Paul Griffiths

Kim Sterelny

Paul E. Griffiths

In this introduction to philosophy of biology, Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths present both the science and the philosophical context necessary for a critical understanding of the debates shaping biology at the end of the 20th century.

An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology

Sex and Death

Having examined the main lines of musical change in the immediate post-war period, Paul Griffiths investigates the diverse directions taken by over 50 composers since 1960, from computer music to opera. Published for the first time in paperback this fully revised and reset edition of Modern Music: The Avant-Garde since 1945 contains an entirely new section on the 1980s to the present.

Modern Music and After

A brief history of western classical music which will appeal to all music lovers.

A Concise History of Western Music

A concise history of western music

Simon Devereaux

The English were punished in many different ways in the five centuries after 1500. This collection stretches from whipping to the gallows, and from the first houses of correction to penitentiaries. Punishment provides a striking way to examine the development of culture and society through time. These studies of penal practice explore violence, cruelty and shame, while offering challenging new perspectives on the timing of the decline of public punishment, the rise of imprisonment and reforms of the capital code.

Punishing the English

Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900

Shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize Based on the German composer's own correspondence, this inventive, counterfactual work of historical fiction imagines Beethoven traveling to America to write an oratorio based on the Book of Job. It is a matter of historical record that in 1823 the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (active to this day) sought to commission Beethoven to write an oratorio. The premise of Paul Griffiths’s ingenious novel is that Beethoven accepted the commission and traveled to the United States to oversee its first performance. Griffiths grants the composer a few extra years of life and, starting with his voyage across the Atlantic and entry into Boston Harbor, chronicles his adventures and misadventures in a new world in which, great man though he is, he finds himself a new man. Relying entirely on historically attested possibilities to develop the plot, Griffiths shows Beethoven learning a form of sign language, struggling to rein in the uncertain inspiration of Reverend Ballou (his designated librettist), and finding a kindred spirit in the widowed Mrs. Hill, all the while keeping his hosts guessing as to whether he will come through with his promised composition. (And just what, the reader also wonders, will this new piece by Beethoven turn out to be?) The book that emerges is an improvisation, as virtuosic as it is delicate, on a historical theme.

Mr. Beethoven

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Including songs from the favourite operas of Lo sposo deluso, Le nozze di Dorina, Il barbero di buon core, L'astratto, ovvero Il giocatore fortunato, Le gelosie fortunate, La villanella rapita, I due baroni di Rocci Azzurra, L'oca del Cairo, Il curioso indiscreto, etc.

Chatto Playscript

The Jewel Box

Olivier Messiaen was one of the outstanding creative artists of his time. The strength of his appeal, to listeners as well as to composers, is a measure of the individuality of his music, which draws on a vast range of sources: rhythms of twentieth-century Europe and thirteenth-century India, ripe romantic harmony and brittle birdsong, the sounds of Indonesian percussion and modern electronic instruments. What binds all these together is, on one level, his unswerving devotion to praising God in his art, and on another, his independent view of how music is made. Messiaen's music offers a range of ways of experiencing time: time suspended in music of unparalleled changelessness, time racing in music of wild exuberance, time repeating itself in vast cycles of reiteration.In Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time, leading writer and musicologist, Paul Griffiths, explores the problems of religious art, and includes searching analyses and discussions of all the major works, suggesting how they function as works of art and not only as theological symbols. This comprehensive and stimulating book covers the whole of Messiaen's output up to and including his opera, Saint Françoise d'Assise.

Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time

John Cage's name has long been well known and his influence widely acknowledged. Yet his music is comparatively unexplored, and his ideas have often been misrepresented. This book is the first serious study of Cage's output, and considers his music in relation to the development of his thinking.

Cage

Let me tell you

As Marco dictates his tale, Rustichello, bored, embellishes Marco's story, and the result is a combination of history and fantasy--a phantasmagoria

A Novel of Changes

Myself and Marco Polo

Martin Robinson

There are innumerable products that promise to make individuals more attractive, healthier, more popular, and more successful. But worldly possessions are never enough for true happiness: there's more to it than having a great job, designer clothes, a busy social life, or a fat bank balance. This insightful guide unveils the eight factors that psychologists have discovered as foundations of real happiness, among them learning to forgive; investing time and energy in friends and family; and practicing acts of kindness. In an age of unprecedented wealth that is coupled with unprecedented unhappiness and even depression, this book is a timely wake-up call.

The 8 Secrets of Happiness

The Rake's Progress is Stravinsky's biggest work and one of the few great operas written since the 1920s, rare too for the unusual quality of its libretto, by Auden and Kallman. Its importance is undisputed, but so too are the problems it raises: problems of both performance and understanding, caused by the irony with which it is so thoroughly permeated. In aspects of style and operatic convention it looks back to the eighteenth century, and in particular to the operas of Mozart and da Ponte, while making references also to other periods, to operas from Monteverdi to Verdi. Yet at the same time it is wholly a work of the twentieth-century, and indeed it is centrally concerned with the impossibility of return, artistic, psychological or actual, as well as with the nature and limitation of human free will. The Rake's Progress is not one of unbridled dissipation but rather, more interestingly, one of attachment to naive notions of freedom and choice, and his tragedy is that he can never go back.

Igor Stravinsky, the Rake's Progress

Arie J. Zuckerman

Jangu E. Banatvala

John R. Pattison

Barry Schoub

The knowledge and practice of clinical virology continues to expand. This new fifth edition has thirty-six comprehensive chapters, each of which has been extensively revised or rewritten, with the addition of new colour plates. This updated version takes into account knowledge accumulated in molecular biology with its applications for laboratory diagnosis, immunisation and antiviral chemotherapy. Each chapter highlights the clinical features and epidemiological patterns of infection. Similarly, in response to the global concern of the threat posed by new viruses, a new chapter on Emerging Infections is included. There is also new material on Hospital Acquired Infections, including some advice relating to SARS, that will be of benefit to those dealing with the day-to-day management of patients in hospital.

Principles and Practice of Clinical Virology

This superbly authoratitive new work provides a comprehensive A-Z guide to some 1000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a vast range of composers, as well as looking at such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Throught Griffiths skilfully blends lightly worn scholarship with personal insight, whether examining the emotional colouring that different musical keys achieve or charting the rise and development of the symphony.

The Penguin Companion to Classical Music

Returned from twenty years of travelling in China, Marco Polo now languishes in a Genoan prison cell. But his fellow inmate, Rustichello of Pisa, turns out to be an author of popular romances and persuades Polo to dictate his memoirs to him. The scribe listens, ignores, alters and embellishes. The consequent ironies, uncertainties, slippages between fact and fiction are the very stuff of the post-modern writer. On first publication in 1989, it was widely praised. 'The narrative loops are as graceful as any Arabian calligraphy ... Paul Griffiths writes superbly.' Hilary Mantel, Daily Telegraph 'A thoroughly modern piece of fiction which queries the nature of authorship, readership and truth itself ... Marco's doubtful account of himself rapidly falters and falls victim to ambiguity, paradox, self-reference, wilful anachronism and parody.' Robert Irwin, TLS

Over three decades, Paul Griffiths's survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage's development of zen music; in Milton Babbitt's settling of the serial system and in Dmitry Shostakovich's unsettling symphonies; in Karlheinz Stockhausen's development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono's pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis's view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio's consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that haven't yet stopped unfolding. This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no singular history of music; Griffiths's study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how and why they converge and diverge. This new edition of Modern Music and After discusses not only the music of the fifteen years that have passed since the previous edition, but also the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the latter half of the twentieth century. In particular, the book has been expanded to incorporate the variety of responses to the modernist impasse experienced by composers of the 1980s and 1990s. Griffiths then moves the book into the twenty-first century as he examines such highly influential composers as Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino. For its breadth, wealth of detail, and characteristic wit and clarity, the third edition of Modern Music and After is required reading for the student and the enquiring listener.

Karola Stotz

Integrates the work of philosophers of science seeking to make sense of genetics with an accessible introduction to the science.

An Introduction

Genetics and Philosophy

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky: The Rake's Progress

Paul J. Griffiths

In seeking to portray a more positive image of young people in the 16th and 17th centuries, this study surveys attitudes and activities to demonstrate that youth had a creative presence, an identity, and a historical significance which was never fully explored.

Paul Griffiths

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