Unfinished Music draws its inspiration from the riddling aphorism by Walter Benjamin that serves as its epigraph: "e;the work is the death mask of its conception.
This study seeks to explore the role and significance of aria insertion, the practice that allowed singers to introduce music of their own choice into productions of Italian operas.
Over the past 30 years, musicologists have produced a remarkable new body of research literature focusing on the lives and careers of women composers in their socio-historical contexts.
Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes.
The Music Issue enhanced eBook include all the tracks on our special CD and:The tell-all letter from a teenage girl who kissed-and kissed-Elvis PresleyHow corruption and greed made the Jacksonville music sceneGretchen Wilson, country music's "e;Redneck Woman"e;The invaluable social spaces of African American record storesBobby Rush, "e;bluesman-plus"e;Where Opryland resides in hearts, minds, and soulsBackstage with the Avett Brothers, Doc Watson, Tift Merritt, Southern Culture on the Skids, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Johnny Cash, and more great artists.
In Proust's Songbook, Jennifer Rushworth analyzes and theorizes the presence and role of songs in Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).
The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains.
They've sold more than 20 million albums, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and they're one of Homer Simpson's favorite bands-but even today, fifty years after they first formed, Cheap Trick remains to many a club band with a cult following.
In the mid-20th century, African musicians took up Cuban music as their own and claimed it as a marker of black Atlantic connections and of cosmopolitanism untethered from European colonial relations.
Howard Bloom-called "e;the greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known"e; by Derek Sutton, the former manager of Styx, Ten Years After, and Jethro Tull-is a science nerd who knew nothing about popular music.
Female-to-male crossdressing became all the rage in the variety shows of nineteenth-century America and began as the domain of mature actresses who desired to extend their careers.
Bold new essays demonstrate how Leonard Bernstein influenced American culture, society, and politics through his conducting, composing, political relationships, and activism.
As one of the most popular classical composers in the performance repertoire of professional and amateur orchestras and choirs across the world, Gustav Mahler continues to generate significant interest, and the global appetite for his music, and for discussions of it, remains large.
An accessible multi-disciplinary exploration of Franz Schubert''s haunting late song cycle Winterreise (1827) that combines context and different analytical approaches.
As one of the first African American vocalists to be recorded, Bessie Smith is a prominent figure in American popular culture and African American history.
Examines in detail the contexts of Brahms's masterpiece and demonstrates that, contrary to recent consensus, it was performed and received as an inherently Christian work during the composer's life.
William Kinderman's detailed study of Parsifal, described by the composer as his "e;last card,"e; explores the evolution of the text and music of this inexhaustible yet highly controversial music drama across Wagner's entire career, and offers a reassessment of the ideological and political history of Parsifal, shedding new light on the connection of Wagner's legacy to the rise of National Socialism in Germany.
Winner of the ASCAP Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical BiographyThe musical landscape of New York City and the United States of America would look quite different had it not been for William Schuman.
WINNER: Book Prize from the Jewish Music and Jewish Studies Group of the American Musicological SocietyA rich interdisciplinary exploration of the world of Sara Levy, a Jewish salonniere and skilled performing musician in late eighteenth-century Berlin, and her impact on the Bach revival, German-Jewish life, and Enlightenment culture.
In Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of "e;Hey Jude,"e; James Campion dives deeply into the song's origins, recording, visual presentation, impact, and eventual influence, while also discovering what makes "e;Hey Jude"e; a classic musical expression of personal comfort and societal unity conceived by a master songwriter, Paul McCartney.
"e;American Hardcore sets the record straight about the last great American subculture"e;Paper magazineSteven Blush's "e;definitive treatment of Hardcore Punk"e; (Los Angeles Times) changed the way we look at Punk Rock.
The greatest backup group in the history of recorded music undoubtedly was the Jordanaires, a gospel group of mostly Tennessee boys, formed in the 1940s, that set the standard for studio vocal groups in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and beyond.
Sounding Authentic considers the intersecting influences of nationalism, modernism, and technological innovation on representations of ethnic and national identities in twentieth-century art music.
Born in New Orleans before migrating to Chicago, Mahalia Jackson (1911-72) is undoubtedly the most widely known black gospel singer, having achieved fame among African American communities in the 1940s then finding a wide audience among non-black U.
