A work of performance art of any kind does not exist in a vacuum; a given performance in a certain place with a certain audience may totally change its reality.

Joseph W. Polisi, President of The Juilliard School, talks about his new book, American Muse, which is a biography of his mentor, composer William Schuman (1910-1992).

A reprint of a chapter from the new biography of American composer and arts administrator William Schuman (1910-1992) who juggled running Juilliard and Lincoln Center with composing a total of 10 symphonies, 2 one-act operas, 5 string quartets, concertos, choral works, and over 100 popular songs.

Ken Smith, author of Fate! Luck! Chance!, describes how an insider’s perspective helped him to better understand and write about the making of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, a new opera by Stewart Wallace and Amy Tan.

Two chapters of Paul Hegarty’s book Noise/Music, a socio-musicological examination of the ever-changing threshold of tolerance between music and noise in a wide variety of musical genres during the 20th century, are featured along with a discussion about the book between Hegarty and Frank J. Oteri.

The future is here, as they say, and boy is it messy. If you are a creator of content, your economic model for making a living probably feels a little twisted around at the moment. In Music 2.0, Gerd Leonhard proposes a way out of policing copies and a way into enjoying “music like water”.

The author of A History of American Classical Music explains how he was able to encapsulate such a wide-ranging history in under 230 pages by concentrating on just sparking readers’ intellectual curiosity.

Excerpts from Chapter Two, “From Founding Through Revolution.”

With the evolution of advanced electroacoustic tools, musical space became increasing fluid, flexible, abstract, and imaginary.

The authors of Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? discuss aural architecture, auditory spatial awareness and the gradual transformation of the listening experience into primarily an aural privacy completely divorced from physical surroundings.