THE WAR ON MUSIC: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century

Walter Simmons on November 18, 2022

By John Mauceri. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. 232 pp. When a book appears that purports to deal with the mid-20th-century estrangement of classical music audiences from the fruits of their own time, which has largely continued since …

Rosner’s Requiem: On a Forgotten Genius of American Music

Walter Simmons on July 29, 2021

In the spring of 1970, I was about to enter the Manhattan School of Music to pursue the study of musicology. At the time, I was working at C. F. Peters Corporation, then the primary publisher of the music of Alan Hovhaness, a well-known American composer whose unusual style involved combining the modal polyphony of the Renaissance with Armenian, Indian, Japanese, and Korean elements, and who interested me greatly.

VINCENT PERSICHETTI: Grazioso, Grit, and Gold

Walter Simmons on March 3, 2019

VINCENT PERSICHETTI: Grazioso, Grit, and Gold. by Andrea Olmstead. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. 493 pp. Cloth. $110 The third quarter of the 20th century was an enormously fruitful period in American classical music, which saw the appearance of …