Songs of Slavery and Emancipation by Mat Callahan (review)

reinforcing the authenticity of his musicianship and his rootedness, as a composer, in the core of the Western canon. That realization, in turn, underlines the humanity and emotional directness that lies at the core of his music. Perhaps the book’s most striking essay is its most subjective: Lawrence Berman’s reconsideration of four Kirchner scores—the string quartets nos. 1 and 3, Sonata Concertante, and Music for Or­ chestra—as a type of twentieth-century extension of Liszt’s concept of program music. The effort, as the author notes, is entirely intuitive. And yet, his idiosyncratic conclusions (that the “story” of the Sonata Concertante, for example, might concern a “lover’s quarrel or a domestic dispute between husband and wife” [p. 235]) have the ring of, if not exactly truth, then at least plausibility. That such a sense of the man and an understanding of his music can result from a collection of disparate writings on, by, and about him is a testament to Kirchner’s work and the abiding impression he left on those around him. While one wouldn’t mind the addition of a transcript from one or two of John Kenneth Galbraith’s New Year’s Eve toasts (they’re alluded to here; the economist was a regular guest at Kirchner’s holiday parties), what we have got is an all-encompassing celebration of the composer’s life and career. Its treasures, big and small, combine to make it both a marvelous introduction to Kirchner’s wider world and a worthy supplement to Robert Riggs’s admirable biography of the composer (Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher [Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2010]).