Music-History & Criticism

Music gives specific meanings to our lives, but also to how we experience death; it forms a central part of death rituals, consoles survivors, and celebrates the deceased. Music & Death investigates different musical engagements with death. Its eleven essays examine a broad range...

From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend's mind, documenting and reflecting...

Pop music would be a different beast without the B-Side. Music history is riven with songs deemed throwaway that revolted against their lowly status and refused to be denied. Be it rock'n'roll's national anthem ('Rock Around The Clock'), disco's enduring game-changer ('I Feel Love')...

" With a foreword by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Chosen by the The Amelia Bloomer Project committee for their 2005 list of recommended feminist books for young readers. Girls Rock! explores the many ways women have defined themselves as rock musicians in an...

From male bisexuality to religion in pop, Little Richard spent the 1950s pioneering ideas that are still too challenging for the mainstream. As a Black multimillionaire rock star, he was the most exciting person on the planet between 1955 and 1957, the years in...

The American musical has achieved and maintained relevance to more people in America than any other performance-based art. This thoughtful history of the genre, intended for readers of all stripes, offers probing discussions of how American musicals, especially through their musical numbers, advance themes...

Hip hop is a global form of creative expression. In Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, rappers refuse the boundaries of hip hop's US genesis, claiming the art form as a means to empower themselves and their communities in the face of postcolonial racial and class...

The emergence of jazz out of New Orleans is part of the American story, but the creation of this music was more than a regional phenomenon: it also crossed geographical, cultural, and technological lines. Court Carney takes a new look at the spread and...

THREE STEPS TO HEAVEN: THE EDDIE COCHRAN STORYAuthor: Bobby CochranISBN-10: 0634032526ISBN-13: 9780634032523Publisher: Hal Leonard Publishing CorporationLanguage: EnglishPublished: 06/01/2003Pages: 278Format: HardcoverWeight: 1.13lbsSize: 9.42h x 6.34w x 0.71d

Teen pop is a sub-genre of popular music marketed to tweens and teens. Its melodic yearning and veneer of sincerity appeal to an emerging romantic eroticism and autonomy. But tweens and teens buy music that isn't primarily marketed to them, too. Teen pop encompasses...

Why do we feel the need to perform music in a historically informed style? Is this need related to wider cultural concerns? In this challenging study, John Butt sums up recent debates on the nature of the early music movement, calling upon a seemingly...

From the beginning, the Beatles acknowledged in interviews their debt to Black music, apparent in their covers of and written original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating unacknowledged forerunners, as...

Dreaming with Open Eyes examines visual symbolism in late seventeenth-century Italian opera, contextualizing the genre amid the broad ocularcentric debates emerging at the crossroads of the early modern period and the Enlightenment. Ayana O. Smith reevaluates significant aspects of the Arcadian reform aesthetic and...

Salamone Rossi (c.1570-c.1627) occupies a unique place in Renaissance music culture: he was the earliest outstanding Jewish composer to work in the European art music tradition. Working for the Gonzaga dukes in Mantua, yet remaining faithful to his own religious community, Rossi has a...

Proud to Be an Okie brings to life the influential country music scene that flourished in and around Los Angeles from the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s to the early 1970s. The first work to fully illuminate the political and cultural aspects of...

Despite the voluminous literature on Wagner's operas, little has been published that does justice to all the elements of their performance. This book, addressed to both specialists and the opera-going public, brings together a team of authorities from around the world to examine the...

The first book to critically examine the legacy of pop superstar Mariah Carey. When it comes to Mariah Carey, star power is never in doubt. She has sold hundreds of millions of albums and cut more chart-topping hits than any other solo artist--ever. And...

The Mexican American orquesta is neither a Mexican nor an American music. Relying on both the Mexican orquesta and the American dance band for repertorial and stylistic cues, it forges a synthesis of the two. The ensemble emerges historically as a powerful artistic vehicle...

Beloved music critic Tom Breihan's fascinating narrative of the history of popular music through the lens of game-changing #1 singles from the Billboard Hot 100. When Tom Breihan launched his Stereogum column in early 2018, "The Number Ones"--a space in which he has been...

One of the music world's pre-eminent critics takes a fresh and much-needed look at the day Dylan "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival, timed to coincide with the event's fiftieth anniversary.On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at...

Listen as you read! From Dixie to Rocky Top: Book Playlist, now on Spotify. The first book to explore the history of college fight songs as a culturally important phenomenon, From Dixie to Rocky Top zeroes in on the US South, where college football...

Author: Phil StrongmanISBN-10: 0752882414ISBN-13: 9780752882413Publisher: W&nLanguage: EnglishPublished: 11/22/2007Pages: 320Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.99lbsSize: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.67d

What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art...

From 1940 to 1990, new machines and devices radically changed listening to music. Small and large single records, new kinds of jukeboxes and loudspeaker systems not only made it possible to playback music in a different way, they also evidence a fundamental transformation of...

Contributors to this volume are Philip Alperson, Francis Sparshott, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Edward T. Cone, Peter Kivy, Jenefer Robinson, Joseph Margolis, Arnold Berleant, Morris Grossman, Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Davies, Martin Donougho, Roger Scruton, and Rose Rosengard Subotnik.Author: Philip AlpersonISBN-10: 0271013184ISBN-13: 9780271013183Publisher: Penn State University PressLanguage:...

Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory breaks new ground by redirecting the arguments of foundational texts within film theory to film sound tracks. Walker includes sustained analyses of particular films according to a range of theoretical approaches: psychoanalysis, feminism, genre studies, post-colonialism, and queer...

Unruly Media argues that we are the crest of a new international style in which sonic and visual parameters become heightened and accelerated. This audiovisual turn calls for new forms of attention. Post-classical cinema, with its multi-plot narratives and flashy style, fragments under the...

The Book's Usefulness. It is our hope and prayer that this book might be used of the Lord to convince and encourage even further those who are concerned about music in their churches. It will equip the reader with important facts to enable them...

Swing is back in style, and with it a renewed interest in the Big Band Era. And few players dominated that era more than Harry James, whose soaring trumpet solos and romantic hit tunes influenced popular music for a generation. Now, Peter J. Levinson,...

Elvis the Saint, Elvis the Sinner. For countless followers, Elvis means more than a rhinestone-studded jumpsuit and a pair of swinging hips. Elvis transcends, for whatever reason, this mortal coil. His influence on worldwide pop culture is stunning, ubiquitous, deeply profound. That so many...

Fantasy Pieces examines from several vantage points a vital life-force of Robert Schumann's music, namely metrical conflict. Harald Krebs's imaginative yet rigorous study makes use of Schumann's fascinating projections of his own personality--the characters Florestan and Eusebius--as one means of addressing the biographical and...

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects and capacities.Author: Fiona SampsonISBN-10: 147443262XISBN-13: 9781474432627Publisher: Edinburgh University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 02/22/2018Pages: 240Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.65lbsSize:...

Designed to introduce music students and musicians to the vitality of music philosophical discourse, Philosophical Perspectives on Music explores diverse accounts of the nature and value of music. It offers an accessible, even-handed consideration of philosophical orientations without advocating any single one, demonstrating that...

"A History of the Violin Bow" is a collection of classic articles on the subject of the violin, with a particular focus on the bow. The articles explore a range of topics from the history and origins of the violin, to notable makers, rare...

A King, a Tsar, a Marquis and a Messiah have one thing in common; they all had violin cases custom made for them. From the mundane to the magnificent, violin cases span the centuries and reflect the cultural values and aspirations of the times...

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...

Is God Funky or What?: Black Biblical Culture and Contemporary Popular Music complicates the traditional categories of sacred and secular by exposing religious rhetoric of contemporary popular black music and revealing a biblical-based spirituality that forms the cultural context.Author: Rochelle Brock, Theodore W. BurghISBN-10:...

The history of India's first electronic music studio founded in 1969 at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad by David Tudor. Subcontinental Synthesis explores the history of India's first electronic music studio, founded in 1969 at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad...

This book demonstrates the processes of intercultural musical collaboration and how these processes contribute to facilitating positive relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia. Each of the chapters in this edited collection examines specific examples in diverse contexts, and reflects on key issues...

What does it mean, in a polarized political climate, that feminism is popular in mainstream popular music during the 2010s? Engaging with feminist theory and previous research about gender and music, this book investigates the meaning of current trends relating to gender, feminism and...

Beethoven's middle-period quartets, Opp. 59, 74 and 95, are pieces that engage deeply with the aesthetic ideas of their time. In the first full contextual study of these works, Nancy November celebrates their uniqueness, exploring their reception history and early performance. In detailed analyses,...

Historical Dictionary of Baroque Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on composers, instruments, cities, and technical terms.Author: Joseph P. SwainISBN-10: 1538151618ISBN-13: 9781538151617Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield PublishersLanguage: EnglishPublished: 05/15/2023Pages: 464Format:...

Over the course of the 19th century, ballads proliferated in German-speaking Europe in a truly remarkable range of contexts. Audiences were of course likely encounter balladry in the volumes of Goethe and Schiller, in various anthologies or illustrated editions. But they were just as...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States,...

No Boomer-esque celebration of the "music that defined an era," Rock and Roll vs. Modern Life is instead a deeply critical analysis of rock and roll as a chaotic, caterwauling project to upend the foundational presumptions of postwar values. What we have here is...

Beethoven Symphonies Revisited guides the reader -- music student, concert goer, or general music lover -- through the movements in a way that renews the novelty and excitement that listeners must have felt at the first performances. Stylistic discussion concentrates on the unusual features...

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...

Music In and On the Air is a wonderful collection of radio pieces from Pulitzer Prize winning critic Lloyd Schwartz. The book explores contemporary classics, musical theatre and film, and includes almost all the reviews Schwartz has presented since becoming the classical music critic...

In the mid-twentieth century, certain elements of the American popular music industry (publishers, recording companies, and broadcasters) began to redefine their product as something more than mere entertainment. This became evident in the arguments made by competing sides in a series of clashes that...

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb's Dixielanders in 1943 through the...