Arts, Architecture & Design Books

Recorded in 1949, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" changed the face of American music. Earl Scruggs's instrumental essentially transformed the folk culture that came before it while helping to energize bluegrass's entry into the mainstream in the...

Chicago blues musicians parlayed a genius for innovation and emotional honesty into a music revered around the world. As the blues evolves, it continues to provide a soundtrack to, and a dynamic commentary on, the African American experience: the legacy...

In this new collection of interviews, Steve Cushing once again invites readers into the vaults of Blues Before Sunrise, his acclaimed nationally syndicated public radio show. Icons from Memphis Minnie to the Gay Sisters stand alongside figures like...

The all-embracing, "whaddya got?" nature of rebellion in Fifties America included pop music's unlikely challenge to entrenched notions of masculinity. Within that upheaval, four prominent artists dared to behave in ways that let the public...

A unique woman's unstoppable journey to the center of American music As both composer and critic, Peggy Glanville-Hicks contributed to the astonishing cultural ferment of the mid-twentieth century. Her forceful voice as a writer and commentator...

Shaping jazz into symphonies and show tunes—only in America Leonard Bernstein's gifts for drama and connecting with popular audiences made him a central figure in twentieth-century American music. Though a Bernstein work might reference anything...

Notes from a lifetime loving American music The cowboy songs and dusty Texas car rides of his youth set Patrick B. Mullen on a lifelong journey into the sprawling Arcadia of American music. That music fused so-called civilized elements with native...

Lilian Terry has lived music. As a performer, she has shared the stage with Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone. She cofounded the European Jazz Federation and pioneered jazz education in Italy. Her work as a director-producer of radio and television...

Awards and Recognition:Awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Special Recognition Award (2007). A masterful investigation of the close interrelationships between music and intellectual historyDuring the great upheavals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,...

Explores an international network of artists, artist groups, and critics linked by their aesthetic and theoretical responses to science, science fiction, and new media. Focuses on the Italian Spatial Artist Lucio Fontana and French Painter of Space Yves...

Eclectic topics, cutting-edge research, and America's musical heritage In Rethinking American Music, Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis curate essays that offer an eclectic survey of current music scholarship. Ranging from Tin Pan Alley to Thelonious...

The architecture and achievements of a twentieth-century master Born in Sondrio, Italy, in 1891, Pier Luigi Nervi was a pioneer in the engineering and architecture of reinforced concrete. His buildings showed how the use of reinforced concrete...

What Andy Warhol didn't know--or pretended not to know--changed history. He habitually adopted the guise of a fool in public, which made it all the harder to grasp what he was getting at with his pop paintings and deadpan films. By making his own...

In this visually rich volume, Mariah Proctor-Tiffany reconstructs the art collection and material culture of the fourteenth-century French queen Clémence de Hongrie, illuminating the way the royal widow gave objects as part of a deliberate strategy to...

Born just nine years apart in Ukraine and Siberia, respectively, Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina were both children of Jewish families who fled Russian governmental repression and conflict. Both made early marriages of convenience or convention...

Dedicated to an articulation of the earth from broadly ecological perspectives, eco art is a vibrant subset of contemporary art that addresses the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues. In Landscape into Eco...

The magnificent prehistoric art discovered in caves throughout France and Spain raises many questions about early human culture. What do these superbly rendered paintings of horses, bison, and enigmatic human figures and symbols mean? How can we explain...

The surge of evolutionary and neurological analyses of art and its effects raises questions of how art, culture, and the biological sciences influence one another, and what we gain in applying scientific methods to the interpretation of artwork. In this...

This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices. Looking at avant-garde figures such...

This collection looks beyond the literary, religious, and philosophical aspects of Chaucer's texts to a new mode of interdisciplinary scholarship: one that celebrates the richness of Chaucer's visual poetics. The twelve illustrated essays make...

Blazing artistic trails through the digital age Trailblazing women working in digital arts media and education established the Midwest as an international center for the artistic and digital revolution in the 1980s and beyond. Foundational events at...

Exploring and celebrating individual lives in diverse situations, Women Singers in Global Contexts is a new departure in the study of women's worldwide music-making. Ten unique women constitute the heart of this volume: each one has engaged her singing...

How do we speak about jazz? In this provocative study based on the author's deep immersion in the New York City jazz scene, Thomas H. Greenland turns from the usual emphasis on artists and their music to focus on non-performing participants, describing...

Balancing sophisticated melodies and irresistible rhythms with lyrics by turns cynical and passionate, Cole Porter sent American song soaring on gossamer wings. Timeless works like "I Get a Kick Out of You" and "At Long Last Love"...

Derided for its conformity and consumerism, 1950s America paid a price in anxiety. Prosperity existed under the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Optimism wore a Bucky Beaver smile that masked worry over threats at home and abroad. But even dread could not...

SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City proposes a new and invigorating vision of urbanism, architectural design, and urban revitalization in twenty-first-century America. Culling transformative ideas from the realms of historic preservation,...

Henry Mancini, the first publicly successful and personally recognizable film composer in history, has practically become a Hollywood brand name. In his lifetime, he sold thirty million albums and won four Oscars and twenty Grammy awards. Through...

The latest in the perennially popular line of Studio Ghibli artbooks, which includes interviews, concept sketches, and finished animation cels from classics such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro.The Wind Rises is Miyazaki’s love letter to the...

From the beginning, the Beatles announced their debt to Black music in interviews, recording covers and original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating...

As one of Currier & Ives's leading artists, Frances (""Fanny"") Bond Palmer (1812-1876) was a major lithographer whose prints found their way into homes, schools, barns, taverns, business offices, yacht clubs, and elsewhere, reaching a mass audience...

Early in his career, critics and collectors widely recognized that Harold Weston (1894-1972), was capturing and saying something unusual in his paintings. ""There is a young American painter,"" wrote Duncan Phillips, ""who stirs in me the hope for a...

In a world inundated by an endless proliferation of texts, images, and data, the tension between the human desire to preserve and the economic incentive to retain collides with the finite nature of storage and its attendant costs. The impulse to keep...

Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts presents a compelling argument that the creative and cultural inquiry undertaken by artists is a form of research. The text explores themes, practices, and contexts of artistic inquiry and positions...

Joseph Beuys's work continues to influence and inspire practitioners and thinkers all over the world, in areas from organizational learning, direct democracy and new money forms to new art pedagogies and ecological art practices. Here, in dialogue with...

''A fine account of the development of jazz in New Orleans and Chicago from 1900 to 1960. . . . It should be in every jazz collection.'' - Choice

A comprehensive guide to the texts and tunes of an American musical traditionThis authoritative reference work investigates the roots of the Sacred Harp, the central collection of the deeply influential and long-lived southern tradition of shape-note...

Gone to the Country chronicles the life and music of the New Lost City Ramblers, a trio of city-bred musicians who helped pioneer the resurgence of southern roots music during the folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Formed in 1958 by Mike...

In this book, Robert L. Stone follows the sound of steel guitar into the music-driven Pentecostal worship of two related churches: the House of God and the Church of the Living God. A rare outsider who has gained the trust of members and musicians inside...

Both a beguiling portrait of the artist and an idiosyncratic self-portrait of the author, Mysterious Mozart is Philippe Sollers's alternately oblique and searingly direct interpretation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's oeuvre and lasting mystique,...

Showcasing American music and music making during the Great Depression, Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration photography program. With an appreciation for the amateur and the...

Lincoln Hall at the University of Illinois, named to commemorate the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, has long been a familiar landmark on the Urbana-Champaign campus and the home for undergraduate and graduate work in the liberal arts and...

An analysis of black women's involvement in the ''women's music'' scene from the 1970s to todayDrawing on fieldwork conducted at eight women's music festivals, Eileen M. Hayes shows how studying these festivals--attended by predominately white...

The life of a masterful conductor who directed from the heartServing Genius tells the life story of Carlo Maria Giulini, one of the most renowned and beloved conductors of the twentieth century. Detailing Giulini's extraordinary professional career,...

Framing timely and pressing questions concerning music and cultural rights, this collection illustrates the ways in which music--as a cultural practice, a commercial product, and an aesthetic form--has become enmeshed in debates about human rights,...

Life Flows on in Endless Song explores American folk songs as a frame for the American experience. Robert V. Wells discusses how folk songs emerged from particular historical circumstances and evolved as they migrated from one region to another. Crafting...

Few narratives in pop encompass Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Madonna, Duran Duran, Diana Ross, Johnny Mathis and Led Zeppelin. This story is one of them. Chic, led by former Black Panther activist Nile Rodgers and down-home family man Bernard...

Vinyl was supposed to be dead - and we were all set to be curating our own Spotify playlists. But, as is clear from creaking-at-seams record-pressing plants in the Czech Republic to purveyors of beach-glass vinyl in Big Sur; things haven't quite panned...