These three texts explore the power and potential of music by a renowned musicologist, a celebrated composer, and a Nobel Prize–winning author.
Jan Holcman’s The Legacy of Chopin is a comprehensive study of the great composer’s views on music—including pianism, composition, pedagogy, criticism, and more. Drawing on extensive research from a wide range of sources, Holcman provides essential historical and musicological context for Frederic Chopin’s references and concepts, making his more esoteric ideas accessible to the general reader.
Nobel Prize winning author and devoted pianist André Gide presents inspiring discourse on the power of Chopin’s music in Notes on Chopin. Gide depicts Chopin as a composer “betrayed . . .deeply, intimately, totally violated” by a music community that had fundamentally misinterpreted his work. Notes is a moving and poetic expression of profound admiration for a pioneering composer, and this edition includes rare pages and fragments from Gide’s journals.
In Style and Idea, Austrian composer and music theorist Arnold Schoenberg presents his vision of how music speaks to us and what it is capable of saying. Through a series of essays, Schoenberg discusses the relationship between music and language, new and outmoded music, composition in twelve tones, entertaining through composing, the relationship of heart and mind in music, evaluation of music, and other topics.
