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Porter, Andrew : Musical Events: A Chronicle, 1980-1983

Summit Books, New York City, NY, 1987

ISBN 0671635387

First Edition / First Printing. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 524 pages. Retrospective collection of music reviews and essays. One of the greatest books on music of our time. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Andrew Porter's "Musical Events: A Chronicle 1980-1983". The fourth retrospective collection by the greatest music critic in the Western tradition of the second-half of the 20th century. All of the pieces originally appeared in slightly different form in The New Yorker Magazine. Five volumes, published in chronological order, were published in all. The New Yorker invited the London-based Porter on a "trial" basis, initially to cover just one season that eventually became "A Musical Season: A Critic From Abroad In America" (1974). He stayed on for almost twenty years, helping to cement with his presence New York's supremacy as the arts and music capital of the 20th century. His near-weekly reviews and extended essays on music, thankfully collected for posterity in his retrospective volumes, are unsurpassed to this day. "Nobody reviewing in America has anything like Porter's command of it. Nor has The New Yorker ever before had access through music to so distinguished a mind" (Virgil Thomson). "One of the exceedingly rare examples of a scholar who is also a perceptive critic of the highest rank" (The New Republic). "No critic in the magazine's history - not Edmund Wilson, not Lewis Mumford, not Pauline Kael - possessed greater authority in his or her field" (Alex Ross). Porter's specialty was the human voice and its miraculous range in song, opera, theater, spectacle, and drama, culminating in his magisterial English translation of Wagner's "Ring" (Porter translated thirty-seven operas in all, and was also a world-class scholar). He was incurably curious and passionate about new music, that is, the music of our time, and one of the contemporary composers he discusses at considerable length in this volume is Philip Glass, in one of the earliest appreciations of the now-legendary American composer's ground-breaking Minimalist operas. Andrew Porter died on April 3, 2015 at the age of 87, a permanent loss. An absolute "must-have" title for Andrew Porter collectors. This title is a great collection. This is one of few copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a beauty. Please note: This is the first of two volumes, both titled "Musical Events". It covers the period 1980-1983, and is a hardcover original only. Amazon and other platforms list it as a "paperback". There is no such thing. Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A scarce copy thus. One of the greatest music critics of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER ANDREW PORTER TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0671635387.

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