspiring her to this gambit.

Perhaps the most fecund and brilliant movement, the C minor Allegretto is a formally remarkable scherzo with a lengthy trio that takes over the bulk of the movement, leading to a greatly curtailed reprise. Hensel’s manuscript shows that the initially clear ternary design of the movement was manipulated by both intercutting two-bar snippets of the scherzo material into the development of the trio and excising the reprise of the opening bars of the scherzo, thus surreptitiously initiating the reprise amidst the ongoing trio. This leads to the dissolution of the scherzo and a tonally unstable close that prepares the world of the following movement.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Intermezzo and Finale respond to the challenge of balancing the first movement’s slow-movement and finale-like episodes with the movements of the overarching concerto cycle. The Intermezzo is a ternary-form lyric character piece, which invokes the epigrammatic style of Schumann’s early piano cycles, and which is elided with the Finale via an enigmatic reference to the first movement’s main theme. The Finale, in contrast, is an expansive sonata rondo, which, in a nod to the Beethovenian symphonic struggle–victory narrative, supplants A minor with the parallel major. Together, the two movements convey a productive dialectic of lyric concentration and symphonic expansion, which in combination radically rethink the bel canto and brillante stylistic hallmarks of Schumann’s virtuoso precedents.

As titles referring to compositional genres, Nocturne, Notturno and Nachtsmusik had a particular resonance for nineteenth-century composers sensitive to romantic traditions extending from Schubert and Schumann to reach an apogee in Wagner’s celebration of the ‘fabled realm of night’ in Tristan und Isolde. Though placed there in explicit opposition to the mundane reality of daylight, Wagner (notably in Siegfried) also made much of the glorious effects of the rising sun. The tension between darkness and light as reflecting radically different states of mind as well as different effects of nature, was also a favoured topic for late romantic poets and painters active in the Viennese culture in which Schoenberg came to maturity. Nevertheless, the aspect of romantic sensibility that offset nocturnal unease with a heightened sense of the sublime and the supernatural ensured that examples of Night Music could have a special ambivalence in keeping with their exploratory technical resources.