In November 1916, a young Afro-Brazilian musician named Donga registered sheet music for the song "e;Pelo telefone"e; ("e;On the Telephone"e;) at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro.
Since its first publication in 1990, Brahms and His World has become a key text for listeners, performers, and scholars interested in the life, work, and times of one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated composers.
No-one, least of all Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi themselves, expected the six-time former World Snooker champion and a British-Iranian underground rock musician to become one of the most trusted brands in British alternative music.
Edited by prominent musician and scholar Leonard Brown, John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music is a timely exploration of Coltrane's sound and its spiritual qualities that are rooted in Black American music-culture and aspirations for freedom.
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.
Despite the Modernist search for new and innovative aesthetics and rejection of traditional tonality, several twentieth century composers have found their own voice while steadfastly relying on the aesthetics and techniques of Romanticism and 19th century composition principles.
The first thorough theoretical study of Janacek's compositions, focusing on motivic and rhythmic structure and identifying elements that give the music coherence, character, and interest.
Now that the political and economic plight of European Roma and the popularity of their music are objects of international attention, Romani Routes provides a timely and insightful view into Romani communities both in their home countries and in the diaspora.
In 1946, Harry Choates, a Cajun fiddle virtuoso, changed the course of American musical history when his recording of the so-called Cajun national anthem "e;Jole Blon"e; reached number four on the national Billboard charts.
Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music.
In early 2005, an engineer at the Library of Congress accidentally discovered, in an unmarked box, the recording of Thelonious Monk's and John Coltrane's performance at a 1957 benefit concert at Carnegie Hall.
A monumental study of musical practices in 18th century Santiago de Chile, and the only English-language monograph about Chilean colonial music, A Sweet Penance of Music offers a comprehensive view of musicians within the city and their links with other Latin American urban centers in the wider colonial system.
Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print bringstogether established and emerging scholars of early modern print culture to explore the dynamic relationships between words and illustrations in awide variety of popular cheap print from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.
Russian composer Alexander Skryabin's life spanned the late romantic era and the momentous early years of the twentieth century, but was cut short before the end of the first world war.
This book is an invaluable chronicle of an exuberant time of artistic exploration and experimentation populated by now legendary figures such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Cornelius Cardew, Terry Riley, Julius Eastman, David Tudor, and many others who were part of this under-known chapter of late 20th century music history.
By gathering historical and musical fragments from a Europe torn apart by the Second World War and the Cold War, East German playwright Heiner Muller and West German composer Heiner Goebbels created Wolokolamsker Chaussee as a musical panorama that stretched across modern European history at a moment of international crisis.
Although women have been teaching and performing music for centuries, their stories are often missing from traditional accounts of the history of music education.
The Critical Nexus confronts an important and vexing enigma of early writings on music: why chant, which was understood to be divinely inspired, needed to be altered in order to work within the then-operative modal system.
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.
This first volume of Music in Black American Life collects research and analysis that originally appeared in the journals American Music and the Black Music Research Journal, and in the University of Illinois Press's acclaimed book series Music in American Life.
The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space.
The Exultet rolls of southern Italy are parchment scrolls containing text and music for the blessing of the great Easter candle; they contain magnificent illustrations, often turned upside down with respect to the text, The Exultet in Southern Italy provides a broad perspective on this phenomenon that has long attracted the interest of those interested in medieval art, liturgy, and music.
When Hank Williams died on New Year's Day 1953 at the age of twenty-nine, his passing appeared to bring an abrupt end to a saga of rags-to-riches success and anguished self-destruction.
As the official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives has pioneered new areas of research in the life, times, and music of Bach since its first appearance in 1995.
