Music-History & Criticism

Trip-hop described some of the 1990s' best music, and it was one of the decade's most revealing bad ideas. The music itself was an intoxication of beats, bass, and voice. It emerged amid the social tensions of the late 1980s, and as part of...

Dancing to the Drum Machine is a never-before-attempted history of what is perhaps the most controversial musical instrument ever invented: the drum machine. Here, author Dan LeRoy reveals the untold story of how their mechanical pulse became the new heartbeat of popular music. The...

Dancing to the Drum Machine is a never-before-attempted history of what is perhaps the most controversial musical instrument ever invented: the drum machine. Here, author Dan LeRoy reveals the untold story of how their mechanical pulse became the new heartbeat of popular music. The...

The sounds of spectators at football (soccer) are often highlighted - by spectators, tourists, commentators, journalists, scholars, media producers, etc. - as crucial for the experience of football. These sounds are often said to contribute significantly to the production (at the stadium) and conveyance...

Owning the Masters provides the first in-depth history of sound recording copyright. It is this form of intellectual property that underpins the workings of the recording industry. Rather than being focused on the manufacture of goods, this industry is centred on the creation, exploitation...

Contributions by Joshua Coleman, Christine Hand Jones, Kevin C. Neece, Charlotte Pence, George Plasketes, Jeffrey Scholes, Jeff Sellars, Toby Thompson, and Jude Warne After performing with Ronnie Hawkins as the Hawks (1957-1964), The Band (Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, and Levon...

Contributions by Joshua Coleman, Christine Hand Jones, Kevin C. Neece, Charlotte Pence, George Plasketes, Jeffrey Scholes, Jeff Sellars, Toby Thompson, and Jude Warne After performing with Ronnie Hawkins as the Hawks (1957-1964), The Band (Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, and Levon...

Winner of the 2023 Award for Excellence for Best History in the category of Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, R&B, Gospel, Hip Hop, or Soul Music from the Association for Recorded Sound CollectionsWasn't That a Mighty Day: African American Blues and Gospel Songs...

Winner of the 2023 Award for Excellence for Best History in the category of Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, R&B, Gospel, Hip Hop, or Soul Music from the Association for Recorded Sound CollectionsWasn't That a Mighty Day: African American Blues and Gospel Songs...

He didn't know it at the time, but Tim Ghianni's love affair with Nashville and its musical artists began on a steamy night in 1972, when the twenty-year-old author had unsolicited help from honky-tonkin' legends Bobby Bare and Shel Silverstein during an after-midnight "salvation"...

Few songs have captured the contradictions and ambiguities of the 1960s as memorably as "California Dreamin'," the iconic folk music single that catapulted the Mamas & the Papas into rock and roll history. In All the Leaves Are Brown, author Scott Shea details how...

In an age of ubiquitous music and countless new songs releasing every minute, the Great American Songbook endures. After all, the Songbook--that sprawling canon of popular songs, standards, and show tunes from roughly the 1920s through the 1950s--is a foundational text of American pop...

The Jive 95: An Oral History of America's Greatest Underground Rock Radio Station, KSAN San Francisco is an oral history of America's first hippie underground FM station which broadcast the countercultural consciousness of the '60s and '70s to a new generation. A communal radio...

The Child Ballads are a series of over 300 traditional ballads from England and Scotland that, along with their American variants, were anthologized by folklorist Francis James Child in the nineteenth century. An Evolving Tradition is the story of the Child Ballads--the world's best-known...

In 1969, when Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice decided to write a rock opera about Jesus Christ, they had little idea they were about to embark on one of the most popular, boundary-pushing, and influential musicals ever. The show's success was hardly assured...

After Syd Barrett departed Pink Floyd, the band that he had co-founded and fronted became a rudderless ship, releasing a series of nebulous (though highly inventive) jam albums and taking on touring expenses that nearly bankrupted them. Their eighth album was a make-it-or-break-it proposition,...

Featuring exclusive interviews, this book uncovers the studio stories, ideas, and hidden meanings behind Scary Monsters as Bowie stood at the crossroads of the next decade.Author: Adam SteinerISBN-10: 1493065645ISBN-13: 9781493065646Publisher: Backbeat BooksLanguage: EnglishPublished: 07/15/2023Pages: 298Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.05lbsSize: 8.73h x 6.16w x 0.73dReview Citation(s): Library...

Disco remains the most important and influential musical and cultural movement of the past half-century. Everything since has been an affirmation of, or a reaction to, those pulsating dance floor rhythms. Author: Steven BlushISBN-10: 1493063898ISBN-13: 9781493063895Publisher: Backbeat BooksLanguage: EnglishPublished: 04/01/2023Pages: 298Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.06lbsSize: 8.75h...

The film legacy of the Beatles is explored in this exciting inside-look at the group and their music-making process. Author: Steve MatteoISBN-10: 1493059017ISBN-13: 9781493059010Publisher: Backbeat BooksLanguage: EnglishPublished: 05/15/2023Pages: 350Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.22lbsSize: 8.69h x 6.18w x 0.83dReview Citation(s): Library Journal 05/01/2023 pg. 92

In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians--Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop musician DJ Screw--Boon outlines how...

In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians--Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop musician DJ Screw--Boon outlines how...

No-one, least of all Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi themselves, expected the six-time former World Snooker champion and a British-Iranian underground rock musician to become one of the most trusted brands in British alternative music. In their weekly radio shows and as two-thirds of...

Dewar MacLeod is Professor of History at the William Paterson University of New Jersey. He is the author of Making the Scene in the Garden State: Popular Music in New Jersey from Edison to Springsteen and Beyond and Kids of the Black Hole: Punk...

"If you want to understand American history, listen to its popular music," writes renowned NPR host Rob Kapilow. "If you want to understand America's popular music, listen to its history." Through the songs of eight legendary American composers--Kern, Porter, Gershwin, Arlen, Berlin, Rodgers, Bernstein,...

A user's guide to opera--Matthew Aucoin, "the most promising operatic talent in a generation" (The New York Times Magazine), describes the creation of his groundbreaking new work, Eurydice, and shares his reflections on the past, present, and future of opera From its beginning, opera...

This book, first published in 1934, contains the recollections of the varied and coloured life of a great pianist and composer, who is one of the most striking figures of the musical world. Rachmaninoff dictated his memoires to the author of this book, and...

Since first becoming a true believer in the power and importance of rock & roll as a boy in the 1950s, Art Fein has been immersed in music and the music business, taking on many diverse roles: Journalist: onetime music editor of Variety, contributor...

Tour Tales tells the story of George Michaels, a young rock music fan growing up in northern New Jersey during the early nineteen eighties, who one day rediscovers the Grateful Dead, and his whole life changes. This comical, coming-of-age tale chronicles George and his...

Eleven international scholars analyse key works by Sir James MacMillan, and contextualise his unique musical-theological approach.Author: George ParsonsISBN-10: 1108716873ISBN-13: 9781108716871Publisher: Cambridge University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 11/10/2022Pages: 266Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.94lbsSize: 9.61h x 6.69w x 0.56d

The first English language collection on the musical sublime. Reveals music's place at the forefront of this interdisciplinary aesthetic category.Author: Sarah HibberdISBN-10: 1108708048ISBN-13: 9781108708043Publisher: Cambridge University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 11/10/2022Pages: 322Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.13lbsSize: 9.61h x 6.69w x 0.67d

A collection of ten chapters that approach Beethoven and his music from aesthetic, analytical, biographical, historical and performance perspectives.Author: Keith ChapinISBN-10: 110844993XISBN-13: 9781108449939Publisher: Cambridge University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 11/10/2022Pages: 266Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.94lbsSize: 9.61h x 6.69w x 0.56d

Author: Graham GriffithsISBN-10: 110843472XISBN-13: 9781108434720Publisher: Cambridge University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 11/10/2022Pages: 372Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.09lbsSize: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.77d

Explores a range of topics that contextualize Strauss's life and works, such as collaborators, influences, philosophy, and the profession.Author: Morten KristiansenISBN-10: 1108434460ISBN-13: 9781108434461Publisher: Cambridge University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 11/10/2022Pages: 394Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.16lbsSize: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.81d

Sociability may be a key term of reference for eighteenth-century studies as a whole, but it has not yet developed an especially strong profile in music scholarship. Many of the associations that it brings do not fit comfortably with a later imperative of individual...

Johnny Thunders: In Cold Blood is the definitive portrait of the condemned man of rock'n'roll, from the baptism of fire and tragedy that was the New York Dolls, through the junkie punk years of the Heartbreakers, to his sudden and mysterious death in 1991....

An expert and informative appraisal of all of Elgar's works - from his juvenilia to the unfinished 3rd symphony - by the author of the acclaimed Gerald Finzi. The new Diana McVeagh book on Elgar is first-rate, wrote Gerald Finzi of her earlier study...

This is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It treats those forms as inextricably intertwined, and sets them in a wide variety of social and critical contexts. The book comprises four...

The diverse musics of the Caribbean form a vital part of the identity of individual island nations and their diasporic communities. At the same time, they witness to collective continuities and the interrelatedness that underlies the region's multi-layered complexity. This Companion introduces familiar and...

While interpretation of musical scores is amongst the most frequent of musical activities, it is also, strangely, one of the least researched. This collection of essays seeks to remedy this deficit by illuminating ways in which today's curious musician - interested in probing beyond...

Woodstock University addresses the educational interface of 1969's iconic Woodstock Festival, as a number of its attendees and performers would later become academics 'with a touch of gray, ' and it also considers the role of music in Woodstock's legacy as the embodiment of...

Schubert's Workshop offers a fresh study of the composer's compositional technique and its development, rooted in the author's experience of realising performing versions of Franz Schubert's unfinished works. Through close examination of Schubert's use of technical and structural devices, Brian Newbould demonstrates that Schubert...

Schubert's Workshop offers a fresh study of the composer's compositional technique and its development, rooted in the author's experience of realising performing versions of Franz Schubert's unfinished works. Through close examination of Schubert's use of technical and structural devices, Brian Newbould demonstrates that Schubert...

Music and noise seem to be mutually exclusive. Music is generally considered as an ordered arrangement of sounds pleasing to the ear and noise as its opposite: chaotic, ugly, aggressive, sometimes even deafening. When presented in a musical context, noise can thus act as...

Black Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement critically explores the soundtracks of the Black Power Movement as forms of "movement music." That is to say, much of classic Motown, soul, and funk music often mirrored and served as mouthpieces...

Music was everywhere in ancient Rome. Wherever one went in the sprawling city, the sound of singing and piping, drumming and strumming was never far out of earshot. This book examines the role of music in Roman politics and society, focusing on the period...

Described by one contemporary as the 'sweet singer of The Temple', George Herbert has long been recognised as a lover of music. Nevertheless, Herbert's own participation in seventeenth-century musical culture has yet to be examined in detail. This is the first extended critical study...

In this wide-ranging and accessible survey of American labor songs, Ronald D. Cohen chronicles the history behind the work songs of cowboys, sailors, hoboes, and others, as well as the singing culture of groups ranging from the Industrial Workers of the World to Pete...

A guide to the origins and music of Szymanowski's exquisitely beautiful opera King Roger. Karol Szymanowski (1881-1937), the most important Polish composer after Chopin, wrote only two operas, the second of which, King Roger, completed in 1924, is a masterpiece. After decades of neglect...

The second woman to earn a PhD from Columbia University-and the first from south of the Mason-Dixon Line to do so-Kentucky native Katherine Jackson French broke boundaries. Her research kick-started a resurgence of Appalachian music that continues to this day, but French's collection of...

The musical and cultural impact of the Fab Four in Florida In 1964, Beatlemania flooded the United States. The Beatles appeared live on the Ed Sullivan Show and embarked on their first tour of North America--and they spent more time in Florida than anywhere...