Book picks similar to
Orchestration by Walter Piston


music
music-theory
non-fiction
music-books

Introduction to Mineralogy


William D. Nesse - 1999
    It presents the important traditional content of mineralogy including crystallography, chemical bonding, controls on mineral structure, mineral stability, and crystal growth to provide a foundation that enables students to understand the nature and occurrence of minerals. Physical, optical, and X-ray powder diffraction techniques of mineral study are described in detail, and common chemical analytical methods are outlined as well. Detailed descriptions of over 100 common minerals are provided, and the geologic context within which these minerals occur is emphasized. Appendices provide tables and diagrams to help students with mineral identification, using both physical and optical properties. Numerous line drawings, photographs, and photomicrographs help make complex concepts understandable. Introduction to Mineralogy not only provides specific knowledge about minerals but also helps students develop the intellectual tools essential for a solid, scientific education. This comprehensive text is useful for undergraduate students in a wide range of mineralogy courses.

The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed


Shea Serrano - 2015
    Shea Serrano deftly pays homage to the most important song of each year. Serrano also examines the most important moments that surround the history and culture of rap music—from artists’ backgrounds to issues of race, the rise of hip-hop, and the struggles among its major players—both personal and professional. Covering East Coast and West Coast, famous rapper feuds, chart toppers, and show stoppers, The Rap Year Book is an in-depth look at the most influential genre of music to come out of the last generation.    Complete with infographics, lyric maps, hilarious and informative footnotes, portraits of the artists, and short essays by other prominent music writers, The Rap Year Book is both a narrative and illustrated guide to the most iconic and influential rap songs ever created.

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991


Michael Azerrad - 2001
    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.

Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground


Michael Moynihan - 1998
    The book focuses on the scene surrounding the extreme heavy metal subgenre black metal in Norway in the early 1990s, with a focus on the string of church burnings and murders that occurred in the country around 1993.

Songwriting for Dummies


Jim Peterik - 2002
    Written by a group of music industry pros, this practical guide shows you how to develop your songwriting skills and successfully utilize the Internet to promote and market your work!Whether you?re a first-time songwriter or songwriting vet looking for a fast-track into the recording industry, this friendly, easy-to-follow guide is the source for you. Using well-known tunes as examples, the authors walk you through everything you need to know to write hit singles, catchy jingles, and everything in between.25% new and updated content, including information on social media networks YouTube, Twitter, Viddler, and Digg Coverage of the latest music industry trends and techniques Tips and tricks to combat songwriter's block Whether you want to know how to compose a love song for that special someone or you?re looking break into the industry Songwriting For Dummies, 2nd Edition is a gold mine of inspiration and how-to information.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back


Christopher R. Weingarten - 2010
    Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing - even occasionally stomping on vinyl that sounded too clean. Using production techniques that have never been duplicated, the Bomb Squad plundered and reconfigured their own compositions to make frenetic splatter collages; they played samples by hand together in a room like a rock band to create a "not quite right" tension; they hand-picked their samples from only the ugliest squawks and sirens.Weingarten treats the samples used on Nation Of Millions as molecules of a greater whole, slivers of music that retain their own secret histories and folk traditions. Can the essence of a hip-hop record be found in the motives, emotions and energies of the artists it samples? Is it likely that something an artist intended 20 years ago would re-emerge anew? This is a compelling and thoroughly researched investigation that tells the story of one of hip-hop's landmark albums.

Organizational Behavior: Emerging Realities for the Workplace Revolution


Steven L. McShane - 1999
    Acclaimed for its readability and presentation of current knowledge, this textbook's philosophy is that OB knowledge is for everyone, not just traditional managers. The new reality is that everyone - sales representatives, production employees, physicians - needs OB knowledge to successfully work in and around organizations. Organizational Behavior is unparalleled in its ability to engage students by bringing cutting edge OB concepts closer to reality through the 'theory-practice link' approach. McShane and Von Glinow help readers connect OB theories to emerging workplace realities through hundreds of fascinating real-life stories from across the United States and around the world. be the source of the hottest topics, such as: employee engagement, resilience, four-drive theory, blogs and wikis, psychological harassment, learning orientation, Schwartz's values model, separating socioemotional from constructive conflict, and much, much, more.

Horses


Philip Shaw - 2008
    While Horses pays homage to the record's origins in the nascent New York punk scene, the book's core lies in a detailed analysis of Patti Smith's lyrics and includes discussions of lyrical preoccupations: love, sex, gender, death, dreams, god, metamorphosis, intoxication, apocalypse and transcendence. Philip shaw demonstrates how Horses transformed the possibilities of both poetry and rock music; and how it achieved nothing less than a complete and systematic derangement of the senses.

Everything's an Argument with Readings


Andrea A. Lunsford - 1998
    Newly streamlined, its signature engaging, and jargon-free instruction emphasizes cultural currency, humor, and visual argument. Students love Everything's an Argument because it helps them understand how a world of argument already surrounds them; instructors love it because it helps students construct their own personally meaningful arguments about that world. The print text is now integrated with e-Pages for Everything's an Argument, designed to take advantage of what the Web can do. Also available in a brief version without the reader and as an e-Book.

Structure & Function of the Body


Gary A. Thibodeau - 1900
    This book includes a companion CD-ROM that adds a visual emphasis with animations.

Genesis of a Music


Harry Partch - 1949
    Having lived mostly in the remote deserts of Arizona and New Mexico with no access to formal training, Partch naturally created theatrical ritualistic works incorporating Indian chants, Japanese kabuki and Noh, Polynesian microtones, Balinese gamelan, Greek tragedy, dance, mime, and sardonic commentary on Hollywood and commercial pop music of modern civilization. First published in 1949, Genesis of a Music is the manifesto of Partch's radical compositional practice and instruments (which owe nothing to the 300-year-old European tradition of Western music.) He contrasts Abstract and Corporeal music, proclaiming the latter as the vital, emotionally tactile form derived from the spoken word (like Greek, Chinese, Arabic, and Indian musics) and surveys the history of world music at length from this perspective. Parts II, III, and IV explain Partch's theories of scales, intonation, and instrument construction with copious acoustical and mathematical documentation. Anyone with a musically creative attitude, whether or not familiar with traditional music theory, will find this book revelatory.

Fundamentals of Piano Practice


Chuan C. Chang - 2007
    Mental play impacts every aspect of piano playing: memorizing, controlling nervousness, developing performance skills, playing musically, acquiring absolute pitch, composing, improvisation, etc. Genius is more created than born; most of what had been attributed to talent are simple knowledge-based solutions that we can all learn. Improved memory can raise the effective IQ; memory is an associative process based on algorithms -- music is such an algorithm, enabling us to memorize hours of repertoire. Learning piano makes you smarter and teaches project management. Includes chapter on tuning your own piano; the chromatic scale, temperaments, circle of fifths, etc., are explained.

Designing Sound


Andy Farnell - 2010
    Its thesis is that any sound can be generated from first principles, guided by analysis and synthesis. The text takes a practitioner's perspective, exploring the basic principles of making ordinary, everyday sounds using an easily accessed free software. Readers use the Pure Data (Pd) language to construct sound objects, which are more flexible and useful than recordings. Sound is considered as a process, rather than as data--an approach sometimes known as "procedural audio." Procedural sound is a living sound effect that can run as computer code and be changed in real time according to unpredictable events. Applications include video games, film, animation, and media in which sound is part of an interactive process. The book takes a practical, systematic approach to the subject, teaching by example and providing background information that offers a firm theoretical context for its pragmatic stance. [Many of the examples follow a pattern, beginning with a discussion of the nature and physics of a sound, proceeding through the development of models and the implementation of examples, to the final step of producing a Pure Data program for the desired sound. Different synthesis methods are discussed, analyzed, and refined throughout.] After mastering the techniques presented in Designing Sound, students will be able to build their own sound objects for use in interactive applications and other projects

Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven


John Eliot Gardiner - 2013
    How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque—and occasionally so intemperate? 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, and explaining in wonderful detail the ideas on which Bach drew, how he worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects—and what it can tell us about Bach the man. Gardiner’s background as a historian has encouraged him to search for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and fruitfully coalesce. This has entailed piecing together the few biographical shards, scrutinizing the music, and watching for those instances when Bach’s personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Gardiner’s aim is “to give the reader a sense of inhabiting the same experiences and sensations that Bach might have had in the act of music-making. This, I try to show, can help us arrive at a more human likeness discernible in the closely related processes of composing and performing his music.” It is very rare that such an accomplished performer of music should also be a considerable writer and thinker about it. John Eliot Gardiner takes us as deeply into Bach’s works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists.

The Art of Noise (futurist manifesto, 1913)


Luigi Russolo - 1913
    Russolo calls for an infinite expansion of musical vocabulary and sensibility in coordination with that of industrial machinery—“We must enlarge and enrich more and more the domain of musical sounds”—envisioning a machine-based music that would dispense entirely with inherited forms. This publication made the text widely available in English for the first time. Also included is a description of the “First Concert of Futurist Noise Instruments” in Modena, Italy on June 2, 1913.