Between May 1949 and August 1954 the composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of remarkable letters which reflect on their own music and the music and culture of the time. This correspondence, together with a further letter from 1962 and various other relevant documents, have been edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and appear here for the first time completely in English. At the time Cage and Boulez were great friends and these amicable letters reflect their differing ideas on the course new music should take. While Boulez was thinking about forms of serialism, Cage was moving in the direction of ever greater compositional freedom and chance procedures. Professor Nattiez has written a full introduction to this collection of documents and the meticulous and detailed annotation of every letter makes this a volume of extraordinary value for our understanding of the development of both Cage and Boulez and the music of their time.
Does one need to know the rules of harmony to be considered a musician? Throughout A la recherche du temps perdu, and particularly ' Swann in Love', Proust displays a surprising sensitivity to the way music is heard, a sensitivity to which we owe some of the most beautiful writing on music. Through a study of the texts devoted to the Sonata and Septet of Vinteui, Jean-Jacques Nattiez demonstrates the fundamental role played by music in the evolution of the novel. He also shows how Debussy, Wagner and Beethoven provide the basis for a mystical quest whose goal is pure music and the literary absolute. Music as model for literature: this is the subject of Professor Nattiez's essay, which unravels the various musical themes running through Proust's work, and which thus constitutes a particularly clear and perceptive introduction to his writing.
In this book Jean-Jacques Nattiez, well-known for his pioneering work in musical semiology, examines both music, and discourse about music, as products of human activity that are perceived in varying
