In Language of the Spirit, renowned music scholar Jan Swafford argues that we have it all wrong: classical music has something for everyone and is accessible to all. Ranging from Gregorian chant to Handel's Messiah, from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons to the postmodern work of Philip Glass, Swafford is an affable and expert guide to the genre. He traces the history of Western music, introduces readers to the most important composers and compositions, and explains the underlying structure and logic of their music.Language of the Spirit is essential reading for anyone who has ever wished to know more about this sublime art.

    His writing style is remarkable — unrestrained, informal, full of brilliant insight — and this style plus Huneker's wide knowledge of art and literature as well as music has kept his literacy work alive. Chopin: The Man and His Music reflects the intimate, thorough knowledge of Chopin's music that Huneker acquired while studying to be a concert pianist and his unusually keen insight into the character of the great Polish composer whose music he adored.The book is divided into two parts. The first treats Chopin's life — his youth in Poland, his emigration to Paris, the famous George Sand episode, his sickness and death — and comments on Chopin as a teacher and as a pianist and performer. The second part discusses the entire body of Chopin's music, piece by piece. Huneker notes his own overall impression of the individual compositions as well as the impressions of Schumann, George Sand, Chopin's biographer Frederick Niecks, many of the great pianists, and others. He directly compares differing editions of Chopin's Études, Preludes, Nocturnes, Mazurkas, Polonaises, Sonatas, and other works edited by von Bülow, Kullak, Riemann, Mikuli, and Godowsky in their detailed treatment of fingering, phrasing, pedaling, tempo indication, and so forth.Huneker's entire work is reprinted here unchanged, thoroughly edited in running footnotes by Herbert Weinstock to correct the exuberant Huneker's inaccuracies and to add information that modern musical scholarship has unearthed. Weinstock has also provided an engrossing introductory essay on Huneker, and has amplified the bibliography to include modern books and articles on Chopin.A classic in musical biography and commentary, this work is unsurpassed for sympathetic understanding and insight into Chopin's life and music. It will interest equally music students, pianists, and music lovers.

    Their hits, including Golden Brown, No More Heroes and Always The Sun, were written against a background of spectacular success, dismal failure, drug dependency, financial ruin, infighting and misfortune. Understandably, the band have been loath to reveal the true meaning behind their songs, instead revelling in the mystery and confusion they created. As a response to David Buckley's one-sided biography of the band (No Mercy, Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), Hugh Cornwell, founding member and songwriter, is determined to set the record straight, displace the myths and explain for the first time the real stories behind The Stranglers, his departure and the origins of all their songs.

    This sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing, and faith has been recognized as an indie rock classic in its own right. Among the bands profiled: Mission of Burma, Butthole Surfers, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Big Black, Hüsker Dü, Fugazi, Minor Threat, Mudhoney, The Replacements, Beat Happening, and Dinosaur Jr.

    To this day, it remains the bestselling jazz album of all time, embraced by fans of all music genres. The album represented a true watershed moment in jazz history, and helped to usher in the first great jazz revolution since bebop.The Making of Kind of Blue is an exhaustively researched examination of how this masterpiece was born. Recorded with pianist Bill Evans; tenor saxophonist John Coltrane; composer/theorist George Russell; and Miles himself, the album represented a fortuitous conflation of some of the real giants of the jazz world, at a time when they were at the top of their musical game. The end result was a recording that would forever change the face of American music.Through extensive interview and access to rare recordings, Eric Nisenson pieced together the whole story of this miraculous session, laying bare the genius of Miles Davis, other musicians, and the heart of jazz itself.

    . . from Plymouth Rock to Pearl Harbor-the history of America in bite-size chunks How did the conquistadors first stumble across America-and what were the Spanish looking for anyway? What was the Dred Scott Supreme Court case and how did it affect the Civil War? And while some of us may indeed remember the Alamo, why were we once urged to "Remember the Maine"? Here, in chronological order, is a rollicking tour of American history from Columbus's arrival through Nixon's resignation, including details about the early colonists, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War-from Southern secession to the surrender at Appomattox-and the nation's plunge into World War I and the end of U.S. isolationism. It's the perfect refresher for all the things we learned in school but may have forgotten since. In concise, highly readable chapters, Remember the Alamo!""tells the most exciting story in the world: the story of America-home of Ben Franklin and Al Capone, Abe Lincoln and Rosa Parks, a nation with a passion and a gift for making history to this day.

    It was the year rock and roll evolved into the premier art form of its time and accelerated the drive for personal freedom throughout the Western world. The feedback loop between the artists and their times ignited an unprecedented explosion of creativity. The Beatles made their first artistic statement with Rubber Soul and performed at Shea Stadium, the first rock concert to be held in a major American stadium. Bob Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone”—the quintessential anthem of the year—and went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. The Rolling Stones' hit song "Satisfaction" catapulted the band to world-wide success. Fashion designer Mary Qaunt raised the hemlines of her skirts to above the knee, introducing the iconic miniskirt.This was not only the year of rock as new genres such as funk and psychedelia were born. Soul music became a prime force of desegregation as Motown crossed out of the R&B charts on to the top of the Billboard Top 100. Country music reached new heights with Nashville and the Bakersfield sound and competition between musicians coincided with seismic cultural shifts wrought by the Civil Rights Movement, psychedelics, and Vietnam.In 1965, Andrew Grant Jackson combines fascinating and often surprising personal stories with a panoramic historical narrative.

    Its traditions serve as a record of our past. A ballerina dancing The Sleeping Beauty today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps and gestures are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and culture that followed. Ballet has been shaped by the Renaissance and Classicism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Bolshevism, Modernism, and the Cold War. Apollo’s Angels is a groundbreaking work—the first cultural history of ballet ever written, lavishly illustrated and beautifully told.Ballet is unique: It has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. The steps are never just the steps—they are a living, breathing document of a culture and a tradition. And while ballet’s language is shared by dancers everywhere, its artists have developed distinct national styles. French, Italian, Danish, Russian, English, and American traditions each have their own expression, often formed in response to political and societal upheavals.From ballet’s origins in the Renaissance and the codification of its basic steps and positions under France’s Louis XIV (himself an avid dancer), the art form wound its way through the courts of Europe, from Paris and Milan to Vienna and St. Petersburg. It was in Russia that dance developed into the form most familiar to American audiences: The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker originated at the Imperial court. In the twentieth century, émigré dancers taught their art to a generation in the United States and in Western Europe, setting off a new and radical transformation of dance. Jennifer Homans is a historian and critic who was also a professional dancer: She brings to Apollo’s Angels a knowledge of dance born of dedicated practice. She traces the evolution of technique, choreography, and performance in clean, clear prose, drawing readers into the intricacies of the art with vivid descriptions of dances and the artists who made them. Her admiration and love for the ballet shines through on every page. Apollo’s Angels is an authoritative work, written with a grace and elegance befitting its subject.

    The thirst for blood and cry for deadly vengeance lie deep in humankind, as criminologist Colin Wilson authoritatively illustrates in this millennial history of the most heinous of human crimes. Analyzing the tangle of motives behind murder and examining an astonishing variety of homicidal methods over the past twenty centuries, Wilson not only profiles infamous historical figures like Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, Gilles de Rais, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, Marquis de Sade, and Jack the Ripper, but also studies particular categories of homicide and such phenomena as the Jacobean witch hunts and gangland killings of America's Jazz Age. Wilson's chronicle includes, too, the serial killings, random shooting sprees, and cult murders that have troubled more recent times. The comprehensive history and illuminating analysis of how humans kill, and why, make crime-expert Wilson's volume one that no true-crime fan or student of criminology will want to miss.

    How to maximize your creativity and productivity. How to develop your craft by consolidating techniques. How to read music with your ears. How you can write music without using an instrument. How to write music spontaneously, as your ear guides your hand. How to communicate accurately through music notation. Why you don't need "perfect pitch." Tools to develop your music perception. 140 exercises, many music examples--models for a lifetime of study. Resources for composing, orchestrating, film scoring. Working in the music business. Where to find supplies, organizations, information, inspiration. A definitive guide and reference for composers, orchestrators, arrangers and performers.

    RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN is a celebration of what happened next.Post-punk bands like PiL, Joy Division, Talking Heads, The Fall and The Human League dedicated themselves to fulfilling punk's unfinished musical revolution. The post-punk groups were fervent modernists; whether experimenting with electronics and machine rhythm or adapting ideas from dub reggae and disco, they were totally confident they could invent a whole new future for music.

    He examines the myths and misconceptions that have grown up around progressive rock and paints a vivid, colourful picture of the Seventies based on hundreds of hours of his own interviews with musicians, music business insiders, journalists and DJs, and from the personal testimonies of those who were fans of the music in that extraordinary decade.

    The Italianistas. The scooter-riding, all-night-dancing instigators of what became, from its myriad sources, a very British phenomenon.Mod began life as the quintessential working-class movement of a newly affluent nation – a uniquely British amalgam of American music and European fashions that mixed modern jazz with modernist design in an attempt to escape the drab conformity, snobbery and prudery of life in 1950s Britain. But what started as a popular cult became a mainstream culture, and a style became a revolution.In Mod, Richard Weight tells the story of Britain’s biggest and most influential youth cult. He charts the origins of Mod in the Soho jazz scene of the 1950s, set to the cool sounds of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. He explores Mod’s heyday in Swinging London in the mid-60s – to a new soundtrack courtesy of the Small Faces, the Who and the Kinks. He takes us to the Mod–Rocker riots at Margate and Brighton, and into the world of fashion and design dominated by Twiggy, Mary Quant and Terence Conran.But Mod did not end in the 1960s. Richard Weight not only brings us up to the cult’s revival in the late 70s – played out against its own soundtrack of Quadrophenia and the Jam – but reveals Mod to be the DNA of British youth culture, leaving its mark on glam and Northern Soul, punk and Two Tone, Britpop and rave.This is the story of Britain’s biggest and brassiest youth movement – and of its legacy. Music, film, fashion, art, architecture and design – nothing was untouched by the eclectic, frenetic, irresistible energy of Mod.

     While a limited understanding of contrapuntal elements may be gained through analysis alone, these elements are grasped in a more intimate way through the actual writing of contrapuntal examples. Also, by linking the study of counterpoint to music of a specific period, the text provides a clear model for students to emulate and a definite basis for the criticism of student work.

    After a little noticed debut and a follow-up that had failed to chart at all, Pye Records were threatening to annul the group’s contract. But with its unforgettable distorted guitar riff, 'You Really Got Me’ went on to reach No.1, entering the US Top Ten later the same year. Followed by a string of hits, it marked the breakthrough of one of Britain’s most innovative and influential bands, and a turning point in the fortunes of two brothers whose troubled story is as tumultuous and characterful as the music they produced: Ray and Dave Davies. Born into a deeply musical working-class family in London’s Muswell Hill, Ray and Dave grew up in a city recovering from the bombs and privations of the Second World War, and, more than any other musicians of the Sixties, they crafted the soundtrack that made it swing again. In songs such as ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’ – which toppled The Beatles to become the hit of Summer 1966 – ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Days’ and ‘Lola’, they drew on music hall, folk and rhythm and blues to craft a peculiarly English pop idiom, inspiring generations of songwriters from David Bowie to Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn.Pocked by sibling rivalry, furious on-stage violence, walkouts, overdoses, a career-throttling ban from the US, gross self-indulgence, and the band's curious rebirth as Eighties stadium rockers, the story laid bare in God Save The Kinks is one of the greatest in British pop history.