This is the most readable and comprehensive guide to enjoying over five hundred years of classical music—from Gregorian chants, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Johannes Brahms, Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, and beyond.
The Vintage Guide to Classical Music is a lively musical history and an authoritative reference work to the personalities, epochs, and genres of the Western classical tradition. Among its features: chronologically arranged essays on nearly 100 composers, from Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–1377) to Aaron Copland (1900–1990), that combine biography with detailed analyses of the major works while assessing their role in the social, cultural, and political climate of their times informative sidebars that clarify broader topics such as melody, polyphony, atonality, and the impact of the early-music movement a glossary of musical terms, from capella to woodwinds a step-by-step guide to building a great classical music library.
JAN SWAFFORD received degrees from Harvard and the Yale School of Music and is the author of Charles Ives: A Life with Music, which was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, won the PENWinship Award, and was hailed by Newsweek as "one of the best biographies in recent memory." He is also the author of The Vintage Guide to Classical Music and a featured commentator on NPR's Performance Today. An award-winning composer whose work has been widely performed by ensembles here and abroad, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
View titles by Jan Swafford
This is the most readable and comprehensive guide to enjoying over five hundred years of classical music—from Gregorian chants, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Johannes Brahms, Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, and beyond.
The Vintage Guide to Classical Music is a lively musical history and an authoritative reference work to the personalities, epochs, and genres of the Western classical tradition. Among its features: chronologically arranged essays on nearly 100 composers, from Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–1377) to Aaron Copland (1900–1990), that combine biography with detailed analyses of the major works while assessing their role in the social, cultural, and political climate of their times informative sidebars that clarify broader topics such as melody, polyphony, atonality, and the impact of the early-music movement a glossary of musical terms, from capella to woodwinds a step-by-step guide to building a great classical music library.
Author
JAN SWAFFORD received degrees from Harvard and the Yale School of Music and is the author of Charles Ives: A Life with Music, which was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, won the PENWinship Award, and was hailed by Newsweek as "one of the best biographies in recent memory." He is also the author of The Vintage Guide to Classical Music and a featured commentator on NPR's Performance Today. An award-winning composer whose work has been widely performed by ensembles here and abroad, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
View titles by Jan Swafford
