The string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, the signal achievement of “that noble genre,” have rewarded the engagement of scholars, performers, and audiences for almost two hundred years. This book and its accompanying recording invite you to experience three of these profound and beautiful works of music from the inside, with a leading Beethoven scholar and a premier performing ensemble as your guides. Lewis Lockwood provides historical and biographical background along with musical analysis, drawing on the most important insights of recent scholarship on Beethoven’s life and works. The members of the Juilliard String Quartet share the fruits of decades of performing and teaching these compositions through annotated scores and recordings of the first movements of three representative quartets, including the rarely heard original version of Opus 18 no. 1. And all parties join in lively and illuminating conversations that range from details of bowing and articulation to Beethoven’s development as a composer to the social history of the nineteenth century. Inside Beethoven’s Quartets illustrates how scholarly knowledge can inform a performance, as well as how performers’ interpretive choices can illuminate this sublime music.

In 1972-73, Barney Childs embarked on an ambitious attempt to survey the landscape of new American concert music. He recorded freewheeling conversations with fellow composers, most of them under forty, all of them important but most not yet famous. Though unable to publish the interviews in his lifetime, Childs had gathered invaluable dialogues with the likes of Robert Ashley, Olly Wilson, Harold Budd, Christian Wolff, and others.

Virginia Anderson edits the first published collection of these conversations. She pairs each interview with a contextual essay by a contemporary expert that shows how the composer's discussion with Childs fits into his life and work. Together, the interviewees cover a broad range of ideas and concerns around topics like education, notation, developments in electronic music, changing demands on performers, and tonal music.

Innovative and revealing, Interviews with American Composers is an artistic and historical snapshot of American music at an important crossroads.

The defining feature of this textbook is the treatment of classical and New Testament Greek as one language using primary sources. All the example sentences the students will translate are real Greek sentences, half of which are taken from classical literature and philosophy and half of which are directly from the New Testament. The advantage of this approach is that it highlights the linguistic, literary, and historical connections between classical Greece and early Christianity. Rather than having students memorize isolated tables and artificial sentences, Michael Boler spent years combing through thousands of pages of literature, philosophy, and scripture to find short, powerful sentences that not only teach the grammatical concepts in each chapter, but also contain seeds of wisdom that will spark wonder and discussion. Introduction to New Testament and Classical Greek is born out of classroom experience in a Catholic liberal arts university whose students were disappointed to be forced to choose between textbooks that taught classical Greek in isolation and ones that focused exclusively on the New Testament. By the end of this book, students will have read over 200 lines of scripture and an equal amount of ancient literature from Homer to Aristotle. They will also have the grammatical knowledge to continue to read classical and New Testament Greek. Each chapter contains a section at the end that delves deeply into the etymology and background of the words and passages encountered in the respective chapter. Professors will thus be able to use these chapters as a bridge to philosophical, theological, historical, and literary topics that will enrich the class.