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The Lydian Chromatic Concept is one of the two most splendid books about music; the other is My Musical Language by Messiaen. Though I’m considered a contemporary music composer, if I dare categorize myself as an artist, I've been strongly influenced by the Lydian Concept, which is not simply a musical method – we might call it a philosophy of music, or we might call it poetry. – Toru Takemitsu, Swing Journal interview, Tokyo The simple melody was an experiment inspired by an evening Miles had spent with George Russell who at the time was working on his Lydian Chromatic Concept, Miles was fascinated by Russell’s approach. Here was a means for breaking free from tonal clichés while maintaining some amount of restraint. Shortly after his evening with Russell, Miles recorded his new composition demonstrating Russell’s basic principles. – Round About Midnight: A Portrait of Miles Davis by Eric Nisenson, Dial Press, New York

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Alai Oli - group of Ekaterinburg. For 4 years of existence they had time to win love of listeners not only in all corners of Russia, but also in other countries. Warm, light reggae with a female vocal and gentle lyrics - cheerful, and at times sad, but nevertheless encouraging, expels melancholy from heart, even when a rain not behind a window, and inside.

Completed in 1911, Petrouchka was the second of Stravinsky's great ballets and is one of the most famous ballet scores of the twentieth century, equally at home in the concert hall as in the theatre. Now published in The Masterworks Library: Landmark 20th century works from the Boosey & Hawkes catalogue available for the first time in full score format at pocket score prices with introductory notes, illustrations and photographs. Ideal for students, conductors, performers, libraries, CD collectors and general music enthusiasts.

Stravinsky's longest serial score, Threni sets passages from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. An unusual feature is the musical treatment of the Hebrew letters offsetting the different verses. "The effect," writes Eric Walter White, "is like that of a series of illuminated initials embellishing a manuscript; and the special cadential qualities of these brief harmonic glosses give them a curious kind of nimbus."

The translucent scoring and evanescent lyricism of this ballet – a cousin to Apollo (who appears at the close to "raise heavenward Orpheus' song") – confer a distinctive beauty. Even the Furies are spectral and restrained. Orpheus's pleading lyre is memorably translated as a solo harp. Stravinsky's retelling of the famous myth connects to a rarefied lineage of musical incarnations also including the Orpheus operas of Monteverdi and Gluck – and (a possible companion piece) Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, in which the solo piano, pleading for Eurydice, pacifies the angry string choir of the second movement.

Pulcinella is a ballet by Igor Stravinsky based on an 18th-century play — Pulcinella is a character originating from Commedia dell'arte. The ballet premiered in Paris on 15 May 1920 under the baton of Ernest Ansermet. The dancer Léonide Massine created both the libretto and choreography, and Pablo Picasso designed the original costumes and sets. It was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev.

This intimate opera buffa for Diaghilev takes place in a middle class home situated in a small Russian town, ca. 1840. Parasha, in love with Basil, contrives to have Basil engaged as the family cook. He flees through a window when discovered shaving his beard. Stravinsky conceived Mavra as an homage to Pushkin, Glinka, and Tchaikovsky, all of whom elegantly "united the most characteristically Russian elements with the spiritual riches of the West." Including two arias, a duet, and a quartet, the score invokes Russo-Italian operatic conventions. This affectionate impulse does not, however, preclude a mordant satire on bourgeois manners. The love duet, with its fervent endearments and symphonic ejaculations, is a hilarious parody of the Romeo-and-Juliet genre.

One of the seminal works of the 20th century and a milestone in the history of music, The Rite of Spring famously caused a riot at its first performance in Paris in 1913. Since then, this revolutionary masterpiece has found its place as one of the most performed and admired scores of the twentieth century.
Now published in The Masterworks Library: Landmark 20th century works from the Boosey & Hawkes catalogue available for the first time in full score format at pocket score prices with introductory notes, illustrations and photographs. Ideal for students, conductors, performers, libraries, CD collectors and general music enthusiasts.

In his Poetics of Music (1942) Stravinsky says: "Summing up: What is important for the lucid ordering of the work – for its crystallization – is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it." Stravinsky conceived Apollo as a ballet blanc – a "white ballet" with classical choreography and monochromatic attire. Envisioning the work in his mind's eye, he found that "the absence of many-colored hues and of all superfluities produced a wonderful freshness." Upon first hearing Apollo, Diaghilev found it "music somehow not of this world, but from somewhere else above." The ballet closes with an Apotheosis in which Apollo leads the Muses towards Parnassus. Here, the gravely beautiful music with which the work began is truly recapitulated "on high" – ceaselessly recycled, frozen in time.

Even for Stravinsky, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments is strikingly original, grounded not in the "symphonic" genre but – as the musicologist Richard Taruskin has shown – in the Russian Orthodox service for the dead. It began as a serene and archaic chorale composed in memory of Debussy. Stravinsky then expanded this "Fragment" with music more popular in flavor. The chorale, at the close, became an apotheosis sublimating an eclectic wealth of material. The ensemble eschews strings in favor of colorful, chanting winds. According to Stravinsky, in 1936: "I did not, and indeed I could not, count on any immediate success for this work. It lacks all those elements that infallibly appeal to the ordinary listener, or to which he is accustomed. . . . It is an austere ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies . . . This music is not meant to 'please' an audience, nor to arouse its passions." More than half a century later, the religious elan of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments seems both pleasing and arousing.

Commissioned by CBS television, The Flood conflates the Creation with the story of Noah's ark. Stravinsky: "Why did I call my work The Flood, instead of Noah? Because Noah is mere history. As a genuine antediluvian he is a great curiosity, but a sideshow curiosity. And even as 'eternal man,' the second Adam, the – to Augustinians – Old Testament Christ image, he is less important than the Eternal Catastrophe. The Flood is also The Bomb." God, impressively strange, is sung by two basses, Lucifer by a tenor; there is also a Caller (for the animal parade) and a Narrator. Stravinsky called the "musical speed" of The Flood "cinematographic;" writing for television, he eagerly dispensed with "the afflatus of overtures, connecting episodes, curtain music."