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The Art of Accompanying and Coaching was first published in 1965. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Kurt Adler, former conductor and chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera, provides a comprehensive guide to musical accompanying and coaching, based in his extensive experience, which will be helpful, if not indispensable, to music teachers, students, coaches, accompanists, orchestral and choral conductors, and performing vocal and instrumental artists.

The first part of the book gives the historical and technical background of the subject and explains in detail the mechanics of string instruments, piano, celeste, organ, harmonium, and voice. The next section offers a thorough guide to the singing diction of five languages— Italian, Latin, French, German, and English. The author continues with a discussion of the elements of musical style, describing, with the use of ample musical illustrations, tempo, rhythm, dynamics, phrasing and articulation, and ornamentation. This section closes with an analysis of the German lied style and the French art song style.

Mr. Adler goes on to synthesize the various elements of accompanying and coaching. He stresses the importance of psychological and spiritual rapport between accompanists and artist and shows ways of achieving this. He explains the differences and similarities among opera, oratorio, and song coaching. In a section on program arranging, he offers advice about planning concerts of various kinds, citing examples of programs given by outstanding artists. He writes about particular aspects of accompanying — self accompanying, the difference between piano accompanying and soloistic piano playing, and accompanying for singers, instrumentalists, and dancers. In conclusion, he describes the qualities of an ideal accompanist and the rewards derived from excellence in performance.

University and college music departments, schools of music, choral groups, voice teachers, singers, pianists, and other musicians will find the book of inestimable value, either as a text or as a reference work. It will be especially helpful to pianists who aspire to become accompanists.

This book brings together the great majority of Barthes’s interviews that originally appeared in French in Le Figaro Littéraire, Cahiers du Cinéma, France-Observateur, L'Express, and elsewhere. Barthes replied to questions—on the cinema, on his own works, on fashion, writing, and criticism—in his unique voice; here we have Barthes in conversation, speaking directly, with all his individuality. These interviews provide an insight into the rich, probing intelligence of one of the great and influential minds of our time.

Every woman autobiographer is a daughter who writes and establishes her identity through her autobiographical narrative. In The Voice of the Mother, Jo Malin argues that many twentieth-century autobiographies by women contain an intertext, an embedded narrative, which is a biography of the writer/daughter’s mother.

Analyzing this narrative practice, Malin examines ten texts by women who seem particularly compelled to tell their mothers’ stories: Virginia Woolf, Sara Suleri, Kim Chernin, Drusilla Modjeska, Joan Nestle, Carolyn Steedman, Dorothy Allison, Adrienne Rich, Cherríe Moraga, and Audre Lorde. Each author is, in fact, able to write her own autobiography only by using a narrative form that contains her mother’s story at its core. These texts raise interesting questions about autobiography as a genre and about a feminist writing practice that resists and subverts the dominant literary tradition.

Malin theorizes a hybrid form of autobiographical narrative containing an embedded narrative of the mother. The textual relationship between the two narratives is unique among texts in the auto/biographical canon. This alternative narrative practice—in which the daughter attempts to talk both to her mother and about her—is equally an autobiography and a biography rather than one or the other. The technique is marked by a breakdown of subject/object categories as well as auto/biographical dichotomies of genre. Each text contains a “self” that is more plural than singular, yet neither.

In addition to being a theoretical and textual analysis, Malin’s book is also a mother-daughter autobiography and biography itself. She shares her own story and her mother’s story as a way to connect directly with readers and as a way to bridge the gap between theory and practice.