Announcing the release of a new book:
Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe 1964-1976
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The selections offered here serve as witness to some of the most important music and music-making of the time, in Boston and elsewhere.
✳︎ The selections offered here serve as witness to some of the most important music and music-making of the time, in Boston and elsewhere.
The History
The history of Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe 1964-1976
Jorja Fleezanis, founder of The Michael Steinberg &Jorja Fleezanis Fund, planned to honor her late husband Michael Steinberg by publishing a book of his most distinguished pieces of music criticism from his twelve-year tenure at the Boston Globe (1964-1976). She was working on that project when she died in 2022. The Steinberg Fleezanis Fund Board of Directors committed to completing the book. In 2026 Jorja's dream has become a reality as Oxford University Press publishes Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964-1976. Editing the book were three people deeply connected ot Jorja and Michael: Susan Feder, Steinberg Fleezanis Fund board member; Jacob Jahiel, a former student of Jorja's; and Marc Mandel, whose long career as the Boston Symphony Orchestra's program book editor and manager began when Michael hired him.
Director of Publications for Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1976-79
“Michael himself talked, with no apparent effort, in long, perfectly shaped sentences and in a voice that was warm and soft-spoken, in seeming contradiction to the sharpness of his criticism, which could draw blood. But if he was an unsparing critic he was also a profoundly positive one.”
“Eloquent and highly entertaining, his Globe writings inspired admiration and controversy for their exacting standards.”
The Boston Symphony years, 1976-79. Michael Steinberg, Louis Krasner (violinist), Itzhak Perlman (violinist), Seiji Ozawa (conductor). Louis Krasner premiered The Berg Violin Concerto in 1935. Perlman played it with the Boston Symphony with Ozawa conducting.
From Oxford University Press
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. In summary this new book:
Foregrounds Steinberg's observations about the core repertoire of Western music, new music, and its performers
Includes material that has not been printed or available since its original publication in the Boston Globe.
Paints a unique picture of musical life in mid-20th-century Boston through the pen of one of the city's most renowned music critics.
Where to Purchase Book
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Purchase at the SFF's concert
The book, which will retail for $35.00, will be available for purchase at the SFF's concert on June 7, 2026, at Westminster Church in Minneapolis, MN, where its latest commission The Wild Iris will premiere.
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Oxford University Press
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Barnes and Noble