Music reviews and criticism

In the wake of World War II, the cultural life of the United States underwent a massive transformation.

A handy and engaging chronicle, this book is the most detailed production history to date of the original Broadway version of Cabaret, showing how the show evolved from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories, into John van Druten's stage play, a British film adaptation, and then the Broadway musical, conceived and directed by Harold Prince as an early concept musical.

In Local Fusions, author Barbara Rose Lange explores musical life in Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria between the end of the Cold War and the world financial crisis of 2008.

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.

Alastair Williams argues that the social transformations of 1968 led to a new phase of art music in Germany.

Arguably the world's most popular partnered social dance form, salsa's significance extends well beyond the Latino communities which gave birth to it.

Imposing Harmony is a groundbreaking analysis of the role of music and musicians in the social and political life of colonial Cuzco.

One of Rolling Stones 20 Best Music Books of 2013 and one of Slates Staff Picks for Best Books of 2013 The ebook edition now includes Nathan Rabins "e;Extended Jam Session"e;a two-part bonus chapter about what writing this book did to (and for) his life.

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.

Uses rhetorical and literary theory to recover the power of the blues in its cultural tradition.

This volume assembles leading scholars to provide a comprehensive study of representation in music from the nineteenth century to today.

Here is the first full-scale account of Schoenberg's early tonal works, a rich repertory that music historians have tended to neglect or view as transitional to a mature atonal style.

The musical scores of Stanley Kubrick's films are often praised as being innovative and forward-looking.

Shortly after Chopin's death in 1849, Franz Liszt wrote the first full-length biography of his fellow composer.

LEO SMITH-cellist, journalist, composer, and teacher-was one of the most picturesque and frequently idolized artists on the Canadian scene.

Julie Brown reconsiders Schoenberg''s step into atonality as a response to Wagner''s charges concerning the Jewish influence on German music.

A pioneering study of how American composer Aaron Copland helped shape the sound of the Hollywood film industry and introduced the moviegoing public to modern musical styles.

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.

Rudolph, Frosty, and Captain Kangaroo is a memoir by Judy Gail Krasnow about her father, Hecky Krasnow, the producer of such classic childrens records and holiday tunes as Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, Im Gettin Nuttin for Christmas, Peter Cottontail, Suzy Snowflake, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, The Captain Kangaroo March, Smokey the Bear, Davy Crockett, Little Red Monkey, and The Little Engine That Could.

Unique and often startling encounters between music and the moving image in the films of Stanley Kubrick are trademarks of his style; witness the powerful effects of Strauss's "e;Also Sprach Zarathustra"e; in 2001: A Space Odyssey and of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in A Clockwork Orange, each excerpt vetted by Kubrick himself.

Published in its first edition in 1983, Boyd's treatment of this canonical composer is essential reading for students, scholars, and everyone interested in Baroque music.

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

The Annual Review of Jazz Studies (ARJS) is a journal providing a forum for the ever expanding range and depth of jazz scholarship, from technical analyses to oral history to cultural interpretation.

"e;The American Negro,"e; Arthur Schomburg wrote in 1925, "e;must remake his past in order to make his future.

The one-hit wonder has a long and storied history in popular music, exhorting listeners to dance, to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, to ponder mortality, to get a job, to bask in the sunshine, or just to get up and dance again.

As one of the original pioneering composers of the American experimental music movement and a well known scholar of classics, Christian Wolff has long been active as a significant thinker and elegant writer on music.

Servanthood of Song is a history of American church music from the colonial era to the present.

Enrique Granados (1867-1916) is one of the most compelling figures of the late-Romantic period in music.

Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, Christian worship on the Iberian Peninsula was structured by rituals of great theological and musical richness, known as the Old Hispanic (or Mozarabic) rite.

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished sources surrounding Kinkel, this book explores the extent to which Kinkel's Lieder reflect and transcend compositional-aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political facets typically associated with the first half of the nineteenth century.

This volume assembles leading scholars to provide a comprehensive study of representation in music from the nineteenth century to today.

In the bleak cage of the Soviet Union, a brilliant pianist, inspired by the music of Olivier Messiaen, survived and triumphed.

The cowboy songs and dusty Texas car rides of his youth set Patrick B.

They've sold more than 20 million albums, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and they're one of Homer Simpson's favorite bands-but even today, fifty years after they first formed, Cheap Trick remains to many a club band with a cult following.

By common consent the leading British composer of the twentieth-century's middle decades, Britten continues to create significant contexts for the work of those who survived and succeeded him.

Russian music today has a firm hold around the world in the repertoire of opera houses, ballet companies, and orchestras.

Phil Ochs is known primarily as a songwriter; however, his oeuvre extends far beyond that-to short stories, poetry, criticism, journalism, and satire, all of which are included in I'm Gonna Say It Now: The Writings of Phil Ochs, which represents the majority of what Ochs wrote outside of his large circle of songs.

Few composers even begin to approach Beethoven's pervasive presence in modern Western culture, from the concert hall to the comic strip.

An NPR Best Book of the YearWinner of the Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music CriticismThis is the best book about the Beatles ever written Mashable Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape offers an entertaining, unconventional look at the most popular band in history, the Beatles, exploring what they mean today and why they still matter so intensely to a generation that has never known a world without them.

Combining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman's Beethoven is both a richly drawn portrait of the man and a guide to his music.

A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms.

The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's precocity is so familiar as to be taken for granted.

Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) was one of the most versatile, wide-ranging, and prolific German composers of the seventeenth century.

Rudolph, Frosty, and Captain Kangaroo is a memoir by Judy Gail Krasnow about her father, Hecky Krasnow, the producer of such classic childrens records and holiday tunes as Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, Im Gettin Nuttin for Christmas, Peter Cottontail, Suzy Snowflake, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, The Captain Kangaroo March, Smokey the Bear, Davy Crockett, Little Red Monkey, and The Little Engine That Could.

This collection of new interviews with twenty-five accomplished female composers substantially advances our knowledge of the work, experiences, compositional approaches, and musical intentions of a diverse group of creative individuals.

The Musical Gift tells Sri Lanka's music history as a story of giving between humans and nonhumans, and between populations defined by difference.

Time after time, people turn to music when coping with traumatic life events.

This engaging study introduces Renaissance polyphony to a modern audience, balancing the listening experience with what lies beyond the notes.