The Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth, and Memory Hardcover - 2010

From the rear cover

"An amazingly rich book with shocking news about Gesualdo's life and elegantly wise thoughts about avant-garde composing in the 1950s. Gesualdo's music is the guide through this labyrinth." --Louis Andriessen

"Watkins' book sheds light on the emergence of Gesualdo's oeuvre and its peculiar identification with musical modernity, the latter being taken in its most general (or better, contradictory) sense. This unexpected encounter, as this book demonstrates, did not happen by chance but was due rather to a resurgence, a swelling tide." --Pierre Boulez

"Glenn Watkins brings together his twin passions: Gesualdo and the twentieth-century experimentalists who heard in the music of this Renaissance visionary a distant echo of their own bold stylistic moves. Balancing detailed evidence with reflections on the often unexpected course of cultural history, The Gesualdo Hex represents a magnificent capstone to a distinguished career." --Susan McClary, Distinguished Professor of Music, UCLA

"The sweep of Watkins' book is truly impressive. His grasp of the milieus of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Boulez is as complete as it is of Gesualdo himself. Watkins has devoted his life to the study of this melancholic man--and it shows. The book is destined to become a classic." --Peter Phillips, director, the Tallis Scholars

"Thirty-five years after publishing Gesualdo's still-definitive life and works, Glenn Watkins offers remarkable new biographical information, and searching and provocative musings about the composer's surprisingly significant place in our musical culture." --Richard Cohn, professor of music, Yale University

Media reviews

Citations

• Booklist, 01/01/2010, Page 31
• Choice, 08/01/2010, Page 0
• Library Journal, 12/15/2009, Page 110
• Publishers Weekly, 11/23/2009, Page 48
• Reference and Research Bk News, 11/01/2010, Page 245