Music reviews and criticism

The Musical Playground is a new and fascinating account of the musical play of school-aged children.

Empirically proving thatno matter where you arekids wanna rock, this is Chuck Klosterman's hilarious memoir of growing up as a shameless metalhead in Wyndmere, North Dakota (population: 498).

Through musical analysis of compositions written between the mid-twelfth to late nineteenth centuries, this volume celebrates the achievements of eight composers, all women: Hildegard of Bingen, Maddalena Casulana, Barbara Strozzi, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Marianne Martines, Josephine Lang, Fanny Hensel, Clara Schumann, and Amy Beach.

When writer and director Joss Whedon created the character Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he could hardly have expected the resulting academic interest in his work.

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.

Elegantly and engagingly written, this study demonstrates how opera has communicated with its diverse audiences over time.

This Element provides a unique perspective on the seminal composers in the history of music: Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti.

Cohen traces a history of modernism in migration through the composer Stefan Wolpe, from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College.

A radical reappraisal of the left-wing politics at the heart of nineteenth-century German music and culture, first published in 2010.

In 1950, as Arnold Schoenberg anticipated the publication of a collection of 15 of his most important writings, Style and Idea, he was already at work on a second volume to be called Program Notes.

American composers are at the forefront of a renaissance in concert music, in the process expanding the very definition of the category.

Notation in Johannes Brahms's sonata scores tells violinists and pianists far more than merely what pitches to play and how long to play them--if read carefully, these scores reveal an immense amount of expression, both of musical and human essences.

As featured in the Telegraph and on Radio 4's Today programme.

What were Prince's politics?

From the earliest days of rock and roll, white artists regularly achieved fame, wealth, and success that eluded the Black artists whose work had preceded and inspired them.

Starting with 1964's Goldfinger, every James Bond film has followed the same ritual, and so has its audience: after an exciting action sequence the screen goes black and the viewer spends three long minutes absorbing abstract opening credits and a song that sounds like it wants to return to 1964.

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.

A rip-snorting rock ‘n’ roll memoir from the legendary disc jockey who’s been called “the missing link to the Sixties.

The Muse That Sings is a unique behind-the-scenes look at both twentieth-century music and the nuts and bolts of creative work.

There's nothing like it in the Rush catalog-or, indeed, in the entire prog-rock canon.

How important was music to Martin Luther?

Charles Mingus is one of the most importantand most mythologizedcomposers and performers in jazz history.

This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the composition, performance and reception of musical modernism.

Listen to Classic Rock!

These volumes present the recently discovered archives of the Erard firm, perhaps the largest record of musical instrument making anywhere.

Innovative analytical techniques provide a penetrating view of how Haydn and Mozart employ harmony in their compositions.

In Arranging Gershwin, author Ryan Baagale approaches George Gershwin's iconic piece Rhapsody in Blue not as a composition but as an arrangement -- a status it has in many ways held since its inception in 1924, yet one unconsidered until now.

The offertory has played a crucial role in recent vigorous debates about the origins of Gregorian chant.

Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture documents the transition of recorded music on CDs to music as digital files on computers.

'You never knew what you were going to be confronted with when you went on Later.

The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, and numerous other groups put Britain at the center of the modern musical map.

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.

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

During the decades leading up to 1910, Portugal saw vast material improvements under the guise of modernization while in the midst of a significant political transformation - the establishment of the Portuguese First Republic.

The 1960s saw the emergence in the Netherlands of a generation of avant-garde musicians (including figures such as Louis Andriessen, Willem Breuker, Reinbert de Leeuw and Misha Mengelberg) who were to gain international standing and influence as composers, performers and teachers, and who had a defining impact upon Dutch musical life.

This first multi-author book on Telemann in English examines the composer''s life and works from a wide range of perspectives.

A memoir by an American who almost single-handedly introduced Soviet rock to the free world, [.

In the 1920s, the Mexican composer Julin Carrillo (1875-1965) developed a microtonal system called El Sonido 13 (The 13th Sound).

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

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

How did castrati manage to amaze their eighteenth-century audiences by singing the same aria several times in completely different ways?

The "e;Beethoven Syndrome"e; is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer's inner self.

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility.

In Crossing Paths, John Daverio explores the connections between art and life in the works of three giants of musical romanticism.

From the Romantic era onwards, music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time.

Hollywood's conversion from silent to synchronized sound film production not only instigated the convergence of the film and music industries but also gave rise to an extraordinary period of songs in American cinema.

Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory is the first comprehensive study of the musical structure and social history of klezmer music, the music of the Jewish musicians' guild of Eastern Europe.

Rick Beyer, the author of the acclaimed History Channel(R) series The Greatest Stories Never Told, returns with new historic tales, this time focusing on amazing war storiesSearch the annals of military history and you will discover no end of quirky characters and surprising true stories: The topless dancer who saved the Byzantine Empire; the World War I battle that was halted so a soccer game could be played; the scientist who invented a pigeon-guided missile in 1943; and don't forget the elderly pig whose death triggered an international crisis between the United States and Great Britain.