Music-History & Criticism

In this critical history, DeForrest Brown, Jr "makes techno Black again" by tracing the music's origins in Detroit and beyondIn Assembling a Black Counter Culture, writer and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr, provides a history and critical analysis of techno and adjacent electronic music such...

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for CriticismA New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the YearTime magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping...

Conversations with the avant-garde's leading lights--from Suicide to Anohni--by experimental music's go-to interviewer, guitarist and sound artist Alan LichtFor the past 30 years, Alan Licht has been a performer, programmer and chronicler of New York's art and music scenes. His dry wit, deep erudition...

Vienna in the 1880s. Paris in the 1920s. Memphis in the 1950s. These are the paradigm shifts of modern culture. Memphis then was like Seattle with grunge or Brooklyn with hip-hop-except the change was more than musical: Underground Memphis embraced black American culture when...

Keith Jarrett is one of the great pianists of our times. Before achieving worldwide fame for his solo improvisations, he had already collaborated with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. His Kn Concert album (1975) has now sold around four million copies and...

An examination of NASA's Golden Record that offers new perspectives and theories on how music can be analyzed, listened to, and thought about--by aliens and humans alike. In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained...

The definitive history of the world's most famous 12-string electric guitar. When the Byrds recorded their hit version of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man " they popularized a new sound in pop music: the electric 12-string guitar. Rickenbacker is the guitar maker that brought the...

The quadrivium-the classical curriculum-comprises the four liberal arts of number, geometry, music, and cosmology. It was studied from antiquity to the Renaissance as a way of glimpsing the nature of reality. Geometry is number in space; music is number in time; and cosmology expresses...

He is known as the Mark Twain of American songwriting, a man who transformed the everyday happenings of regular people into plainly profound statements on war, industrialization, religion, and the human condition. Marking the 50th anniversary of the album's release, John Prine chronicles the...

An all-access, firsthand account of the life and music of one of history's most beloved bands--from an original mastering engineer at Abbey Road Geoff Emerick became an assistant engineer at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in 1962 at age fifteen, and was present as...

"One of the most important documentaries on rock music ever published, this is EMI Records' official diary-format history of every Beatles recording session. Researched from hundreds of unreleased Abbey Road archive tapes, it features thousands of previously unpublished studio documents and interviews with many...

Sergey Prokofiev (1891-1953), arguably the most popular composer of the twentieth century, led a life of triumph and tragedy. The story of his prodigious childhood in tsarist Russia, maturation in the West, and rise and fall as a Stalinist-era composer is filled with unresolved...

"Bang your head Metal Health'll drive you mad " -- Quiet Riot Like an episode of VH1's Behind the Music on steroids, Bang Your Head is an epic history of every band and every performer that has proudly worn the Heavy Metal badge. Whether...

The Funk Era and Beyond is the first scholarly collection to discuss the significance of funk music in America. Contributors employ a multitude of methodologies to examine this unique musical genre's relationship to African American culture and to music, literature, and visual art as...

Throughout the history of slavery, enslaved people organized resistance, escape, and rebellion. Sustaining them in this struggle was their music, some examples of which are sung to this day. While the existence of slave songs, especially spirituals, is well known, their character is often...

Throughout the history of slavery, enslaved people organized resistance, escape, and rebellion. Sustaining them in this struggle was their music, some examples of which are sung to this day. While the existence of slave songs, especially spirituals, is well known, their character is often...

Following the Drums: African American Fife and Drum Music in Tennessee is an epic history of a little-known African American instrumental music form. John M. Shaw follows the music from its roots in West Africa and early American militia drumming to its prominence in...

In 1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli cowrote Free Jazz/Black Power, a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism. It remains a testimony to the long-ignored encounter of radical African American music and French left-wing criticism....

Elizabeth Stewart is a highly acclaimed singer, pianist, and accordionist whose reputation has spread widely not only as an outstanding musician but as the principal inheritor and advocate of her family and their music. First discovered by folklorists in the 1950s, the Stewarts of...

In October 2001, an unlikely gathering of musicians calling itself the MuzikMafia took place at the Pub of Love in Nashville, Tennessee. "We had all been beat up pretty good by the 'industry' and we told ourselves, if nothing else, we might as well...

What do such artists as Bob Marley, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nina Simone, and Sun Ra have in common? All created uniquely powerful musical art that had a profound effect on their audiences. Through their music and their lives, they became forces for liberation, challenging...

Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie examines the cultural and political significance of lyrics by beloved songwriter and activist Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie. The text traces how Guthrie documented the history of America's poor and disadvantaged through lyrics about topics as...

Around the world there are grandparents, parents, and children who can still sing ditties by Tigger or Baloo the Bear or the Seven Dwarves. This staying power and global reach is in large part a testimony to the pizzazz of performers, songwriters, and other...

When a jazz hero dies, rumors, speculation, gossip, and legend can muddle the real cause of death. In this book, Frederick J. Spencer, M.D., conducts an inquest on how jazz greats lived and died pursuing their art. Forensics, medical histories, death certificates, and biographies...

American soul music of the 1960s is one of the most creative and influential musical forms of the twentieth century. With its merging of gospel, R&B, country, and blues, soul music succeeded in crossing over from African American culture into the general pop culture....

Finalist for the 2019 Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year About Jazz, Jazz Awards for Journalism "Is there jazz in China?" This is the question that sent author Eugene Marlow on his quest to uncover the history of jazz in China. Marlow traces...

In Music in Disney's Animated Features James Bohn investigates how music functions in Disney animated films and identifies several vanguard techniques used in them. In addition, he also presents a history of music in Disney animated films, as well as biographical information on several...

Finalist for the 2019 Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year About Jazz, Jazz Awards for Journalism "Is there jazz in China?" This is the question that sent author Eugene Marlow on his quest to uncover the history of jazz in China. Marlow traces...

In New Orleans, music screams. It honks. It blats. It wails. It purrs. It messes with time. It messes with pitch. It messes with your feet. It messes with your head. One musician leads to another; traditions overlap, intertwine, nourish each other; and everyone...

Celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the acclaimed and influential debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill with this eye-opening and moving exploration of Lauryn Hill and her remarkable artistic legacy.Released in 1998, Lauryn Hill's first solo album is often cited by music critics as...

From Simon & Schuster, Moguls and Madmen is Jory Farr's guide to the pursuit of power in popular music. As Jory Farr describes in the prologue of Moguls and Madmen, "this book is not for them [multi millionaire super scouts and corporate executives], however....

Traditional approaches to musical form have always adopted a top-down perspective whereby a work's form organizes and unifies the individual parts of the work through an overarching logic. How Sonata Forms turns this view on its head, proposing instead that it was the parts...

Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death:...

A monumental study of musical practices in 18th century Santiago de Chile, and the only English-language monograph about Chilean colonial music, A Sweet Penance of Music offers a comprehensive view of musicians within the city and their links with other Latin American urban centers...

Includes index and bibliographical references.Author: HerreraISBN-10: 0190877537ISBN-13: 9780190877538Publisher: Oxford University Press, USALanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/16/2020Pages: 224Format: HardcoverWeight: 1.10lbsSize: 9.30h x 6.20w x 0.50d

Opera has always been a vital and complex mixture of commercial and aesthetic concerns, of bourgeois politics and elite privilege. In its long heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it came to occupy a special place not only among the arts but in...

A companion volume to David Schulenberg's textbook, Music of the Baroque, Third Edition, this anthology features frequently studied works by such celebrated Baroque composers as Bach, Handel, and Monteverdi together with compositions by lesser-known composers like Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre. Each score is...

At its most intimate level, music heals our emotional wounds and inspires us. At its most public, it unites people across cultural boundaries. But can it rebuild a city? That's the central question posed in New Atlantis, journalist John Swenson's beautifully detailed account of...

Full-page newspaper ads announced the date. Reserved seats went on sale at premium prices. Audience members dressed up and arrived early to peruse the program during the overture that preceded the curtain's rise. And when the show began, it was--a rather disappointing film musical....

The phrase "popular music revolution" may instantly bring to mind such twentieth-century musical movements as jazz and rock 'n' roll. In Sounds of the Metropolis, however, Derek Scott argues that the first popular music revolution actually occurred in the nineteenth century, illustrating how a...

As audiences are increasingly no longer solely listeners but also active producer-consumers, and as video games and other interactive systems increasingly permeate our daily lives, understanding interactivity and its impact on the audience has never been more important. A collection of newly commissioned chapters...

Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body is a historical and theoretical examination of French court ballet over a hundred-year period, beginning in 1573, that spans the late Renaissance and early baroque. Utilizing aesthetic and ideological criteria, author Mark Franko analyzes court ballet...

Unique and often startling encounters between music and the moving image in the films of Stanley Kubrick are trademarks of his style; witness the powerful effects of Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in 2001: A Space Odyssey and of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in A Clockwork...

Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, A Love Supreme is widely considered John Coltrane's magnum opus and one of the greatest jazz albums of all time. In Beyond A Love Supreme, Tony Whyton explores both the musical complexities of A...

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood studios and record companies churned out films, albums, music videos and promotional materials that sought to recapture, revise, and re-imagine the 1950s. Breaking from dominant wisdom that casts the trend as wholly defined by Ronald Reagan's politics or...

As the field of Cultural History grows in prominence in the academic world, an understanding of the history of culture has become vital to scholars across disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music cultivates a return to the fundamental premises...

Given the variety and richness of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English 'songscape', it might seem unsurprising to suggest that early modern song needs to be considered as sung. When a reader encounters a song in a sonnet sequence, a romance, and even a masque...

Celebrating its 100th anniversary, this extraordinary series continues to amaze and captivate its readers with detailed insight into the lives and work of music's geniuses. Unlike other composer biographies that focus narrowly on the music, this series explores the personal history of each composer...

This book (published in German by B舐enreiter in 1988 and now available in English translation for the first time) is a comprehensive guide to the genesis, transmission, structure, meaning, and performance considerations of Bach's St John Passion. One of Bach's most fascinating works, its...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is one of the great icons of Western music. An amazing prodigy who toured the capitals of Europe as a child, astonishing royalty and professional musicians with his precocious skills, in his adulthood he wrote some of the finest music in...