Music-History & Criticism

The legions of Bob Dylan fans know that Dylan is not just a great composer, writer, and performer, but a great thinker as well. In Bob Dylan and Philosophy, eighteen philosophers analyze Dylan's ethical positions, political commitments, views on gender and sexuality, and his...

What is required for a listener to understand a piece of music? Does aural understanding depend upon reflective awareness of musical architecture or large-scale musical structure? Jerrold Levinson thinks not. In contrast to what is commonly assumed, Levinson argues that basic understanding of music...

This is the story of Chicago's vibrant music scene in the 1960s and 1970s.The 1960s and 1970s was a time when jazz, rock and roll, country and western, folk, blues, and R & B flowed through the streets of Chicagoland. Much has been written...

Washington Post national arts reporter Geoff Edgers takes a deep dive into the story behind "Walk This Way," Aerosmith and Run-DMC's legendary, groundbreaking mashup that forever changed music. The early 1980s were an exciting time for music. Hair metal bands were selling out stadiums,...

He has recorded with the biggest stars in the music business. He wrote many of the hits that made Sean "Puffy" Combs one of the richest men alive. On the surface, the multi-million dollar empire that Puff built looks like the stuff of dreams....

A concise history of classical music from c. 1750 to c. 1830, from Gluck to BeethovenAuthor: Julian RushtonISBN-10: 0500202109ISBN-13: 9780500202104Publisher: Thames & HudsonLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/17/1986Pages: 194Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.93lbsSize: 8.24h x 5.98w x 0.53d

Gillespie discusses 350 composers and their works for harpsichord and piano, including Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Debussy. Includes 116 musical examples, illustrations, and a glossary of musical terms.Author: John GillespieISBN-10: 048622855XISBN-13: 9780486228556Publisher: Dover PublicationsLanguage: EnglishPublished: 06/01/1972Pages: 512Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.51lbsSize: 9.19h x 6.49w x...

Stanley Crouch-MacArthur "Genius" Award recipient, co-founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center, National Book Award nominee, and perennial bull in the china shop of black intelligentsia-has been writing about jazz and jazz artists for more than thirty years. His reputation for controversy is exceeded only...

The perfect music gift from one of the most trusted names in continuing education. Learn how to better appreciate music in this guide that will unlock the knowledge you need to understand "the most abstract and sublime of all the arts." Whether you're listening...

Reel Music, revised for a new generation of movie lovers, tells the story of film music through iconic scenes. The Second Edition features more in-depth exploration of international films--from classics like Seven Samurai to more recent works like Run Lola Run--as well as new...

A wickedly funny look at opera today--the feuds and deals, maestros and managers, divine voices and outsized egos--and a portrait of the opera world's newest superstar at a formative point in her life and career. In Cinderella & Company, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Manuela Hoelterhoff...

One journalist's wild summer on the road with the world's most popular cult rock band, Phish. Despite their enormous success and their status as America's biggest cult rock and roll band, Phish remains an enigma. Each of their albums has sold more than 500,000...

Jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, and bassoonist Garvin Bushell (1902-1991) performed with many of the twentieth century's greatest jazz musicians--from Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, and Cab Calloway to Eric Dolphy, Gil Evans, and John Coltrane--during his remarkable career that spanned from 1916 to the 1980s. Although...

An essential resource for scholars and performers, this study by a world-renowned specialist illuminates the piano music of four major French composers, in comparative and reciprocal context. Howat explores the musical language and ethos of this repertoire, juxtaposing structural analysis with editorial and performing...

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 with...

"We have in this book a Rosetta stone for mediating, or translating, African musical behavior and aesthetics."-Andrew Tracey, African Music "John Miller Chernoff, who spent 10 years studying African drumming, has a flair for descriptive writing, and his first-person narratives should be easily understood...

SECRETS OF THE WALL REVEALED Imagine dusting off a beloved album, comfortable as an old pair of jeans, and one day discovering that it goes much deeper down the rabbit hole than you ever envisioned. The thematic intention of every note...The nuance behind every...

"To be truly strong, a performer/artist must enter into extreme vulnerability. If you embrace vulnerability, you emerge fearless from staring your fear in the face. The more open you are in your work as a performer/artist, the more strength you gather."--Jarboe (Swans)In a series...

In the early 1970s, an era of grand gestures in rock, no band could match the scale of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Boasting an impressive pedigree in previous bands, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer were huge from the off, the ultimate progressive...

Franz Xaver Niemetschek was born in 1766 in what is now the Czech Republic and came from a musical family, which gave him a deep appreciation and admiration for Mozart's genius. In 1798 he published his biography on Mozart, with a touching dedication to...

In the fall of 1969, a rumor swept across two continents that the lovable Beatle, Paul McCartney, had been killed in a car crash. According to some, he was replaced by "Billy Shears." This book is an attempt to separate fact from fiction. Join...

July, 1967: It seems the entire country stopped to listen to a husky voice steeped in the simmering secrets of the South tell a tragic tale of teenage suicide. So much for the Summer of Love. "Ode to Billie Joe" knocked the Beatles' "All...

Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for ExcellenceBest Research in Record Labels-Certificate of Merit (2012) The Starday Story: The House That Country Music Built is the first book entirely dedicated to one of the most influential music labels of the twentieth century. In addition...

The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. "Coon songs," with their ugly name,...

From 1920's Speakeasy to mid-century haunt of the famous and infamous, discover the tantalizing history of a legendary New Jersey Nightclub.Where did Frank Sinatra, Mickey Mantle, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joan Crawford and hundreds of other A-listers along with mobsters like Meyer Lansky eat, drink...

Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933), the first performer elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, was a folk hero in his own lifetime and has been idolized by fans and emulated by performers ever since. His life story has been particularly susceptible to romanticizing, marked...

Charleston Jazz sets out to reveal the rich, untold story of the evolution of American jazz in one of its major cradles: Charleston, South Carolina. The text and images show that what happened on the Gullah coast of South Carolina in terms of history,...

Nicolo Paganini: His Life and Work is a classical music biography by Stephen Samuel Stratton. There are some names, the mere mention or thought of which conjure up distinct personalities; such are Handel, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner; but not one has the extraordinary individuality of...

Every now and then, a song inspires a cultural conversation that ends up looking like a brawl. Merle Haggard's Okie from Muskogee, released in 1969, is a prime example of that important role of popular music. Okie immediately helped to frame an ongoing discussion...

Of all the white American pop music groups that hit the charts before the Beatles, only the Beach Boys continued to thrive throughout the British Invasion to survive into the 1970s and beyond. The Beach Boys helped define both sides of the era we...

In 1720, Antonio Stradivari crafted an exquisite work of art-a cello known as the Piatti. Over the next three centuries of its life, the Piatti cello left its birthplace of Cremona, Italy, and resided in Spain, Ireland, England, Italy, Germany, and the United States....

Go inside the people and places that made Atlanta the pop music capital of the United States in the second half of the 20th century.Former DJ Bill Lowery attracted a galaxy of talent and created an empire of music publishing, productiAuthor: Andy Lee White,...

The music that has been produced in Memphis over the past 100 years is as unique and diverse as the city itself. Growing out of the Mississippi Delta, the Memphis blues have been transported worldwide by such ambassadors as B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf....

Sex, death and nostalgia are among the impulses driving Beatles fandom: the metaphorical death of the Beatles after their break-up in 1970 has fueled the progressive nostalgia of fan conventions for 48 years; the death of John Lennon and George Harrison has added pathos...

West Midlands 1980s, home to heavy metal. Black Sabbath and Judas Priest are household names, but over the smoking chimneys and factory yards something new and equally ugly forms... 'Grebo' was a media constructed music genre that even today sends a shudder down the...

Includes a plot summary, brief history, and list of selected recordings for each ballad! Presented here are thirty of the most popular stateside ballads of murder by pistol, axe, penknife and poison. Whether based on true crimes or traditional tales from the Old World,...

A compendium of other musics, channelled from the spirit world, the fairy kingdom, outer space, secret societies and occult lodges. This unique collection of esoteric earworms gathers, and reproduces, music from other worlds. Here you'll find tunes hummed, strummed, and sung by spirits, sprites,...

Fawzia Afzal-Khan's book is an important and timely feminist intervention in the study of classical music and a cogent challenge to the prevailing antisecular orthodoxy in the academy. In this complex and sensitive study...of the careers of artistes like Malka Pukhraj, Roshanara Begum, Reshma,...

Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination explores the intersection of gender, art religion (Kunstreligion) and other aesthetic currents in Brahms reception of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the...

Hip Hop has told the tale and now it's time to reflect back...This cultural brilliance of sound presented a voice detailing life growing up in the streets of America's largest cities of color as far back as the 1920s. Sprung from the spirits of...

BTS did it again Map of the Soul: 7 is a capstone of a 2-album project intended to reveal the inner landscape of the human soul that is packed with rich symbolism and woven together with BTS's signature sound and moves. Starting with the...

How can performing be transformed into cognition? Knowing in Performing describes dynamic processes of artistic knowledge production in music and the performing arts. Knowing refers to how processual, embodied, and tacit knowledge can be developed from performative practices in music, dance, theatre, and film....

Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk is the first book-length portrait of punk as a musical style with an emphasis on how punk developed in relation to changing ideas of race in American society from the late 1960s to the early 1980s....

The Clash were an extraordinary band. Bursting out of the Punk explosion in 1977, they recorded their self-titled first album over three weekends. It is now regarded as the quintessential Punk record. Over the next five years they recorded another fourteen sides of long-playing...

In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive--individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another--some 11,000 to...

The first performance of George Frideric Handel's Messiah in Dublin in 1742 is now legendary. Gentlemen were asked to leave their swords at home and ladies to come without hoops in their skirts in order to fit more people into the audience. The initial...

An argument that by amplifying alienation in performance, we can shift the emphasis from the sonic to the social.Works in sound studies continue to seek out sound "itself"--but, today, when the aesthetic can claim no autonomy and the agency of both artist and audience...

Depeche Mode FAQ will appeal to both casual and diehard fans of the band. It's an enlightening and informative account of the forty-year history of the leading synth-pop act. The book provides the reader with a handy reference guide while digging deep into what...

Dark sound carries the dense cultural weight of darkness; it is the undertow of music that embodies melancholy, desire, grief, violence, rage, pain, loss and longing. Compelling and unnerving, dark sound immerses bodies in the darkest moments and delves into the depths of our...

In seventeenth century Italy, overcrowding, violent political uprising, and plague led an astonishing number of abandoned and orphaned children to overwhelm the cities. Out of the piety of private citizens and the apathy of local governments, the system of conservatori was created to house,...