Expressionism in Twentieth-century Music - Hardcover

Idealism, rebellion against complacency, and an urgent need for new linguistic power with which to transcend their sense of spiritual crisis were characteristics common to expressionist painters, poets, and dramatists as well as to composers. Indeed, these individuals were frequently active in several fields. Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music explores expressionism in music in relation to the same movement in other creative arts.
This humanist approach to music written in the first quarter of the twentieth century considers the biographical, cultural, and societal context in which these compositions were conceived and explores the psychological imperatives at the root of individual composers' innovations. John C. Crawford and Dorothy L. Crawford point out influential expressionist tendencies in Wagner, Richard Strauss, Mahler, Scriabin, and Mussorgsky, all of whom prepared the ground as forerunners to musical expressionism. The authors examine strongly expressionist traits in the works not only of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern but also of Bartok, Stravinsky, Ives, and a "second generation" - Hindemith, Krenek, and Weill; and they find a legacy of expressionism in such composers as Ruggles and Shostakovich and in other iconoclasts still living.
In its interdisciplinary approach, the book is generously provided with musical analyses and excerpts from major expressionist compositions, examples of contemporaneous poetry (some of it written by the composers themselves), and reproductions of striking art works by Kandinsky, Marc, Kokoschka, Klimt, and Nolde, among others. A chapter is devoted to synthesis of the arts, which was uniquely important to expressionist composers.
Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music demonstrates the interdependence of the arts in the twentieth century and makes a challenging body of music more accessible and meaningful to students, composers, and musicologists.

John C. Crawford is Professor of Music at the University of California, Riverside.