By the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, the idea of a black man playing lead guitar in a rock band seemed exotic. Yet a mere ten years earlier, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley had stood among the most influential rock and roll performers. Why did rock and roll become "white"? Just around Midnight reveals the interplay of popular music and racial thought that was responsible for this shift within the music industry and in the minds of fans.Rooted in rhythm-and-blues pioneered by black musicians, 1950s...
'To see The Clash on the White Riot tour was like discovering how to be a rock star: you just did it yourself. You didn't wait for someone to come and discover you. That was the most important thing that came out of punk... We came home and we cut our hair and bought skinny trousers. It was year zero. That was the moment for me' Billy BraggPunk Rock is a book like no other. It is an oral history of a radical movement which exploded in Seventies Britain. With its own clothes, hair, artwork, fanzi...
A little more than 50 years ago, in 1955, Ali Akbar Khan issued an LP called "Music of India: Morning and Evening Ragas", with spoken introduction by violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Until then, Indian music was terra incognita in the West. When the same album was reissued as a CD in 1995, under the title "Then and Now", it was nominated for a Grammy. Between "then and now" has been the explosive influence of Indian music and culture in the West. Words such as karma, yoga, raga, nirvana, all once unkno...
Beethoven and the Lyric Impulse (Routledge Voice Studies)
by Amanda Glauert
Amanda Glauert revisits Beethoven’s songs and studies his profound engagement with the aesthetics of the poets he was setting, particularly those of Herder and Goethe. The book offers readers a rich exploration of the poetical and philosophical context in which Beethoven found himself when composing songs. It also offers detailed commentaries on possible responses to specific songs, responses designed to open up new ways for performing, hearing and appreciating this provocative song repertoire....
This book is the definitive guide to Johannes Brahms's four symphonies. It presents an engaging and thorough treatment of the genesis, structure, reception, and performance history of these internationally admired and frequently performed works. Walter Frisch provides a sensitive analytical commentary on the symphonies as well as a consideration of their place within Brahms's oeuvre, within the symphonic repertory of his day, and within the broader musical culture of nineteenth-century Germany a...
Examining, for the first time, the compositions of Johann Joseph Fux in relation to his contemporaries Bach and Handel, The Musical Discourse of Servitude presents a new theory of the late baroque musical imagination. Author Harry White contrasts musical "servility" and "freedom" in his analysis, with Fux tied to the prevailing servitude of the day's musical imagination, particularly the hegemonic flowering of North Italian partimento method across Europe. In contrast, both Bach and Handel repre...
The Anglo Concertina Absolute Beginners
by Chris Sherburn and Dave Mallinson
Purcell's trio sonatas are among the cornerstones of Baroque chamber music. The composer himself unassumingly described them as "a just imitation of the most famed Italian masters." However, analysis of their underlying structuresreveals that Purcell's modesty hides a highly original blend of Italian models, complex English traditional compositional devices, and his own near obsession with compositional and contrapuntal technique. Alon Schab'spathbreaking Sonatas of Henry Purcell: Rhetoric an...