Music-History & Criticism

Women's Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound shines a long-overdue light on the works and lives of female-identifying screen composers. Bringing together composer profiles, exclusive interview excerpts, and industry case studies, this volume showcases their achievements and reflects on the systemic gender...

Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, M ire Bhu N Laeire (Yellow Mary O'Leary; 1774-1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song....

Stravinsky in Context offers an alternative to chronological biography. Thirty-five short, specially commissioned essays explore the eventful life-tapestry from which Stravinsky's compositions emerged. The opening chapters draw on new research into the composer's childhood in St. Petersburg. Stravinsky's early, often traumatic upbringing is examined...

One of the most iconic and successful British bands of the 1980s, Level 42 are also arguably the ultimate 'fusion' unit, streamlining their energetic early jazz/funk/rock sound into slick, effortlessly-soulful pop music. Encompassing eleven studio albums, including twenty UK top 40 hits and two...

From the earliest days of rock and roll, white artists regularly achieved fame, wealth, and success that eluded the Black artists whose work had preceded and inspired them. This dynamic continued into the 1960s, even as the music and its fans grew to be...

The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's precocity is so familiar as to be taken for granted. In scholarship and popular culture, Mozart the Wunderkind is often seen as belonging to a category of childhood all by himself. But treating the young composer as an...

Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music, in which popular-music idioms are merged with lush string orchestrations and big-band instrumentation. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through...

American Folklore from the great northwest zine scene in the early nineties Call it jazz, punk, metal, garage rock or rawk, Seattle's music scene has always thrived. During the roaring '90s the local Puget Sound musicians took the global stage and owned our collective...

Here for the first time is a stirring collection of 110 rare songs from the Holocaust in sixteen languages with singable English translations, songs of resistance, despair, rage, hope, and even humor, written in the face of utter evil. The very existence of these...

Antifascist and socialist monuments pervaded the landscape of the former German Democratic Republic (1949-89), presenting a distorted vision of the national past. Official commemorative culture in East Germany celebrated a selective set of political heroes, seeming to leave no public space for mourning those...

UFO, the legendary band which have been gracing the world's stages for the last 50 years, have given us more than their fair share of superb quality hard rock songs including 'Doctor, Doctor', 'Rock Bottom', 'Shoot Shoot', 'Too Hot To Handle', and 'Only You...

The formative early ballets of West Side Story creators Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins explored in detail for the very first time. 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Winner. Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins stand as giants of the musical-theatre world, but it was...

Author: Jez RowdenISBN-10: 1789520363ISBN-13: 9781789520361Publisher: Sonicbond PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 05/15/2021Pages: 160Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.55lbsSize: 8.20h x 5.80w x 0.60d

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk-the ideal of the "total work of art"-has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner,...

A missed phone call. A misheard word. An indiscernible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates...

Self Empunishment contains 34 conversations with self-reliant, self-employed, and otherwise self-motivated musicians, technicians, and artists. The interviews, conducted by Brian Walsby, are revealing discussions about what has led these artists to where they are now, what choices have guided their journey, why they do...

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. In this book, Benjamin Lapidus...

The composer Thomas Tallis (c. 1505 - November 1585) lived and worked through much of the turbulent Tudor period in England. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not just react to radical change: he thrived on it. He helped invent new musical styles...

Following the creation of the United States, profound disagreements remained over how to secure the survival of the republic and unite its diverse population. In this pathbreaking account, Billy Coleman uses the history of American music to illuminate the relationship between elite power and...

Essays on important topics in early music. Christopher Page is one of the most influential and distinguished scholars and performers of medieval music. His first book, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages (1987), marked the beginning of what might be called the"Page turn"...

Captures seven hit-making decades during the American recording industry's glittering, freewheeling years.Tommy LiPuma was one of America's most successful record producers whose work with seminal artists like Miles Davis, Diana Krall, Barbra Streisand, Rickie Lee Jones, George Benson, and Willie Nelson went on to...

In Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture, M. J. Grant explores the history of this iconic song, demonstrating how its association with ideas of fellowship, friendship and sociality has enabled it to become so significant for such a wide range of individuals...

A pathbreaking study of the Parisian press's attempts to claim Richard Wagner's place in French history and imagination during the unstable and conflict-ridden years of the Third Reich. Richard Wagner was a polarizing figure in France from the time that he first entered French...

Little Feat may not be a household name, but they are well-known to a good number of musicians who are: Keith Richards rounded up the Rolling Stones to see them perform in Amsterdam in 1975, Robert Plant publicly lamented their lack of success (as...

There has never been - and never will be - another band like Opeth. Formed in Stockholm, Sweden circa 1989, their roughly thirty-year career showcases a melding of diverse influences; a prevailing commitment to songwriting and instrumental excellence; and unwaveringly chameleonic vision - no...

Tin Pan Alley, once New York City's songwriting and recording mecca, issued more than a thousand songs about the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. In Reinventing Dixie, John Bush Jones explores the broad impact of these songs in creating...

A complete and harmonious history of music, from prehistory to the present day! Have you ever wondered how blues influenced rock music? Or why jazz took a more Latin-American approach? Classical or rock, everyone has their favorite music style, but how did your top...

The Three Apostles of Russian Music looks at three figures in the Soviet avant-garde who led modernist music in the 1920s. Mosolov, Popov, and Roslavets were popular composers who are now unfortunately forgotten. These remarkable musicians produced compositions like the sensational machine music Foundry...

'Status Quo? All their songs sound the same and they only know three chords' Really? This retrospective of one of Britain's most successful bands takes this lazy criticism and puts it to the sword. Spanning the period 1970 to 1984, the creative peaks and...

Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop shows how the vocal performances of girl singers in 1960s Britain defined-and sometimes defied-ideas about what it meant to be a young woman in the 1960s British pop music scene. The singing and expressive voices of...

It was the season of the blockbuster. Between August 12 and November 26 1991, a whole slew of acts released albums that were supposed to sell millions of copies in the run-up to Christmas. Metallica, Michael Jackson, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Garth Brooks, MC Hammer,...

Letters of an avant-garde iconThis selection of over five hundred letters gives us the life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important and groundbreaking composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his...

Jon Savage's 1991 book, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "the definitive history of the English punk movement." Widely imitated but never equaled, it remains that rare work of music history...

Stemming from the tradition of rallying troops and frightening enemies, mounted bands played a unique and distinctive role in American military history. Their fascinating story within the U.S. Army unfolds in this latest book from noted music historian and former army musician Bruce P....

An engrossing and intimate portrait of the Oklahoma-based psychedelic pop band the Flaming Lips, cult heroes to millions of indie-rock fans.In July 2002, the Flaming Lips released an ambitious album called Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which merged elements of orchestral pop, electronic dance...

When Irving Berlin first conceived the song "White Christmas," he envisioned it as a "throwaway" -- a satirical novelty number for a vaudeville-style stage revue. By the time Bing Crosby introduced the tune in the winter of 1942, it had evolved into something far...

Detroit is famous for its cars and its music. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Motor City fans experienced a golden age of rock and roll.Rock was the defiant voice of the boomer generation. The 1960s and the 1970s were turbulent decades. Blacks and...

The first systematic bottom-up look at the writers of the rock era, using publicly available information, including copyrights, royalty rights, labels and crowdsourced databases. The data set is huge--all three major magazines, 24,426 songs, 11,834 writers and 10,773 writer teams. Each song is scored,...

A rare look at the life and music of renowned Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov During his lifetime, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) was a composer whose work had great influence not only in his native Russia but also internationally. While he remains well-known in Russia--where many...

First published in 1960, Albert B. Lord's The Singer of Tales remains the fundamental study of the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of oral epic poetry. Based upon pathbreaking fieldwork conducted in the 1930s and 1950s among oral epic singers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia,...

Who's better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply...

Dylan Jones' luminous excavation of Jimmy Webb's song 'Wichita Lineman' offers a portal into a defining moment of American cultural history. The sound of Wichita Lineman was the sound of ecstatic solitude - but then its hero was the quintessential loner. What a great...

The Cambridge Companion to the Saxophone tells the story of the saxophone, its history and technical development from Adolphe Sax (who invented it c.1840) to the end of the 20th century. It includes extensive accounts of the instrument's history in jazz, rock and classical...

In 1877 Thomas Edison dreamed that one day there would be a talking machine in every home, but even his legendary vision could not have foreseen the way that recorded sound would pervade modern life. From the first thin sheet of tinfoil that was...

A. J. Racy is well known as a scholar of ethnomusicology and as a distinguished performer and composer. In this pioneering book, he provides an intimate portrayal of the Arab musical experience and offers insights into how music generally affects us all. The focus...

This book is the first complete study in English of the work of the best-known Japanese composer of the twentieth century. It is also the first book in this language to offer an in-depth analysis of his music. T D-oru Takemitsu's works are increasingly...

The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and...

What is jazz? What is gained--and what is lost--when various communities close ranks around a particular definition of this quintessentially American music? Jazz/Not Jazz explores some of the musicians, concepts, places, and practices which, while deeply connected to established jazz institutions and aesthetics, have...

"Invaluable as a work of reference, in addition to being full of sound judgments and happy suggestions." -- Jacques Barzun, MLA NotesA distinguished musicologist explores 19th-century French art songs in this fascinating study of the melodies of Berlioz, Liszt, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Franck, Fauré, and...

A new edition of Dave Marsh's classic work on the three-chord song that rocked the world "A tale as compelling as any John Grisham thriller."-Rolling Stone "Dave Marsh's Louie Louie is part rant, part rock criticism and part cultural analysis, with a good dose...