Music-History & Criticism

In the first and only definitive biography of country music star Keith Urban, insider Jeff Apter chronicles how a skinny, shy high school dropout with an outrageous mullet went from humble origins in Australia to conquering Nashville and global stardom--plus his struggles with addiction,...

No one played like Jesse Ed Davis. One of the most sought-after guitarists of the late 1960s and '70s, Davis appeared alongside the era's greatest stars--John Lennon and Mick Jagger, B.B. King and Bob Dylan--and contributed to dozens of major releases, including numerous top-ten...

The Beatles changed the course of pop history - and the UK singles chart was never the same again.Every UK Number 1: The Beatles and Their Solo Years is the ultimate deep dive into the chart-topping story of John, Paul, George and Ringo -...

METALLICA: Masters of Metal - The Sound That Shook the WorldHeavy. Relentless. Revolutionary. didn't just rise through the ranks of rock-they tore down the walls and rebuilt the sound of heavy metal from the ground up. METALLICA: Masters of Metal is a powerful, all-access...

Understanding the value of vinyl records is rarely as straightforward as it first appears.While price guides are often expected to provide quick answers, the reality is that record values are influenced by a combination of factors, including condition, pressing differences, demand, and timing. This...

Explores American concert life and cultural history around 1900 through the lens of four visiting European composers. "America may not be the promised land of music, but it is the promised land of musicians." Lines like these abound in the reminiscences of European musicians...

Black British Music in America 1967-2000: Atlantic Crossover historically examines musical and cultural relationships through popular music recordings, exploring the transatlantic journeys via academic, critical, and commercial reception of the music. It addresses an overlooked area of Black popular music, investigating the fluctuating fortunes...

The Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond provides a comprehensive exploration of women's participation in musical leadership from the nineteenth century to the present. Global in scope, with contributors from over thirty countries, this book reveals the wide...

This Handbook illustrates the many ways that progressive rock and metal music forge striking engagements with literary texts and themes.The authors and their objects of analytic inquiry offer global and diverse perspectives on these genres and their literary connections: from ancient times to the...

A piercing investigation showing how a glittering Mozart music festival in 1941 Vienna became a powerful instrument of Nazi propaganda in both annexed Austria and occupied France. Vienna, November 28, 1941. At the Konzerthaus, the overture to Don Giovanni opened a monumental "Mozart Week...

Heavy music didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened in rooms, on stages, in studios, and in the streets, shaped by economics, culture, and the relentless pressure of people who refused to accept what they were handed.When Heavy Became Mass traces the arc of...

"How to Sing" is a definitive guide to vocal technique and the art of singing by one of the most celebrated operatic sopranos of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lilli Lehmann. This work provides a rigorous and comprehensive exploration of the physiological...

"The Complete Opera Book" by Gustav Kobbe stands as a definitive and comprehensive guide to the world of opera, meticulously cataloging the stories, music, and history of the art form's most significant works. Designed to serve both the seasoned aficionado and the curious newcomer,...

Director David Lynch is best known for films that channel the uncanny and the weird into a distinct "Lynchian" aesthetic, in which sound and music play a key role: Lynch not only writes his intended sounds into the script but also often takes on...

Performer and researcher Peter O'Hagan studies the musical style of Pierre Boulez during his final creative period, by means of a detailed consideration of the ensemble work sur Incises, which stands at the heart of Boulez's later output.O'Hagan offers a unique blend of perceptions...

The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans is a comprehensive overview of major topics, established debates and new directions in the study of popular music and politics in this region.The vibrant growth of this subject area since the 1990s has...

Explore the fascinating stories behind every song and every album ever recorded by the band that has won more Grammys than any other musical act. U2 All the Songs is the complete, behind-the-scenes chronicle of the five-decade-long recording history of one of the most...

From Memphis grit to Philly smooth, The Story of Soul in 50 Songs takes readers inside the grooves that transformed American music from 1959 to 1974. The Story of Soul in 50 Songs is a richly illustrated, rhythmic journey through some of the most...

The Byrds: The Rise, The Rifts, and The Resonance is a deeply moving portrait of artistic courage and the quiet determination that transforms possibility into reality. It tells the story of five individuals drawn together by a shared belief in sound as a form...

Discover the untold stories behind Fleetwood Mac's masterpiece album in this expertly written and beautifully presented deep dive. Released in February 1977, Rumours transformed Fleetwood Mac from a veteran British-American rock act into a global phenomenon. On the album's 50th anniversary, music journalist Andrea...

Fight for your right to celebrate 40 years of Beastie Boys' groundbreaking debut album--Licensed to Ill--through vivid photography, track-by-track analysis, and new interviews. When Licensed to Ill hit the Billboard charts in 1986, it didn't just make history--it rewrote it. The Beastie Boys' mix...

The remarkable story of pastor Donald Gay and his family's lasting contributions to gospel music and Chicago culture.When the preacher Gregory Donald Gay joined his sisters onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1950, on a sold-out bill they shared with Mahalia Jackson and the Clara...

The best writer about pop music . . . an inspiration." --Jarvis Cocker, BBC Radio 6 Music The definitive, lavishly illustrated collection of music writing, memoir, and reportage from the redoubtable Nik Cohn. Before rock criticism had rules, Nik Cohn was already breaking them....

Black Song: A Manifesto for Music and Justice centers acts of musical creation and performance that emerge from Black experiences, affirm Black humanity, and connect to Black communities. Written for scholars, performers, and music fans, the book shows that learning about Black Song and...

For a few short years in the 1970s, the unique music of Focus entertained the world. Built around the prodigious instrumental talents of Dutch masters Jan Akkerman (guitar) and Thijs van Leer (keyboards and flute), the band produced three classic hit albums in quick...

Wide-ranging, irreverent and humorous, packed with fascinating - and sometimes tragic - details on lands and people who are rarely heard from. Princes Amongst Men is the only book to provide an overview of Gypsy music across the Balkans, documenting remarkable artistry in former...

Reimagining Panama's Musical and Cultural Narratives of Jazz: Panamanian Suite narrates the complex relationship between Panama and the United States by tracing the paths of their music, tracking the development of jazz in Panama from the mid-nineteenth century to the modern day through three...

This work serves as an exemplary case study on the evolution of music education in the US from 1833-2017 through the history of the Oberlin Conservatory. While nominally the history of music education at Oberlin, this book also illustrates changing views and values related...

This is the untold history of Oceania's 1960s lost psychedelic album, The Happy Prince. Recorded in Sydney by the La De Das, an Aotearoa/New Zealand band, this was the first LP in Australia that told a single story, creating an audio world. The La...

Where Brahms and Bruckner really antipodes, as believed in the late 19th century or had their contemporaries overestimated the dimension of their distance? This book seeks an answer to this question. It is based on the principles of intermediality and on a method of...

Change Is... surveys 50 musicians/groups that helped to establish modern jazz in Britain. These include familiar names - Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes, John Dankworth - as well as lesser-known figures deserving of wider recognition. The book includes a section on the early development of...

At the height of Tim Maia's soaring fame, he joined a radical, extraterrestrial-obsessed cult and created two plus albums of some of Brazil's-and the globe's-best funk and soul music. This book explores the career of the man often hailed as the James Brown or...

More than simply a paragon of Brazilian samba, Dona (Lady) Ivone Lara's 1981 Sorriso Negro (translated to Black Smile) is an album deeply embedded in the political and social tensions of its time. Released less than two years after the Brazilian military dictatorship approved...

What makes a song sound foreign? What makes it sound "American," or Brazilian? Caetano Veloso's 2004 American songbook album, A Foreign Sound, is a meditation on these questions-but in truth, they were questions he'd been asking throughout his career. Properly heard, the album throws...

This collection brings together an anthology of articles by Thomas Christensen, one of the leading historians of music theory active today. Published over the span of the past 25 years, the selected articles provide a historical conspectus about a range of vital topics in...

In recent years the music of minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass has, increasingly, become the subject of important musicological reflection, research and debate. Scholars have also been turning their attention to the work of lesser-known...

""On Sound and Atmospheric Vibrations with the Mathematical Elements of Music"" is a book by George Biddell Airy that explores the science of sound and its relationship to music. Airy was a renowned British mathematician and astronomer who served as the Astronomer Royal from...

The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of screen music and sound studies, addressing the ways in which music and sound interact with forms of narrative media such as television, videogames, and film. The inclusive framework of...

This book considers the activities and writings of early song collectors and proto-ethnomusicologists, memoirists, and other "musical travelers" in 19th-century France. Each of the book's discrete but interrelated chapters is devoted to a different geographic and discursive site of empire, examining French representations of...

Materials and Techniques of Post-Tonal Music, Fifth Edition provides the most comprehensive introduction to post-tonal music and its analysis available. Covering music from the end of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first, it offers students a clear guide to understanding the...

The Turkic soundscape is both geographically huge and culturally diverse (twenty-eight countries, republics and districts extending from Eastern Europe through the Caucasus and throughout Central Asia). Although the Turkic peoples of the world can trace their linguistic and genetic ancestries to common sources, their...

In Listening for Africa David F. Garcia explores how a diverse group of musicians, dancers, academics, and activists engaged with the idea of black music and dance's African origins between the 1930s and 1950s. Garcia examines the work of figures ranging from Melville J....

What defines pop music? Why do we consider some styles as easier listening than others? Arranged in three parts: Aesthetics and Authenticity - Groove, Sampling and Industry - Subjectivity, Ethnicity and Politics, this collection of essays by a group of international scholars deals with...

Among the most original and provocative musicological writers of his generation, James Hepokoski has elaborated new paradigms of inquiry for both music history and music theory. Advocating fundamental shifts of methodological reorientation within the quest for potential musical meanings, his work spans both disciplines...

Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula provides a pioneering overview of folk and traditional urban music, along with dance and rituals, of Saudi Arabia and the Upper Gulf States of Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. The nineteen chapters introduce variegated regions and subcultures and...

A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical Context is an integrated account of the genres and concepts of twentieth-century art music, organized topically according to aesthetic, stylistic, technical, and geographic categories, and set within the larger political, social, economic, and cultural framework. While...

Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation is a collection of twenty-one essays by leading scholars, surveying vital themes in the history of African American music. Bringing together the viewpoints of ethnomusicologists, historians, and performers, these essays cover topics including the music...

Music in the Baroque World: History, Culture, Performance offers an interdisciplinary study of the music of Europe and the Americas in the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. It answers calls for an approach that balances culture, history, and musical analysis, with...

As a coherent field of research, the field of music and visual culture has seen rapid growth in recent years. The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture serves as the first comprehensive reference on the intersection between these two areas of study, an...

In seven richly illustrated chapters and a deft introduction, nine leading music and film scholars revisit the great theme of artistic collaboration from a heretofore unexplored angle: the relationship between film directors and composers in the 'Long Italian Post-War'.Author: Giorgio BiancorossoISBN-10: 0367569264ISBN-13: 9780367569266Publisher: RoutledgeLanguage:...