Coda

When we started this blog just over four years ago, it was intended to be a way to bring our music books to the attention of a wider audience. We quickly dropped the idea of mentioning events in music generally - other bloggers are doing that better than we could - and instead concentrated on stories from our authors and excerpts from our broad range of books on classical music. Many of you seemed to enjoy it and a flattering number of other music bloggers linked to it or referenced it, including Alex Ross and the mighty Overgrown Path.

Well, all good things come to an end, and we feel it’s time to bring down the curtain on our beloved Stave. We’ll soon be replacing it with an online newsletter - the Posthorn - which will feature articles on our books, interviews with our authors, excerpts from new titles, competitions, special offers, free books, and balloon-twisting - well, not balloon-twisting. To sign up for the Posthorn, simply send an e-mail to posthorn@boydellusa.net and a link to the first issue will be sent to you in November 2011.

In the meantime, anything posted on the web is there for eternity, and we invite you to look over our past posts and sample some of the best writing on classical music in cyberspace and, indeed, in the real world too.

Many thanks to all our readers. See you again soon in the Posthorn.

Michael Richards and Ralph Locke

A Philadelphia Story

Ralph P. Locke, editor of Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press) reported last year on some pretty wild doings in “Music City” (Nashville, Tennessee) when the American Musicological Society came to town. This year the meeting was held in Philadelphia and celebrated the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Society. His report focuses on the awards ceremonies held in the grand ballroom of the Sheraton City Center Hotel.

Scholarly meetings are rarely known for high theatricality. At the American Musicological Society’s annual gathering, though, there is that moment during the Business Meeting when, in front of more than a thousand seated conference attendees, awards are given out for particularly distinguished scholarly works of the past year.

Some awards are defined by the age of the author (“in the early stages of his or her career” or its opposite, which has various affectionate nicknames) or by the format of the scholarly product (book, articles, or conference paper). Others are defined by scholarly area: performance practice (e.g., Baroque ornamentation), Broadway and music theater, gay/ lesbian/ transgendered studies, and so on.

All the awards, though, tend to be announced in an exceptionally dramatic manner: the chair of the respective prize committee (or another member of the committee) reads a citation that describes the winning item, using a succession of phrases that tempt and tease the audience. Only in the final words does the speaker reveal the identity of the winning title and author.

This ritual was beautifully enacted in Philadelphia on 17 November 2009 by Paul Laird, reporting for the Robert M. Stevenson Committee, which singles out each year an unusually distinguished (nobody in the scholarly world ever declares something simply the “best”) scholarly product dealing with Spanish or Latin American music. The book was published by University of Rochester Press in its Eastman Studies in Music series, and had already garnered great praise both pre- and post-publication. The craftily crafted citation went like this:

The Robert M. Stevenson Committee for 2009 considered a number of fine sources for the award for the best piece of scholarship on an Iberian or Latin American topic. We chose a virtuosic study of a single, baffling source in which the author established its provenance; substantially illuminated the manuscript, the city, and the time from which it emanated; effectively contextualized the source’s iconography in a rich web of multinational references; and considered the music in terms of concordances and related repertories, both monophonic and polyphonic. The author began with traditional philological methods and constructed an impressive historical edifice around the source, raising issues concerning a multi-religious and multi-cultural community and finally offering a rich picture of the devotional practices of a confraternity, synthesizing medieval tradition and humanistic modernity. We are pleased to honor with the 2009 Stevenson Prize Lorenzo Candelaria’s The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo (University of Rochester Press, 2008).

Many of us, sitting in the audience, figured out quickly—this is of course part of the fun—just which “virtuosic study of a single, baffling source” was surely being rewarded. The University of Rochester Press and Boydell and Brewer (which distributes URP’s book outside of North America) congratulate Lorenzo Candelaria.

Professor Candelaria is now busy at work on a broader but, in its own way, equally “virtuosic” book: a richly contextualized study of sacred music in Mexico, from the Conquistadores to today. The tantalizing title: Music in Mexican Catholicism. The publisher, we proudly state in our closing sentence is, once again, . . . (drumroll, please!) University of Rochester Press.

Wagner today and forever

From Beyond the Stave will take a short break for three weeks, returning at the end of May. In the meantime we leave you with Eastman Studies in Music series editor, Ralph Locke, whose own book has recently been published by a publishing house just down the road from Boydell & Brewer's Suffolk HQ.

Wagner’s operas repel some people and strike others as simply ridiculous. But many of those who scoff, or claim to be repulsed, have never listened to an entire Wagner opera, studied its libretto, or done much reading about the works, their background, and their importance. It is easier now than ever to get one’s ears and eyes around Wagner’s works. All of his operas (except to some extent his earliest three) are available in numerous superb recorded CD and DVD performances. The Metropolitan Opera sent a live high-definition video transmission of Tristan und Isolde to movie theaters around the world in March 2008, and repeated it on television a few months later. All told, the performance reached millions of viewers.

During a recent out-of-town trip, the car that I rented was outfitted with something new to me: Sirius Satellite Radio. I tuned in to the Metropolitan Opera Radio channel one weekday morning at 7:45AM, only to find myself in the middle of a recording from the Met’s audio archives: a 1971 Saturday matinee radiocast of Tristan. The opera must have started more than an hour earlier: we were already in Act 2, heading toward Tristan’s entry and the great love duet. The featured singers were soprano Birgit Nilsson (legendary for her rock-solid performances in the 1960s and 70s) and tenor Jess Thomas. For my taste, both of them were outshone by the less well-known Irene Dalis as a riveting Brangäne. Clearly, Dalis possessed one of the great mezzo-soprano voices—and mezzo temperaments!—of the twentieth century. (Her intense portrayal of Kundry, in the 1962 Bayreuth recording of Parsifal under Knappertsbusch, is praised by connoisseurs as one of the best ever.)

A few days before I was thrown into the heaving surges of Tristan und Isolde at such an early hour, someone at the Christian Science Monitor asked me to comment on the recently inaugurated Ring Cycle at Los Angeles Opera (more on this below). Though my own operatic research veers towards the Italian and French repertoire, the Met re-broadcast from 1971 and the news about Los Angeles’s Ring Cycle reminded me how important Wagner was and remains for the musical world, and for Western cultural life, generally.

Despite the remarks of confirmed anti-Wagnerians, the operas (or, as Wagner termed them, “music dramas”) remain commanding monuments of artistic inspiration and insight. And they have been broadly influential, besides. Indeed, it seems to me nearly impossible to overestimate the impact of Wagner’s theories and the operas in which he put those theories into often blazingly brilliant practice. Before Wagner, the full resources of symphonic music—the elaborate development of musical motive and astute handling of key, chord, and modulation—had been brought to new heights by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Wagner was the first to propose certain immensely effective ways in which these essentially symphonic and sonata-like resources could be harnessed to an acted-out story, in conjunction with other resources, such as sets and costumes.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle remains, to my mind, the highest of his achievements. It uses sharply etched motives and no less distinctive orchestral colors to characterize—brilliantly, movingly—the individuals and actions on stage. As many a Wagner commentator has recognized, the motives do not necessarily stay fixed but are altered, combined, reharmonized, and sometimes utterly transformed. (For the utter novice, one great place to start is Deryck Cooke’s perceptive 2-CD set, An Introduction to Der Ring des Nibelungen, which uses musical excerpts from the still-unsurpassed Solti recording. Another is the hilarious—and remarkably accurate—narrated version by “concert comedienne” Anna Russell, which is likewise now available on CD.) The resulting music, immensely varied and emotionally pointed, suggests how we might feel about the story that is being played out in front of us. Of course, we are not obligated to respond in the way that the music wants to impel us. As always with great art, we are free to give in to the tide’s flow—or to resist it, by which I mean think critically about it.

Wagner’s innovations shaped the operatic work of composers within Germany and abroad, such as Massenet and Debussy in France. Directly or indirectly (i.e., through the works of the post-Wagnerians), these innovations also became embedded in the practices of musicians who accompanied silent films. (Of course, Wagner’s works were by no means the only root of silent-film accompanying. Perhaps the single most basic influence came from the established practices of incidental music in the theater: a small orchestra played short tunes and more continuous figurations “under” mimed action scenes and even under many spoken exchanges.)

Once sound film arrived in the 1920s, the standard devices of silent-film accompanying found their way into the practices of film-score composers. These (partly Wagnerian) devices continue to work their reliable magic in our own day. Particular features from Wagner’s Ring Cycle find echo in Howard Shore’s background score to Peter Jackson’s film trilogy based on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: the orchestra underlines, with vividly characterized themes and distinctive orchestral colors and textures, the highly contrasted characters and their temptations and travails.

Elsewhere in the popular realm a different kind of Wagnerian ambition often shows up. One need only think of the sound-and-light shows that occur nightly in front of certain historic European buildings or, in Egypt, at the pyramids at Gizeh. Götterdämmerung-like effects have become standard at ice-skating exhibitions and stadium-rock concerts.

Still, Wagner’s achievement in the Ring Cycle remains incomparable. No other operatic work is at once so great and so vast. And so daunting. Few cities in the world have an opera company capable of mounting even one of the Ring operas in a given year. No wonder people in Los Angeles are getting so excited that the first two Ring operas are being performed there this season (Das Rheingold in February and March; Die Walküre during April, featuring Plácido Domingo as Siegmund) and that all four will be scheduled in 2010—along with a two-and-a-half-month city-wide Wagner festival involving over 50 arts and cultural organizations.

Los Angeles’s mammoth Wagner project will surely attract people who come from many walks of life and have many different tastes and, we might say, cultural commitments. Brünnhilde and Siegfried, armed with helmets (or not, depending on the costume designer) and industrial-strength voices (for sure), could even be considered the original heavy-metal artists! The Ring Cycle is a world unto itself. It can be explored again and again, in different productions and with different performers. And, like all great works of art, the more one brings to it, and the more one approaches it with an open and active, challenging mind, the more one gets in return.

I also imagine that opera lovers from elsewhere will make Los Angeles a chosen destination, as already happens every summer at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus that Wagner himself designed, and at the Seattle Opera (whose every-four-years Ring Cycle returns this coming August).

Meanwhile, those of us in more modest-sized cities and towns have access, as I mentioned earlier, to Wagner’s various operas through CDs and DVDs. There are also splendidly insightful and challenging books. Restricting myself to titles from the Boydell family of imprints (including University of Rochester Press and Camden House), I might mention the multi-authored companions to Wagner’s Meistersinger and Parsifal and books on the importance of two cities in Wagner’s career: Venice and Zurich. Stephen McClatchie’s Analyzing Wagner's Operas tells the engrossing story of how the writings of a widely respected scholar of the 1920s-30s, Alfred Lorenz, served as a “musical metaphor” for Nazi ideology. (The often perverted appropriation of Wagner by the Third Reich need not, however, scare us away from exploring the works today, and finding out for ourselves what they have to offer.) In another recent study, cultural historian Hannu Salmi reveals unknown details of Wagner’s early years in Riga (today the capital of Latvia) and Königsberg (today the Russian city of Kaliningrad). Salmi’s book also recounts the struggles of local musicians throughout the Baltic region to get Wagner’s operas performed even halfway adequately.

And now, as I indicated at the outset, there is the Metropolitan Opera Radio channel (via Sirius Satellite). No Ring Cycle operas were to be heard during the few days when I was driving that nicely outfitted car. But it is surely only a matter of time before Sirius will be broadcasting them. Perhaps all four operas will be scheduled, one after the other, running for some 16 or more hours straight. Operaphiles may end up driving out of town on the highway and then back home, repeating the trip as many times as needed. Or they may prefer to sit listening in their driveway, running down the battery until that sweet-sad moment of release when the fabled Rhine overflows its banks and what we perhaps mistake for real life can begin again.

Wagner fans will also be interested to hear that the Boydell Press will reissue John Lucas' acclaimed biography of conductor Reginald Goodall later this year.

Exploring the Many Facets of an Art and Practice, Part Two

Ralph Locke continues his short history of the Eastman Studies in Music series:

Two important batches of music books have appeared outside the Eastman series.Some interesting manuscripts written by performers tended to take a tone that was not scholarly and was even healthfully opinionated.With the eager support of Robert Easton and his successors Sean Culhane, Tim Madigan, and now Suzanne Guiod, I therefore proposed such books as stand-alone items. Again, we seem to have guessed right, as these books sold well. One of them gained particularly glowing reviews—The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, by a remarkable West Coast master of multiple percussion, Steven Schick.

Needless to say, as time went along, the board members and I were not able to resist the offer of important manuscripts from some members of the Eastman faculty. These manuscripts go through the usual full review process, with confidential readings at several stages by specialist scholars at other institutions. Eastman Studies authors who are current or former members of the Music Theory and Musicology departments include Elizabeth West Marvin (co-editor, Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1960), Matthew Brown (Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond), David Beach (Aspects of Unity in J. S. Bach’s Partitas and Suites), and Kerala J. Snyder (Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck, revised edition; its CD contains splendid performances by, among others, Eastman Professor of Organ Hans Davidsson).

A book, like a hill, can be alive with the sound of music. The Percussionist’s Art contains, tucked into a little pocket, a thrilling compact disc of many of the pieces that Schick discusses in detail. The Press has similarly provided CDs for Eastman Studies books on such topics as Indonesian music (The Gamelan Digul), the great Chinese erhu player Abing (Musical Creativity in Twentieth-Century China), and, most recently, some forgotten but charming, and socially revealing, operettas (Music in German Immigrant Music Theater: New York City, 1840-1940). One Eastman Studies title contains not one but two CDs: Composing with Japanese Instruments, a practical guide (widely used in its original Japanese version) by the eminent composer Minoru Miki.

At the time of this writing, the Eastman Studies series has released more than sixty titles, and many more are in the pipeline. We are pleased that our books have been so well received in the scholarly world and also by reviewers in the general press. Particularly heartening was this phrase from a review in Music and Letters of Scott Messing’s two-volume Schubert in the European Imagination: “offers yet more evidence that the University of Rochester Press has become a highly significant player in the field.” The appearance of the series’ fiftieth title—Music Theory and Mathematics—in February 2008 brought welcome attention to the Press as a whole, as has Boydell’s music-book blog which requested this piece from me.

As prices rise and libraries and individuals trim back their book purchases, many Eastman Studies books have been helped by a subvention from the author’s home institution or a scholarly society. No fewer than seven Eastman Studies books dealing in part or whole with music in the United States have received a welcome boost from the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music. The latest Hanson subvention is for a forthcoming two-volume study of the string quartet since 1900, in which American composers John Cage, Elliott Carter, Mel Powell, Milton Babbitt, and Shulamit Ran rightly sit shoulder to shoulder with Debussy, Sibelius, Bartók, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich.

But, regardless of shifts in technology and funding, Eastman Studies aims to remain a major purveyor of serious—and, in many cases, also brightly engaging—discussion of music for both the specialist and the general reader. We do not hesitate to include musical examples and sometimes even provide them in abundance. Still, certain books restrict themselves (wonderfully) to words alone: for example, renowned music critic Paul Griffiths’s exquisitely edited collection of some of his most fascinating reviews and essays, The Substance of Things Heard. I can only thank the boards of the University of Rochester Press and of Boydell and Brewer for sensing the need for high-level books on music and realizing that a series run by a team of scholars could meet that need.

Exploring the Many Facets of an Art and Practice, Part One

This year the University of Rochester Press celebrates its first twenty years of innovative publishing. In the first of a two part post, Ralph Locke, Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music (pictured, right), outlines the history of the Eastman Studies in Music series which is one of the jewels in the Rochester crown:

Music is a curious field. Nearly everyone loves some kind of music, and some people love many kinds. But, unlike novels or poems or plays or paintings, musical works cannot easily be represented in words or visual images, the two primary communications systems of the book trade. Furthermore, musical notation—the basic way in which the compositions of the great Western tradition are set down, from Gregorian Chant to composers of today such as Steve Reich—feels opaque to many music lovers, even ones who attend concerts or opera regularly or have, at some point in life, studied an instrument or sung in a chorus.

The net result has been a looming gap, for several centuries now, between the aspects of music that music professionals take for granted and the ways in which music has tended to be written about in books, magazines, and newspapers. This gap provides academic and other niche publishers with an opportunity, one that the Eastman Studies in Music series has attempted to fill for some fifteen years.

It was in the early 1990s that Robert Easton (URP’s first Director) and Jürgen Thym (Professor of Musicology and, at the time, the department’s Chair) asked me if I would develop a music series for the nascent Press. I gratefully said yes. I had edited a scholarly journal for a few years, I had published a monograph based on my dissertation (through University of Chicago Press), and I was co-editing a multi-author book (for University of California Press). I thus had some sense of the amount of additional work that editing a book series would probably entail (URP had minimal staff in its early years) and of the likely stumbling blocks.

I was no less aware of the rich possibilities. A healthy university press, I felt, would speak well to the world about the often-hidden merits of the University of Rochester, and a music series—the name, everyone agreed, needed to be Eastman Studies in Music—would raise awareness more specifically about the high-level work that goes on in the Eastman School of Music. I also urged that the call for manuscripts set no constraints on subject matter or methodology. Quality and significance would be paramount. I dreaded the thought of rejecting a project because it dealt with the “wrong” century, genre, or country, because it focused heavily on archival fact-collecting, or because it relied upon one or another current in music analysis or cultural criticism. I was also concerned, at least at the outset, that the Eastman Studies series not publish too many writings by Eastman faculty members, lest it appear to be a kind of vanity press. The series, I felt (and still feel), should simply draw on the expertise of musicologists from Eastman and other universities in order to maintain the highest standards of excellence.

I thus put together an editorial board in which the Eastman folks were slightly outnumbered by members from major research universities, although once the reputation of the Eastman Studies series was secure, I began to feel comfortable having a precisely balanced board.

The first authors to be published in the series were a varied and distinguished lot. Margaret G. Cobb, the doyenne of Debussy studies, contributed an urgently needed revised edition of her famous book The Poetic Debussy. It went on to sell out in hard cover and paperback alike. (Like many URP books, it is now available again, thanks in part to advances made in the technology of on-demand reprinting.) Joscelyn Godwin’s Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 1750-1950 likewise made it into paperback. So did the first of several Eastman Studies books on organ music: Lawrence Archbold and William Peterson’s French Organ Music from the Revolution to Franck and Widor.

Clearly, we realized, our concept was working. And, just as clearly, we were getting—because of my own scholarly proclivities—an overabundance of titles on French topics. We gradually vanquished that problem, with books on such topics as music publishing in sixteenth-century Venice, fugal theory in the Baroque era, Bach, Wagner, “the pleasure of modernist music” (e.g., Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ligeti’s music in the film 2001), and numerous aspects of music and musical life in the United States. A distinctly American book, Elliott Carter’s Collected Essays and Lectures, quickly became one of the Press’s all-time best-sellers (in hard cover and paperback) and remains in print today—to the satisfaction, we hope, of the renowned composer, who celebrated his 100th birthday this past December.

To be continued...

Music Scholars come to Music City

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - At 3am on November 7^th, a woman in Nashville, having learned that her husband was in Fuel Bar and Nightclub with another woman, came by and called him out into the parking lot, writes Ralph Locke. A quarrel erupted, she cut him in the back with a broken bottle, and he took out a gun and fired a warning shot in the air. I heard about the incident the next morning on the local TV news, and could not help but thinking that it sounded like a country-and-western song.

I was one of some two thousand musicologists and music theorists who were in Nashville that week, attending the joint annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory. Our hotel was a short walk from Second Street, and many of us walked by Fuel at one point or another. After I heard the news about the violent episode, I asked around but was relieved not to find anybody who had been within shooting distance of Fuel (or, I really mean, being-shot distance) during the wee hours of the 7^th.

Aside from newsworthy events of that sort, Nashville - the epicenter of the country-music industry, featuring dozens of high-level, if sometimes too well-fueled, clubs and bars at which an amazing array of hopeful performers strut their stuff - proved an inspired choice. We academics like to flatter ourselves as open-minded, and there are few things that can force open a music scholar’s mind with more drastic efficacy than encountering music of a sort that he or she normally can barely tolerate. True, there were some country-music aficionados among us - I know one, at least - but I imagine I was more typical.

Walking by what looked like a nineteenth-century red-brick church (because that’s what it originally was), and never having heard of this building - the Ryman Auditorium - I was surprised to hear loud chords and joyous applause coming from inside. The guard at the door gave me a ticket that I suppose had been given to her by somebody leaving early. The ticket listed the main performer as Ronnie Milsap, a name that sounded faintly familiar to me, though I wasn’t sure whether it belonged to a woman or a man.

I quickly discovered that Milsap is one of the most beloved male country-music artists and the first country superstar to have been born blind. (He has had, across his decades-long career, more number-one songs on the country chart than any performer except George Strait and Conway Twitty.) We all sat in wooden pews, and people were bringing food and drink from the concessions in the lobby into the hall, as if this were a big outdoor festival. The audience loved Milsap’s banter about his career, and they welcomed as old favorites such love-forever-lost songs as “That Girl Who Waits on Tables Used to Wait for Me at Home.”

Quite a contrast to the sessions at the scholarly conference two blocks up the hill: no shouts of love and appreciation from the floor, for one thing! To be fair, though, many of the attendees noted that there was less contentiousness during this year’s sessions than has sometimes occurred in the past. Perhaps the two societies’ program committees chose particularly well: the papers that I attended were on a very high level. But the people in the audience can take some credit, too. The discussion and debate - often plentiful - was generally carried out in a remarkably constructive spirit. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of methodological pluralism: scholars may be beginning to accept that no one approach or interpretive angle necessarily invalidates another.

A particular excitement at any scholarly meeting surrounds the exhibit of new books. The tables for the Boydell and Brewer/University of Rochester Press family of firms received many visitors and many book orders. I edit URP’s Eastman Studies in Music series, so I looked on with particular pleasure - while trying to be inconspicuous! - as visitors to the booth discovered such recent titles as Beethoven’s Century, by Hugh Macdonald, and Variations on the Canon, a book of new essays created in tribute to the great pianist and critic Charles Rosen. (I kept hearing remarks along the lines of “Look at these names: Treitler, Lockwood, Kerman, even Rosen himself…!”) The fact that the many important books published by Toccata Press are now distributed by Boydell further enriched the wares on display.

But the biggest “wows” were heard as people opened the covers of Boydell’s richly illustrated Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents. Carter turns 100 on 11 December 2008 and continues to compose actively. A wealth of previously unpublished documents, scores, letters and photographs in the archives of the Paul Sacher Foundation (in Basel, Switzerland) enabled the authors - Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler - to include 90 illustrations of this material, 60 of them in color. The documents are connected by a flowing and thoughtful text: this is one picture book that can be read with pleasure and profit from beginning to end. Sometimes, at the book table, it seemed that people who picked up this inviting book could barely stop themselves from reading on and on.

And maybe that is the scholar’s equivalent of the whoops, cheers, and applause heard at country-music concerts!

Amusicology

Our colleague Ralph Locke has drawn our attention to a marvellous blog which has just celebrated its first year online: amusicology (also included in our links, below left). Directed from the keyboard by two Harvard PhD candidates, Ryan Bañagale and Drew Massey, we are told the ”a” could stand for amusing (which it often is), abrupt (no entry is longer than 1,000 words) or even anarchic. Recent posts have included one about getting published as a young scholar, another about scaling the musicological walls (warning: contains material on the Grateful Dead) and a fascinating review of just two sentences from Alex Ross’ new book (sadly not one of ours) by Drew Massey himself. This delightful blog is worth fifteen minutes of anyone’s time.

Eastman's 50th

This month the University of Rochester Press will publish the 50th volume in its acclaimed series, Eastman Studies in Music. "When we began, I didn't dare dream that this could happen," says Ralph Locke (pictured right in front of the URP offices), a professor at the Eastman School of Music for more than 30 years and series editor since 1994. "We started producing two books a year, and now we are up to seven and growing, which means we can publish books on a range of topics and reach a wider spectrum of the reading public."

"Books about choral and organ music do very well," he notes, picking up a copy of Maurice Duruflé: The Man and His Music, a popular biography about the French organist and composer. "An organ can whisper or roar, people love that," says Locke. "And Duruflé's Requiem is widely loved for its gentle message of transcendence."

Originally from Boston, Mass., Locke recalls when his passion for classical music was permanently unleashed. It was the early 1970s. He was singing in the chorus of a Tanglewood concert. And Leonard Bernstein was wearing a Nehru suit conducting Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2. "It was so beautiful my head nearly blew off, and I knew that I wanted to keep music at the center of my life," says Locke. "I strongly felt that classical music could speak to anybody, I saw it all around me, regardless of social class or education."

In addition to his teaching at the Eastman School of Music and his work with the University of Rochester Press, Locke is writing a book about his most recent love, opera, and other theater works including West Side Story, from the perspective of how Western composers portray different places and ethnic groups.

Opera, he says, combines the best of everything: stage, drama, dancing, and costume. "And the music helps us sense on an emotional level what the libretto is saying in words and actions," says Locke. "Are the characters fearful, are they overly trusting? Music says it all."

From Beyond the Stave congratulates Ralph Locke, University of Rochester Press editorial director Suzanne Guiod and the editors of that 50th title: Music Theory and Mathematics: Chords, Collections, and Transformations (edited by Jack Douthett, Martha M. Hyde, and Charles J. Smith).

The photograph shows Ralph Locke in front of the University of Rochester Press offices located at the historic (1854) Ellwanger and Barry nursery building on Mount Hope Avenue.