Ephemeral, fragile, often left unbound, sixteenth-century songbooks led fleeting lives in the pockets of singers and on the music desks of instrumentalists.
Niemen Enigmatic is the fourth album in the career of Czeslaw Niemen, arguably one of the greatest Polish musicians of all time (from pop and rock to jazz-rock and avant-garde).
If you drive into any American city with the car stereo blasting, you'll undoubtedly find radio stations representing R&B/hip-hop, country, Top 40, adult contemporary, rock, and Latin, each playing hit after hit within that musical format.
Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics-an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.
A composer and lyricist of enormous innovation and influence, Marc Blitzstein remains one of the most versatile and fascinating figures in the history of American music, his creative output running the gamut from films scores and Broadway operas to art songs and chamber pieces.
Often labeled "e;neo-Nazis"e; or "e;right-wing extremists,"e; radical nationalists in the Nordic countries have always relied on music to voice their opposition to immigration and multiculturalism.
We seem to see melodrama everywhere we look-from the soliloquies of devastation in a Dickens novel to the abject monstrosity of Frankenstein's creation, and from Louise Brooks's exaggerated acting in Pandora's Box to the vicissitudes endlessly reshaping the life of a brooding Don Draper.
Hollywood film music is often mocked as a disreputably 'applied' branch of the art of composition that lacks both the seriousness and the quality of the classical or late-romantic concert and operatic music from which it derives.
Most modern performers, trained on the performance practices of the Classical and Romantic periods, come to the music of the Renaissance with well-honed but anachronistic ideas.
From its dynamic start at dance parties in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip hop and rap music have exploded into a dominant style of popular music in the United States and a force for activism and expression all over the world.
Some of Debussy's most beloved pieces, as well as lesser-known ones from his early years, set in a rich cultural context by leading experts from the English- and French-speaking worlds.
American director Robert Altman (1925-2006) first came to national attention with the surprise blockbuster M*A*S*H (1970), and he directed more than thirty feature films in the subsequent decades.
This book is the first biography of 20th-century pianist Rudolf Serkin, providing a narrative of Serkin's life with emphasis on his European roots and the impact of his move to America.
In recent years, a psychological perspective has gained increasing acceptance in the education provided to musicians: teachers, performers, and "e;creatives"e; alike.
It is not an exaggeration that Matsutoya Yumi-better known by her stage name Yuming-is one of the most influential figures in Japanese popular music history.
Born in New Orleans before migrating to Chicago, Mahalia Jackson (1911-72) is undoubtedly the most widely known black gospel singer, having achieved fame among African American communities in the 1940s then finding a wide audience among non-black U.
This title is part of UC Presss Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact.
Brian Dolan's social and cultural history of the music business in relation to the history of the player piano is a critical chapter in the story of contemporary life.
Powerful and embracive, The Transformation of Black Music explores the full spectrum of black musics over the past thousand years as Africans and their descendants have traveled around the globe making celebrated music both in their homelands and throughout the Diaspora.
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.
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.
The story of music from prehistory to the present day Classical or rock, everyone has their favourite musical style, but how did your top choice come about?
In the third volume of his bestselling series, Pastor Robert Morgan expands his material to include the great history of worship, the first biblical hymns, biographical sketches of the most interesting composers, and almost 60 generations of hymn singing.
The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age chronicles the career of the most significant castrato of the second half of the eighteenth-century.
Multivocality frames vocality as a way to investigate the voice in music, as a concept encompassing all the implications with which voice is inscribed-the negotiation of sound and Self, individual and culture, medium and meaning, ontology and embodiment.
In this penetrating study, Russell Stinson explores how four of the greatest composers of the nineteenth century--Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms--responded to the model of Bach's organ music.
