Walter Simmons has received the National Educational Film Festival Award and the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music criticism. He has contributed articles to The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, American National Biography, Fanfare, Music Journal, and Musical America. He is the author of Voices in the Wilderness: Six American Neo-Romantic Composers (Scarecrow, 2004).
The most immediately striking characteristics of this volume are
its comprehensiveness, thoroughness, and scholarship. Simmons seems
to have read everything ever written by and about these composers.
He has researched everything concerning each work from its genesis
to the score to the premiere and the reactions, pro and con, of the
public and the critics, repeat performances and reactions to them,
recordings, critical reactions to them, and their current
availability, all carefully documented in the end notes, and
generally maintaining a scholarly distance and objectivity. He
gives a detailed and penetrating analysis of each with a cogent
evaluation of its merits at the end. I was repeatedly impressed
with his obvious professional integrity, with one phrase jumping
off the page at me, when he wrote: '. . . for reasons unknown to
me' rather than its common form without the final two words; after
all, someone might know the reason. The breadth and depth of his
information are impressive. The chapter may not constitute the
definitive study of the composer but it is surely the definitive
summary of him, his work, and his importance. Simmons' writing is
succinct, precise, and incisive; every sentence is packed with
information with next to no excessive verbiage, and often in
felicitously excessive phrasing. Each work is described
blow-by-blow from beginning to end. He quotes heavily from critics
as well as summarizing their evaluations. He describes objectively
but also evaluates astutely himself both the works and the critics'
writings about them, aiming for a synthesis viewpoint. His style is
straightforward, eminently readable, and pleasant; no pomposity
comes with his scholarship and erudition.
*Cvnc: An Online Arts Journal In North Carolina*
Each chapter in Simmons’s new book offers a detailed biographical
sketch, a description of individual stylistic features of each
composer, an assessment of the important and representative works
that identifies both strengths and weaknesses, and a depiction of
the larger social and cultural context out of which the music
arose. There are many and extensive quotations from critical
opinions (often at some variance with each other) and hundreds of
citations in the notes for each chapter, as well as bibliographies
and discographies for each composer—and even a compact disc with
works by all three of them....Simmons’s extraordinary ability to
advocate for these composers yet see them whole, with all their
virtues, difficulties, and failings, is a triumph of sensitivity
and a lifetime spent in thoughtful listening, research, and
adjudication. He loves these men and their music yet makes careful,
nuanced discriminations about them, raises questions about their
accomplishments (sometimes unanswerable), and gives full credit to
the intricate and unfathomable workings of personality and
circumstance that bring forth artistic creation. Together with the
many detailed and perceptive analyses of individual works (strictly
verbal—there are no music examples) it is this celestial balance of
judgment and mercy, knowledge and enigma, light and dark, that
makes Voices of Stone and Steel indispensable for anyone studying
or simply curious about the achievement of these three
distinguished and emblematic “modern traditionalist” American
composers.
*American Record Guide*
In his epochal study Voices in the Wilderness (2008), musicologist
Walter Simmons charts the careers and assesses the achievement of
six American “Neo-Romantic” composers…. Perhaps the important
unstated thesis in Voices in Stone and Steel—a thoroughly readable,
fascinating, and necessary book—is the de-vivifying effect of
professionalization on all creative and visionary endeavors in the
American world since World War II. What would Schuman, Persichetti,
and Mennin have achieved composition-wise had they been as
independent, both in their careers and their worldviews, as the
great eccentrics who pioneered a genuine American art-music, such
as Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, and Henry Cowell? Or what, simply,
might the three men have achieved had they lived in a more human
age than the Age of Ideologies?
*The University Bookman*
Describing music with words is something every critic struggles
with. Despite denying in his introduction that it can be done,
Simons is a master at it. His analyses are consistently revealing,
never too esoteric for the untrained reader (no scores, mere hints
at harmonic analysis), nor too simplistic for the knowledgeable
one. He advises us to listen as we read, yet-if one knows the music
at all-it comes alive with only his descriptions. He devotes three
dense pages to Schuman's Third Symphony, and every phrase, every
note sounds and breathes. A well-loved symphony becomes all the
more meaningful on next hearing. . . . One fervently hopes that
Simmons' series will continue, and that he will champion neglected
composers across the entire spectrum of American music.
*Fanfare Magazine*
This book. . . has been a labour of love for the author. Walter
Simmons starts from the premise that the high watermark of American
symphonic music in the years following the Second World War passed
relatively unnoticed and undocumented, and that the vast
contributions to American musical literature of three major figures
during that period have largely been eclipsed by their other
important, but less enduring, lifetime achievements… In this most
interesting and absorbing book Simmons emerges as a persuasive
advocate for those, myself included, who feel that the past few
decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in American musical
culture, the effects of which are only now starting to be
assimilated.
*Tempo*
Through careful analysis of their music and insightful appraisal of
their achievements, interspersed with enough biographical
information to humanize his subjects, Simmons makes a solid case
for their work and provides an enjoyable read in the process. . . .
Overall the balance between biography and analysis is well judged.
Simmons shows us enough of his subjects' feet of clay to remind us
that composers are people, too, in a book that is primarily about
absolute music. . . . With enticing recent recordings readily
available. . . . there surely exists a new audience for this period
of American music-an audience with open ears and fewer
preconceptions. For them Simmons' book will be a godsend.
*Fanfare Magazine*
A valuable book....What is of great value here is: first, the
brilliant summaries of the style and substance of the considerable
musical output of these composers; second, the many detailed
descriptive analyses of individual compositions; third, historical
reports of the critical and popular reactions to these musical
works when first performed; fifth, information about the recording
history of many of these works; and, finally, Simmons' highly
informed evaluations of the strengths and weakness of the many
works he writes about. . . . Highly recommended.
*Classical Net*
At a time when these composers were all active, Stanley Cavell
observed in a famous essay called “Music Discomposed” that “the
task of the modern artist . . . is to find something he can be
sincere and serious in; something he can mean” (“Music
Discomposed,” in Must We Mean What We Say? [New York: Scribner,
1969], p. 212). Schuman, Persichetti, and Mennin succeeded
admirably in this task. Simmons's book is a wonderful invitation to
these composers and helps reclaim their reputations for a
contemporary audience.
*The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism*
There is sufficient material here on all three composers to form an
insightful view of their lives and work – both administrative and
musical – and one would have to seek far and wide for greater
insights into the legacies of all three men, who – together with
Copland, Bernstein, Harris, Piston, Thomson and Ives – constituted
the bulk of important American music in the 20th-century up to,
say, 1960, by which time their most valuable works had
appeared.
*Musical Opinion*
This new contribution is most welcome. . . .There is still much to
be gained from these musical examinations. . . .Voices of Stone and
Steel is . . . a valuable entryway into a varied, compelling, and
satisfying body of music.
*American Music*
There is much in this book that will be of distinctive value to
either laymen or scholars, and indeed any work that tries to walk
the line in this way will be certain to frustrate both groups to
some extent. Regardless, Simmons’ work is crucially important to
filling out the canon of American music history, and he has
produced a well-conceived and thoughtfully organized reference that
will hopefully provoke further scholarly research.
*Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association*
In The Music of William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and Peter
Mennin: Voices of Stone and Steel the insightful critic and
musicologist Walter Simmons has taken on the cause of three
remarkable but neglected mid-20th-century American
composers—William Schuman, Peter Mennin and Vincent Persichetti.
This ambitious book provides a detailed study of their music, along
with incisive summaries of their lives and careers; it also reveals
the personal and professional links between the three men and
places their various accomplishments in context of their era. In
careful, clear prose, the author presents deft, scholarly analyses
of most of his subjects' works, ranging through the genres-from
symphonies to songs. He assumes the role of counsel for the
defense, but doesn't hesitate to note the occasions when his
composers fell down on the job. As Edmund Wilson once did with
literature, here Simmons provokes a desire in the reader to hear
the music about which he writes so compellingly. I can think of
only one adjective that adequately describes this important book:
magnificent.
*Phillip Ramey, Composer, Former Annotator and Program Editor of
the New York Philharmonic, author of the award-winning biography
Irving Fine: An American*
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