Music-History & Criticism

Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry invokes and critiques the relationship between blues-based popular music and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume is anchored in music from the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music...

What does it mean to be in the groove?Winner of the 2007 Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American MusicWinner of IASPM's 2007 International Book AwardIn this exploration of the funk groove and its unique sounds, author Anne Danielsen takes an in-depth...

Author Anthony "Tony" Brown is a native of Portsmouth Virginia who between the years 1990 and 1998 worked for super-producer Teddy Riley, founder of NEW JACK SWING as an A&R and Studio Manager at Riley's Future Recording Studios. Tony worked with Riley in his...

An Unsung Cat explores the life and music of jazz saxophonist, Warne Marsh. The book also offers an extensively researched discography and photographs that reveal the public and private face of this unique performer. A significant addition to the literature of jazz studies.Author: Safford...

Arnold Bake (1899-1963) was a Dutch pioneer in South Asian ethnomusicology, whose research impressed not only the most renowned Indologists of his time but also the leading figures in the emerging field of ethnomusicology. This long-overdue biography sheds light on his knowledge of the...

Although music was an essential part of Freek and Roman culture, modern introductions to the subject have often tended to be too general for the serious reader or too technical for all but the specilist. Aimed at a wider audience, this book offers a...

Ludwig van Beethoven had a life beyond music. He considered it his duty to spend leisure-time improving his Bildung (sophistication). To this end he familiarised himself with tangible manifestations of Greco-Roman antiquity, for he perceived these cultures and their representatives as examples of intellectual,...

Joy H. Calico examines the cultural history of postwar Europe through the lens of the performance and reception of Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw--a short but powerful work, she argues, capable of irritating every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. Schoenberg, a Jewish composer...

R. Murray Schafer: A Creative Life is the authoritative exploration of the life and work of this preeminent Canadian composer, artist, educator, and activist. Working closely with the composer and his family, L. Brett Scott has created the most up-to-date and accurate exploration of...

Bebop music is more than a jazz movement that seemed to have burst suddenly upon the jazz scene--it is an outgrowth of the sociocultural environment dating from the 1920s through the 1940s. In this consideration of the period and its music, noted jazz scholar...

Who are "the folk" in folk music? This book traces the musical culture of these elusive figures in Britain and the US during a crucial period of industrialization from 1870 to 1930, and beyond to the contemporary alt-right. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary range...

Music revenues are predicted to hit $131 billion by 2030 according to Goldman Sachs.Soundstorm analyzes the business and culture of the modern music ecosystem as it straddles unprecedented growth and unforeseen challenges in the ever-evolving digital age. Through a collection of essays, 22-year-old Saransh...

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media surveys the contemporary landscape of audiovisual media. Contributors to the volume look not only to changes brought by digital innovations, but to the complex social and technological past that informs, and is transformed by,...

A first-ever book on the subject, New York City Blues: Postwar Portraits from Harlem to the Village and Beyond offers a deep dive into the blues venues and performers in the city from the 1940s through the 1990s. Interviews in this volume bring the...

A comprehensive biography of the brilliant jazz composer and pianist Bill Evans This enthralling book is the first biography in English of Bill Evans (1929-1980), one of the most influential of all jazz pianists. Peter Pettinger, himself a concert pianist, describes Evans's life (the...

A collection of rare musical artifacts from the University of Hong Kong's Fung Ping Shan Library. Chinese Music in Print is grounded in a desire to move rare items from the University of Hong Kong's Fung Ping Shan Library from the world of music...

The fateful events of the consequential last months of 1980, how they changed music & politics, and set the tone for today's toxic climate. A story about rock and roll, murder, war, politics, the cultural divide and the current assault on democracy in America....

Situated at the intersection between the history, historiography and aesthetics of twentieth-century music, this study uses Benjamin Britten's operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics and audiences mediated the "great divide" between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the "middlebrow,"...

Originally published in 1896.Contents Include: Great Violinists of the Italian School Leader of the Royal Violins Cherubini as a Violinist Paganini Violin days of Balfe Charles Auguste de Beriot Souvenier of Sivori Two Josephs of Cremona Violin Recital in Mongolia Valuable Violins The Stradivarius...

Music and Heritage provides new thinking about the diverse ways people engage with heritage. By exploring the relationships that exist between music, place and identity, the book illustrates how people form attachments to place and how such attachments are represented by sound and music-making....

Jim Sullivan spent 26 years writing about music for the Boston Globe and two decades more writing for national publications. He has interviewed and reviewed countless musicians, many of them multiple times. Access to such A-list stars is hard to come by in the...

This book explores the relationship between three African American women's dance-art-music sensibilities within the context of a Pan African aesthetic. Its purpose is three-fold: to show commonalities between Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone's lives and original compositions; to codify, examine and evaluate...

It is widely believed that Jimi Hendrix was one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time...and quite possibly, THE greatest. All you have to do is compare what rock guitar sounded like before Jimi burst on the scene in the late '60s, and...

From the very beginning, music has helped us create our world - everything from language, to technology, to philosophy and religion. The Art of Ancient Music discusses the important role music has played in shaping human development. While emphasizing shared human themes, the text...

The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus is a critical account of the history of Andalusian music in Iberia from the Islamic conquest of 711 to the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims converted to Christianity) in the early 17th century. This volume presents the...

In The Emancipation of Slaves Through Music, music mogul Dr. Mathew Knowles presents a keen examination of the liberating effects of music on an oppressed people. By taking readers on the journey of its secret use during slavery up through its eventual commercialization in...

Lawrence Gellert has long been a mysterious figure in American folk and blues studies, gaining prominence in the left-wing folk revival of the 1930s for his fieldwork in the U.S. South. A "lean, straggly-haired New Yorker," as Time magazine called him, Gellert was an...

The 'cyclic' polyphonic Mass has long been seen as the pre-eminent musical genre of the late Middle Ages, spawning some of the most impressive and engrossing musical edifices of the period. Modern study of these compositions has greatly enhanced our appreciation of their construction...

John Psathas has said that, of all New Zealand composers, John Cousins has "thrown the spear furthest," meaning he is one of our most original artists, going beyond the edge. Provocative, penetrating, and fundamentally true, Cousins remains absorbed and energised by creative work. On...

Native Americans supplied the maracas. African slaves brought drums and ritual music, and Spaniards brought guitars, brass instruments, and clarinets along with European ballroom dancing. The advent of blues and jazz gave new forms to styles of songs, notably feeling songs, which joined the...

Quincy Jones (b. 1933) is one of the most prolific composers, arrangers, bandleaders, producers, and humanitarians in American music history and the recording and film industries. Among pop music fans he is perhaps most famous for producing Michael Jackson's album, Thriller. Clarence Bernard Henry...

New, insightful essays from musicologists, historians, art historians, and literary scholars reconsider the relationship of Debussy, Gauguin, Zola, and other great French creative artists to cultural and political trends during the Third Republic. This collection of new essays examines the relationships between discourses of...

The B-minor Mass has always represented a fascinating challenge to musical scholarship. Composed over the course of the composer's life, it is considered by many to be Johann Sebastian Bach's greatest and most complex work. The fourteen essays assembled in this volume originate from...

Krautrock is not a music genre. Krautrock is a way of life. Its sonic diversity and global reach belie the common culture from where it emerged. This is a band-by-band history. In May 1945, the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, putting an end to the...

This book provides the first scholarly history of the　viola d'amore, a popular bowed string instrument of the Baroque era, with a unique tone produced by a set of metal sympathetic strings. Composers like Bach made use of the viola d'amore for its particular sound,...

What is postmodern music and how does it differ from earlier styles, including modernist music? What roles have electronic technologies and sound production played in defining postmodern music? Has postmodern music blurred the lines between high and popular music? Addressing these and other questions,...

Queering the Popular Pitch is a new collection of 19 essays that situate queering within the discourse of sex and sexuality in relation to popular music. This investigation addresses the changing debates within gay, lesbian and queer discourse in relation to the dissemination of...

In a book that challenges modernist ideas about the value and role of music in Western society, Composing the Citizen demonstrates how music can help forge a nation. Deftly exploring the history of Third Republic France, Jann Pasler shows how French people from all...

Known for creating classic films including His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks is one of the best-known Hollywood 'auteurs', but the important role that music plays in his films has been generally neglected by film...

How Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, Survived Herself-and Became the Indie Rock Queen. Chan Marshall's stark lyrics, minimal arrangements, and wounded, smoky vocals, were an instant indie hit in the nineties-but her mental instability nearly derailed her career. How this sensitive but headstrong Georgian...

Modernism is both a contested aesthetic category and a powerful political statement. Modernist music was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis and forcibly replaced by socialist realism under the Soviets. Sympathetic philosophers and critics have interpreted it as a vital intellectual defence against totalitarianism,...

Feminism has always been a complex and controversial topic, as female rock musicians know especially well. When they've stayed true to their own vision, these artists have alternately been adored as role models or denounced as bad influences. Either way, they're asked to cope...

Scattered in archives and historical societies across the United States are hundreds of volumes of manuscript music, copied by hand by eighteenth-century amateurs. Often overlooked, amateur music making played a key role in the construction of gender, class, race, and nation in the post-revolution...

The Symphonic Poem in Britain 1850-1950aims to raise the status of the genre generally, and in Britain specifically, by reaffirming British composers' confidence in dealing with literary texts. The Symphonic Poem in Britain 1850-1950 aims to raise the status of the genre generally and...

What are the key topics that define Romantic violin playing? This book discusses key issues (and barriers) of putting into practice nineteenth-century violin performing practices. It deals with a number of well-known problems concerning romantic performance including the widely perceived 'gap' between scholarship and...

Until his untimely death in 2016, Prince entertained, amused, and just as often confused legions of fans and followers in a prolific and purple career that spanned four decades. This volume covers it all--the number-one hits, the prot馮駸, sidekicks, and rivals, the down-and-dirty funk...

Richly ethnographic and a compelling read, After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy is a study of carnival, politics, and the musical engagement of ordinary citizens and celebrity musicians in contemporary Haiti. The book explores how the self-declared president of konpa Sweet Micky (Michel...

Gilles Deleuze's intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly used in Difference and Repetition, it remained underexplored in Deleuze's subsequent work. In this collection of essays numerous contributors offer perspectives on...

Max Weber (1864-1920) war ein deutscher Soziologe und National konom. Er gilt als einer der Klassiker der Soziologie sowie der gesamten Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Mit seinen Theorien und Begriffspr gungen hatte er gro en Einfluss insbesondere auf die Wirtschafts-, die Herrschafts- und die Religionssoziologie....

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural...