http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/category/LTMU/Music.html Music Music eBooks en Copyright 2007 info@ebooksabouteverything.com (eBooks About Everything) info@ebooksabouteverything.com http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/html_everything/mas_assets/www/logo.gifhttp://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/category/LTMU/Music.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.make-a-store.com
The Eagles are the bestselling, and arguably the tightest-lipped, American group ever. Now band member and guitarist Don Felder finally breaks the Eagles’ years of public silence to take fans behind the scenes. He shares every part of the band’s wild ride, from the pressure-packed recording studios and trashed hotel rooms to the tension-filled courtrooms, and from the joy of writing powerful new songs to the magic of performing in huge arenas packed with roaring fans. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780470450420/Felder,-Don-HEAVEN-&-HELL-.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780470450420/Felder,-Don-HEAVEN-&-HELL-.html
The vibrant urban folk scene of the 1960s is dazzlingly portrayed in this collection of more than 150 previously unpublished photographs by Raeburn Flerlage. From concert performances and studio sessions to interviews and intimate club shows, Flerlage's images effortlessly capture the essence of both the artists and their music. Arresting photographs of popular performers, such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger, mingle with those of more traditional musicians, including the Reverend Gary Davis, Booker White, Dock Boggs, and Mother Maybelle Carter as well as many other blues, bluegrass, Cajun, and gospel artists who performed at the University of Chicago Folk Festival. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/1554908736/--Chicago-Folk:-Images-of-the-Sixties-Music-Scene-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/1554908736/--Chicago-Folk:-Images-of-the-Sixties-Music-Scene-(Adobe-Reader).html
In-depth interviews with the main movers in the punk rock movement-Crass members Penny Rimbaud, Gee Vaucher, and Steve Ignorant-detail the face of the revolution founded by these radical thinkers and artists. When punk ruled the waves, Crass waived the rules by putting out their own records, films, and magazines and setting up a series of situationist pranks that were dutifully covered by the world's press. Not just another iconoclastic band, Crass was a musical, social, and political phenomenon: commune dwellers that were rarely photographed and remained contemptuous of conventional pop stardom. As detailed in this history, their members explored and finally exhausted the possibilities of punk-led anarchy. This definitive biography of the band not only gives backstage access to their lives, philosophies, and the movement that followed, but also to never-before-seen photographs and rare dialogues. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/1604862319/Berger,-George-The-Story-of-Crass-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/1604862319/Berger,-George-The-Story-of-Crass-(Adobe-Reader).html
Parental Advisory is a intelligent and entertaining look at the colorful history of popular music in the United States that hs been either challenged or supresseed by forces of government or community. From Dean Martin ("Wham, Bam, Thank You Ma'am") to Marilyn Manson ("Antichrist Superstar"), Parental Advisory illuminates the complicated issue of music censorship, and demonstrates how censorship comes from all sides of the political spectrum. The book discusses everyone from The Beatles ("More popular than Jesus") to Ozzy Osbourne ("Suicide Solution") to N.W.A. ("Fuck tha Police") and The Prodigy ("Smack My Bitch Up")--as well as frenzied record burnings, controversial album cover art, the censors (Tipper Gore gets her very own chapter), and the freedom fighters (such as Frank Zappa). Featuring amusing sidebars (the PMRC's "Filthy Fifteen" list) chapters divided by subject (Sex; Politics; Violence; Race; Religion; Drugs; MTV) and finally a decade-by-decade timeline of important moments in censorship history, Parental Advisory is by turns frightening, amusing, hilarious, chilling--but always revealing. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780688167721/Nuzum,-Eric-D.-Parental-Advisory-.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780688167721/Nuzum,-Eric-D.-Parental-Advisory-.html
A unique book of wisdom and experience that reaches from the most violent slums of New York City to the highest planes of spiritual thought by the RZA, hip-hop's most exalted wise man.

The RZA, the Abbot of the Wu-Tang Clan and hip-hop culture's most dynamic genius, imparts the lessons he's learned on the journey that's taken him from the Staten Island projects to international superstar, all along the way a devout student of knowledge in every form he's found it-on the streets, in religion, in martial arts, in chess, in popular culture. Part chronicle of an extraordinary life and part spiritual and philosophical discourse, The Tao of Wu is a nonfiction Siddhartha for the hip-hop generation -an engaging, seeking book that will enlighten, entertain, and inspire.

The legions of Wu-Tang fans are accustomed to this heady mix-their obsession with the band's puzzlelike lyrics and elaborate mythology has propelled the group through fifteen years of dazzling, multiplatform success. In his 2005 bestseller The Wu-Tang Manual, the RZA provided the barest glimpse of how that mythology worked. In The Tao of Wu, he takes us deep inside the complex sense of wisdom and spirituality that has been at the core of his commercial and creative success.

The book is built around major moments in the RZA's life when he was faced with a dramatic turning point, either bad (a potential prison sentence) or good (a record deal that could pull his family out of poverty), and the lessons he took from each experience. His points of view are always surprising and provocative, and reveal a profound, genuine, and abiding wisdom-consistently tempered with humor and peppered with unique, colloquial phraseology. It is a spiritual memoir as the world has never seen before, and will never see again. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/1101149663/The-RZA-The-Tao-of-Wu-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/1101149663/The-RZA-The-Tao-of-Wu-(Adobe-Reader).html
This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., begins with an absorbing account of his own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community. Deeply informed by Ramsey's experience as an accomplished musician, a sophisticated cultural theorist, and an enthusiast brought up in the community he discusses, Race Music explores the global influence and popularity of African American music, its social relevance, and key questions regarding its interpretation and criticism. Beginning with jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, this book demonstrates that while each genre of music is distinct-possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and formal qualities-each is also grounded in similar techniques and conceptual frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Ramsey provides vivid glimpses of the careers of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Mahalia Jackson, among others, to show how the social changes of the 1940s elicited an Afro-modernism that inspired much of the music and culture that followed. Race Music illustrates how, by transcending the boundaries between genres, black communities bridged generational divides and passed down knowledge of musical forms and styles. It also considers how the discourse of soul music contributed to the vibrant social climate of the Black Power Era. Multilayered and masterfully written, Race Music provides a dynamic framework for rethinking the many facets of African American music and the ethnocentric energy that infused its creation. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780520210486/Ramsey,-Guthrie-Race-Music:-Black-Cultures-from-Bebop-to-Hip-Hop-.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780520210486/Ramsey,-Guthrie-Race-Music:-Black-Cultures-from-Bebop-to-Hip-Hop-.html
Robert Kimball was educated at Yale College and Yale Law School. He has been the music critic of the New York Post and is the co-author or editor of many books on musical theater, including Cole, the celebrated book about Cole Porter that he edited with Brendan Gill. He also edited for the Complete Lyrics series the volumes of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Frank Loesser. He is co-editor, with Robert Gottlieb, of Reading Lyrics. He lives in New York.

Barry Day was born in England and is an MA from Balliol College, Oxford. He has written or edited some twenty books as well as plays and musical revues showcasing the work of Dorothy Parker, P. G. Wodehouse, the Lunts, Oscar Wilde, and Sherlock Holmes. His eight books on Noël Coward include Noel Coward: The Complete Lyrics. He has also edited P. G. Wodehouse: The Complete Lyrics. He is a Trustee of the Noël Coward Foundation, a board member of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and winner of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire “for service to British Culture in the United States.”

Miles Kreuger is a native New Yorker and a graduate of Columbia Grammar School and Bard College. He has been writing about musical theater and film since 1958, including the definitive study of Show Boat. In 1965, he created the world’s first academic course on the American musical, at New York University, and has since taught at Columbia, the University of Southern California, and UCLA. He is president of The Institute of the American Musical and lives in Los Angeles.

Eric Davis is an avid student of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American popular music. He received his BA from Indiana University and is currently pursuing graduate studies in musicology at the University of Southern California.


From the Hardcover edition. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780307265197/Mercer,-Johnny,-Kimball,-Robert,-Day,-Barry-COMP-LYRICS-OF-JOHNNY-MERCER-.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/parent-9780307265197/Mercer,-Johnny,-Kimball,-Robert,-Day,-Barry-COMP-LYRICS-OF-JOHNNY-MERCER-.html
In this colorful and detailed history, Joshua Goldstein describes the formation of the Peking opera in late Qing and its subsequent rise and re-creation as the epitome of the Chinese national culture in Republican era China. Providing a fascinating look into the lives of some of the opera's key actors, he explores their methods for earning a living; their status in an ever-changing society; the methods by which theaters functioned; the nature and content of performances; audience make-up; and the larger relationship between Peking opera and Chinese nationalism. Propelled by a synergy of the commercial and the political patronage from the Qing court in Beijing to modern theaters in Shanghai and Tianjin, Peking opera rose to national prominence. The genre's star actors, particularly male cross-dressing performers led by the exquisite Mei Lanfang and the "Four Great Female Impersonators" became media celebrities, models of modern fashion and world travel. Ironically, as it became increasingly entrenched in modern commercial networks, Peking opera was increasingly framed in post-May fourth discourses as profoundly traditional. Drama Kings demonstrates that the process of reforming and marketing Peking opera as a national genre was integrally involved with process of colonial modernity, shifting gender roles, the rise of capitalist visual culture, and new technologies of public discipline that became increasingly prevalent in urban China in the Republican era. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/052093279X/Goldstein,-Joshua-Drama-Kings:-Players-and-Publics-in-the-Re-creation-of-Peking-Opera,-1870-1937-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/052093279X/Goldstein,-Joshua-Drama-Kings:-Players-and-Publics-in-the-Re-creation-of-Peking-Opera,-1870-1937-(Adobe-Reader).html
Visual Perception of Music Notation: On-Line and Off Line Recognition addresses the computer recognition of music notation, its interpretation and use within various application contexts. It includes research in the field of image processing and pen-based computing, representation languages and web-based applications. This book consolidates the successes, challenges and questions raised by the computer perception of this music notation language. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/1931777950/George,-Susan-Ella-VISUAL-PERCEPTION-OF-MUSIC-NOT-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/1931777950/George,-Susan-Ella-VISUAL-PERCEPTION-OF-MUSIC-NOT-(Adobe-Reader).html
This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory. Since some of the polyphonic music from the twelfth century and later was written down, scholars have long assumed that it was all composed and transmitted in written form. Our understanding of medieval music has been profoundly shaped by German philologists from the beginning of the last century who approached medieval music as if it were no different from music of the nineteenth century. But Medieval Music and the Art of Memory deftly demonstrates that the fact that a piece was written down does not necessarily mean that it was conceived and transmitted in writing. Busse Berger's new model, one that emphasizes the interplay of literate and oral composition and transmission, deepens and enriches current understandings of medieval music and opens the field for fresh interpretations. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520930649/Berger,-Anna-Maria-Busse-Medieval-Music-and-the-Art-of-Memory-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520930649/Berger,-Anna-Maria-Busse-Medieval-Music-and-the-Art-of-Memory-(Adobe-Reader).html
When Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner "the most enthusiastic mimomaniac" ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements. Mary Ann Smart suspects that Nietzsche may have seen and heard more than he realized. In Mimomania she takes his accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music-and that of several of his near-contemporaries-for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted. As Smart demonstrates, this productive fusion of music and movement often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underlining the sighs of a Bellini heroine, for instance, or the authoritarian footsteps of a Verdi baritone. Mimomania tracks such effects through readings of operas by Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner.Listening for gestural music, we find resemblance in unexpected places: between the overwrought scenes of supplication in French melodrama of the 1820s and a cluster of late Verdi arias that end with the soprano falling to her knees, or between the mute heroine of Auber's La Muette de Portici and the solemn, almost theological pantomimic tableaux Wagner builds around characters such as Sieglinde or Kundry. Mimomania shows how attention to gesture suggests a new approach to the representation of gender in this repertoire, replacing aural analogies for voyeurism and objectification with a more specifically musical sense of how music can surround, propel, and animate the body on stage. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520939875/Smart,-Mary-Ann-Mimomania:-Music-and-Gesture-in-Nineteenth-Century-Opera-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520939875/Smart,-Mary-Ann-Mimomania:-Music-and-Gesture-in-Nineteenth-Century-Opera-(Adobe-Reader).html
How do you spell "Mendelssohn"? Where do you place the hyphen in "Beethoven" if it breaks between two lines? Is it "premiere" or "première"? The answers and much more can be found in this completely revised and updated resource for authors, students, editors, concert producers--anyone who deals with classical music in print. This essential volume covers some of the thorniest issues of musical discourse: how to go about describing musical works and procedures in prose, the rules for citations in notes and bibliography, and proper preparation of such materials as musical examples, tables, and illustrations. One section discusses program notes, another explains the requirements for submitting manuscripts and electronic files. A new section outlines best practices for student writers. An appendix lists common problem words. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520934849/Holoman,-D.-Kern-Writing-about-Music:-A-Style-Sheet-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520934849/Holoman,-D.-Kern-Writing-about-Music:-A-Style-Sheet-(Adobe-Reader).html
John Deathridge presents a different and critical view of Richard Wagner based on recent research that does not shy away from some unpalatable truths about this most controversial of composers in the canon of Western music. Deathridge writes authoritatively on what Wagner did, said, and wrote, drawing from abundant material already well known but also from less familiar sources, including hitherto seldom discussed letters and diaries and previously unpublished musical sketches. At the same time, Deathridge suggests that a true estimation of Wagner does not lie in an all too easy condemnation of his many provocative actions and ideas. Rather, it is to be found in the questions about the modern world and our place in it posed by the best of his stage works, among them Tristan und Isolde and Der Ring des Nibelungen. Controversy about Wagner is unlikely to go away, but rather than taking the line of least resistance by regarding him blandly as a "classic" in the Western art tradition, Deathridge suggests that we need to confront the debates that have raged about him and reach beyond them, toward a fresh and engaging assessment of what he ultimately achieved. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/052093461X/Deathridge,-John-Wagner-Beyond-Good-and-Evil-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/052093461X/Deathridge,-John-Wagner-Beyond-Good-and-Evil-(Adobe-Reader).html
Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, Struggling to Define a Nation captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. In an engaging blend of music analysis and cultural critique, Charles Hiroshi Garrett examines a dazzling array of genres--including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music--and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. Garrett argues that rather than a single, unified vision, an exploration of the past century reveals a contested array of musical perspectives on the nation, each one advancing a different facet of American identity through sound. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520942825/Garrett,-Charles-Hiroshi-Struggling-to-Define-a-Nation:-American-Music-and-the-Twentieth-Century-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520942825/Garrett,-Charles-Hiroshi-Struggling-to-Define-a-Nation:-American-Music-and-the-Twentieth-Century-(Adobe-Reader).html
Over the past four decades, Richard Taruskin's publications have redefined the field of Russian-music study. This volume gathers thirty-six essays on composers ranging from Bortnyansky in the eighteenth century to Tarnopolsky in the twenty-first, as well as all of the famous names in between. Some of these pieces, like the ones on Chaikovsky's alleged suicide and on the interpretation of Shostakovich's legacy, have won fame in their own right as decisive contributions to some of the most significant debates in contemporary musicology. An extensive introduction lays out the main issues and a justification of Taruskin's approach, seen both in the light of his intellectual development and in that of the changing intellectual environment, which has been particularly marked by the end of the cold war in Europe. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520942809/Taruskin,-Richard-On-Russian-Music-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520942809/Taruskin,-Richard-On-Russian-Music-(Adobe-Reader).html
While he was still in his twenties, Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton's band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing affordable, community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA) Foundation, were at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movements in black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists--musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists--passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. Based primarily on one hundred in-depth interviews with current and former participants, The Dark Tree is the first history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of African American Los Angeles. Brought to life by the passionate voices of the men and women who worked to make the arts integral to everyday community life, this engrossing book completes the account began in the highly acclaimed Central Avenue Sounds, which documented the secular music history of the first half of the twentieth century and which the San Francisco Examiner called "one of the best jazz books ever compiled." ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520932242/Isoardi,-Steve-The-Dark-Tree:-Jazz-and-the-Community-Arts-in-Los-Angeles-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520932242/Isoardi,-Steve-The-Dark-Tree:-Jazz-and-the-Community-Arts-in-Los-Angeles-(Adobe-Reader).html
This authoritative volume of 453 letters written by and to composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) provides unparalleled insight into one of the most extraordinary and paradoxical careers in American music history. The most comprehensive collection of Ives's correspondence in print, this book opens a direct window on Ives's complex personality and his creative process. Though Ives spent much of his career out of the mainstream of professional music-making, he corresponded with a surprisingly large group of musicians and critics, including John J. Becker, Henry Bellamann, Leonard Bernstein, John Cage, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Ingolf Dahl, Walter Damrosch, Lehman Engel, Clifton J. Furness, Lou Harrison, Bernard Herrmann, John Kirkpatrick, Serge Koussevitzky, John Lomax, Francesco Malipiero, Radiana Pazmor, Paul Rosenfeld, Carl Ruggles, E. Robert Schmitz, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Peter Yates. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520932285/Ives,-Charles-Selected-Correspondence-of-Charles-Ives-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520932285/Ives,-Charles-Selected-Correspondence-of-Charles-Ives-(Adobe-Reader).html
It is well known that Béla Bartók had an extraordinary ability to synthesize Western art music with the folk music of Eastern Europe. What this rich and beautifully written study makes clear is that, contrary to much prevailing thought about the great twentieth-century Hungarian composer, Bartók was also strongly influenced by the art-music traditions of his native country. Drawing from a wide array of material including contemporary reviews and little known Hungarian documents, David Schneider presents a new approach to Bartók that acknowledges the composer's debt to a variety of Hungarian music traditions as well as to influential contemporaries such as Igor Stravinsky. Putting representative works from each decade beginning with Bartók's graduation from the Music Academy in 1903 until his departure for the United States in 1940 under critical lens, Schneider reads the composer's artistic output as both a continuation and a profound transformation of the very national tradition he repeatedly rejected in public. By clarifying why Bartók felt compelled to obscure his ties to the past and by illuminating what that past actually was, Schneider dispels myths about Bartók's relationship to nineteenth-century traditions and at the same time provides a new perspective on the relationship between nationalism and modernism in early-twentieth century music. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520932056/Schneider,-David-E.-Bartok,-Hungary,-and-the-Renewal-of-Tradition:-Case-Studies-in-the-Intersection-of-Modernity-and-Nationality-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520932056/Schneider,-David-E.-Bartok,-Hungary,-and-the-Renewal-of-Tradition:-Case-Studies-in-the-Intersection-of-Modernity-and-Nationality-(Adobe-Reader).html
Just as the preoccupations of any given cultural moment make their way into the language of music, the experience of music makes its way into other arenas of life. To unearth these overlapping meanings and vocabularies from the Victorian era, Ruth A. Solie examines sources as disparate as journalism, novels, etiquette manuals, religious tracts, and teenagers' diaries for the muffled, even subterranean, conversations that reveal so much about what music meant to the Victorians. Her essays, giving voice to "what goes without saying" on the subject-that cultural information so present and pervasive as to go unsaid-fill in some of the most intriguing blanks in our understanding of music's history. This much-anticipated collection, bringing together new and hard-to-find pieces by an acclaimed musicologist, mines the abundant casual texts of the period to show how Victorian-era people-English and others-experienced music and what they understood to be its power and its purposes. Solie's essays start from topics as varied as Beethoven criticism, Macmillan's Magazine, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, opera tropes in literature, and the Victorian myth of the girl at the piano. They evoke common themes-including the moral force that was attached to music in the public mind and the strongly gendered nature of musical practice and sensibility-and in turn suggest the complex links between the history of music and the history of ideas. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520930061/Solie,-Ruth-A.-Music-in-Other-Words:-Victorian-Conversations-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520930061/Solie,-Ruth-A.-Music-in-Other-Words:-Victorian-Conversations-(Adobe-Reader).html
In this provocative analysis of Beethoven's late style, Stephen Rumph demonstrates how deeply political events shaped the composer's music, from his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution to his later entrenchment during the Napoleonic era. Impressive in its breadth of research as well as for its devotion to interdisciplinary work in music history, Beethoven after Napoleon challenges accepted views by illustrating the influence of German Romantic political thought in the formation of the artist's mature style. Beethoven's political views, Rumph argues, were not quite as liberal as many have assumed. While scholars agree that the works of the Napoleonic era such as the Eroica Symphony or Fidelio embody enlightened, revolutionary ideals of progress, freedom, and humanism, Beethoven's later works have attracted less political commentary. Rumph contends that the later works show clear affinities with a native German ideology that exalted history, religion, and the organic totality of state and society. He claims that as the Napoleonic Wars plunged Europe into political and economic turmoil, Beethoven's growing antipathy to the French mirrored the experience of his Romantic contemporaries. Rumph maintains that Beethoven's turn inward is no pessimistic retreat but a positive affirmation of new conservative ideals. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520930126/Rumph,-Stephen-Beethoven-after-Napoleon:-Political-Romanticism-in-the-Late-Works-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520930126/Rumph,-Stephen-Beethoven-after-Napoleon:-Political-Romanticism-in-the-Late-Works-(Adobe-Reader).html
Alton Augustus Adams, Sr., was a musician, writer, hotelier, and the first black bandmaster of the United States Navy. Born in the Virgin Islands in 1889, Adams joined the U.S. military in 1917. Although naval policy at the time restricted blacks to menial jobs, Adams and his all-black ensemble provided a bridge between the local population and their all-white naval administrators. His memoirs, edited by Mark Clague, with a foreword by Samuel Floyd, Jr., reveal an inspired activist who believed music could change the world, mitigate racism, and bring prosperity to his island home. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520933818/Augustus,-Adams-Sr.-The-Memoirs-of-Alton-Augustus-Adams,-Sr.:-First-Black-Bandmaster-of-the-United-States-Navy-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520933818/Augustus,-Adams-Sr.-The-Memoirs-of-Alton-Augustus-Adams,-Sr.:-First-Black-Bandmaster-of-the-United-States-Navy-(Adobe-Reader).html
In this fascinating social history of music in Los Angeles from the 1880s to 1940, Catherine Parsons Smith ventures into an often neglected period to discover that during America's Progressive Era, Los Angeles was a center for making music long before it became a major metropolis. She describes the thriving music scene over some sixty years, including opera, concert giving and promotion, and the struggles of individuals who pursued music as an ideal, a career, a trade, a business--or all those things at once. Smith demonstrates that music making was closely tied to broader Progressive Era issues, including political and economic developments, the new roles played by women, and issues of race, ethnicity, and class. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520933834/Smith,-Catherine-Parsons-Making-Music-in-Los-Angeles:-Transforming-the-Popular-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520933834/Smith,-Catherine-Parsons-Making-Music-in-Los-Angeles:-Transforming-the-Popular-(Adobe-Reader).html
Opera developed during a time when the position of women-their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality-was constantly debated. Many of these controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this engaging study is the first comprehensive treatment of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. Wendy Heller explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. Heller begins by examining contemporary Venetian writings about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera. The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts-by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus-form the background for her penetrating analyses of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino). ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520919343/Heller,-Wendy-Emblems-of-Eloquence:-Opera-and-Women's-Voices-in-Seventeenth-Century-Venice-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520919343/Heller,-Wendy-Emblems-of-Eloquence:-Opera-and-Women's-Voices-in-Seventeenth-Century-Venice-(Adobe-Reader).html
"What can be done about the state of classical music?" Lawrence Kramer asks in this elegant, sharply observed, and beautifully written extended essay. Classical music, whose demise has been predicted for at least a decade, has always had its staunch advocates, but in today's media-saturated world there are real concerns about its viability. Why Classical Music Still Matters takes a forthright approach by engaging both skeptics and music lovers alike. In seven highly original chapters, Why Classical Music Still Matters affirms the value of classical music-defined as a body of nontheatrical music produced since the eighteenth century with the single aim of being listened to-by revealing what its values are: the specific beliefs, attitudes, and meanings that the music has supported in the past and which, Kramer believes, it can support in the future.Why Classical Music Still Matters also clears the air of old prejudices. Unlike other apologists, whose defense of the music often depends on arguments about the corrupting influence of popular culture, Kramer admits that classical music needs a broader, more up-to-date rationale. He succeeds in engaging the reader by putting into words music's complex relationship with individual human drives and larger social needs. In prose that is fresh, stimulating, and conversational, he explores the nature of subjectivity, the conquest of time and mortality, the harmonization of humanity and technology, the cultivation of attention, and the liberation of human energy. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520933648/Kramer,-Lawrence-Why-Classical-Music-Still-Matters-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520933648/Kramer,-Lawrence-Why-Classical-Music-Still-Matters-(Adobe-Reader).html
In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two groundbreaking claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian worldview. Until this historical moment, as Berger illustrates in his analysis of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, music was simply "in time." Its successive events unfolded one after another, but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, was not central to the way the music was experienced and understood. But after the shift, as he finds in looking at Mozart's Don Giovanni, the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; the cycle of time unbends and becomes an arrow. Berger complements these musical case studies with a rich survey of the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period. ]]> http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520933699/Berger,-Karol-Bach's-Cycle,-Mozart's-Arrow:-An-Essay-on-the-Origins-of-Musical-Modernity-(Adobe-Reader).html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 49:11:30 GMT http://www.ebooksabouteverything.com/ebooks/item/0520933699/Berger,-Karol-Bach's-Cycle,-Mozart's-Arrow:-An-Essay-on-the-Origins-of-Musical-Modernity-(Adobe-Reader).html