The Artist as Citizen by Joseph W. Polisi, with a Foreword by Wynton Marsalis. Amadeus Press, 199 pp./20 photos, $24.99. Spanning Polisi’s 32 years as president of the Juilliard School, this collection of writings updates the 2005 edition. Among the additions are “Why,” a convocation address to the 2014 class at Aspen Music School urging them to support the creation of “challenging, as well as comforting, works of art”; and “Music Education in the Twenty-First Century,” a speech delivered last November at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music outlining plans for the Tianjin Juilliard School, which he hopes will launch in September 2018. Polisi’s overall thesis, as he writes in his Prologue, is that 21st-century artists “must be not only communicative through their art, but also knowledgeable about the intricacies of their society…so that they can effectively work toward showing the power of the arts.”
A Dictionary for the Modern Conductor by Emily Freeman Brown. Rowman & Littlefield, 419 pages, $85 (hardcover), $63.99 (Kindle edition). An unusual blend of glossary, biographical dictionary, and guide to prominent orchestras and musical institutions worldwide, this is a volume that even the most score-literate and well-traveled conductor should find revealing. Its thousands of glossary entries range from the most basic (“adagio,” “doppler effect”) to such delights as “digitación” (a Spanish term referring to instrumental fingering choices), “in battere” (downbeat), and “Eight O’Clock Pops” (a concert series started by Erich Kunzel with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra in 1965). Among the seven appendices is an essay called “Six Pieces That Changed Everything” analyzing key works by Beethoven, Debussy, Stravinsky, Copland, Penderecki, and Corigliano. Brown holds a DMA in orchestral conducting from the Eastman School of Music, and is currently director of orchestral activities and professor of conducting at Bowling Green State University.
Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise by Douglas W. Shadle. Oxford University Press, 330 pp. $55 (hardcover), $52.55 (Kindle edition). Shadle, an assistant professor of musicology at Vanderbilt University, delves deeply into the forgotten history of symphonic composition by Americans born between 1777 and 1874, whose work was largely eclipsed by that of their European contemporaries. He identifies symphonies by 54 composers, highlighting 21 of them—from Charles Ives, Amy Beach, and George Whitefield Chadwick to such obscure but prolific symphonists as George Frederick Bristow (1825-1888) and Asger Hamerik (1843-1923)—in his exhaustively researched text.
