Music reviews and criticism Books

This book explores the relationship between three African American women's dance-art-music sensibilities within the context of a Pan African aesthetic. Its purpose is three-fold: to show commonalities between Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Nina...

The concept of intertextuality - namely, the meaning generated by interrelations between different texts - was coined in the 1960s among literary theorists and has been widely applied since then to many other disciplines, including music.　...

The manuscript Seville, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular 5-2-25, a composite of dozens of theoretical treatises, is one of the primary witnesses to late medieval music theory. Its numerous copies of significant texts have been the focus of substantial...

Carl Schachter is the world's leading practitioner of Schenkerian theory and analysis. His articles and books have been broadly influential, and are seen by many as models of musical insight and lucid prose. Yet, perhaps his greatest impact has been...

One of the most beloved film musicals of all time, The Wizard of Oz represents an enduring family favorite and cultural classic. Yet there is much more to the story than meets the eye, and the MGM movie is just one of many ways in which it has been...

Classical composers seeking to create an American sound enjoyed unprecedented success during the 1930s and 1940s. Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Howard Hanson and others brought national and international attention to American composers for the first time in...

"[A] magical, profound, and elegant look at the continued need for high quality in our throw away society." --Douglas Brinkley, HistorianThis intensely human story, which moves from an ageless workshop in Brooklyn to the rehearsal rooms of Carnegie Hall...

A History of Baroque Music is an exhaustive study of the music of the Baroque period, with particular focus on the 17th century. Individual chapters consider the work of significant composers, including Monteverdi, Corelli, Scarlatti, Schütz, Purcell,...

The poignant memoir of forgotten Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, and a remarkable chronicle of the early days of the world's most influential pop group.

Simple songs or airs, in which a male poetic voice either seduces or excoriates a female object, were an influential vocal genre of the French Baroque era. In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary study, Catherine Gordon-Seifert analyzes the style of...

Classical music permeates contemporary life. Encountered in waiting rooms, movies, and hotel lobbies as much as in the concert hall, perennial orchestral favorites mingle with commercial jingles, video-game soundtracks, and the booming bass from a...

Approaches to Meaning in Music presents a survey of the problems and issues inherent in pursuing meaning and signification in music, and attempts to rectify the conundrums that have plagued philosophers, artists, and theorists since the time of...

Much music was written for the two most important dances of the 18th and 19th centuries, the minuet and the waltz. In Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz, Eric McKee argues that to better understand the musical structures and expressive meanings...

Claudia R. Jensen presents the first unified study of musical culture in the court and church of Muscovite Russia. Spanning the period from the installation of Patriarch Iov in 1589 to the beginning of Peter the Great's reign in 1694, her book offers...

As the field of Cultural History grows in prominence in the academic world, an understanding of the history of culture has become vital to scholars across disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music cultivates a return to the...

This is a comprehensive introduction to the inner workings of rock music. Everett takes readers through all aspects of the music and its lyrics, leading fans and listeners to new insights and new ways to develop their own interpretations of the aural...

The Beatles made music within a virtuous circle, together reaching heights that none of them could alone. Then, in a flash, that circle collapsed, and the solo years which followed were patchy, indeed.But a secret has been hiding in plain sight ever...

This book considers and discuss aspects of the management of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the twentieth century since the death of its founder Richard D'Oyly Carte and concentrate on key events which contributed to its demise in 1982.

Music in Conflict studies the complex relationship of musical culture to political life in Palestine-Israel, where conflict has both shaped and claimed the lives of Palestinians and Jews. In the context of the geography of violence that characterizes the...

Adding European and non-English speaking contexts to the vibrant field of Dylan studies, this volume covers a wide range of topics and methodologies while dealing with the inherently complex and varied material produced or associated with the iconic...

Ben Green investigates the phenomenon of peak music experiences from a social and cultural perspective, including discussions on it as sources of inspiration; as a core motivation for ongoing musical and social activity; the significance of live music...

The mention of the term "melodrama" is likely to evoke a response from laymen and musicians alike that betrays an acquaintance only with the popular form of the genre and its greatly heightened drama, exaggerated often to the point of the ridiculous. Few...

"I'm not a working musician," the legendary Canadian jazz guitarist Sonny Greenwich once declared. "When I decide to play, I play to awake people spiritually. That's the only reason."For that, and for his stirring, distinctively linear style, he was...

The major objective of this collection of 28 essays is to analyze the trends, musical formats, and rhetorical devices used in popular music to illuminate the human condition. By comparing and contrasting musical offerings in a number of countries and in...

The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction captures a new paradigm in the study of music interaction, as a wave of recent research focuses on the role of the human body in musical experiences. This volume brings together a broad collection of...

What's So Important About Music Education? presents a new philosophy of music education for the United States, rooted in history and current perspectives from ethnomusicology. J. Scott Goble explores the societal effects of the nation's foundations in...

This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in science and technology studies (STS), which propose that facts are neither absolute truths, nor completely relative, but emerge from an intensely...

This new study of the intersection of romance novels with vocal music records a society on the cusp of modernisation, with a printing industry emerging to serve people's growing appetites for entertainment amidst their changing views of religion and the...

Mabel Daniels (1877-1971): An American Composer in Transition assesses Daniels within the context of American music of the first half of the twentieth century. Daniels wrote fresh sounding works that were performed by renowned orchestras and ensembles...

Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) was Victorian Britain's most celebrated and popular composer, whose music to this day reaches a wider audience than that of any of his contemporaries. Yet the comic operas on which Sullivan's reputation is chiefly based have...

From the outset, French opera generated an enormous diversity of literature, familiarity with which greatly enhances our understanding of this unique art form. Yet relatively little of that literature is available in English, despite an upsurge of...

In recent years, scholars and musicians have become increasingly interested in the revival of musical improvisation as it was known in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This historically informed practice is now supplanting the late Romantic view of...

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) was arguably the most important Russian composer since Shostakovich, and his music has generated a great deal of academic interest in the years since his death. Schnittke Studies provides a variety of perspectives on the...

The enigmatic character of The Art of Fugue became apparent as early as in its first edition, printed more than a year after the composer's death. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who published both the first and the second editions, raised several unsolved...

The flourishing of religious or spiritually-inspired music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries remains largely unexplored. The engagement and tensions between modernism and tradition, and institutionalized religion and spirituality are...