Music reviews and criticism

Using a replica of Beethoven's Erard piano, scholar and performer Tom Beghin launches a striking reinterpretation of a key period of Beethoven's work.

As one of the most influential and popular genres of the last three decades, rap has cultivated a mainstream audience and become a multimillion-dollar industry by promoting highly visible and often controversial representations of blackness.

The displacement of European musics and musicians is a defining feature of twentieth-century music history.

An expansive analysis of the relationship between human and machine in music.

Basic Elements of Music introduces readers to a wide range of knowledge essential for a well-rounded understanding of music.

From John Philip Sousa to Green Day, from Scott Joplin to Kanye West, from Stephen Foster to Coldplay, The Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, Volumes 1 and 2 covers the vast scope of its subject with virtually unprecedented breadth and depth.

Music was everywhere during the Civil War.

A comprehensive guide to the band with praise from Booklist saying "e;Stray Cats fans and music lovers in general will appreciate this exhaustively researched document of the group's influential and lengthy career.

Like his compositions, Milton Babbitt's writings about music have exerted an extraordinary influence on postwar music and thinking about music.

Elliott Carter (1908-2012) was the foremost composer of classical music in America during the second half of the 20th century.

This is the first complete survey of the historical pitch standards used by musicians during the last four centuries.

The integration of audible space is a central aspect of electroacoustic music.

Basic Elements of Music introduces readers to a wide range of knowledge essential for a well-rounded understanding of music.

Since its composition and first performance in 1724, Bach's St.

Haydn is enjoying renewed appreciation: this book explores fresh approaches to his music and the cultural forces affecting it.

This pathbreaking work reveals the pivotal role of music--musical works and musical culture--in debates about society, self, and culture that forged European modernity through the "e;long nineteenth century.

Sweet Air rewrites the history of early twentieth-century pop music in modernist terms.

This collection assembles the best interviews from Steve Cushing's long-running radio program Blues Before Sunrise, the nationally syndicated, award-winning program focusing on vintage blues and R&B.

The first book to consider the shellac disc as a global format.

Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains assembles interdisciplinary essays investigating concepts of harmony during a transitional period, in which the Pythagorean notion of a harmoniously ordered cosmos competed with and was transformed by new theories about sound - and new ways of conceptualizing the world.

Franz Schubert's song cycles Schone Mullerin and Winterreise are cornerstones of the genre.

Elvis Presley and his two faithful sidekicks tore up Texas highways, crisscrossing the state, always late for their next high school hop, car dealership opening, or Lion's Club fund raiser.

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians.

Many of the world's biggest bands have imploded amid bitter and violent grudges over money, publishing, ego-driven power plays, relationships, drugs, and that famous old bromide, "e;musical differences.

Following the creation of the United States, profound disagreements remained over how to secure the survival of the republic and unite its diverse population.

The first book of its kind in English, Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk explores the texts and contexts of German punk cultures.

During his early years, Franz Liszt worked as a traveling piano virtuoso, his adventures highlighted by his entree into the literary world as a correspondent for the most popular French journals of his time.

Who doesn't want to be a rockstar?

Defined by its distinct performance style, stage practices, and regional and dialect based identities, Cantonese opera originated as a traditional art form performed by itinerant companies in temple courtyards and rural market fairs.

Interprets an eighteenth-century musical repertoire in sociable terms, both technically (specific musical patterns) and affectively (predominant emotional registers of the music).

Opera After the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany presents opera as a site for the renegotiation of tradition in a politically fraught era of rebuilding.

Making Money, Making Musicoffers tools to encourage creative and adaptive entrepreneurship in the music business.

Representing a historical cross-section of performance and training in Western music since the seventeenth century, Five Lives in Music brings to light the private and performance lives of five remarkable women musicians and composers.

Of all the elements that combine to make movies, music sometimes seems the forgotten stepchild.

Renowned today as a prominent African-American in Music Theater and the Arts community, composer, conductor, and violinist Will Marion Cook was a key figure in the development of American music from the 1890s to the 1920s.

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Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us.

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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.

Ed Ward covers the first half of the history of rock & roll in this sweeping and definitive narrative-from the 1920s, when the music of rambling medicine shows mingled with the songs of vaudeville and minstrel acts to create the very early sounds of country and rhythm and blues, to the rise of the first independent record labels post-World War II, and concluding in December 1963, just as an immense change in the airwaves took hold and the Beatles prepared for their first American tour.

Both from the Ears and Mind offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England.

In Musicologia-meaning "e;musical reasoning"e; as distinct from a mere love of music-author and composer Robin Maconie takes aim against the fashionable misconception that music is empty of meaning, or "e;auditory cheesecake.

What the hell is shoegaze?

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