Music reviews and criticism

Artists today are at a crossroads.

Combining cultural analysis with historical and personal accounts of a century of musical life at the American Academy in Rome, this volume provides a history of the AAR's Rome Prize in Composition.

Many have long found it difficult to take Rod Stewart seriously.

Listening for the Secret is a critical assessment of the Grateful Dead and the distinct culture that grew out of the group's music, politics, and performance.

The Treatise on Musical Objects is regarded as Pierre Schaeffer's most important work on music and its relationship with technology.

The tonadilla, a type of satiric musical skit popular on the public stages of Madrid during the late Enlightenment, has played a significant role in the history of music in Spain.

Here is the book jazz lovers have eagerly awaited, the second volume of Gunther Schuller's monumental The History of Jazz.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre.

Opera often seems to arouse either irrational enthusiasm or visceral dislike.

Shonen Knife-an all-female punk trio from Osaka, Japan-cultivated a global fan base that has included the likes of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore.

The time: 1936-1938.

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 this groundbreaking new study, Kate van Orden examines noble education in the arts to show how music contributed to cultural and social transformation in early modern French society.

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.

Explores how Gershwin''s iconic music was shaped by American political, intellectual, cultural and business interests as well as technological advances.

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.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Soviet musicians and ensembles were acclaimed across the globe.

Hold On World revisits Lennon and Ono's love affair and startling collaborations.

Although women have been teaching and performing music for centuries, their stories are often missing from traditional accounts of the history of music education.

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.

The stories of rock musicians who die young are the thing of lore and legend.

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

Situates the controversial narrative of 'The English Musical Renaissance' within its wider historical context.

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.

Edgy, witty, and opinionated critical analysis of "e;classic rock"e; in the 21st century, discussing everything from modern remixes of classic albums (why?

Inge van Rij''s book demonstrates how Berlioz used the sights and sounds of the orchestra to explore other worlds.

During the Great War, composers and performers created music that expressed common sentiments like patriotism, grief, and anxiety.

My Neighbor Totoro is a long-standing international icon of Japanese pop culture that grew out of the partnership between the legendary animator Miyazaki Hayao and the world-renowned composer Joe Hisaishi.

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world?

Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany offers a new narrative of Baroque music, accessible to non-music specialists, in which Tanya Kevorkian defines the era in terms of social dynamics rather than style and genre development.

A new look at the life, times, and music of Polish composer and piano virtuoso Fryderyk ChopinFryderyk Chopin (1810-49), although the most beloved of piano composers, remains a contradictory figure, an artist of virtually universal appeal who preferred the company of only a few sympathetic friends and listeners.

Changes our picture of how music and politics interact through a rigorous and wide-ranging reappraisal of the field.

Both Ernest Hemingway and F.

An exploration of rhythm and the richness of musical time from the perspective of performers, composers, analysts, and listeners.

What the hell is shoegaze?

The Story of Boogie-Woogie: A Left Hand Like God examines the socio-historical background of the boogie-woogie piano style, from its early appearances in the barrelhouses of lumber, turpentine, and railroad camps in the southern United States, to its emergence at rent parties in Chicago and St.

Wassail songs are part of Welsh folk culture, but what exactly are they?

The musical output of jazz pianist and composer Herbie Hancock has toppled genre boundaries and influenced generations of musicians.

Following the earlier volumes in the Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure series, Mahler's Fourth Symphony is a study of origins of one of Mahler's most popular and accessible works.

In a career spanning five decades, Elton John has sold over 250 million records worldwide and has appeared in nearly 4 000 live performances.

Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America.

The Everly Brothers-aka Don and Phil to fans with an intimate appreciation for them-seemed to exist almost as an apparition.

Outside and Inside: Representations of Race and Identity in White Jazz Autobiography is the first full-length study of key autobiographies of white jazz musicians.

Leo Black's memoir not only recalls 'the Glock Era and After' in a series of informative, poignant, witty and judicious vignettes, but is also a key text for understanding one of the great ages of British music.

Once conduits to new music, frequently bypassing the corporate music industry in ways now done more easily via the Internet, record stores championed the most local of economic enterprises, allowing social mobility to well up from them in unexpected ways.