Book picks similar to
Big Bangs: Five Musical Revolutions by Howard Goodall
music
non-fiction
music-history
history
Fretboard Theory
Desi R. Serna - 2008
Hands-on approach to guitar theory gives you total command of the fretboard and music's most critical elements by visualizing shapes, patterns and how they connect. Content includes: What scales to learn and how including pentatonic and major scale patterns Guitar CAGED chord system including inversions and arpeggio patterns Guitar chord progressions and playing by numbers (Nashville Number System) Roots, keys and applying scalesUnderstanding music modes and modal scales such as Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and LocrianPlaying and using intervals including thirds, fifths and sixthsAdding extensions such as "add 9," "suspended 4," and "major 7" Details to how hundreds of popular songs were playedNot only does Fretboard Theory teach guitar music theory in a refreshing new manner, but it takes things a step farther by associating everything to your favorite songs. This is the ONLY GUITAR THEORY RESOURCE that includes important details to hundreds of popular songs. Pop, rock, acoustic, blues, metal and more!This new generation of guitar instruction is perfect whether you want to jam, compose or just understand the music you play better. For acoustic and electric guitar players. At 9x12 and 150 pages, Fretboard Theory includes twice the content of ordinary books. Four chapters are also available on DVD (see Getting Started with the Pentatonic Scale, CAGED Template Chord System, Guitar Chord Progressions and Playing By Numbers, Guitar Modes - The Modal Scales of Popular Music).
Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital
Mark Andersen - 2001
punk rock music scene that led to the rise of such bands as Positive Force, Riot Grrrl, Fugazi, and Bikini Kill.
Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music
Gerri Hirshey - 1984
Here are the recollections of many of the giants of soul—Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Mary Wilson, Marvin Gaye, Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Wilson Pickett. These and other interviews, many of them exclusive, add up to a brilliant anecdotal portrait of the music and the life. Gerri Hirshey is the author of We Gotta Get Out of this Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock; she has also written for Rolling Stone and the New York Times.
Haley's Hints
Graham Haley - 1999
Now in paperback--the extraordinary New York Times bestselling guide packed with 2,000 time and money saving tips on everything from laundry to gardening, pet care to pest control, painting to plumbing--topped off with the unique Easy-Find index for finding answers fast.
The Beatles Are Here!: 50 Years after the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians Other Fans Remember
Penelope Rowlands - 2014
Through the voices of those who witnessed it or were swept up in it indirectly, The Beatles Are Here! explores the emotional impact—some might call it hysteria—of the Fab Four’s February 1964 dramatic landing on our shores. Contributors, including Lisa See, Gay Talese, Renée Fleming, Roy Blount, Jr., and many others, describe in essays and interviews how they were inspired by the Beatles. This intimate and entertaining collection arose from writer Penelope Rowlands’s own Beatlemaniac phase: she was one of the screaming girls captured in an iconic photograph that has since been published around the world—and is displayed on the cover of this book. The stories of these girls, who found each other again almost 50 years later, are part of this volume as well. The Beatles Are Here! gets to the heart of why, half a century later, the Beatles still matter to us so deeply.
There's Something Happening Here: The Story Of Buffalo Springfield For What It's Worth
John Einarson - 1997
Eye-witness perspective of founding band member Richie Furay, the story of an influential group, pop culture, and politics in the 60's and 70's.
Rivers' Edge: The Weezer Story
John D. Luerssen - 2004
Welcome to Weezer’s weird world, steered by brainchild Rivers Cuomo — perhaps the world’s most unlikely rock star. Exhaustively researched, Rivers’ Edge documents the rise of the band from Cuomo’s beginnings as a failure on Hollywood’s hair metal scene to his reinvention of himself as the undeniable ruler of Weezer. Luerssen uncovers what really happened during Weezer’s strange hiatus and subsequent re-emergence in 2000, which was one of the most successful comebacks in music history. Through key interviews with friends, associates, members of Weezer, and bandmates in their solo projects, Rivers’ Edge is a must-own for any Weezer fan.
Becoming Human: Our Past, Present and Future
Scientific American - 2013
Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division
Peter Hook - 2012
Godfathers of alternative rock, they reinvented music in the post-punk era, creating a new sound—dark, hypnotic, and intense—that would influence U2, Morrissey, R.E.M., Radiohead, and numerous others. The story is now legendary: in 1980, on the heels of their groundbreaking debut, Unknown Pleasures, and on the eve of their first U.S. tour, the band was rent asunder by the tragic death of their enigmatic lead singer, Ian Curtis. Yet in the mere three years they were together, Joy Division produced two landmark albums and a handful of singles—including the iconic anthem "Love Will Tear Us Apart"—that continue to have a powerful resonance.Now, for the first time, their story is told by one of their own. In Unknown Pleasures, founding member and bass player Peter Hook recounts how four young men from Manchester and Salisbury, with makeshift instruments and a broken-down van, rose from the punk scene to create a haunting, atmospheric music that would define a generation. Peter talks with eye-opening candor and reflection about the suicide of Ian Curtis; the band's friendships and fallouts; the evolution of their sound and image; and the larger-than-life characters who formed a vital part of the Joy Division legend, including Factory Records founder Tony Wilson and producer Martin Hannett. Told with surprising humor and vivid detail, Unknown Pleasures is the book Joy Division fans have awaited for decades.
Low Slow: Master the Art of Barbecue in 5 Easy Lessons
Gary Wiviott - 2009
Surrender all of your notions about barbecue. Forget everything you've ever learned about cooking with charcoal and fire. It is all wrong. Get it right with the "Five Easy Lessons" program, which includes over 130 recipes and step-by-step instructions for setting up and cooking low and slow on a Weber Smokey Mountain, an offset smoker, or a kettle grill. This program is guided by a singular philosophy: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Do exactly as Gary says, don't even think about opening the lid before it's time, and you will learn:What gear you do and, more importantly, don't needExactly how to start and maintain a proper fire (without lighter fluid)All about marinades, brines, and rubsTo use your senses and trust your instincts (instead of thermometers)How to make delicious, delicious barbecue The perfect how-to guide for beginner and expert alike, Low & Slow will take your barbecue skills to the next level.
Stomping The Blues
Albert Murray - 1976
This study of the blues by one of America's premier essayists and novelists will change old attitudes about a tradition that continues to feed the very heart of popular music—a blues that dances, shakes, shimmies, and exchanges bad news for stomping, rollicking, pulse-quickening good times.
The Sixties
Richard Avedon - 1999
Benjamin Spock, September 1969The connection between all the rhetoric and all the poetry, between the words of a Black Panther and those of a rock star or a pacifist, between the scars of a pop artist and those of a napalm victim, have haunted and informed the structuring of this book, with its own peculiar version of a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A Night at the Opera: An Irreverent Guide to The Plots, The Singers, The Composers, The Recordings
Denis Forman - 1995
A Night at the Opera dissects the eighty-three most popular operas recorded on compact disc, from Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. For each opera, Sir Denis details the plot and cast of characters, awarding stars to parts that are "worth looking out for," "really good," or, occasionally, "stunning." He goes on to tell the history of each opera and its early reception. Finally, each work is graded from alpha to gamma (although the Ring cycle gets an "X"), and Sir Denis has no qualms about voicing his opinion: the first act of Fidelio is "a bit of a mess," while the last scene of Don Giovanni "towers above the comic finales of Figaro and Così and whether or not [it] is Mozart's greatest opera, it is certainly his most powerful finale."The guide also presents brief biographies of the great composers, conductors, and singers. A glossary of musical terms is included, as well as Operatica, or the essential elements of opera, from the proper place and style of the audience's applause (and boos) to the use of surtitles.A Night at the Opera is for connoisseurs and neophytes alike. It will entertain and inform, delight and (perhaps) infuriate, providing a subject for lively debate and ready reference for years to come.
Mahatma Gandhi and His Myths: Civil Disobedience, Nonviolence, and Satyagraha in the Real World (Plus Why It's 'Gandhi,' Not 'Ghandi')
Mark Shepard - 1989
In this Annual Gandhi Lecture for the International Association of Gandhian Studies, Mark Shepard tackles some persistently wrong-headed views of Gandhi, offering us a more accurate picture of the man and his nonviolence.///////////////////////////////////////////////// Mark Shepard is the author of "Mahatma Gandhi and His Myths," "The Community of the Ark," and "Gandhi Today," called by the American Library Association's Booklist "a masterpiece of committed reporting." His writings on social alternatives have appeared in over 30 publications in the United States, Canada, England, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, and India. ///////////////////////////////////////////////// SAMPLE I suspect that most of the myths and misconceptions surrounding Gandhi have to do with nonviolence. For instance, it's surprising how many people still have the idea that nonviolent action is passive. It's important for us to be clear about this: There is nothing passive about Gandhian nonviolent action. I'm afraid Gandhi himself helped create this confusion by referring to his method at first as "passive resistance," because it was in some ways like techniques bearing that label. But he soon changed his mind and rejected the term. Gandhi's nonviolent action was not an evasive strategy nor a defensive one. Gandhi was always on the offensive. He believed in confronting his opponents aggressively, in such a way that they could not avoid dealing with him. But wasn't Gandhi's nonviolent action designed to avoid violence? Yes and no. Gandhi steadfastly avoided violence toward his opponents. He did not avoid violence toward himself or his followers. Gandhi said that the nonviolent activist, like any soldier, had to be ready to die for the cause. And in fact, during India's struggle for independence, hundreds of Indians were killed by the British. The difference was that the nonviolent activist, while willing to die, was never willing to kill. Gandhi pointed out three possible responses to oppression and injustice. One he described as the coward's way: to accept the wrong or run away from it.
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.