Preparation for My Winter Thursday Course

The idea for the class, “Music in Cultural History: Aesthetics and Idealogy” to be offered Thursday mornings, was originally a plan to examine composers and their works in the regimes of Stalin and the Soviets and also the Third Reich, and was to be an examination of the artist in a condition of aesthetic tyranny.

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Most Important Work of the Twentieth Century? Take a Look at Richard Strauss's "Salome"

I nominate Strauss’s Salome. Take a look at chronology…Salome came out in 1905, a half dozen or so years before Pierrot and Le Sacre, and half a generation before Wozzeck and Varese and a few years before Erwartung, which is immeasurably indebted to it. Pelleas came out in 1902, I know. But was it really that influential outside of France?

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