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Music Since 1900: Luigi Nono
By Carola Nielinger-Vakil. 2015
The anti-fascist cantata Il canto sospeso, the string quartet Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima and the 'Tragedy of Listening' Prometeo…
cemented Luigi Nono's place in music history. In this study, Carola Nielinger-Vakil examines these major works in the context of Nono's amalgamation of avant-garde composition with Communist political engagement. Part I discusses Il canto sospeso in the context of all of Nono's anti-fascist pieces, from the unfinished Fučik project (1951) to Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (1966). Nielinger-Vakil explores Nono's position at the Darmstadt Music Courses, the evolution of his compositional technique, his penchant for music theatre and his use of spatial and electronic techniques to set the composer and his works against the diverging circumstances in Italy and Germany after 1945. Part II further examines these concerns and shows how they live on in Nono's work after 1975, culminating in a thorough analysis of Prometeo.What You Wanna Know
By Samantha Stonebraker. 1999
You know him as B-Rok, a front man for the Backstreet Boys. I know him as G.B., a special nickname…
shared only between the two of us until Now. I am Brian Littrell's first love and highschool sweetheart. Brian and I were best friends for four years. I was with the Backstreet Boys from the beginning when they were just about to catch their shooting star. From signing their record deal to touring across Europe, Brian and I were inseparable. I saw the ups and downs, and want to share this amazing story with you. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to date one of the Backstreet Boys? Are there questions you've always wanted to know the truth about? After the lights go down, what are The Backstreet Boys really like? I want to share with you some personal stories about the band, and some really fun, never before seen photos of Brian and The Backstreet Boys. If it could happen to me, it could happen to you, and I want you to be prepared. I'm just a normal girl who was the first love of one of The Backstreet Boys. If you're going to be the next girlfriend or just want the hottest secrets about The Backstreet Boys, I think you'll enjoy What You Wanna Know. You'll definitely feel closer to those boys you love. Have fun with it, and enjoy! Smiles, SamanthaIt's Like That
By Joseph Simmons Run. 2000
Money, success, and widespread adulation: Run of Run-DMC, one of the first rappers to achieve nationwide recognition and top-selling albums,…
seemed to have it all in his heyday. But the dizzying effects of fame soon left Run feeling empty and dissatisfied. Stuck in a pit of despair, he went through the motions of his public life while grappling with his loss of direction and a family life that was falling apart. Here is the story of how he turned his life around, discovering a wellspring of spirituality within himself and a special connection with God. Now an ordained minister, Run talks in this extraordinary book about his profound life change and getting the message out to the community. Still a major rap performer, with an album entitled Crown Royal and frequent appearances on MTV, Run is truly a rennaissance man. A spiritual memoir unlike any other, It's Like That captures the innocence of youth, the pain of chaos, and the joy that one can only find through righteous living. This is an epic and absorbing tale from one of the most popular and complex performers of our times.The Rhino Records Story: Revenge of the Music Nerds
By Harold Bronson. 2013
In the 1970s in the backroom of a record store, Harold Bronson and Richard Foos were making history-and Rhino Records…
was born. Harold Bronson's The Rhino Records Story tells the tale of how a little record shop became a multi-million dollar corporation. Starting as an expression of Bronson and Foos' passion for rock music, absurdity, and an anti-establishment sensibility, Rhino soon outgrew its beginnings as a reissue label, taking on new artists and new mediums. Their accomplishments grew to encompass several gold record awards, the Best Label of the Year Award, the revival of careers of famous musicians, and the creation of a company to produce feature films including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This behind-the-scenes look at a company considered by many to be the industry's best, reveals the secrets to their success. Written from the perspective of cofounder Harold Bronson, The Rhino Records Story divulges a unique business approach which made Rhino what it was at the height of its success. Woven throughout this story of a rising corporation, Bronson guides us through the ascent, fall, and revival of artists Rhino touched such as the Monkees, the Turtles, the Knack, and Frankie Lymon. In a mix of hard work, passion for music, and a flair for the unconventional, the story of Rhino Records takes shape. The owners also ran their company humanely, and were awarded the Clinton administration's only Corporate Citizenship Award given to an entertainment company. Rhino Records, as it was envisioned by Bronson and Foos, had higher priorities than the bottom line. Struggling against corporate interests, rock star personalities, and a perpetual underdog reputation, Bronson provides an exclusive insight into how the industry was run and how Rhino excelled. By the fans, for the fans, Rhino Records is the story of rock history, evolving pop culture, and a unique understanding of the music that mattered.The Last Waltz: The Strauss Dynasty and Vienna
By John Suchet. 2015
Captured in a beautiful package, including more than fifty color photographs, The Last Waltz tells the intriguing story of of…
the Viennese Strauss family known for producing some of the best known, best loved music of the nineteenth century. Johann and Josef Strauss, the Waltz Kings, composed hundreds of instantly recognizable and enduringmelodies, including The Blue Danube Waltz, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Voices of Spring and The Radetzky March. Their iconic music has been featured on the scores of nearly a thousand films.Yet despite their success, this was a family riven with tension, feuds and jealousy, living in a country that was undergoing seismic upheaval. Through the personal and political chaos, the Strauss family continued to compose music to which the Viennese - anxious to forget their troubles - could dance and drank champagne, even as their country hurtled towards oblivion at the hands of the First World War. Classical music expert and radio host John Suchet skillfully portrays this gripping story, capturing the family dramas, the tensions, triumphs and disasters against the turbulent backdrop of Austria in the nineteenth century, from revolution to regicide.Porcelain: A Memoir
By Moby. 2016
From one of the most interesting and iconic musicians of our time, a piercingly tender, funny, and harrowing account of…
the path from suburban poverty and alienation to a life of beauty, squalor, and unlikely success out of the NYC club scene of the late '80s and '90s.There were many reasons Moby was never going to make it as a DJ and musician in the New York club scene. This was the New York of Palladium; of Mars, Limelight, and Twilo; of unchecked, drug-fueled hedonism in pumping clubs where dance music was still largely underground, popular chiefly among working-class African Americans and Latinos. And then there was Moby--not just a poor, skinny white kid from Connecticut, but a devout Christian, a vegan, and a teetotaler. He would learn what it was to be spat on, to live on almost nothing. But it was perhaps the last good time for an artist to live on nothing in New York City: the age of AIDS and crack but also of a defiantly festive cultural underworld. Not without drama, he found his way. But success was not uncomplicated; it led to wretched, if in hindsight sometimes hilarious, excess and proved all too fleeting. And so by the end of the decade, Moby contemplated an end in his career and elsewhere in his life, and put that emotion into what he assumed would be his swan song, his good-bye to all that, the album that would in fact be the beginning of an astonishing new phase: the multimillion-selling Play. At once bighearted and remorseless in its excavation of a lost world, Porcelain is both a chronicle of a city and a time and a deeply intimate exploration of finding one's place during the most gloriously anxious period in life, when you're on your own, betting on yourself, but have no idea how the story ends, and so you live with the honest dread that you're one false step from being thrown out on your face. Moby's voice resonates with honesty, wit, and, above all, an unshakable passion for his music that steered him through some very rough seas. Porcelain is about making it, losing it, loving it, and hating it. It's about finding your people, your place, thinking you've lost them both, and then, somehow, when you think it's over, from a place of well-earned despair, creating a masterpiece. As a portrait of the young artist, Porcelain is a masterpiece in its own right, fit for the short shelf of musicians' memoirs that capture not just a scene but an age, and something timeless about the human condition. Push play.The Multi-Talented Mr.Erskine
By Katherine Elise Chaddock. 2012
This first biography of John Erskine views him in the larger contexts of the mass culture and expanded commercialism that…
helped propel his fame. It also relates a life narrative that demonstrates perils of academic celebrity along a conceptual path from public intellectual to pop icon.Adele: The Biography
By Chas Newkey-Burden. 2011
Adele's soulful voice, catchy hits, and vulnerable personality have won her critical acclaim and widespread popularity. She has topped the…
charts in 18 countries and swept the top awards at the 2012 Grammys—but who is she? How has her tempestuous life that influenced her heartbreaking tracks? How did she overcome the challenges that threatened to derail her career? In Adele, veteran celebrity biographer Chas Newkey-Burden traces her story from her childhood in London, where she began singing at the age of four. During her teenage years she wrote her own music and attended the BRIT school, alongside the likes of Leona Lewis. After posting demos on her MySpace webpage, she earned a record deal and quickly captured hearts. Adele remains an unlikely icon. Her looks are unusual in a formulaic world of celebrity image, she suffers badly with pre-stage nerves, and she once canceled a crucial promotional trip to the U.S. because she felt too down to travel. This is a full, unflinching portrait of a genuine talent and inspiring, uncompromising woman—the curvy girl next door who conquered the world.New Music at Darmstadt
By Martin Iddon. 2013
New Music at Darmstadt explores the rise and fall of the so-called 'Darmstadt School', through a wealth of primary sources…
and analytical commentary. Martin Iddon's book examines the creation of the Darmstadt New Music Courses and the slow development and subsequent collapse of the idea of the Darmstadt School, showing how participants in the West German new music scene, including Herbert Eimert and a range of journalistic commentators, created an image of a coherent entity, despite the very diverse range of compositional practices on display at the courses. The book also explores the collapse of the seeming collegiality of the Darmstadt composers, which crystallised around the arrival there in 1958 of the most famous, and notorious, of all post-war composers, John Cage, an event Carl Dahlhaus opined 'swept across the European avant-garde like a natural disaster'.African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston
By Randy Weston. 1967
The pianist, composer, and bandleader Randy Weston is one of the world's most influential jazz musicians and a remarkable storyteller…
whose career has spanned five continents and more than six decades. Packed with fascinating anecdotes, African Rhythms is Weston's life story, as told by him to the music journalist Willard Jenkins. It encompasses Weston's childhood in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood--where his parents and other members of their generation imbued him with pride in his African heritage--and his introduction to jazz and early years as a musician in the artistic ferment of mid-twentieth-century New York. His music has taken him around the world: he has performed in eighteen African countries, in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, in the Canterbury Cathedral, and at the grand opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina: The New Library of Alexandria. Africa is at the core of Weston's music and spirituality. He has traversed the continent on a continuous quest to learn about its musical traditions, produced its first major jazz festival, and lived for years in Morocco, where he opened a popular jazz club, the African Rhythms Club, in Tangier. Weston's narrative is replete with tales of the people he has met and befriended, and with whom he has worked. He describes his unique partnerships with Langston Hughes, the musician and arranger Melba Liston, and the jazz scholar Marshall Stearns, as well as his friendships and collaborations with Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, the novelist Paul Bowles, the Cuban percussionist Candido Camero, the Ghanaian jazz artist Kofi Ghanaba, the Gnawa musicians of Morocco, and many others. With African Rhythms, an international jazz virtuoso continues to create cultural history.Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora
By Brigid Cohen. 2012
The German-Jewish emigre composer Stefan Wolpe was a vital figure in the history of modernism, with affiliations ranging from the…
Bauhaus, Berlin agitprop and the kibbutz movement to bebop, Abstract Expressionism and Black Mountain College. This is the first full-length study of this often overlooked composer, launched from the standpoint of the mass migrations that have defined recent times. Drawing on over 2000 pages of unpublished documents, Cohen explores how avant-garde communities across three continents adapted to situations of extreme cultural and physical dislocation. A conjurer of unexpected cultural connections, Wolpe serves as an entry-point to the utopian art worlds of Weimar-era Germany, pacifist movements in 1930s Palestine and vibrant art and music scenes in early Cold War America. The book takes advantage of Wolpe's role as a mediator, bringing together perspectives from music scholarship, art history, comparative literature, postcolonial studies and recent theories of cosmopolitanism and diaspora.The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams
By Alain Frogley, Aidan J. Thomson. 2013
An icon of British national identity and one of the most widely performed twentieth-century composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams has been…
misunderstood as much as he had been revered; his international impact and enduring influence on areas as diverse as church music, film scores and popular music has been insufficiently appreciated. This volume brings together a team of leading scholars, examining all areas of the composer's output from new perspectives, and re-evaluating the cultural politics of his lifelong advocacy for the music-making of ordinary people. Surveys of major genres are complemented by chapters exploring such topics as the composer's relationship with the BBC and his studies with Ravel; uniquely, the book also includes specially commissioned interviews with major living composers Peter Maxwell Davies, Piers Hellawell, Nicola Lefanu and Anthony Payne. The Companion is a vital resource for all those interested in this pivotal figure of modern music.With Billie: A New Look at the Unforgettable Lady Day
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.After Mahler
By Stephen Downes. 2013
The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures…
and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.Adele: The Biography
By Chas Newkey-Burden. 2012
Adele's soulful voice, catchy hits, and vulnerable personality have won her critical acclaim and widespread popularity. She has topped the…
charts in 18 countries and swept the top awards at the 2012 Grammys--but who is she? How has her tempestuous life that influenced her heartbreaking tracks? How did she overcome the challenges that threatened to derail her career? In Adele, veteran celebrity biographer Chas Newkey-Burden traces her story from her childhood in London, where she began singing at the age of four. During her teenage years she wrote her own music and attended the BRIT school, alongside the likes of Leona Lewis. After posting demos on her MySpace webpage, she earned a record deal and quickly captured hearts. Adele remains an unlikely icon. Her looks are unusual in a formulaic world of celebrity image, she suffers badly with pre-stage nerves, and she once canceled a crucial promotional trip to the U.S. because she felt too down to travel. This is a full, unflinching portrait of a genuine talent and inspiring, uncompromising woman--the curvy girl next door who conquered the world.Girl in a Band
By Kim Gordon. 2015
For many, Kim Gordon, vocalist, bassist and founding member of Sonic Youth, has always been the epitome of cool. Sonic…
Youth is one of the most influential and successful bands to emerge from the post-punk New York scene, and their legacy continues to loom large over the landscape of indie rock and American pop culture. Almost as celebrated as the band's defiantly dissonant sound was the marriage between Gordon and her husband, fellow Sonic Youth founder and lead guitarist Thurston Moore. So when Matador Records released a statement in the fall of 2011 announcing that--after twenty-seven years--the two were splitting, fans were devastated. In the middle of a crazy world, they'd seemed so solid. What did this mean? What comes next? What came before?In Girl in a Band, the famously reserved superstar speaks candidly about her past and the future. From her childhood in the sunbaked suburbs of Southern California, growing up with a mentally ill sibling who often sapped her family of emotional capital, to New York's downtown art and music scene in the eighties and nineties and the birth of a band that would pave the way for acts like Nirvana, as well as help inspire the Riot Grrl generation, here is an edgy and evocative portrait of a life in art. Exploring the artists, musicians, and writers who influenced Gordon, and the relationship that defined her life for so long, Girl in a Band is filled with the sights and sounds of a pre-Internet world and is a deeply personal portrait of a woman who has become an icon.Mozart
By Paul Johnson. 2013
Eminent historian Paul Johnson dazzles with a rich, succinct portrait of Mozart and his music As he's done in Napoleon,…
Churchill, Jesus, and Darwin, acclaimed historian and author Paul Johnson here offers a concise, illuminating biography of Mozart. Johnson's focus is on the music--Mozart's wondrous output of composition and his uncanny gift for instrumentation. Liszt once said that Mozart composed more bars than a trained copyist could write in a lifetime. Mozart's gift and skill with instruments was also remarkable as he mastered all of them except the harp. For example, no sooner had the clarinet been invented and introduced than Mozart began playing and composing for it. In addition to his many insights into Mozart's music, Johnson also challenges the many myths that have followed Mozart, including those about the composer's health, wealth, religion, and relationships. Always engaging, Johnson offers readers and music lovers a superb examination of Mozart and his glorious music, which is still performed every day in concert halls and opera houses around the world.The Louis Armstrong You Never Knew
By James Lincoln Collier. 2004
Iron Man
By Tony Iommi. 2011
Temple of the Scapegoat: Opera Stories
By Donna Stonecipher, Isabel Cole. 2018
Revolving around the opera these tales are an archaeological excavation of the slag-heaps of our collective…
existence W G Sebald Combining fact and fiction each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge s Temple of the Scapegoat dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind Total Commitment Freedom Reality Outrivals Theater The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom A Crucial Character Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are and Deadly Vocal Power vs Generosity in Opera An opera Kluge says is a blast furnace of the soul telling of the great singer Leonard Warren who died onstage having literally sung his heart out Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that opera is about comprehension and passion The two never go together Passion overwhelms comprehension Comprehension kills passion This appears to be the essence of all operas says Huang Tse-we He also comes to understand that female roles face the harshest fates Compared to the mass of soprano victims out of 86 000 operas 64 000 end with the death of the soprano the sacrifice of tenors is small out of 86 000 operas 1 143 tenors are a write-off