Music-History & Criticism

In Culture on the Margins, Jon Cruz recounts the "discovery" of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song making as meaningless...

Clarity of outline, conciseness, and formal beauty are excellent things in musical works, but an exquisite fancy, a noble imagination, and a lofty poetic spirit are of infinitely greater account; and no one ever possessed these inestimable gifts in greater measure than Franz Schubert.This...

Pink Floyd's extraordinary career has now spanned four decades, from their early days pushing the cutting edge of British psychedelic pop to their massive successes with moody, conceptual masterpieces like Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, to their...

"Up Front and Center- New Orleans Music at the End of the 20th Century" is the first in-depth account of this very important era in the history of New Orleans music. It is filled with vivid descriptions of many of the most significant musical...

Fifth Anniversary Edition It all began in a blizzard on his way to see the Grateful Dead in Philadelphia. Twenty seven years later, in 2009, Howard "Catfish" Weiner's road rhapsody landed him in Las Vegas for his 100th Bob Dylan show. Tangled Up in...

When Erik Tawaststjerna completed his multi-volume study of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) in the late 1980s, it was anticipated that it would become the definitive source for information about the life and music of Finland's most revered composer. While there is no denying the musicological...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER "This book is essential" - A-Trak, DJ/Producer "This writing and these stories don't ache for the past as much as they contextualize how the present is still being made by what was left behind by recent horizons that still echo." - Hanif...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our...

Explicitly or not, the historical musicology of post-Revolutionary France has focused on Paris as a proxy for the rest of the country. This distorting lens is the legacy of political and cultural struggle during the long nineteenth century, indicating a French Revolution unresolved both...

Music in a Word Volume 1 is an anthology and memoir by veteran American music journalist Ira Robbins. If you've ever wondered how and why anyone becomes a critic, some of the answers are here. Music in a Word is a collection of articles,...

While some film scores crash through theater speakers to claim their place in memory, others are more unassuming. Either way, a film's score is integral to successful world building. This book lifts the curtain on the elusive yet thrilling art form, examining the birth...

The second volume of veteran rock critic Ira Robbins' anthology-and-memoir Music in a Word trilogy compiles his extensive writing about nine artists: The Who, Cheap Trick, Ramones, Nirvana, Clash, Kinks, Elvis Costello, Keith Richards and the Replacements. This large-format paperback includes features, reviews and...

This study stems from discoveries in a trove of documents belonging to Charles-Henri de Lorraine, prince de Vaud駑ont, who served as governor of Milan under the Spanish crown from 1698 to 1706. These documents, together with a mass of other sources - letters, diaries,...

Author: Jeff HornISBN-10: 1588200930ISBN-13: 9781588200938Publisher: 1st Book LibraryLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/20/2000Pages: 320Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.86lbsSize: 7.98h x 4.98w x 0.81d

A volume of collected essays which engage Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg from the perspective of both active performers and academics in a wide range of disciplines. Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg has been one of the most performed operas ever since its...

Iannis Xenakis' Persepolis stood as witness to one of the most important events in modern human history, the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Its existence is owed to an invitation to participate in the 1971 Shiraz Arts Festival, which was overseen by Empress Farah Pahlavi....

'If you talk about the '70s, I was a hardworking artist. I did nothing but tour - recording, touring, TV, you know. I had constant jetlag. Constant black shadows under my eyes but, oh, what a ride! What a wonderful ride. And I'm still...

The greatest backup group in the history of recorded music undoubtedly was the Jordanaires, a gospel group of mostly Tennessee boys, formed in the 1940s, that set the standard for studio vocal groups in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and beyond. In their sixty-five-year career,...

This volume brings together analyses of works by thirteen Russian composers from across the twentieth century, showing how their approaches to tonality, modernism, and serialism forge forward-looking paths independent from their Western counterparts. Russian music of this era is widely performed, and much research...

The Minneapolis Pops Orchestra, A Historyis the story of a professional orchestra that has played concerts in a beautiful city park for over 70 years. In its introduction the book gives a brief history of the concert tradition at Lake Harriet that started in...

For over one hundred years, Memphis, Tennessee, has been the center of musical innovation for American popular music. From W. C. Handy to Alberta Hunter and Lil Hardin Armstrong, in the early years, to B. B. King in the late 1940s, Elvis Presley, Johnny...

Bernard van Dieren (1887 - 1936) was a Dutch composer whose life was spent mostly in England. A respected but controversial composer (his admirers included the Sitwell brothers, Peter Warlock, Cecil Gray, Constant Lambert and Kaikhosru Sorabji) his music was little performed in his...

This book, Boys From Houston II - Deep in the Heart, is the second in a series of music retrospective books, providing more rare photographs, interviews with select musicians and fans, as well as introducing a broader spectrum of relative events and happenings influenced...

Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde documents the collaborations and conflicts essential to the history of the post-war avant-garde. It offers a study of composer Morton Feldman's associations and friendships with artists like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Frank...

Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach collects seventeen essays by leading Bach scholars. The authors each address in some way such questions of meaning in J. S. Bach's vocal compositions--including his Passions, Masses, Magnificat, and cantatas--with particular attention...

Chopin's twenty-four Pr ludes remain as mysterious today as when they were newly published. What prompted Franz Liszt and others to consider Chopin's Pr ludes to be compositions in their own right rather than introductions to other works? What did set Chopin's Pr ludes...

This second volume of Music in Black American Life offers research and analysis that originally appeared in the journals American Music and Black Music Research Journal, and in two book series published by the University of Illinois Press: Music in American Life, and African...

This first volume of Music in Black American Life collects research and analysis that originally appeared in the journals American Music and the Black Music Research Journal, and in the University of Illinois Press's acclaimed book series Music in American Life. In these selections,...

For a brief period from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, folk music captured a mass audience in the United States, as college students and others swarmed to concerts by the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. In this...

In 1986, when Bon Jovi's third studio album, Slippery When Wet, was released, America had found its next superband. In Bon Jovi: America's Ultimate Band, Margaret Olson chronicles the history and music of the band from its inception to present day. She closely examines...

"Wonderful compilation" -- Henry Fogel, Dean, Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University; former president, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra League "An enjoyable read, and a great conversation starter." -- James McCarthy, Limelight magazine, Australia "...for those seeking to shake up their listening...

Southern music has flourished as a meeting ground for the traditions of West African and European peoples in the region, leading to the evolution of various traditional folk genres, bluegrass, country, jazz, gospel, rock, blues, and southern hip-hop. This much-anticipated volume in The New...

The chautauqua movement was a truly American phenomenon, providing education and entertainment for millions of people and employing thousands of musicians in the process. While scholars have previously explored various facets of the chautauqua movement, this is the first book to trace the place...

The world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin devoted much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways. Defining Russia Musically represents one of his landmark achievements: here Taruskin uses music, together with history and politics, to illustrate...

Alexander Wheelock Thayer's Life of Beethoven. has long been recognized as the classic biography of Beethoven. "Thayer, with his calm and logical mind, scrupulous, magnanimous and spacious...had set out to describe for posterity the great man as he was and lived...and his patient realism...

This book provides a study and critical edition of the corpus of hymns sung by monks and canons in their services in England before the Norman Conquest. An eleventh-century Latin manuscript known as the Durham Hymnal, with its accompanying Old English interlinear gloss, makes...

Carl Dahlhaus here treats Nietzsche's youthful analysis of the contradictions in Wagner's doctrine (and, more generally, in romantic musical aesthetics); the question of periodicization in romantic and neo-romantic music; the underlying kinship between Brahms's and Wagner's responses to the central musical problems of their...

A forgotten singer from the early days of jazz is at the center of this riveting book -- a narrative that is part mystery, part biography, part meditation on the meaning and power of music.Author: Nick ToschesISBN-10: 0316895075ISBN-13: 9780316895071Publisher: Little Brown and CompanyLanguage: EnglishPublished:...

Exposing the depth of two major artists' philosophies, creative visions, stylistic tendencies, and contributions to their craft, this unprecedented comparative analysis synthesizes biographical material, critical interpretation, and selected exemplars of the writers' work. Smith reinterprets their work in a new and fascinating light, presenting...

This discography documents all recordings made by this pioneering and influential record label which was active in many areas - popular, jazz, blues, country, and ethnic music during a formative and dynamic period in America's cultural history just before and during the 1920s on...

This is the first book in English about Domenico Cimarosa, his more than 65 operas and his sacred and secular vocal music, his keyboard music, and his various works for solo instruments and ensembles. This is also the first authoritative book on Cimarosa since...

For the dedicated record collector and music lover this discography provides invaluable information about Legge himself and a crucial periodin recording history, from his issuance of discs on a subscripion basis tothe creation of the Philharmonia Orchestra to the systematic recording of the greatest...

In a series of candid interviews with jazz players, composers, and critics, Gene Lees explores racism in the past and present of jazz--both the white racism that for decades ghettoized black musicians and their music, and the prejudice that Lees documents of some black...

Rock is a music of rebellion against authority, and has consequently frightened and outraged people throughout its forty-year history. Anti-Rock is the first book to detail the objections of rock's detractors. Critics from parents to religious groups, industry executives to scientists, government spokesmen to...

In this long awaited book, Eric Sams examines each of Johannes Brahms's 213 songs and reveals the full extent of the poetry, fantasy and humour of the composer's work. The book begins with an introduction to Brahms the song-writer, and then provides a complete...

This groundbreaking anthology brings together for the first time the works of women poet-composers, or trouv res, in northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Refuting the long-held notion that there are no extant Old French lyrics by women from this period, the...

Female-to-male crossdressing became all the rage in the variety shows of nineteenth-century America and began as the domain of mature actresses who desired to extend their careers. These women engaged in the kinds of raucous comedy acts usually reserved for men. Over time, as...

Pavement wrapped up at Easley Recording in Memphis. They mixed the tracks and recorded overdubs in New York. They took a step back and assessed the material. It was a wild scene. They had fully fleshed-out songs and whispers and rumors of half-formed ones....

Robert Johnson is the subject of the most famous myth about the blues: he allegedly sold his soul at the crossroads in exchange for his incredible talent, and this deal led to his death at age 27. But the actual story of his life...

That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound is the definitive treatment of Bob Dylan's magnum opus, Blonde on Blonde, not only providing the most extensive account of the sessions that produced the trailblazing album, but also setting the record straight on much of the misinformation that...