Beethoven


Maynard Solomon - 1977
    Includes a 30-page bibliographical essay, numerous illustrations, and a full-color pictorial biography of the composer.

Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture


Philip Auslander - 1999
    This provocative book tackles some of the enduring 'sacred truths' surrounding the high cultural status of the live event.

The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerc e


Fred Goodman - 1997
    There was no rock press, no such thing as artist management -- literally no rock-and-roll business. Today the industry will gross over $20 billion. How did this change happen?From the moment Pete Seeger tried to cut the power at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival debut of Bob Dylan's electric band, rock's cultural influence and business potential have been grasped by a rare assortment of ambitious and farsighted musicians and businessmen. Jon Landau took calls from legendary producer Jerry Wexler in his Brandeis dorm room and went on to orchestrate Bruce Springsteen's career. Albert Grossman's cold-eyed assessment of the financial power at his clients' fingertips made him the first rock manager to blaze the trail that David Geffen transformed into a superhighway. Dylan's uncanny ability to keep his manipulation of the business separate from his art and reputation prefigured the savvy -- and increasingly cynical -- professionalism of groups like the Eagles.Fred Goodman, a longtime rock critic and journalist, digs into the contradictions and ambiguities of a generation that spurned and sought success with equal fervor. The Mansion on the Hill, named after a song title used by Hank Williams, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen, breaks new ground in our understanding of the people and forces that have shaped the music.From the Hardcover edition.

Orphan Train Brides


Caroline Clemmons - 2019
    Determined to liberate five quirky, ragtag orphans not likely to be adopted by caring people, they vowed the children would not end up as they had fourteen years ago. Back then, Merry and Polly and the two boys adopted with them from that orphan train worked as slaves. They received little food, substandard living quarters, and insufficient clothing to protect against the cold winters. Mary and Polly’s children love their new home and family at the sisters’ Mockingbird boarding house. The rescue idea appears to have been a great success—until the supervisor from the Children’s Protection Society arrives. Single women are not allowed to adopt. Merry and Polly each has five days to find a suitable husband who won’t steal her share of the boarding house. Two award winning and bestselling authors conspired to bring readers these two heartwarming stories, A Family For Merry and A Family For Polly in the duet, Orphan Train Brides. In addition to Orphan Train Brides, the authors have in their future projects a duet about the two brothers, Bart and Newton Bird.(The two novellas in Orphan Train Brides are expanded from previous inclusion in the Under A Mulberry Moon anthology.)

The Existential Worries of Mags Munroe


Jean Grainger - 2022
    My twelve-year-old daughter frequently moans that Ballycarrick is the most boring town in Ireland.Nothing ever happens here.She’s right.And as the local police sergeant, this is something I’m delighted about.I’ve enough to worry about - the polar ice-caps, the evil monster that’s shrinking my trousers, not to mention the hot flushes - without having to be like one of those gritty Netflix cops, chasing criminals down alleyways and busting drug deals.So, life is calm and fairly predictable.Until something unthinkable happens in our sleepy backwater.A crime, but not like anything I've ever seen before.It's a complete mystery.And it's up to me to solve it.

Music, Language, and the Brain


Aniruddh D. Patel - 2007
    Patel challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. Since Plato's time, the relationship between music and language has attracted interest and debate from a wide range of thinkers. Recently, scientific research on this topic has been growing rapidly, as scholars from diverse disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, music cognition, and neuroscience are drawn to the music-language interface as one way to explore the extent to which different mental abilities are processed by separate brain mechanisms. Accordingly, the relevant data and theories have been spread across a range of disciplines. This volume provides the first synthesis, arguing that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities.Winner of the 2008 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.

Ways of Hearing


Damon Krukowski - 2019
    But how are they being heard? In this book, Damon Krukowski examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. In Ways of Hearing--modeled on Ways of Seeing, John Berger's influential 1972 book on visual culture--Krukowski offers readers a set of tools for critical listening in the digital age. Just as Ways of Seeing began as a BBC television series, Ways of Hearing is based on a six-part podcast produced for the groundbreaking public radio podcast network Radiotopia. Inventive uses of text and design help bring the message beyond the range of earbuds.Each chapter of Ways of Hearing explores a different aspect of listening in the digital age: time, space, love, money, and power. Digital time, for example, is designed for machines. When we trade broadcast for podcast, or analog for digital in the recording studio, we give up the opportunity to perceive time together through our media. On the street, we experience public space privately, as our headphones allow us to avoid "ear contact" with the city. Heard on a cell phone, our loved ones' voices are compressed, stripped of context by digital technology. Music has been dematerialized, no longer an object to be bought and sold. With recommendation algorithms and playlists, digital corporations have created a media universe that adapts to us, eliminating the pleasures of brick-and-mortar browsing. Krukowski lays out a choice: do we want a world enriched by the messiness of noise, or one that strives toward the purity of signal only?

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America


Tricia Rose - 1994
    In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it.Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men.But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."

Guitar Mastery Simplified: How Anyone Can Quickly Become a Strumming, Chords, and Lead Guitar Ninja


Erich Andreas - 2012
    This book is for beginners to advanced guitar players.The solutions you'll discover inside Guitar Mastery Simplified will have you on your way to playing the guitar like a true strumming, chords and lead guitar ninja! The guitar lessons inside this book will have you rockin' out to all your favorite guitar jams and songs in no time.

Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader


Martin Scorsese - 2004
    Racing in the Street is the first comprehensive collection of writings about Springsteen, featuring the most insightful, revealing, famous, and infamous articles, interviews, reviews, and other writings. This nostalgic journey through the career of a rock-’n’-roll legend chronicles every album and each stage of Springsteen’s career. It’s all here—Dave Marsh’s Rolling Stone review of Springsteen’s ten sold-out Bottom Line shows in 1975 in New York City, Jay Cocks’s and Maureen Orth’s dueling Time and Newsweek cover stories, George Will’s gross misinterpretation of Springsteen’s message on his Born in the USA tour, and Will Percy’s 1999 interview for Double Take, plus much, much more.

The River Road


Karen Osborn - 2002
    One spring night, while at home on a break from college, the threesome embarks on a night of adventure and experimentation, driving recklessly through the Connecticut Valley. Stopping at the French King Bridge, David -- full of hubris and hallucinogens -- dares to jump, mistakenly believing he'll be able to swim ashore. With this one act, he sets in motion an inexorable chain of events that indelibly alters the lives of everyone involved.Told through the alternating voices of Kay, Michael, and David's father, Kevin, The River Road is a closely observed and psychologically penetrating narrative of the accusations, murder investigation, and courtroom battle that follow.

Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975


Richard Thompson - 2021
    . .  [Beeswing is] everything you’d hope a Richard Thompson autobiography would be . . . It’s both major and minor, dirge and ditty, light on its feet but packing a punch.” —The Wall Street Journal An intimate look at the early years of one of the world’s most significant and influential guitarists and songwriters. In this moving and immersive memoir, Richard Thompson, international and longtime beloved music legend, recreates the spirit of the 1960s, where he found, and then lost, and then found his way again. Known for his brilliant songwriting, his extraordinary guitar playing, and his haunting voice, Thompson is considered one of the top twenty guitarists of all time, in the songwriting pantheon alongside Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Randy Newman. Now, in his long-awaited memoir, the British folk musician takes us back to the late 1960s, a period of great change and creativity—both for him and for the world at large. Thompson packed more than a lifetime of experiences into his late teens and twenties. During the pivotal years of 1967 to 1975, just as he was discovering his passion for music, he formed the band Fairport Convention with some schoolmates and helped establish the genre of British folk rock. That led to a heady period of songwriting and massive tours, where Thompson was on the road both in the UK and the US, and where he crossed paths with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix. But those eight years were also marked by change, upheaval, and tragedy. Then, at the height of the band’s popularity, Thompson left to form a duo act with his wife Linda. And as he writes revealingly here, his discovery and ultimate embrace of Sufism dramatically reshaped his approach to music—and of course everything else. An honest, moving, and compelling memoir, Beeswing vividly captures the life of a remarkable artist during a period of creative intensity in a world on the cusp of change.

I ♥ Justin Bieber


Harlee Harte - 2010
    Following a bidding war between Justin Timberlake and Usher, the fifteen-year-old singing sensation has had four singles hit the Top 40—before his first record was even released. With that kind of popularity, it’s no wonder that Harlee Harte, author of the “I ♥” series, is on the case! Harlee is the celebrity columnist for Hollywoodland High’s student newspaper. Accompanied by her fun, fashion-forward and fabulous friends, Harlee’s “all-access” press credentials let her get up close and personal with Justin backstage, on the road, and even at major awards ceremonies. Not just a paste-up of Justin Bieber facts, Harlee’s columns are full of puzzles, quizzes, and games that bring her devoted readers closer to this top tween celebrity than ever before. Follow Harlee on Justin’s trail as she tries to juggle the ups and downs, twists and turns of her everyday teenage life—school, boys, girlfriends, parents, and, of course, staying connected with all things Bieber.

Osama Van Halen


Michael Muhammad Knight - 2009
    They demand that Hollywood depict Muslims in a positive light—“just one movie where we're not these two-dimensional al Qaeda stereotypes.” But Damon's concerned they're playing into that same terrorist paradigm, thereby furthering the neoconservative perception of Islam.Meanwhile, Ayyub embarks on a mission to rid the taqwacore scene of a Muslim pop-punk band called Shah 79. Along the way, he makes himself invisible, escapes punk-eating zombies in a mosque off the desert highway, and runs into some psychobilly jinns. Things turn existential when Ayyub finds himself face-to-face with his creator—no, not Allah, but the author.This riotous journey of enlightenment reads like a religious service for teenagers on Halloween. But it isn't all raucous fun; written into his own novel, the author finds he is at the mercy of his creation.

Unfinished Business: Returning the Ministry to the People of God


Greg Ogden - 2003
    Today the church is awakening to the truth that ministry is not just the domain of clergy, but belongs to the entire body of Christ. God is moving her to complete her unfinished business of placing the ministry back in the hands of the people. Unfinished Business has played a pivotal part in helping the church reclaim ministry at the grassroots level. First published in 1990 as The New Reformation, it has become a classic resource for church life. Expanding on and updating the original material with fresh examples and references to eight key important movements, this new edition lays foundations for the church to move from: · Passive to active · Maintenance to mission · Clergy to people of God · Teacher/caregiver to equipping enabler Pointing us back to the church as an organism, not an institution, author Greg Ogden shows how each of us is called to help finish the Reformation’s unfinished business: expressing the priesthood of every believer practically in the church, the world, and all avenues of life.