Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964-1976

Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964-1976 brings together, for the first time, some 300 selections from the more than 2,000 reviews, essays, and features written by the eminent critic and musicologist Michael Steinberg during his dozen years--from 1964 to 1976--as music critic of the Boston Globe. Steinberg possessed a special gift in his ability to make complex aspects of music easy to understand, writing with a combination of wit, elegance, and passion that was inspiring to both amateurs and professionals. Eloquent and highly entertaining, his Globe writings inspired admiration and controversy for their exacting standards. The selections offered here serve as witness to some of the most important music and music-making of the time, in Boston and elsewhere.

This book will be of equal interest to a wide variety of concertgoers, music aficionados, record collectors, teachers, and students. At the same time, it is a valuable artifact of reception history and shows how pieces of music, whether familiar, unfamiliar, or newly created, were interpreted by artists and received by audiences and critics. Defending the Music also serves as a companion volume to existing compilations of Steinberg's work published by Oxford University Press.

Author: Susan Feder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 04/07/2026
Pages: 648
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.26lbs
Size: 9.48h x 6.42w x 1.67d
ISBN: 9780197810217

About the Author
Jorja Fleezanis Concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra from 1989 to 2009, Jorja Fleezanis was the orchestra's longest-tenured concertmaster and only the second woman to hold that title at a major American orchestra. Prior to that she was associate concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony and a violinist with the Chicago Symphony. A devoted teacher, she held chairs in violin and orchestral studies at Indiana University (2009-20) and taught at the University of Minnesota, Round Top International Festival Institute, Aldeburgh Britten Pears School, San Francisco Conservatory, Music@Menlo Festival, New World Symphony, Music Academy of the West, and Interlochen Academy, among other places. Fleezanis studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and the Cleveland Institute of Music. John Adams's Violin Concerto and John Tavener's Ikon of Eros were composed for her. She met Michael Steinberg at the San Francisco Symphony and they married in 1983. After his death in 2009, she established the Michael Steinberg & Jorja Fleezanis Fund to commission and perform text- based compositions by emerging composers. She died in 2022 at age 70.

Susan Feder's multifaceted arts career culminated at the Mellon Foundation, where for fifteen years she developed systems-building initiatives on behalf of artists and organizations long under-resourced by philanthropy, and supported a significant expansion of contemporary arts repertoire. Previously she held the role of vice president at music publisher G. Schirmer, where she nurtured the careers of an international roster of composers. Feder also served as editorial coordinator of The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (1986) and program editor at the San Francisco Symphony. Currently she is active on the boards of several arts nonprofits and foundations. She holds degrees from Princeton University and University of California, Berkeley.

Jacob Jahiel is a PhD student in Historical Musicology at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds an M.A. in Musicology from Indiana University, Bloomington's Jacobs School of Music, where he studied modern violin with Jorja Fleezanis, Baroque violin with Stanley Ritchie, and viola da gamba with Joanna Blendulf. He writes frequently for Early Music America's EMAg and contributes program notes to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Boston Artists Ensemble. As a historical bowed string specialist, he has performed at the Academy for Early Music (MI) and the University of Chicago's Howard Mayer Brown International Early Music Series (IL), among others.

Marc Mandel was manager and editor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra program book from 1979 to 2020, also initiating a series of adult education programs and serving for many years as the orchestra's principal pre-concert speaker. He has written program notes for the Boston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Carnegie Hall, and New York Philharmonic, among others; has written liner notes for the BSO Classics, Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, Nonesuch, and Telarc labels; and was a reviewer for Fanfare Magazine for twenty years. Following his undergraduate studies at Brandeis University, he earned graduate degrees in music history and musicology from Yale University and Princeton University, respectively.