Music-History & Criticism

A behind-the-scenes look at the premieres of five extraordinary operas What was it like at the opening night of Mozart's Don Giovanni or Wagner's Das Rheingold? This glittering introduction to the world of opera takes us behind the scenes during premiere performances of five...

This provocative book explores the cross-fertilization between music and the visual arts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reassessing the work of a wide range of composers and artists including Richard Wagner, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and John Cage, Simon Shaw-Miller demonstrates how...

A century of recording has fundamentally changed our experience of music-the way we listen to it and the way it is performed. This highly engaging book is the first thorough exploration of the impact of recording technology upon the art of music. Timothy Day...

In this concise and engaging analysis of rock music, music theorist Ken Stephenson explores the features that make this internationally popular music distinct from earlier music styles. The author offers a guided tour of rock music from the 1950s to the present, emphasizing the...

From the Parisian operettas of Jacques Offenbach in the 1850s to such current blockbuster musicals as Les Mis rables and Rent, musical theatre has given joy to audiences throughout the world. This lively book--an illustrated history of popular musical theatre--provides a compendium of fascinating...

This important book investigates the role played by German musicology in buttressing Nazi institutions and ideology. Pamela Potter examines the social, economic, and intellectual factors that caused some German musical scholars to support with such fervor the ideological aims of the Nazis. She argues...

Germany's cultural glory and for a time Germany's political shame: the operatic festival established by Richard Wagner in 1876 is one of the most intriguing phenomena in modern European intellectual history. The oldest and best known of all musical festivals, Bayreuth soon after Wagner's...

They may wear cowboy hats and boots and sing about "faded love," but western swing musicians have always played jazz! From Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys to Asleep at the Wheel, western swing performers have played swing jazz on traditional country instruments, with...

In The Singing Irish, Michael Alan Anderson brings to life the rich history and traditions of the Notre Dame Glee Club. Replete with nearly three hundred images, the stunning large-format book examines the early history of the ensemble before 1915, its robust membership, rehearsal...

The book can be viewed as representing the birth of evolutionary biomusicology.What biological and cognitive forces have shaped humankind's musical behavior and the rich global repertoire of musical structures? What is music for, and why does every human culture have it? What are the...

How record albums and their covers delivered mood music, lifestyle advice, global sounds, and travel tips to midcentury Americans who longed to be modern.The sleek hi-fi console in a well-appointed midcentury American living room might have had a stack of albums by musicians like...

In this new collection of interviews, Steve Cushing once again invites readers into the vaults of Blues Before Sunrise, his acclaimed nationally syndicated public radio show. Icons from Memphis Minnie to the Gay Sisters stand alongside figures like schoolteacher Flossie Franklin, who helped Leroy...

The all-embracing, "whaddya got?" nature of rebellion in Fifties America included pop music's unlikely challenge to entrenched notions of masculinity. Within that upheaval, four prominent artists dared to behave in ways that let the public assume--but not see--their queerness. That these artists cultivated ambiguous...

King of the Queen City is the first comprehensive history of King Records, one of the most influential independent record companies in the history of American music. Founded by businessman Sydney Nathan in the mid-1940s, this small outsider record company in Cincinnati, Ohio, attracted...

Inspired by the Hank Williams and Leadbelly recordings he heard as a teenager growing up outside of Boston, Jim Rooney began a musical journey that intersected with some of the biggest names in American music including Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Bill Monroe, Muddy Waters,...

Exploring the relationship between queer sexuality and music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuryQueer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity approaches modern sexuality by way of music. Through the hidden or lost stories of composers, scholars, patrons, performers, audiences, repertoires, venues, and...

As one of the first African American vocalists to be recorded, Bessie Smith is a prominent figure in American popular culture and African American history. Michelle R. Scott uses Smith's life as a lens to investigate broad issues in history, including industrialization, Southern rural...

This collection is the first interdisciplinary volume to examine black women's negotiation of race and gender in African American music. Contributors address black women's activity in musical arenas that pre- and postdate the emergence of the vaudeville blues singers of the 1920s. Throughout, the...

Did Elvis Presley's brand of rock 'n' roll help revise racial attitudes in postwar America? Michael T. Bertrand delves into this question and many others to investigate popular music's revolutionary influence on black-white relations in the South. Youthful fans of rhythm and blues, rock...

The twentieth anniversary paperback edition, updated with a new preface Winner of the International Bluegrass Music Association Distinguished Achievement Award and of the Country Music People Critics' Choice Award for Favorite Country Book of the YearBeginning with the musical cultures of the American South...

This book traces the lives of the Snowdens, an African American family of musicians and farmers living in rural Knox County, Ohio. Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks examine the Snowdens' musical and social exchanges with rural whites from the 1850s through the...

Elvis Presley and Bill Haley. Sam Cooke and the Shirelles. The Crows and the Chords. American Bandstand and Motown. From its first rumblings in the outland alphabet soup of R&B and C&W, rock & roll music promised to change the world--and did it. Combining...

From cradle to great, the comprehensive real story of Bill Monroe The Father of Bluegrass Music, Bill Monroe was a major star of the Grand Ole Opry for over fifty years; a member of the Country Music, Songwriters, and Rock and Roll Halls of...

Music videos have ranged from simple tableaux of a band playing its instruments to multimillion dollar, high-concept extravaganzas. Born of a sudden expansion in new broadcast channels, music videos continue to exert an enormous influence on popular music. They help to create an artist's...

Alongside readings of modern novels (including work by David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Jackie Kay and Andrew O'Hagan), Gerry Smyth offers an extended theoretical analysis of the relationship between music and fiction, as well as a critical overview of the role played by music in...

Following A Century of Premiers: Salisbury to Blair, Leonard turns his attention to their 19th Century predecessors. In a series of 20 biographical essays, he recounts the principal events of their political careers, assesses their performance as Prime Ministers, and asks what lasting influence...

Long before the United States had presidents from the world of movies and reality TV, we had scores of politicians with connections to country music. In I'd Fight the World, Peter La Chapelle traces the deep bonds between country music and politics, from the...

Long a favorite on dance floors in Latin America, the porro, cumbia, and vallenato styles that make up Colombia's m俍ica tropical are now enjoying international success. How did this music--which has its roots in a black, marginal region of the country--manage, from the 1940s...

Offering a broad perspective of the philosophy, theory, and aesthetics of early Indian music and musical ideology, this study makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of the ancient foundations of India's musical culture. Lewis Rowell reconstructs the tunings, scales, modes, rhythms, gestures, formal...

New Musical Figurations exemplifies a dramatically new way of configuring jazz music and history. By relating biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture--a culture that...

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...

At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701-60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history's most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue...

"Playing in an orchestra in an intelligent way is the best school for democracy."--Daniel Barenboim The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been led by a storied group of conductors. And from 1994 to 2015, through the best work of Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink,...

Author: Leonard B. MeyerISBN-10: 0226521435ISBN-13: 9780226521435Publisher: University of Chicago PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/01/1994Pages: 349Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.02lbsSize: 8.54h x 5.58w x 0.84d

While the Haitian musical tradition is probably best known for the Vodou-inspired roots music that helped topple the two-generation Duvalier dictatorship, the nation's troubled history of civil unrest and its tangled relationship with the United States is more intensely experienced through its art music,...

As the United States transitioned from a rural nation to an urbanized, industrial giant between the War of 1812 and the early twentieth century, ordinary people struggled over the question of what it meant to be American. As Brian Roberts shows in Blackface Nation,...

Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance--so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust,...

Is it merely a coincidence that the three "Bs" of classical music--Bach, Beethoven, Brahms--are all German composers? Why do concert halls all over the world feature mostly the works of German and Austrian composers as their standard repertoire? Over the past three centuries, supporters...

From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art...

Georges Barrère (1876-1944) holds a preeminent place in the history of American flute playing. Best known for two of the landmark works that were written for him--the Poem of Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Density 21.5 by Edgard Varèse--he was the most prominent early exemplar...

Hipness has been an indelible part of America's intellectual and cultural landscape since the 1940s. But the question What is hip? remains a kind of cultural koan, equally intriguing and elusive. In Dig, Phil Ford argues that while hipsters have always used clothing, hairstyle,...

In the late 1960s, a new movement emerged championing historically informed 'authentic' approaches to performance. Heard today in concert halls across the world and in a library's worth of recordings, it has completely transformed the way in which we listen to 'old' music, while...

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was one of the most important composers and musical thinkers of the 20th century. His contributions as a composer, as a performer and as the father of ethnomusicology changed the course of music history and of our contemporary perception of music...

The greatest Southern storyteller of our time, New York Times bestselling author Rick Bragg, tracks down the greatest rock and roller of all time, Jerry Lee Lewis--and gets his own story, from the source, for the very first time.A monumental figure on the American...

In Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain, Charles R. Cross, author of the New York Times bestselling Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, examines the legacy of the Nirvana front man and takes on the question: why does Kurt Cobain still...

"Full of tasty morsels. A delightful book to arm one for the next dull cocktail party." --Chicago TribuneRick Beyer, author of the highly successful History Channel series The Greatest Stories Never Told returns with new historic tales from the world of music--ennobling, entrancing and...

A snarky, fact-filled look at the people and places that made the indie/punk scene what it is todayThe American underground music scene is exploding everywhere--not just in New York City and L.A. (although we've got those cities covered too ): In Washington, D.C. ....

Wedding the American oral storytelling tradition with progressive music journalism, Mitch Myers' The Boy Who Cried Freebird is a treatise on the popular music culture of the twentieth century. Trenchant, insightful, and wonderfully strange, this literary mix-tape is authentic music history . . ....

After more than three decades and 150 million albums, AC/DC has established itself as much more than just a great rock band. For millions of fans spanning several generations across the world, they are an ear-bleedingly loud, sweat-soaked religion.Now, in a book of astonishing...

Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith is available in time for the Aerosmith's 40th Anniversary. It's the New York Times bestselling autobiography by the legendary rock group that lived by the motto "Anything worth doing was worth overdoing." Aerosmith shook the music world...