Music reviews and criticism

The Top 10 Sunday Times BestsellerNOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREOscar Nominated For Best Picture and Best Adapted ScreenplaySet amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA's African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America's space program.

Famously reclusive and secretive, North Korea can be seen as a theatre that projects itself through music and performance.

Famously reclusive and secretive, North Korea can be seen as a theatre that projects itself through music and performance.

While much has been said about the nostalgia and historic references of Daft Punk's final album, Random Access Memories, this book reveals its ambition and future-focus, and claims these aspects do not necessarily contradict.

A contemporary of Shakespeare and Monteverdi, and a colleague of Galileo and Artemisia Gentileschi at the Medici court, Francesca Caccini was a dominant musical figure there for thirty years.

In this unique and hybrid book, cultural and music historian Michael P.

In this book, Emily Wilbourne boldly traces the roots of early opera back to the sounds of the commedia dell'arte.

From bell ringing to fireworks, gongs to cannon salutes, a dazzling variety of sounds and soundscapes marked the China encountered by the West around 1800.

The years between roughly 1760 and 1810, a period stretching from the rise of Joseph Haydn's career to the height of Ludwig van Beethoven's, are often viewed as a golden age for musical culture, when audiences started to revel in the sounds of the concert hall.

Feasting and Fasting in Opera shows that the consumption of food and drink is an essential component of opera, both on and off stage.

Daniel Albright investigates musical phenomena through the lens of monism, the philosophical belief that things that appear to be two are actually one.

A history of nineteenth-century New Orleans and the people who made it a vital, if unexpected, part of an emerging operatic world.

Early seventeenth-century Italy saw a revolution in instrumental music.

Offering a broad perspective of the philosophy, theory, and aesthetics of early Indian music and musical ideology, this study makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of the ancient foundations of India's musical culture.

For premodern audiences, poetic form did not exist solely as meter, stanzas, or rhyme scheme.

Through archival work and storytelling, Musical Migration and Imperial New York revises many inherited narratives about experimental music and art in postwar New York.

A biography of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival.

London, 1820.

Film has shaped modern society in part by changing its cultures of memory.

The Jazz Age.

Music listeners today can effortlessly flip from K-pop to Ravi Shankar to Amadou & Mariam with a few quick clicks of a mouse.

Any listener knows the power of music to define a place, but few can describe the how or why of this phenomenon.

We seem to see melodrama everywhere we look-from the soliloquies of devastation in a Dickens novel to the abject monstrosity of Frankenstein's creation, and from Louise Brooks's exaggerated acting in Pandora's Box to the vicissitudes endlessly reshaping the life of a brooding Don Draper.

The Low Countries were at the heart of innovation in Europe in the fifteenth century.

This study uncovers how Saint Cecilia came to be closely associated with music and musicians.

A study of the networks of opera production and critical discourse that shaped Italian cultural identity during and after Unification.

This is a groundbreaking study of the prestigious Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics during the Third Reich.

Sound Authorities shows how experiences of music and sound played a crucial role in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry in Britain.

Jazz is born of collaboration, improvisation, and listening.

Richard Kramer follows the work of Beethoven and Schubert from 1815 through to the final months of their lives, when each were increasingly absorbed in iconic projects that would soon enough inspire notions of "e;late style.

An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic-a phenomenological style that sought to renew contact with music as a worldly circumstance.

Analyzing the final three decades of Haydn's career, this book uses the composer as a prism through which to examine urgent questions across the humanities.

Thinking with Sound traces the formation of auditory knowledge in the sciences and humanities in the decades around 1900.

Opera often seems to arouse either irrational enthusiasm or visceral dislike.

From the author of The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs comes his “Basement Tapes”: the complete “Real Life Rock Top 10” columns For nearly thirty years, Greil Marcus has written a remarkable column called “Real Life Rock Top Ten.

For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work, the blink of an eye in which one's world changes.

The triumph of avant-gardes in the 1920s tends to dominate our discussions of the music, art, and literature of the period.

In New York and London during World War I, the performance of lieder-German art songs-was roundly prohibited, representing as they did the music and language of the enemy.

This year marks the golden anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship band of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

Musicologist Pauline Fairclough explores the evolving role of music in shaping the cultural identity of the Soviet Union in a revelatory work that counters certain hitherto accepted views of an unbending, unchanging state policy of repression, censorship, and dissonance that existed in all areas of Soviet artistic endeavor.

The Women's Liberation Movement held a foundational belief in the written word's power to incite social change.

"e;Don Giovanni"e; Captured considers the life of a single opera, engaging with the entire history of its recorded performance.

A collection of the best music writing and cultural criticism from one of the most influential music journalists of his day The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, Ralph J.

King of the Queen City is the first comprehensive history of King Records, one of the most influential independent record companies in the history of American music.

Known affectionately as "e;The Red Book,"e; Bruno Nettl's The Study of Ethnomusicology became a classic upon its original publication in 1983.

The official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives pioneers new areas of research into the life, times, and music of the master composer.

In this book, Robert L.

Triple Entendre discusses the rise and spread of background music in contexts as diverse as office workplaces, shopping malls, and musical performance.

What did women do in ancient Greece and Rome?

Nicholas Temperley documents the lives, careers, and music of three British composers who emigrated from England in mid-career and became leaders in the musical life of the early United States.