Music

POPULAR MUSIC eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

MUSIC IN ANCIENT GREECE & ROME eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Jarrett, Scott, Day, Holly Music Composition For Dummies eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Music Composition For Dummies explains how to use music theory to write music in a variety of forms. It introduces basic chord construction and shows the reader how to compose music with both chords and melody, develop simple melodic motifs and themes into longer compositions, arrange compositions, create scores, and select the right instruments and voicing to express musical ideas. Music Composition For Dummies also shows you how to create popular songs, classically structured pieces, film and television scores, videogame soundtracks, and more using both traditional and improvisational techniques.

Fine, Larry 2008-2009 Annual Supplement to The Piano Book (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Supplying list prices for more than 2,500 currently made piano brands and models, as well as advice on how to estimate actual street prices to help negotiate the lowest possible price, this annual complement to The Piano Book offers the information necessary to differentiate between a good deal and a great deal when buying a piano. Anyone in the market for a new or used piano-including teachers, technicians, students, and aficionados-can make a more informed purchase using this definitive and singular guide. Completely updated information on piano manufacturers, instrument models, prices, and current trends and conditions in the piano market is also included.

Hicks, Robert / Bohlinger, John A Guitar and a Pen (Mobipocket) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Nothing tells a story better than the story-songs of country music. A GUITAR AND A PEN presents, for the first time, the literary work of some of the best storytellers in the world: the songwriters who cut and polish tales down to sparkling three-minute gems. A blend of fiction and nonfiction, humor, and poignancy, these tales range from Kris Kristofferson's charming tale of how an explicit natural rock formation causes chaos in a small farming town, to the true story of Bluegrass founder Bill Monroe's first visit to the White House as told by Hazel Smith, to Charlie Daniels' character-driven fable of money and unhappiness, to Gary Nicholson's riveting tale of an albino African American singer/songwriter who inspired him to be a musician. A celebratrion of music and storytelling, other contributors include Hal Ketchum, Janis Ian, Mark D. Sanders, Tom T. Hall, Marshall Chapman, and Robert Hicks, among many other notable Nashville luminaries.

Kurutz, Steven LIKE A ROLLING STONE eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Steven Kurutz was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania and graduated from Pennsylvania State University. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, where for three years he was a writer for the paper’s City section. His articles have also appeared in Details, W, Playboy, and Spin, among other publications. He lives in New York City. This is his first book.

Sheed, Wilfrid HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Wilfred Sheed is the author of six novels, two of which, Office Politics and People Will Always Be Kind, were nominated for National Book Awards. He has written three collections of criticism, one of which was nominated by the National Book Critics Circle. Among his other books is a notable memoir of Clare Boothe Luce, who told him that Irving Berlin was the vainest man she ever met and George Gershwin one of the most basically modest. He lives with his wife, Miriam Ungerer, in North Haven, New York

From the Hardcover edition.

Donelan,James H. Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

James H. Donelan describes how two poets, a philosopher, and a composer H lderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of the nineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: the understanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creative mind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four major figures all born in 1770 developed this idea in both metaphorical and actual musical structures, thereby establishing both the theory and the practice of asserting self-identity in music. Beethoven still carries the image of the heroic composer today; this book describes how it originated in both his music and in how others responded to him. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, musicology, and literary criticism, Donelan shows how this development emerged from the complex changes in European cultural life taking place between 1795 and 1831.

Gelbart,Matthew The Invention of "Folk Music" and "Art Music" (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

We tend to take for granted the labels we put to different forms of music. This study considers the origins and implications of the way in which we categorize music today. Whereas earlier ways of classifying music were based on its different functions, for the past two hundred years we have been obsessed with creativity and musical origins, and classify music along these lines. Matthew Gelbart argues that folk music and art music became meaningful concepts only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and only in relation to each other. He examines how cultural nationalism served as the earliest impetus in classifying music by origins, and how the notions of folk music and art music followed - in conjunction with changing conceptions of nature, and changing ideas about human creativity. Through tracing the history of these musical categories, the book confronts our assumptions about different kinds of music today.

TIPPETT STUDIES (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Michael Tippett (1905--1998) was one of the major figures of British music in this century. This volume of essays provides the first substantial writing on the composer for over a decade and includes the work of established scholars as well as several new voices. Essays encompass a range of genres and style periods, but a number of recurring themes may be detected. Broadly speaking, the book moves between technical discussion focused on individual works and wider questions of context - the external factors that shaped the composer his musical production such as his relationship to the past, his fascination with ancient Greece and his pursuit of the transcendent. What emerges from this book is a rich portrait of a composer whose work reflects the century his triumphs and tragedies with particular intensity and who, at the end of his composing career, was increasingly acknowledged by younger composers as a major influence and example.

JANCEK STUDIES (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

This book is the first major publication devoted to the music of Jancek, now widely regarded as one of the most important composers of the early twentieth century. The essays, all by leading scholars, deal with a broad range of subjects relating to opera, symphonic poem, instrumental music, cultural context and reception. Some topics, such as the sources of Jancek's musical expressivity, questions of narrative, Jancek as musical analyst and Jancek as realist, are considered seriously for the first time, whilst other more conventional topics, such as speech melody and Jancek's ethnographic activities, are reappraised. A transcription of Jancek's analytical study of Jeux de vagues from Debussy's La mer is published for the first time, and this document is considered in the light of Jancek's theory of music as a whole and of the reception of La mer.

HAYDN STUDIES (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

The advances in Haydn scholarship would have been unthinkable to earlier generations, who honoured the composer more in word than in deed. Haydn Studies deals with many aspects of a composer who is perennially fresh, concentrating principally on matters of reception, style and aesthetics and presenting many interesting readings of the composer's work. Haydn has never played a major role in accounts of cultural history and has never achieved the emblematic status accorded to composers such as Beethoven, Debussy and Stravinsky, in spite of his radical creative agenda: this volume broadens the base of our understanding of the composer.

Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

This edited volume is the first book to bring together academic specialists writing on the multi-media operatic form from a range of disciplines: comparative literature, history, sociology, and philosophy. The presence in the volumes title of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading cultural sociologist of the late twentieth century, signals the editors intention to synthesize recent advances in social science with recent advances in musicological and other scholarship on opera. Through a focus on opera in Italy and France, the contributors to the volume draw on their respective disciplines both to expand our knowledge of operas history and to demonstrate the kinds of contributions that stand to be made by different disciplines to the study of opera. The volume is divided into three sections, each of which is preceded by a concise and informative introduction explaining how the chapters in that section contribute to our understanding of opera.

Goehring, Edmund J. Three Modes of Perception in Mozart (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

This is the first full-length, scholarly study of what is widely regarded as Mozart's most enigmatic opera and Lorenzo Da Ponte's most erudite text. Against the long-standing judgment that the opera uses a misguided confidence in reason to traduce feeling, Goehring's study shows how Cos affirms comedy's regenerative powers and its capacity to grant access to modes of sympathy and understanding that are otherwise inaccessible. In making this argument, the book surveys a rich literary, operatic, and intellectual territory. It offers a new perspective on the relationships between text and tone in the opera, on the tension between comedy and philosophy and its representation in stage works, and on the pastoral mode, which the opera uses in especially subtle ways. Throughout, Goehring's argument is sustained by close readings of primary sources, many of them little known, and is richly illustrated with musical examples.

Cherlin,Michael Schoenberg's Musical Imagination (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

No composer was more responsible for changes in the landscape of twentieth century music than Arnold Schoenberg (18741951), and no other composers music inspired a commensurate quantity and quality of technical description. Yet there is still little understanding of the correlations between Schoenbergs musical thought and larger questions of cultural significance in and since his time: the formalistic descriptions of music theory do not generally engage larger questions in the history of ideas and scholars without an understanding of the formidable musical technique are ill-equipped to understand the music. Schoenbergs Musical Imagination is intended to connect Schoenbergs music and critical writings to a larger world of ideas. While most technical studies of Schoenbergs music are limited to a single compositional period, this book traces changes in his attitudes as a composer, and their impact on his ever-changing compositional style over the course of his remarkable career.

Horton, Julian Bruckner's Symphonies (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Few works in the nineteenth-century repertoire have aroused such extremes of hostility and admiration, or have generated so many scholarly problems, as Anton Bruckner's symphonies. Julian Horton seeks new ways of understanding the symphonies and the problems they have accrued by treating them as the focus for a variety of inter-disciplinary debates and methodological controversies. He isolates problematic areas in the works' analysis and reception, and approaches them from a range of analytical, historical, philosophical, literary critical and psychoanalytical viewpoints. The symphonies are thus explored in the context of a number of crucial and sometimes provocative themes, including the political circumstances of the works' production, Bruckner and post-war musical analysis, issues of musical influence, the problem of editions, Bruckner and psychobiography, and the composer's controversial relationship to the Nazis.

The Cambridge Companion to Verdi (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

This Companion provides a biographical, theatrical, and social-cultural background for Verdi's music, examines in detail important general aspects of its style and method of composing, and synthesizes stylistic themes in discussions of representative works. Aspects of Verdi's milieu, style, creative process, and critical reception are explored in essays by highly reputed specialists. Individual chapters address themes in Verdi's life, his role in transforming the theater business, and his relationship to Italian Romanticism and the Risorgimento. Chapters on four operas representative of the different stages of Verdi's career, Ernani, Rigoletto, Don Carlos, and Otello synthesize analytical themes introduced in the more general chapters and illustrate the richness of Verdi's creativity. The Companion also includes chapters on Verdi's non-operatic songs and other music, his creative process, and scholarly writing about Verdi from the nineteenth-century to the present day.

Wilson,Alexandra The Puccini Problem (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

The first detailed investigation of the reception and cultural contexts of Puccinis music, this book offers a fresh view of this historically important but frequently overlooked composer. Wilsons study explores the ways in which Puccinis music and persona were held up as both the antidote to and the embodiment of the decadence widely felt to be afflicting late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Italy, a nation which although politically unified remained culturally divided. The book focuses upon two central, related questions which were debated throughout Puccinis career: his status as a national or international composer, and his status as a traditionalist or modernist. In addition, Wilson examines how Puccinis operas became caught up in a wide range of extra-musical controversies concerning such issues as gender and class. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of both the history of opera and of the wider artistic and intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Italy.

Grier,James Musical World of a Medieval Monk (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

James Grier documents the musical activities of Advmar de Chabannes, eleventh-century monk, historian, homilist and tireless polemicist for the apostolic status of Saint Martial, patron saint of the abbey that bore his name in Limoges. Advmar left behind some 451 folios of music with notation in his autograph hand, a musical resource without equal before the seventeenth century. He introduced, at strategic moments, pieces familiar from the standard liturgy for an apostle and items of his own composition. These reveal Advmar to be a supremely able designer of liturgies and a highly original composer. This study analyzes his accomplishments as a musical scribe, compiler of liturgies, editor of existing musical works and composer; it also offers a speculative consideration of his abilities as a singer; and finally, it places Advmar's musical activities in the context of liturgical, musical and political developments at the abbey of Saint Martial in Limoges.

Williams,Peter J. S. Bach (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Peter Wiliams approaches afresh the life and music of arguably the most studied of all composers, interpreting both Bachs life by deconstructing his original Obituary in the light of new information, and his music by evaluating his priorities and irrepressible creative energy. How, though belonging to musical families on both his parents sides, did he come to possess so bewitching a sense of rhythm and melody, and a mastery of harmony that established nothing less than a norm in western culture? In considering that the works of a composer are his biography, the book's title 'A Life in Music' means both a life spent making music and one revealed in the music as we know it. A distinguished scholar and performer, Williams re-examines Bachs life as an orphan and a family man, as an extraordinarily gifted composer and player, and an energetic and ambitious artist who never suffered fools gladly.

Hicks, Robert A Guitar and a Pen (Microsoft Reader Desktop) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Dean, Terrance Hiding in Hip Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry--From Music to Hollywood eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Everyone wants to know the truth about their favorite celebrities' heart's desire. Within the masculine culture of Hip Hop and Hollywood, there is a well-known gay subculture that industry insiders are keenly aware of but choose to hide. Terrance Dean worked his way up for more than ten years in the entertainment industry from intern to executive, and has lived the life of glitz and bling along with Hollywood and Hip Hop's most glamorous. With a family full of secrets and working in an industry founded on maleness -- where one's job, friendships, and reputation all depend on remaining on the down low and in hiding -- Dean writes a revealing account of the journey of coming out from hiding. Full of startling anecdotes and incredible true stories, Hiding in Hip Hop is not a traditional tell-all. A personal and poignant memoir, it is also one of the most provocative and honest looks at stardom and sexuality.

The James Brown Reader eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Nelson George and Alan Leeds have assembled the fi rst comprehensive collection of writings about the late, great Godfather of Soul, creating a fascinating mosaic of the man and the musician. Known as the hardest-working man in show business, James Brown embodied rhythm and blues, funk and soul, and sensuality. His musical innovations in such indelible grooves as "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine," "I Got You (I Feel Good)," and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," transformed American music. To appreciate Brown's immeasurable infl uence, to chronicle his professional and personal triumphs and struggles, and to capture his essence, writers from four decades weigh in on the legendary Soul Brother Number One. What emerges is a tribute to a trailblazer-one that no dedicated fan or music history buff will want to be without.

Rondn, Csar Miguel The Book of Salsa (Microsoft Reader Desktop) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

Salsa is one of the most popular types of music listened to and danced to in the United States. Until now, the single comprehensive history of the music--and the industry that grew up around it, including musicians, performances, styles, movements, and production--was available only in Spanish. This lively translation provides for English-reading and music-loving fans the chance to enjoy Csar Miguel Rondn's celebrated El libro de la salsa. For this first English-language edition, Rondn has added a new chapter to bring the story of salsa up to the present.

McHard, James L. The Future of Modern Music: A Philosophical Exploration of Modernist Music in the 20th Century and Beyond (Adobe Reader) eBook

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:07:31 GMT

A selective survey of the major pioneering composers of the 20th century, this resource focuses on the development of the new emphases in music creation, including tone color and density-elements which prior to 1900 had been subordinated in their treatment and given secondary importance compared to melody and harmony. In addition to presenting general biographies and a list of each of the 123 featured composer's most prominent works, this sourcebook examines the philosophies and the aesthetic considerations behind the new techniques involved in these primary treatments of density and timbre. From Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, and Karlheinz Stockhausen to Julio Estrada, Luigi Russolo, and Otomo Yoshihide, this review provides a means of understanding and appreciating the music predominant in the repertoires of most major, modern-day orchestras.