Showing results for "Music" in History & Criticism

A four-thousand-year history of music that reveals how songs have shifted societies and sparked revolutions. “A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched labor of cultural provocation.” ―Los Angeles Times Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who...

Accompanies BBC2's major new TV series and The Story of Music in 50 Pieces on Radio 3. Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multi-layered orchestration can seem bewilderingly specialised and complex. In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall does away with stuffy biographies, unhelpful labels and tired terminology.

Have you ever wondered how off-key you are while singing in the shower? Or if your Bob Dylan albums really sound better on vinyl? Or why certain songs make you cry? Now, scientist and musician John Powell invites you on an entertaining journey through the world of music. Discover what distinguishes music from plain old noise, how scales help you memorize songs, what the humble recorder teaches you about timbre (assuming your suffering listeners don’t break it first), and more.

You can’t truly understand the last decade of the 20th century without a look at the muddy, electrifying rock music that would come to define it: grunge. For such a short-lived genre—at least in the mainstream—grunge had a lasting impact on American music and culture. It also provides a unique lens through which to examine the post-Reagan, pre-internet America of the 1990s. In the six lectures of The Story of Grunge, you’ll explore the rise and evolution of the genre, tracing it from Seattle subculture to MTV and the Billboard charts, all the way to its decline and evolution into new forms.

The glorious repertoire for solo piano includes many of classical music’s most beloved masterpieces. In these 24 musically rich lectures, you’ll dig deeply into this magnificent tradition, in an in-depth exploration of the art of listening. With Professor Kautsky’s inspired guidance and expert playing, you’ll highlight key works of each composer, and unpack their structure, the musical materials that drive them, and the specific features that affect listeners so strongly, giving you a clear grounding in how to approach and hear this great music.

The blues grew out of the plantations and prisons, the swampy marshes and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. With original research and keen insights, Ted Gioia - the author of a landmark study of West Coast jazz and the critically acclaimed The History of Jazz - brings to life the stirring music of the Delta, evoking the legendary figures who shaped its sound and ethos: Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and others. 

John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents’ house, where it hung for safety during World War II. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as one of the composer's greatest living interpreters. The fruits of this lifetime's immersion are distilled in this remarkable book, grounded in the most recent Bach scholarship but moving far beyond it.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BILLY BRAGG Over the last seven decades, some of rock 'n' roll's most celebrated figureheads have flirted with the imagery and theatre of the Third Reich. From Keith Moon and Vivian Stanshall kitting themselves out in Nazi uniforms to Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious...

And the Roots of the Rhythm Remain is like no other. It shows how personalities, events and politics in Havana, Lagos, Buenos Aires, Soweto, Rio and Seville are as colourful and fascinating as anything that took place in Storyville, Harlem, Laurel Canyon or Liverpool. And, moreover, how jazz, r&b and rock 'n' roll would never have happened if it wasn't for sounds emanating from over the horizon and below the equator.

In 1992, the Screaming Trees were expected to become the next big band to come out of the Seattle music scene during the heyday of grunge. Except it never happened. It wasn't because the band didn't have great songs—indeed, the Trees were revered for their ability to write a great song that was both artistically original and commercially viable, which is no easy task. Other Seattle bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden were fans of the Screaming Trees, playing shows with them and collaborating on albums, long before their own bands broke through into the mainstream.

Kelefa Sanneh has made a deep study of how our popular music unites and divides us, the tribes it forms, and how its genres, shape-shifting across the years, give us a way to track larger forces and concerns. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes the best popular music isn't transcendent: it expresses our grudges, as well as our hopes, and it is motivated by greed as well as inspiration.

This Very Short Introduction, written with both humor and flair, begins with a sampling of music as human activity and then goes on to consider the slippery phenomenon of how music has become an object of thought. Covering not only Western and classical music, Cook touches on all types from rock to Indonesian music and beyond. Incorporating musical forms from every continent, Music will be enjoyable for beginner and expert alike. 

This audiobook is read by the author and includes an exclusive Q&A between Mark Kermode and Jenny Nelson 'Brims with enthusiasm and joyful insight' – Richard Ayoade How can a film score make you cheer, shiver, cry or punch the air? How do directors communicate their musical vision to composers?...

From Gregorian Chant to Henryk Gorecki, the first living classical composer to get into the pop album charts, here is the fascinating story of over a thousand years of Western classical music and the composers who have sought to express in music the deepest of human feelings and emotions. Polyphony, sonata form, serial music - many musical expressions are also explained - with the text illustrated by performances from some of the most highly praised recordings of recent years.

From Mozart to Mendelssohn, this comprehensive guide to classical music history and classical music biography is the perfect latest addition to the best-selling Big Ideas series. Easy to understand and clear to follow, this history of classical music explores and explains music theory and the impact of seminal pieces, while also providing fascinating stories about the lives of crucial composers and performers. Including an insightful foreword by Katie Derham, The Classical Music Book analyses more than 90 works by famous composers.

Yeah Yeah Yeah is a landmark and addictive work that audaciously charts the entire story of pop music. Unlike other books, it comprehensively covers the genre's history, spanning from the advent of the music charts in the 1950s to the digital transition of the year 2000. It covers an astonishing range of artists, from Billy Fury and Roxy Music to TLC and Britney, including giants like Led Zeppelin and Donna Summer. This book will remind you exactly why you first fell in love with pop.

’An absolutely masterly work’ Stephen Fry Alex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and...

The worlds of pop and rock owe a much greater debt to the classical canon than we realise. A direct and fascinating lineage draws from the experimentalism of Pierre Henry to The Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows', from Stockhausen to Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love' and from Bruckner to Sonic Youth via Glenn Branca. In Everything We Do is Music, Elizabeth Alker highlights the innovators of classical music and their fans and collaborators in pop who challenged the notion that such musical worlds were mutually exclusive.

'A revelation. Richard Norris lived the twentieth century and beyond like no one else . . . this is one of the truly great eyewitness accounts of the counterculture' DAVID KEENAN 'A dazzling psychedelic memoir' CAUGHT BY THE RIVER 'Makes you feel like getting up and doing something!' WENDY...

For half a century, Michael Jackson’s music has been an indelible part of our cultural consciousness. Landmark albums such as Off the Wall and Thriller shattered records, broke racial barriers, amassed awards, and set a new standard for popular music. While his songs continue to be played in...