Overture: Some Issues Facing the Contemporary American Composer

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Preface ix
4. Acknowledgments xiii
5. Overture: Some Issues Facing the Contemporary American Composer xv
6. Part One: Essays on Composers
7. 1 Cage Contemplating/Contemplating Cage 1
8. 2 Some Things I Learned (Didn’t Learn) from Milton Babbitt, or Why I Am (Am Not) a Serial Composer 27
9. 3 Not Only Rows in Richard Swift’s Roses Only 85
10. 4 A Footnote to Hasty, Whitehead, and Plato: More Thoughts on Stefan Wolpe’s Music 112
11. Part Two: Talks on My Music
12. 5 Composing Each Time 119
13. 6 Why Not Lilacs 184
14. 7 Cold Mountain Songs 213
15. 8 Music as Poetry: A Talk on My Fourteen Little Piano Pieces 234
16. 9 Nature, Music and Nature, My Music Outdoors 259
17. Part Three: Essays on Criticism and Aesthetics
18. 10 Aspects of Confluence between Western Art Music and Ethnomusicology 303
19. 11 Musical Form, Expectation, Attention, and Quality 313
20. 12 Autocommentary: Thoughts on Music Theory at the Millennium 327
21. 13 Thinking about Musical Time 336
22. Appendixes
23. A Some Serial Music Terms 357
24. B Set-Class Table 359
25. C Hexachordal Combinatoriality 367
26. D Two-Row Combinatoriality 368
27. Notes 369
28. Bibliography 395
29. Index 403