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Showing 1781 - 1800 of 4856 items
By Lynn Gordon. 2008
By Lynn Gordon, Susan Synarski, Karen Johnson. 2008
Turn an in-flight magazine into an engaging game, transform your mid-flight snack into an instant work of art: with 52…
ways to keep kids busy, happy, and occupied in the air or at the boarding terminal, this revised and updated deck is the traveling child's essential carry-on item.By Charisse Jones, Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Unlocking The Truth. 2014
A rock band on the cusp of massive stardom, Unlocking the Truth is made up of three thirteen-year-old African American…
boys: Malcolm, Jarad, and Alec. When not in school they spend their time as rock stars opening for the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, Motorhead, and Guns N' Roses, and crowd surfing at Coachella. They are currently working on their soon to be released debut EP. The key to their success: hard work, dedication, passion, and focus on their art.Part memoir and part guide book, the boys share the essential truths and principles, such as faith, determination and friendship, that led to their success and continue to drive them. The book will inspire and be a resource for kids looking to realize their own dreams, as well as parents who want to support their children's aspirations.By Christian Wolff, Gordon Mumma. 2015
Composer performer instrument builder teacher and writer Gordon Mumma has left an indelible mark on the…
American contemporary music scene A prolific composer and innovative French horn player Mumma is recognized for integrating advanced electronic processes into musical structures an approach he has termed Cybersonics Musicologist Michelle Fillion curates a collection of Mumma s writings presenting revised versions of his classic pieces as well as many unpublished works from every stage of his storied career Here through words and astonishing photos is Mumma s chronicle of seminal events in the musical world of the twentieth century his cofounding the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music his role in organizing the historic ONCE Festivals of Contemporary Music performances with the Sonic Arts Union and working alongside John Cage and David Tudor as a composer-musician with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company In addition Mumma describes his collaborations with composers performers dancers and visual artists ranging from Robert Ashley and Pauline Oliveros to Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg Candid and insightful Cybersonic Arts is the eye-opening account of a broad artistic community by an active participant and observerBy Beth Abelson Macleod. 2015
One of the foremost piano virtuosi of her time, Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler reliably filled Carnegie Hall. As a "new woman," she…
simultaneously embraced family life and forged an independent career built around a repertoire of the German music she tirelessly championed. Yet after her death she faded into obscurity. In this new biography, Beth Abelson Macleod reintroduces a figure long, and unjustly, overlooked by music history. Trained in Vienna, Bloomfield-Zeisler significantly advanced the development of classical music in the United States. Her powerful and sensitive performances, both in recital and with major orchestras, won her followers across the United States and Europe and often provided her American audiences with their first exposure to the pieces she played. The European-style salon in her Chicago home welcomed musicians, scientists, authors, artists, and politicians, while her marriage to attorney Sigmund Zeisler placed her at the center of a historical moment when Sigmund defended the anarchists in the 1886 Haymarket trial. In its re-creation of a musical and social milieu, Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler paints a vivid portrait of a dynamic artistic life.By Nancy Guy. 2015
With her superb coloratura soprano passion for the world of opera and down-to-earth personality Beverly Sills made…
high art accessible to millions from the time of her meteoric rise to stardom in 1966 until her death in 2007 An unlikely pop culture phenomenon Sills was equally at ease on talk shows on the stage and in the role of arts advocate and administrator Merging archival research with her own love of Sills s music Nancy Guy examines the singer-actress s artistry alongside the ineffable aspects of performance that earned Sills a passionate fandom Guy mines the memories of colleagues critics and aficionados to recover something of the spell Sills wove for people on both sides of the footlights during the hot moments of onstage performance At the same time she analyzes essential questions raised by Sills s art and celebrity How did Sills challenge the divide between elite and mass culture and build a fan base that crossed generations and socio-economic lines Above all how did Sills capture the unnameable magic that joins the members of an audience to a performer--and to one-another Intimate and revealing The Magic of Beverly Sills explores the alchemy of art magnetism community and emotion that produced an American iconBy Laurence Bergreen. 1997
Louis Armstrong was the founding father of jazz and one of this century's towering cultural figures, yet the full story…
of his extravagant life has never been told.Born in 1901 to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a slave, he came of age among the prostitutes, pimps, and rag-and-bone merchants of New Orleans. He married four times and enjoyed countless romantic involvements in and around his marriages. A believer in marijuana for the head and laxatives for the bowels, he was also a prolific diarist and correspondent, a devoted friend to celebrities from Bing Crosby to Ella Fitzgerald, a perceptive social observer, and, in his later years, an international goodwill ambassador.And, of course, he was a dazzling musician. From the bordellos and honky-tonks of Storyville--New Orleans's red light district--to the upscale nightclubs in Chicago, New York, and Hollywood, Armstrong's stunning playing, gravelly voice, and irrepressible personality captivated audiences and critics alike. Recognized and beloved wherever he went, he nonetheless managed to remain vigorously himself.Now Laurence Bergreen's remarkable book brings to life the passionate, courageous, and charismatic figure who forever changed the face of American music.By Paul Mccartney. 2004
Fans of McCartney will relish this volume of photos and interviews recording the singer's record-breaking 2002-2003 world tour. The text…
is taken from interviews and conversations filmed during the tour. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)By Lauren Pratt, Robert Wannamaker, Michael Winter, James Tenney, Larry Polansky. 2015
One of the twentieth century's most important musical thinkers, James Tenney did pioneering work in multiple fields, including computer music,…
tuning theory, and algorithmic and computer-assisted composition. From Scratch is a collection of Tenney's hard-to-find writings arranged, edited, and revised by the self-described "composer/theorist." Selections focus on his fundamental concerns--"what the ear hears"--and include thoughts and ideas on perception and form, tuning systems and especially just intonation, information theory, theories of harmonic space, and stochastic (chance) procedures of composition.By Julia Blackburn. 2005
From Julia Blackburn, an author whose ability to conjure lives from other times and places is so vivid that one…
suspects she sees ghosts, here is a portrait of a woman whose voice continues to haunt anyone who hears it.Billie Holiday's life is inseparable from an account of her troubles, her addictions, her arrests, and the scandals that would repeatedly put her name in the tabloid headlines of the 1940s and 1950s. Those who knew her learned never to be surprised by what she might do. Her moods and faces were so various that she could seem to be a different woman from one moment to the next. Volatile, unpredictable, Billie Holiday remained, even to her friends, an elusive and perplexing figure.In With Billie, we hear the voices of those people-piano players and dancers, pimps and junkies, lovers and narcs, producers and critics, each recalling intimate stories of the Billie they knew. What emerges is a portrait of a complex, contradictory, enthralling woman, a woman who knew what really mattered to her. Reading With Billie, one is convinced that she has only just left the room but will return shortly.By Virgil Thomson. 1927
Virgil Thomson was a gifted composer and one of the nation's foremost cultural critics. The best-selling autobiography Virgil Thomson (1966)…
is his gossipy telling of his own extraordinary progress from unteachable smart aleck to revered elder statesman. It recounts his artistically precocious Kansas City boyhood, demanding Harvard education, apprenticeship in Paris between the wars, and hard-won musical and literary maturity in New York. As narrator and protagonist, Thomson fascinates not only with his own story but also with those of his associates, collaborators, friends, and rivals, among them Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Nadia Boulanger, George Antheil, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Pare Lorentz, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. Virgil Thomson is an authentic work of Americana and a first-rate, first-person history of the rise of modernism.Complete with 32 pages of photographs.By Greg Farshtey. 2003
By Marguerite Boland, John Link. 2012
Over the course of an astonishingly long career, Elliott Carter has engaged with many musical developments of the twentieth and…
now twenty-first centuries – from his early neo-classic music of the interwar period, to his modernist works of conflict and opposition in the 1960s and 1970s, to the reshaping of a modernist aesthetic in his latest compositions. Elliott Carter Studies throws new light on these many facets of Carter's extensive musical oeuvre. This collection of essays presents historic, philosophic, philological and theoretical points of departure for in-depth investigations of individual compositions, stylistic periods in Carter's output and his contributions to a variety of genres, including vocal music, the string quartet and the concerto. The first multi-authored book to appear on Carter's music, it brings together new research from a distinguished team of leading international Carter scholars, providing the reader with a wide range of perspectives on an extraordinary musical life.By David Blum. 1998
Quintet presents compelling portraits of five artists known and loved by aficionados of classical music: the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the…
conductor Jeffrey Tate, the violinist Josef Gingold, the pianist Richard Goode, and the opera singer Birgit Nilsson. This gracefully written book offers a deeply personal look at the lives of these immensely talented and hard-working performers. The essays grew out of conversations the musicians had with the late David Blum, who was himself distinguished both as a conductor and as an author of books and articles on musical subjects.Certain to delight music enthusiasts, Quintet is a perfect holiday gift.By Edward Campbell, Peter O’hagan. 2016
Pierre Boulez is acknowledged as one of the most important composers in contemporary musical life This collection explores…
his works influence reception and legacy shedding new light on Boulez s music and its historical and cultural contexts In two sections that focus firstly on the context of the 1940s and 1950s and secondly on the development of the composer s style the contributors address recurring themes such as Boulez s approach to the serial principle and the related issues of form and large-scale structure Featuring excerpts from Boulez s correspondence with a range of his contemporaries here published for the first time the book illuminates both Boulez s relationship with them and his thinking concerning the challenges which confronted both him and other leading figures of the European avant-garde In the final section three chapters examine Boulez s relationship with audiences in the United Kingdom and the development of the appreciation of his musicBy Greg Farshtey. 2003
The Toa have acquired new armor, new tools, new powers and a new name: Toa Nuva. But these new abilities…
do not mean that their mission is finished. They must still defeat Makuta.By Peter Bebergal. 2014
This epic cultural and historical odyssey unearths the full influence of occult traditions on rock and roll--from the Beatles to…
Black Sabbath--and shows how the marriage between mysticism and music changed our world. From the hoodoo-inspired sounds of Elvis Presley to the Eastern odysseys of George Harrison, from the dark dalliances of Led Zeppelin to the Masonic imagery of today's hip-hop scene, the occult has long breathed life into rock and hip-hop--and, indeed, esoteric and supernatural traditions are a key ingredient behind the emergence and development of rock and roll. With vivid storytelling and laser-sharp analysis, writer and critic Peter Bebergal illuminates this web of influences to produce the definitive work on how the occult shaped--and saved--popular music. As Bebergal explains, occult and mystical ideals gave rock and roll its heart and purpose, making rock into more than just backbeat music, but into a cultural revolution of political, spiritual, sexual, and social liberation.By Martin Iddon. 2013
John Cage is best known for his indeterminate music, which leaves a significant level of creative decision-making in the hands…
of the performer. But how much licence did Cage allow? Martin Iddon's book is the first volume to collect the complete extant correspondence between the composer and pianist David Tudor, one of Cage's most provocative and significant musical collaborators. The book presents their partnership from working together in New York in the early 1950s, through periods on tour in Europe, until the late stages of their work from the 1960s onwards, carried out almost exclusively within the frame of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Tackling the question of how much creative flexibility Tudor was granted, Iddon includes detailed examples of the ways in which Tudor realised Cage's work, especially focusing on Music of Changes to Variations II, to show how composer and pianist influenced one another's methods and styles.By Donald Fagen. 2013
In Eminent Hipsters, musician and songwriter Donald Fagen, best known as the co-founder of the rock band Steely Dan, presents…
an autobiographical portrait that touches on everything from the cultural figures that mattered the most to him as a teenager, to his years in the late 1960s at Bard College, to a hilarious account of a recent tour he made with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald. Fagen begins by introducing the 'eminent hipsters' that spoke to him as he was growing up (and desperately yearning to be hip) in suburban New Jersey in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The figures who influenced him most were not the typical ones - Miles Davis, say, or Jack Kerouac - but rather people like Jean Shepherd, whose manic, acidic nightly radio broadcasts out of WOR-Radio had a tough realism about life and 'enthralled a generation of alienated young people'; Henry Mancini, whose chilled-out, nourish soundtracks, especially to films by Blake Edwards utilised the unconventional, spare instrumentation associated with the cool jazz school; and Mort Fega, the laid back, knowledgeable all night jazz man at WEVD, who was like 'the cool uncle you always wished you had'. He writes of how, growing up as a Cold War baby, one of his primary doors of escape became reading science fiction by such authors as Philip K. Dick, and of his regular trips into New York City to hear jazz. Other emblematic musical heroes Fagen writes about include Ray Charles, Ike Turner, and the Boswell Sisters, a trio from the 1920s and 30s whose subversive musical genius included trick phrasing and way out harmony. 'Class of '69' recounts Fagen's colourful tumultuous years at Bard College, the progressive university north of New York City that attracted a strange mix of applicants, including 'desperate suburban misfits with impressive verbal skills but appalling high school records' (like himself). It was at Bard that Fagen first met Walter Becker, with whom he would later form Steely Dan. The final section of the book, 'With the Dukes of September', offers a day-by-day account of a tour Fagen undertook last summer across America with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald, performing a programme of old R&B and soul tunes as well as some of each of their own hits. Told in a weary, cranky, occasionally biting and always entertaining voice, Fagen brings to life the ups and downs and various indignities and anxieties of being on the road - The Dukes were an admittedly 'low-rent operation' compared to a Steely Dan tour - as well as communicating the challenges and joy of playing every night to a different crowd in a different city.By Stanley Sadie, Julie Anne Sadie. 2005
Across Europe, more than three hundred houses and museums commemorate the composers who lived and worked in them. In Calling…
on the Composer, two distinguished musicologists guide the musically curious traveler or reader to these sites and provide essential information on their content and significance.Whether lakeside hut or moated castle, clock tower or cave, village school or fine town house, the physical context for musical genius and the artefacts of day-to-day existence have a powerful impact on how we perceive the figure behind the music we know and love. Julie and Stanley Sadie have journeyed to thirty-one countries to compile this unique travel companion and reference source. They offer practical information for the visitor, seasoned insights, and lively commentary. Richly illustrated and supported by thorough maps, the entries on individual composers trace their steps through the practicalities of life and reveal to us the context of creativity.