Acclaimed composer, sought-after conductor, esteemed educator, tireless advocate for the arts--Tania León’s achievements encompass but also stretch far beyond contemporary classical music. Alejandro L. Madrid draws on oral history, archival work, and ethnography to offer the first in-depth biography of the artist. Breaking from a chronological account, Madrid looks at León through the issues that have informed and defined moments in her life and her professional works. León’s words become a starting ground--but also a counterpoint--to the accounts of the people in her orbit. What emerges is more than an extraordinary portrait of an artist's journey. It is a story of how a human being reacts to the challenges thrown at her by history itself, be it the Cuban revolution or the struggle for civil and individual rights.

Nuanced and multifaceted, Tania León's Stride looks at the life, legacy, and milieu that created and sustained one of the most important figures in American classical music.

This book examines the renowned portrait collection assembled by C. P. E. Bach, J. S. Bach’s second son.
 
One of the most celebrated German composers of the eighteenth century, C. P. E. Bach spent decades assembling an extensive portrait collection of some four hundred music-related items—from oil paintings to engraved prints. The collection was dispersed after Bach’s death in 1788, but with Annette Richards’s painstaking reconstruction, the portraits once again present a vivid panorama of music history and culture, reanimating the sensibility and humor of Bach’s time. Far more than a mere multitude of faces, Richards argues, the collection was a major part of the composer’s work that sought to establish music as an object of aesthetic, philosophical, and historical study.

The Temple of Fame and Friendship brings C. P. E. Bach’s collection to life, giving readers a sense of what it was like for visitors to tour the portrait gallery and experience music in rooms thick with the faces of friends, colleagues, and forebears. She uses the collection to analyze the “portraitive” aspect of Bach’s music, engaging with the influential theories of Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater. She also explores the collection as a mode of cultivating and preserving friendship, connecting this to the culture of remembrance that resonates in Bach’s domestic music. Richards shows how the new music historiography of the late eighteenth century, rich in anecdote, memoir, and verbal portrait, was deeply indebted to portrait collecting and its negotiation between presence and detachment, fact and feeling.

A leading eighteenth-century composer, Sammartini was a key figure in the creation of the classic style, particularly the classic symphony. His symphonies and sonatas have survived in greatest number, but of equal interest is the sacred vocal music, a product of his lifelong service as a church musician. This volume lists all Sammartini's known orchestral and vocal works, sacred and secular—286 items. The entries give an incipit of each movement; instrumentation; date if known; a list of early manuscript and printed copies; and other significant information about variants, circumstances of performance, singers, copyists, and the like. The appendices list arrangements, contrafacta, and lost, doubtful, and spurious works.

Music collections in more than seventy-five libraries have been examined in gathering this material. Most compositions are listed here for the first time. In their introduction the authors provide a detailed biography, and discuss the composer's style, the major manuscript sources, and problems of authenticity. They have also included an extensive bibliography. Their book is basic to any study of Sammartini and of this pivotal period in the history of Western music.