Berlioz on Bands

The colorful and sometimes startling style expressed in the music of Berlioz is also found in his prose. The man wrote hundreds of newspaper articles and many more private letters which have yet to be made available to English readers. This book mines those resources to introduce the views of Berlioz on wind players and their instruments, his lost band works and his extensive accounts of the wide public success of his great wind masterpiece, his Symphony for Band. Included here as well are his fascinating discussions of conducting, composition, music education, national styles of music and his famous subjective descriptions of the various wind instruments. It is difficult to think of a more comprehensive view than his of musical life during the first half of the nineteenth century.