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 Italian Ars Nova Music: A Bibliographic Guide to Modern Editions and Related Literature is an essential resource for scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Italian Trecento music.
The New York City Labor Chorus (NYCLC) was the first group of its kind when it formed in 1991 with members of different unions joining together in song.
An innovative study of the ways in which theological themes related to earthly and heavenly 'treasures' and Bach's own apparent attentiveness to the spiritual values related to money intertwined in his sacred music.
Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartk explores the means by which two early 20th century operas - Debussy's Pellas et Mlisande (1902) and Bartk's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) - transformed the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language.
Camille Saint-Sans is a memorable figure not only for his successes as a composer of choral and orchestral works, and the eternally popular opera Samson et Dalila, but also because he was a keen observer of the musical culture in which he lived.
The contributors to Playing for Keeps examine the ways in which musical improvisation can serve as a method for negotiating violence, trauma, systemic inequality, and the aftermaths of war and colonialism.
Born into a poor Virginian family, John Treville Latouche (1914-56), in his short life, made a profound mark on America's musical theater as a lyricist, book writer, and librettist.
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.
Jazz stories have been entwined with cinema since the inception of jazz film genre in the 1920s, giving us origin tales and biopics, spectacles and low-budget quickies, comedies, musicals, and dramas, and stories of improvisers and composers at work.
Josephine Lang (1815-80) was one of the most gifted, respected, prolific, and widely published song composers of the nineteenth century, yet her life and works have remained virtually unknown.
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.
The greatest Southern storyteller of our time tracks down the greatest rock and roller of all time-and gets his own story, from the source, for the very first time.
The "e;Second Quintet"e; -- the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-1960s -- was one of the most innovative and influential groups in the history of the genre.
'Gaiman is god in the universe of story' Stephen Fry 'A perfect antidote to cynicism and a paean to the power of reading' Observer--- 'Literature does not occur in a vacuum.
In this third edition of the classic Verdi, renowned authority Julian Budden offers a comprehensive overview of Verdi the man and the artist, tracing his ascent from humble beginnings to the status of a cultural patriarch of the new Italy, whose cause he had done much to promote, and demonstrating the gradual enlargement over the years of his artistic vision.
An in-depth biography of “a major artist whose work is sometimes obscured by the shadows of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen” (Craig Werner, author of Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival).
When it was first published in 1994, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his Era was widely heralded not only as the most thorough investigation of Scott Joplin's life and music, but also as a gripping read, almost a detective story.
This comprehensive portrait of Tropicalia, exploring everything from influences and results to context and main players, demonstrates how the genre helped reinvent Brazil's cultural identity in a post-colonial world.
Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism explores the music of Claude Debussy and its early reception in light of the rise of the empirical human sciences in Western Europe around the turn of the twentieth century.
In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain.
