Customer Reviews

Twentieth-Century Chamber Music (Routledge Studies in Musical Genre)

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James McCalla is a member of the music faculty at Bowdoin College. His 20th Century Chamber Music is a dense, intelligently written survey of the modern repertoire, ranging from Debussy to Berio, in various genres. McCalla makes the decision, carefully explained in his introduction, to group works by genre and aesthetic rather than chronologically. However justifiable, his somewhat idiosyncratic ordering makes the text occasionally confusing to follow, and forces him to double back to some works and discuss them twice, notably Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, whose final two, vocal movements are analyzed several chapters ahead of the first two, purely instrumental sections. Then, after all, he surveys all of Bartók's string quartets in order, with the implication that they form too significant, and too interrelated, a body of work to choose from among them.

Most of the familiar names in the 20th-century canon do get their fair share of attention, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók and Elliott Carter in particular (Prokofiev is ignored, except for a somewhat puzzling slam at the Flute Sonata, not an entirely characteristic work). In common with many other surveys of the contemporary repertoire, one wonders what drove some of his subsidiary choices: no doubt Lee Hyla is a major composer, but is he any more or less worthy than others who have explored similar media? Nevertheless, despite its somewhat inconsistent ordering this book has a lot to offer. It is not, however, for the casual music lover, the blurb on the back cover notwithstanding.