Music-History & Criticism

The Light Crust Doughboys are one of the most long-lived and musically versatile bands in America. Formed in the early 1930s under the sponsorship of Burrus Mill and Elevator Company of Fort Worth, Texas, with Bob Wills and Milton Brown (the originator of western...

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song...

Using a replica of Beethoven's Erard piano, scholar and performer Tom Beghin launches a striking reinterpretation of a key period of Beethoven's work. In 1803 Beethoven acquired a French piano from the Erard Fr鑽es workshop in Paris. The composer was "so enchanted with it,"...

A study of musical salons in Europe and North America between 1760 and 1800 and the salon hostesses who shaped their musical worlds. In eighteenth-century Europe and America, musical salons--and the women who hosted and made music in them--played a crucial role in shaping...

This study uncovers how Saint Cecilia came to be closely associated with music and musicians. Until the fifteenth century, Saint Cecilia was not connected with music. She was perceived as one of many virgin martyrs, with no obvious musical skills or interests. During the...

Most studies of musical improvisation focus on individual musicians. But that is not the whole story. From jazz to flamenco, Shona mbira to Javanese gamelan, improvised practices thrive on group creativity, relying on the close interaction of multiple simultaneously improvising performers. In Making It...

Miles Davis's Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis's live recordings from this time, when he was...

The popularity of the motion picture soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought an extraordinary amount of attention to bluegrass, but it also drew its share of criticism from some aficionados who felt the album's inclusion of more modern tracks misrepresented the genre. This...

Winner of the 2007 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the 2007 Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Divas and Scholars is a dazzling and beguiling account of how opera comes to the stage, filled...

During the performances of fashionable operas in an unidentified but "civilized" town in northern Europe, the musicians (with the exception of the conscientious bass drummer) tell tales, read stories, and exchange gossip to relieve the tedium of the bad music they are paid to...

As the cornerstone of the Global Music Series, Thinking Musically, Third Edition, explores musical diversity by integrating the sounds and traditions of world cultures. Bonnie C. Wade discusses how various cultural influences-gender, ethnicity, mass media, westernization, nationalism, and acculturation-are shaping music and the ways...

The main function of western musical notation is incidental: it prescribes and records sound. But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notation began to take on an aesthetic life all its own. In the early fifteenth century, a musician might be asked to sing...

Throughout his life, German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill was fascinated by the idea of America. His European works depict America as a Capitalist dystopia. But in 1935, it became clear that Europe was no longer safe for Weill, and he set sail for New World,...

David Tudor is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His early realization of indeterminate graphic scores and his...

When asked to describe what music means to them, most people talk about its power to express or elicit emotions. As a melody can produce a tear, tingle the spine, or energize athletes, music has a deep impact on how we experience and encounter...

Bandalism ban-dəl-i-zəm] n .: the willful or malicious destruction of, or damage to, the fabric of a rock/pop/indie group brought about by one or more of its membersAxl Rose's monumental meltdowns . . . Kurt Cobain's tragic band-slaying suicide: The long history of platinum-selling...

In The Florida Room Alexandra T. Vazquez listens to the music and history of Miami to offer a lush story of place and people, movement and memory, dispossession and survival. She transforms the "Florida room"--an actual architectural phenomenon--into a vibrant spatial imaginary for Miami's...

For the Enrichment of Community Life is the first part of the history of the Eastman School of Music, beginning with the events that led to the establishment of the school in 1921 and ending in 1932 with the death of the school's benefactor,...

Curtis Mayfield. Etta James. The Chi-Lites. Chess Records. Jerry Butler. Fontella Bass. Chicago was soul music from the late 1950s through the late 1970s. Chicago Soul chronicles the emergence of Chicago soul music out of the city's thriving rhythm-and-blues industry and shows how it...

The essential oral history of hip-hop, from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its reign as the most powerful force in pop culture--from the award-winning journalist behind All the Pieces Matter, the New York Times bestselling oral history of The Wire...

The concept of subjectivity is one of the most popular in recent scholarly accounts of music; it is also one of the obscurest and most ill-defined. Multifaceted and hard to pin down, subjectivity nevertheless serves an important, if not indispensable purpose, underpinning various assertions...

This handbook for flautists addresses all who wish to consider the issues raised when performing music of the past, and experiment with them on old or new instruments. Its aim is to provide an authoritative and practical guide with evidence drawn from a variety...

Liszt's B minor Sonata is now regarded as his finest work for piano, and one of the pinnacles of Romantic piano music. This book, written by a pianist who has performed the Sonata extensively, includes a survey of Liszt's early attempts at sonata composition...

The Cambridge History of American Music is the first study of music in the United States to be written by a team of scholars. The volume begins with a survey of the music of Native Americans and then explores the historical and cultural events...

This book is the first of two volumes offering a selection of Greek writings on music, newly translated into English and equipped with an extensive commentary. This volume contains passages from Greek poets, historians and essayists, evoking or describing aspects of the practical activities...

This 1990 book is a survey of the critical reaction to Beethoven's music as it appeared in the major musical journals, French as well as German, of his day, and represents the first published history of Beethoven reception. The author discusses the philosophical and...

Chopin's four ballades are widely regarded as being among the most significant extended works for solo piano of the nineteenth century. In an illuminating discussion, Jim Samson combines history and analysis to provide a comprehensive picture of these popular piano works, investigating the social...

This book provides a collection of some 400 passages on music from early Christian literature - New Testament to c. 450 AD - newly translated from the original Greek, Latin, and Syriac. As there are no musical sources of the period, music historians must...

This is the first paperback edition of Roy Howat's stimulating and provocative study of Debussy's unorthodox use of musical form. Throught detailed analyses of the piano pieces Reflets dans l'eau and L'isle joyeuse and the symphonic poem La mer, Dr Howat shows how the...

Challenging received views of music in nineteenth-century German thought, culture and society, this 2010 book provides a radical reappraisal of its socio-political meanings and functions. Garratt argues that far from governing the nineteenth-century musical discourse and practice, the concept of artistic autonomy and the...

This collection of articles, written by European, American and British scholars, clarifies problems of style and chronology in the music Schubert composed during the last decade of his life. Althought O. E. Deutsch's documentary biography and memoirs set new milestones in Schubert research, they...

This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton and other British poets of the seventeenth century, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes, and Tomkins. McColley combines close readings of particular poems and...

Roger North's The Musicall Grammarian 1728, first published in 1990, is a treatise on musical eloquence in all its branches. Of its five parts, I and II, on the orthoepy, orthography and syntax of music, constitute a grammar; III and IV, on the arts...

Inventors in the age of the Enlightenment created lifelike androids capable of playing music on real instruments. Music and the Forms of Life examines the link between such simulated life and music, which began in the era's scientific literature and extended into a series...

Inventors in the age of the Enlightenment created lifelike androids capable of playing music on real instruments. Music and the Forms of Life examines the link between such simulated life and music, which began in the era's scientific literature and extended into a series...

Living Genres in Late Modernity rehears the American 1970s through the workings of its musical genres. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as unstable constellations...

Living Genres in Late Modernity rehears the American 1970s through the workings of its musical genres. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as unstable constellations...

How did "voice" become a metaphor for selfhood in the Western imagination? The Lyric Myth of Voice situates the emergence of an ideological connection between voice and subjectivity in late eighteenth-century Italy, where long-standing political anxieties and new notions of cultural enlightenment collided in...

A stunning musical biography of Stevie Nicks that paints a portrait of an artist, not a caricature of a superstar. Reflective and expansive, Mirror in the Sky situates Stevie Nicks as one of the finest songwriters of the twentieth century. This biography from distinguished...

The Treatise on Musical Objects is regarded as Pierre Schaeffer's most important work on music and its relationship with technology. Schaeffer expands his earlier research in musique concr te to suggest a methodology of working with sounds based on his experiences in radio broadcasting...

"...the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen."--Alex Ross, The New Yorker "...an essential survey of contemporary music."--New York Times "...sharp, provacative and always on the money. The listening list alone promises months of fresh discovery, the...

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music historian, composer, and pianist whose prescient theoretical and critical interventions have bridged Black cultural studies and musicology. Representing twenty-five years of commentary and scholarship, these essays document Ramsey's search to understand America's Black musical past...

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music historian, composer, and pianist whose prescient theoretical and critical interventions have bridged Black cultural studies and musicology. Representing twenty-five years of commentary and scholarship, these essays document Ramsey's search to understand America's Black musical past...

What happened to musical modernism? When did it end? Did it end? In this unorthodox Lacanian account of European New Music, Seth Brodsky focuses on the unlikely year 1989, when New Music hardly takes center stage. Instead one finds Rostropovich playing Bach at Checkpoint...

The tonadilla, a type of satiric musical skit popular on the public stages of Madrid during the late Enlightenment, has played a significant role in the history of music in Spain. This book, the first major study of the tonadilla in English, examines the...

Over the past four decades, Richard Taruskin's publications have redefined the field of Russian-music study. This volume gathers thirty-six essays on composers ranging from Bortnyansky in the eighteenth century to Tarnopolsky in the twenty-first, as well as all of the famous names in between....

In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals--including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg--who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would...

Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) was one of jazz's greatest and most enigmatic figures. As a composer, pianist, and bandleader, Monk both extended the piano tradition known as Harlem stride and was at the center of modern jazz's creation during the 1940s, setting the stage for...

Music and Revolution provides a dynamic introduction to the most prominent artists and musical styles that have emerged in Cuba since 1959 and to the policies that have shaped artistic life. Robin D. Moore gives readers a chronological overview of the first decades after...

Opera performances are often radically inventive. Composers' revisions, singers' improvisations, and stage directors' re-imaginings continually challenge our visions of canonical works. But do they go far enough? This elegantly written, beautifully concise book, spanning almost the entire history of opera, reexamines attitudes toward some...