This book traces the emergence of the orchestra from 16th-century string bands to the "e;classical"e; orchestra of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries.
Since the appearance of The Bay Psalm Book in 1640, music has served as a defining factor for American religious experience and has been of fundamental importance in the development of American identity and psyche.
Bach's cantatas are among the highest achievements of Western musical art, yet studies of the individual cantatas that are both illuminating and detailed are few.
Gary Giddins's Weather Bird is a brilliant companion volume to his landmark in music criticism, Visions of Jazz, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
Most scholars since World War Two have assumed that composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) maintained a strong attachment to Judaism throughout his lifetime.
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.
Building on ideas first advanced by Arnold Schoenberg and later developed by Erwin Ratz, this book introduces a new theory of form for instrumental music in the classical style.
In the wake of the Asia-Pacific War, Korean survivors of the "e;comfort women"e; system-those bound into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the war-lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them.
Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century seeks to understand recent German history and contemporary German culture through its sounds and musics, noises and silences, using the means and modes of the emerging field of Sound Studies.
Recognized as the patriarch of the minimalist movement-Brian Eno once called him "e;the daddy of us all"e;--La Monte Young remains an enigma within the music world, one of the most important and yet most elusive composers of the late twentieth century.
Mozart's emergence as a mature artist coincides with the rise to prominence of the piano, an instrument that came alive under his fingers and served as medium for many of his finest compositions.
Amid the recent increase in scholarly attention to rock music, Understanding Rock stands out as one of the first books that subjects diverse aspects of the music itself to close and sophisticated analytical scrutiny.
Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them?
Poised to become a classic of jazz literature, Visions of Jazz: The First Century offers seventy-nine chapters illuminating the lives of virtually all the major figures in jazz history.
In its golden age, American radio both entertained and also fostered programs meant to produce self-governing and opinion-forming individuals, promoting openness to change and tolerance of diversity, familiarity with classical music, and knowledge of world affairs.
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.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American authors pioneered a mode of musical writing that quite literally resounded beyond the printed page.
Winner of the 2015 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological SocietyWhen Leonard Bernstein first arrived in New York City, he was an unknown artist working with other brilliant twentysomethings, notably Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green.
Perhaps the most widely recognized figure in folk music and one of the most well-known figures in American political activism, Pete Seeger now belongs among the icons of 20th-century American culture.
Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes.
From the very beginning of the nineteenth century, many elements of Spanish culture carried an air of 'exoticism' for the French-and nothing played more important of a role in shaping the French idea of Spain than the country's musical tradition.
Hollywood's conversion from silent to synchronized sound film production not only instigated the convergence of the film and music industries but also gave rise to an extraordinary period of songs in American cinema.
The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "e;musical riots put to a switchblade beat"e;--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify?
Michael Steinberg's highly successful listener's guides--The Symphony and The Concerto--have been universally praised for their blend of captivating biography, crystal clear musical analysis, and delightful humor.
An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, a legendary pianist and organist, and an accomplished painter and classicist.
Composer, pianist, and critic Claude Debussy's musical aesthetic represents the single most powerful influence on international musical developments during the long fin de siecle period.
"e;Industrial"e; is a descriptor that fans and critics have applied to a remarkable variety of music: the oildrum pounding of Einsturzende Neubauten, the processed electronic groans of Throbbing Gristle, the drumloop clatter of Skinny Puppy, and the synthpop songcraft of VNV Nation, to name just a few.
