Henry Pleasants (music critic)

Henry Pleasants (May 12, 1910 – January 4, 2000) was an American

His most famous and controversial work was his 1955 publication The Agony of Modern Music, a polemical attack on the direction taken by much of twentieth-century music and an argument in favor of jazz as the "true" master music of the time. The book stated, "Serious music is a dead art. The vein which for 300 years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded speculators picking through its slag pile." He further developed this critique of contemporary music in Death of a Music?: The Decline of the European Tradition and the Rise of Jazz (1961) and Serious Music and All That Jazz (1969).

Henry Pleasants's first and major enthusiasm, however, was the human voice. His The Great Singers: From the Dawn of Opera to Our Own Time (1966) became a standard reference work. Other books on singers and singing were The Great American Popular Singers, Opera in Crisis: Tradition, Present, Future, and The Great Tenor Tragedy: The Last Days of Adolphe Nourrit, about the nineteenth-century French singer who committed suicide after his vocal style became outdated. His article "Elvis Presley," reprinted in Simon Firth, ed., Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, volume 3 (2004), describes in detail Elvis Presley's "extraordinary compass and very wide range of vocal color."

Henry Pleasants Lecture Series

The American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, holds an annual lecture series named in honor of Henry Pleasants, who lectured and conducted seminars on singing there for 29 years. ^{[3] [4] [5]}

Death

On January 4, 2000, Pleasants died aged 89 in a London hospital after suffering a ruptured aorta. He was survived by his wife, harpsichordist Virginia Pleasants (1911 - 2011), two sisters, Constantia Bowditch of Peterborough, New Hampshire, and Nancy Logue of Clarksville, Tennessee; and a brother, William, of Bethel, Delaware (1911 - 2005).

References