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Trochimczyk Maja (red.)

The Music of Louis Andriessen

Routledge Publishing, Inc., New York and London 2002, 328 pages.

The book is one of the “Studies in Contemporary Music an Culture”, a series edited by Joseph Auner, professor of music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The series is a forum for the presentation of subjects which lie beyond the scope of academic musicology. And so, the coming volumes will deal with rock music, the place of sex and sexuality in music, performance art and media, music and technology, musical polyculturality and other polycultural phenomena. The new and provocative approach to various cultural and social problems is to promote the rise of new methods of listening to, studying, teaching and performing contemporary music, informs the series editor’s preface. Maja Trochimczyk, editor of The Music of Louis Andriessen, describes the book as a collection of interviews with, and essays about, the composer. The interviews were conducted by Trochimczyk herself during her three stays in Amsterdam in 1999-2000. The essays were written by Reinbert de Leeuw, the Dutch composer-conductor, Elmer Schönberger, a Dutch musicologist and an expert on Andriessen’s work (author of the entry in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians) and Frits van der Waa, who has written many texts about Andriessen and his works. There is also a lecture which Andriessen gave at the International Courses for Young Composers organised by ISCM Polish Section in 1985.