Music-History & Criticism

The life, times, and music of Franz Schubert During his short lifetime, Franz Schubert (1797-1828) contributed to a wide variety of musical genres, from intimate songs and dances to ambitious chamber pieces, symphonies, and operas. The essays and translated documents in Franz Schubert and...

During his lifetime, and in the course of the twentieth century, Edward Elgar and his music became sites for a remarkable variety of nostalgic impulses. These are manifested in his personal life, in the content of his works, in his critical and biographical reception,...

In this rich study of noise in American film-going culture, Meredith C. Ward shows how aurality can reveal important fissures in American motion picture history, enabling certain types of listening cultures to form across time. Connecting this history of noise in the cinema to...

Making Money, Making Music offers tools to encourage creative and adaptive entrepreneurship in the music business. Written for the classroom and the workplace, it introduces readers to core principles and processes and shows how to apply them adaptively to new contexts, facilitating a deeper...

Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture documents the transition of recorded music on CDs to music as digital files on computers. More than two decades after the first digital music files began circulating in online archives and playing through new software media players, we have...

Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what...

As one of the most influential and popular genres of the last three decades, rap has cultivated a mainstream audience and become a multimillion-dollar industry by promoting highly visible and often controversial representations of blackness. Sounding Race in Rap Songs argues that rap music...

New York City has always been a mecca in the history of jazz, and in many ways the city's jazz scene is more important now than ever before. Blowin' the Blues Away examines how jazz has thrived in New York following its popular resurgence...

Joseph Horowitz writes in Moral Fire: "If the Met's screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs (in the 1890s) are unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare...

In this groundbreaking, historically-informed semiotic study of late eighteenth-century music, Stephen Rumph focuses on Mozart to explore musical meaning within the context of Enlightenment sign and language theory. Illuminating his discussion with French, British, German, and Italian writings on signs and language, Rumph analyzes...

James Stewart once said, "For John Ford, there was no need for dialogue. The music said it all." This lively, accessible study is the first comprehensive analysis of Ford's use of music in his iconic westerns. Encompassing a variety of critical approaches and incorporating...

In this engrossing collection of essays, distinguished composer, theorist, journalist, and educator Arthur Berger invites us into the vibrant and ever-changing American music scene that has been his home for most of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and always entertaining, Berger describes the music...

W. Anthony Sheppard considers a wide-ranging constellation of important musical works in this fascinating exploration of ritualized performance in twentieth-century music. Revealing Masks uncovers the range of political, didactic, and aesthetic intents that inspired the creators of modernist music theater. Sheppard is especially interested...

Jay-Z and Kanye West's 2011 Watch the Throne is a self-avowed "luxury rap" album centered on Eurocentric conceptions of nobility, artistry, and haute couture. Critical Excess performs a close reading of the sonic and social commentary on this album, examining how the album alternately...

The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music offers the first collection of source readings and new essays on the latest thinking in the sociology of music. Interest in music sociology has increased dramatically over the past decade, yet there is no anthology of...

While the growing field of scholarship on heavy metal music and its subcultures has produced excellent work on the sounds, scenes, and histories of heavy metal around the world, few works have included a study of gender and sexuality. This cutting-edge volume focuses on...

The major objective of this collection of 28 essays is to analyze the trends, musical formats, and rhetorical devices used in popular music to illuminate the human condition. By comparing and contrasting musical offerings in a number of countries and in different contexts from...

The title coinage of this book, stimulacra, refers to the fundamental capacity of literary narrative to stimulate our minds and senses by simulating things through words. Musical stimulacra are passages of fiction that readers are empowered to transpose into mental simulations of music. The...

Classical Concert Studies: A Companion to Contemporary Research and Performance is a landmark publication that maps out a new interdisciplinary field of Concert Studies, offering fresh ways of understanding the classical music concert in the twenty-first century. It brings together essays, research articles, and...

Relevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770-1860: Questioning Canons reveals how various cultural processes have influenced what has been included, and what has been marginalised from canons of European music, dance, and theatre around the turn of the nineteenth century and...

The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul brings together Marshall Brown's new and previously published writings on literature and music. These essays engage questions that are central to the development of literature, music, and the arts in the period from Romanticism at the end...

Demonstrating the intimate connections among our public, political, and personal lives, these essays by Robert Cantwell explore the vernacular culture of everyday life. A keen and innovative observer of American culture, Cantwell casts a broad and penetrating intelligence over the cultural functioning of popular...

Johann Sebastian Bach was a Lutheran and much of his music was for Lutheran liturgical worship. As these insightful essays in the twelfth volume of Bach Perspectives demonstrate, he was also influenced by--and in turn influenced--different expressions of religious belief. The vocal music, especially...

Among his numerous children, Johann Sebastian Bach sired five musically gifted sons. The eleventh volume of Bach Perspectives presents essays that explore these men's lives and careers via distinctive and, in several cases, alternative and interdisciplinary methodologies. Robert L. Marshall traces how each of...

In A City Called Heaven, Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and...

This provocative addition to the Bach Perspectives series offers a counternarrative to the isolated genius status that J. S. Bach and his music currently enjoy. Contributors contextualize Bach by examining the output, reputation, and compositional practices of his contemporaries in Germany whose work was...

Sweet Air rewrites the history of early twentieth-century pop music in modernist terms. Tracking the evolution of popular regional genres such as blues, country, folk, and rockabilly in relation to the growth of industry and consumer culture, Edward P. Comentale shows how this music...

As the official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives has pioneered new areas of research in the life, times, and music of Bach since its first appearance in 1995. Volume 8 of Bach Perspectives emphasizes the place of Bach's oratorios in their...

Why are finales different from other movements? Why can we nearly always tell whether a movement comes first or last in a work with several movements? Is the special character of finales necessary as well as traditional? Michael Talbot explores these questions in depth....

The Oxford History of Western Music, Third Edition, guides students on an immersive journey through the evolution of Western music from ancient and medieval times to the present day. By emphasizing the connections between works within each cultural era and across time and place,...

These are the songs that have been listened to, laughed to, loved to, and labored to, as well as downed tools and danced to. Covering the last seven decades, Stuart Maconie looks at the songs that have been the soundtracks for changing times, and...

Sacred Innovation: Orazio Vecchi and Music in the Shadow of the Reformation provides a profound exploration into the life and work of Orazio Vecchi (1550-1605), a renowned composer who shaped the soundscape of Renaissance Italy. The book goes beyond Vecchi's musical legacy, revealing the...

The folk club scene did not really take off until the 1960s. In fact, in 1960 there were only four folk clubs in Scotland, the oldest of them only two years old. Ten years later there was one in practically every town of any...

One of rock and roll's iconic figures, Bruce Springsteen produced his most influential, and many would argue his greatest body of work from 1973 to 1987. During that time, he released eight studio albums, along with the mammoth live album Live/1975-1985. Among these records...

Expanded edition, featuring a new chapter and photographs on the Festival's modern revival under John Giddings.The Isle of Wight Festival in 1969 famously stole Bob Dylan from Woodstock' and set the benchmark for all rock and pop festivals in the UK. Its 1970 follow-up...

From one of the world's most beloved and respected public intellectuals comes a sweeping work of musical criticism, examining the distance between the performer and their audience "Not since Virgil Thomson have we had a music critic with as wide ranging a view as...

"Remarkable...Staggering...Extraordinary and unique."-Aimsel Ponti, Portland Press Herald"You can learn a lot from a guy like Lawrence Schulman. And in admirably massive detail."-Rob Lester, Broadway World"An experienced producer, a passionate critic, a tireless historian..."-Gilles Taillefer, Regard En Coulisse"Enlightening"-Beth Barhydt, Greenwich Sentinel"Byronic"-Priscilla Meyer, Professor Emerita of...

LEGENDARY BRITISH HARD ROCK BANK In the beginning, there was Led Zeppelin - and Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, the progenitors of British heavy metal, a musical form that wildly expanded the terrain of rock in the early Seventies. And as that decade progressed,...

Hosting icons and legends of folk, blues, bluegrass, jazz, spoken word and world music since 1969.A decade after Gerald McCabe opened up a guitar repair shop in Santa Monica, California, legendary folk musicians Elizabeth Cotten and Mike Seeger came looking for a way to...

Since 1925, the Library of Congress has presented one of the most prestigious and innovative concert series in the United States. Philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge founded the series with the purpose of sharing music of the highest caliber with the American people. Her vision...

A complete chronicle of one of the greatest postwar jazz labels.Founded by jazz enthusiast Bob Weinstock, Prestige Records recorded the leading jazz artists of its day, many of whom were at or approaching their creative peak, from its inception in 1949 until 1972. It...

Featuring interviews with some of her well-known fans, including Ru Paul and Sean Hayes, this is a celebration of the album where Cher challenged the ageist pop industry and re-solidified herself as a force to be reckoned with. By 1998, Cher seemed fated to...

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts no longer exclusively comprise static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital...

This is a special edition of the Missouri Folklore Society Journal (ISSN: 0731-2946), covering volumes 27 and 28 (2005-2006), specially devoted to Missouri folk songs and ballads. The volume covers the work of a number of well-known folk song collectors and performers, with numerous...

The Duna live in a physical environment of steep slopes that are sometimes difficult to traverse. A stick of bamboo used as a prop goes a long way in assisting a struggling traveller. Similarly, the Duna live in a social and cultural environment of...

Philip II of Spain founded the great Spanish monastery and royal palace of El Escorial in 1563, promoting within it a musical foundation whose dual function as royal chapel and monastery in the service of a Counter Reformation monarch was unique; this volume explores...

AN EXPLORATION OF AN OVERLOOKED CARIBBEAN MUSICAL TRADITION AND THE EUROPEAN, AFRICAN, AND NEW WORLD INFLUENCES THAT CREATED IT In October 1999, eleven Antilleans attended the service held to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Frédéric Chopin's death. This service, held in the Warsaw church...

A collection of musical transcriptions, song lyrics, memoir, stories, and lore from a matrilineal line of famed Traveller balladeers, musicians, and storytellers Elizabeth Stewart is a highly acclaimed singer, pianist, and accordionist whose reputation has spread widely not only as an outstanding musician but...

How the claim to jazz knowledge forges community and forms an understanding of canon Ken Prouty argues that knowledge of jazz, or more to the point, claims to knowledge of jazz, are the prime movers in forming jazz's identity, its canon, and its community....

The Brazilian berimbau, a musical bow, is most commonly associated with the energetic martial art/dance/game of capoeira. This study explores the berimbau's stature from the 1950s to the present in diverse musical genres including bossa nova, samba-reggae, MPB (Popular Brazilian Music), electronic dance music,...