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Books > Arts & Architecture
Blues history is steeped in Chicago's sidewalks; it floats out of
its restaurants, airport lounges and department stores. It is a
fundamental part of the city's heritage that every resident should
know and every visitor should be afraid to miss. Allow Rosalind
Cummings-Yeates to take you inside the Checkerboard and Gerri's
Palm Tavern, where folks like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie
Dixon and Ma Rainey transformed Chicago into the blues mecca.
Continue on to explore the contemporary blues scene and discover
the best spots to hear the purest sounds of Sweet Home Chicago.
What does modern British and Irish literature have to do with
French impressionist painting? And what does Henry James have to do
with the legal dispute between John Ruskin and J.M.W. Whistler?
What links Walter Pater with Conrad's portrait of a genocidal
maniac in Heart of Darkness? Or George Moore with Irish
nationalism, Virginia Woolf with modern distraction, and Ford Madox
Ford with the Great Depression?
Adam Parkes argues that we must answer such questions if we are to
appreciate the full impact of impressionist aesthetics on modern
British and Irish writers. Complicating previous accounts of the
influence of painting and philosophy on literary impressionism, A
Sense of Shock highlights the role of politics, uncovering new and
deeper linkages. In the hands of such practitioners as Conrad,
Ford, James, Moore, Pater, and Woolf, literary impressionism was
shaped by its engagement with important social issues and political
events that defined the modern age. As Parkes demonstrates, the
formal and stylistic practices that distinguish impressionist
writing were the result of dynamic and often provocative
interactions between aesthetic and historical factors.
Parkes ultimately suggests that it was through this incendiary
combination of aesthetics and history that impressionist writing
forced significant change on the literary culture of its time. A
Sense of Shock will appeal to students and scholars of nineteenth-
and twentieth-century literature, as well as the growing readership
for books that explore problems of literary history and
interdisciplinarity.
Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen is the
first systematic study of jazz on screen media. Where earlier
studies have focused almost entirely on the role and portrayal of
jazz in Hollywood film, the present book engages with a plethora of
technologies and media from early film and soundies through
television to recent developments in digital technologies and
online media. Likewise, the authors discuss jazz in the widest
sense, ranging from Duke Ellington and Jimmy Dorsey through the
likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis,
John Coltrane and Charles Mingus to Pat Metheny. Much of this rich
and fascinating material has never been studied in depth before,
and what emerges most clearly are the manifold connections between
the music and the media on which it was and is being recorded. Its
long association with film and television has left its trace in
jazz, just as online and social media are subtly shaping it now.
Vice versa, visual media have always benefited from focusing on
music and this significantly affected their development. The book
follows these interrelations, showing how jazz was presented and
represented on screen and what this tells us about the music, the
people who made it and their audiences. The result is a new
approach to jazz and the media, which will be required reading for
students of both fields.
Over the past fifty years, a unique hybrid genre of nonfiction
cinema called the "avant-doc" has emerged in the world of
independent film. Combining the unconventional techniques of
avant-garde auteurs like Stan Brakhage with the verisimilitude of
traditional documentaries, the avant-doc expands the way cinema
captures and chronicles events. Drawing on firsthand interviews
with nineteen of the form's chief practitioners and participants,
Avant-Doc constructs an oral history that provides the first
insider's perspective on the phenomenon.
In fifteen essays-one new, two newly revised and expanded, three
with new postscripts-Kendall L. Walton wrestles with philosophical
issues concerning music, metaphor, empathy, existence, fiction, and
expressiveness in the arts. These subjects are intertwined in
striking and surprising ways. By exploring connections among them,
appealing sometimes to notions of imagining oneself in shoes
different from one's own, Walton creates a wide-ranging mosaic of
innovative insights.
Devices of Curiosity excavates a largely unknown genre of early
cinema, the popular-science film. Primarily a work of cinema
history, it also draws on the insights of the history of science.
Beginning around 1903, a variety of producers made films about
scientific topics for general audiences, inspired by a vision of
cinema as an educational medium. This book traces the development
of popular-science films over the first half of the silent era,
from its beginnings in England to its flourishing in France around
1910. Devices of Curiosity also considers how popular-science films
exemplify the circulation of knowledge. These films initially
relied upon previous traditions such as the magic-lantern lecture
for their representational strategies, and they continually had
recourse to established visual iconography, but they also created
novel visual paradigms and led to the creation of ambitious new
film collections. Finally, the book discerns a transit between
nonfictional and fictional modes, seeing affinities between
popular-science films and certain aspects of fiction films,
particularly Louis Feuillade's crime melodramas. This kind of
circulation is important for an understanding of the wider
relevance of early popular-science films, which impacted the
formation of the documentary, educational, and avant-garde cinemas.
Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and
Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna offers a nuanced look at
the intersection of music, cultural identity, and political
ideology in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Drawing on an extensive
selection of writings in the city's political press,
correspondence, archival documents, and a large body of recent
scholarship in late Habsburg cultural and political history, author
David Brodbeck argues that Vienna's music critics were important
agents in the public sphere whose writings gave voice to distinct,
sometimes competing ideological positions. These conflicting
positions are exemplified especially well in their critical
writings about the music of three notable composers of the day who
were Austrian citizens but not ethnic Germans: Carl Goldmark, a Jew
from German West Hungary, and the Czechs Bed?ich Smetana and
Antonin Dvo?ak.
Often at stake in the critical discourse was the question of who
and what could be deemed "German" in the multinational Austrian
state. For critics such as Eduard Hanslick and Ludwig Speidel,
traditional German liberals who came of age in the years around
1848, "Germanness" was an attribute that could be earned by any
ambitious bourgeois-including Jews and those of non-German
nationality-by embracing German cultural values. The more
nationally inflected liberalism evident in the writings of Theodor
Helm, with its particularist rhetoric of German national property
in a time of Czech gains at German expense, was typical of those in
the next generation, educated during the 1860s. The radical student
politics of the 1880s, with its embrace of racialist antisemitism
and irredentist German nationalism, just as surely shaped the
discourse of certain young Wagnerian critics who emerged at the end
of the century. This body of music-critical writing reveals a
continuum of exclusivity, from a conception of Germanness rooted in
social class and cultural elitism to one based in blood.
Brodbeck neatly counters decades of musicological scholarship and
offers a unique insight into the diverse ways in which educated
German Austrians conceived of Germanness in music and understood
their relationship to their non-German fellow citizens. Defining
Deutschtum is sure to be an essential text for scholars of music
history, cultural studies, and late 19th century Central European
culture and society."
Music Outside the Lines is an informative and practical resource
for all who are invested in making music composition an integral
part of curriculum. Author Maud Hickey addresses the practical
needs of music educators by offering both a well-grounded
justification for teaching music composition and also a compendium
of useful instructional ideas and classroom activities. Hickey
begins with a rationale for teachers to begin composition
activities in their own classrooms, with a thoughtful argument that
demonstrates that all music teachers possess the skills and
training needed to take children along the path toward composing
satisfying musical compositions even if they themselves have never
taken formal composition lessons. She also addresses some of the
stickier issues that plague teaching music composition in schools
such as assessment, notation, and technology. Most importantly, she
introduces a curricular model for teaching composition, a model
which provides an array of composition activities to try in the
music classrooms and studios. These activities encourage musical
and creative growth through music composition; while they are
organized in logical units corresponding to existing teaching
modules, they also offer jumping off points for music teachers to
exercise their own creative thinking and create music composition
activities that are customized to their classes and needs. As a
whole, Music Outside the Lines both successfully reasons that music
composition should be at the core of school music curriculum and
also provides inservice and pre-service educators with an essential
resource and compendium of practical tips and plans for fulfilling
this goal.
Universities are unlikely venues for grading, branding, and
marketing beauty, bodies, poise, and style. Nonetheless, thousands
of college women have sought not only college diplomas but campus
beauty titles and tiaras throughout the twentieth century. The
cultural power of beauty pageants continues today as campus beauty
pageants, especially racial and ethnic pageants and pageants for
men, have soared in popularity. In Queens of Academe, Karen W. Tice
asks how, and why, does higher education remain in the beauty and
body business and with what effects on student bodies and
identities. She explores why students compete in and attend
pageants such as "Miss Pride" and "Best Bodies on Campus" as well
as why websites such as "Campus Chic" and campus-based etiquette
and charm schools are flourishing. Based on archival research and
interviews with contemporary campus queens and university sponsors
as well as hundreds of hours observing college pageants on
predominantly black and white campuses, Tice examines how campus
pageant contestants express personal ambitions, desires, and,
sometimes, racial and political agendas to resolve the
incongruities of performing in evening gowns and bathing suits on
stage while seeking their degrees. Tice argues the pageants help to
illuminate the shifting terrain of class, race, religion,
sexuality, and gender braided in campus rituals and student life.
Moving beyond a binary of objectification versus empowerment, Tice
offers a nuanced analysis of the contradictory politics of
education, feminism, empowerment, consumerism, race and ethnicity,
class, and popular culture have on students, idealized
masculinities and femininities, and the stylization of higher
education itself.
Now in its fourth edition, The Art of Music Production has
established itself as the definitive guide to the art and business
of music production and a primary teaching tool for college
programs. It is the first book to comprehensively analyze and
describe the non-technical role of the music producer. Author
Richard James Burgess lays out the complex field of music
production by defining the several distinct roles that fall under
the rubric of music producer. In this completely updated and
revised fourth edition of a book already lauded as "the most
comprehensive guide to record production ever published," Burgess
has expanded and refined the types of producers, bringing them
fully up to date. The first part of the book outlines the
underlying theory of the art of music production. The second part
focuses on the practical aspects of the job including training,
getting into the business, day-to-day responsibilities, potential
earnings, managers, lawyers, and - most importantly - the musical,
financial, and interpersonal relationships producers have with
artists and their labels. The book is packed with insights from the
most successful music producers ranging from today's chart-toppers
to the beginnings of recorded sound, including mainstream and many
niche genres. The book also features many revealing anecdotes about
the business, including the stars and the challenges (from daily to
career-related) a producer faces. Burgess addresses the changes in
the nature of music production that have been brought about by
technology and, in particular, the paradigmatic millennial shift
that has occurred with digital recording and distribution.
Burgess's lifelong experience in the recording industry as a studio
musician, artist, producer, manager, and marketer combined with his
extensive academic research in the field brings a unique breadth
and depth of understanding to the topic.
Discoveries from the Fortepiano meets the demand for a manual on
authentic Classical piano performance practice that is at once
accessible to the performer and accurate to the scholarship.
Uncovering a wide range of eighteenth-century primary sources,
noted keyboard pedagogue Donna Gunn examines contemporary
philosophical beliefs and principles surrounding Classical Era
performance practices. Gunn introduces the reader to the Viennese
fortepiano and compares its sonic and technical capabilities to the
modern piano. In doing so, she demonstrates how understanding
Classical fortepiano performance aesthetics can influence
contemporary pianists, paying particular focus to technique,
dynamics, articulation, rhythm, ornamentation, and pedaling. The
book is complete with over 100 music examples that illustrate
concepts, as well as sample model lessons that demonstrate the
application of Gunn's historically informed style on the modern
piano. Each example is available on the book's companion website
and is given three recordings: the first, a modern interpretation
of the passage on a modern piano; the second, a fortepiano
interpretation; and the third, a historically informed performance
on a modern piano. With its in-depth yet succinct explanations and
examples of the Viennese five-octave fortepiano and the nuances of
Classical interpretation and ornamentation, Discoveries from the
Fortepiano is an indispensable educational aid to any pianist who
seeks an academically and artistically sound approach to the
performance of Classical works.
Montana's brewing history stretches back more than 150 years to the
state's days as a territory. But the art of brewing in Montana has
come a long way since the frontier era. Today, nearly forty craft
breweries span the Treasure State, and the quality of their output
rivals the best craft beer produced anywhere in the country. Maybe
it's because there's also a little piece of Montana in every glass,
as the state's brewers pride themselves on using cold mountain
water and locally sourced barley harvested from Montana's ample
fields. From grain to glass, " Montana Beer: A Guide to Breweries
in Big Sky Country" tells the story of the brewers and breweries
that make the Treasure State's brew so special.
During the nineteenth century, nearly one hundred symphonies were
written by over fifty composers living in the United States. With
few exceptions, this repertoire is virtually forgotten today. In
Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic
Enterprise, author Douglas W. Shadle explores the stunning
stylistic diversity of this substantial repertoire and uncovers why
it failed to enter the musical mainstream. Throughout the century,
Americans longed for a distinct national musical identity. As the
most prestigious of all instrumental genres, the symphony proved to
be a potent vehicle in this project as composers found inspiration
for their works in a dazzling array of subjects, including Niagara
Falls, Hiawatha, and Western pioneers. With a wealth of musical
sources at his disposal, including never-before-examined
manuscripts, Shadle reveals how each component of the symphonic
enterprise-from its composition, to its performance, to its
immediate and continued reception by listeners and
critics-contributed to competing visions of American identity.
Employing an innovative transnational historical framework,
Shadle's narrative covers three continents and shows how the music
of major European figures such as Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner,
Liszt, Brahms, and Dvorak exerted significant influence over
dialogues about the future of American musical culture. Shadle
demonstrates that the perceived authority of these figures allowed
snobby conductors, capricious critics, and even orchestral
musicians themselves to thwart the efforts of American symphonists
despite widespread public support of their music. Consequently,
these works never entered the performing canons of American
orchestras. An engagingly written account of a largely unknown
repertoire, Orchestrating the Nation shows how artistic and
ideological debates from the nineteenth century continue to shape
the culture of American orchestral music today.
The Russian school of violin playing produced many of the twentieth
century's leading violinists - from the famed disciples of Leopold
Auer such as Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, and Mischa Elman to
masters of the Soviet years such as David Oistrakh and Leonid
Kogan. Though descendants of this school of playing are found today
in every major orchestra and university, little is known about the
pedagogical traditions of the Russian, and later Soviet, violin
school. Following the revolution of 1917, the center of Russian
violin playing and teaching shifted from St. Petersburg to Moscow,
where violinists such as Lev Tseitlin, Konstantin Mostras, and
Abraham Yampolsky established an influential pedagogical tradition.
Founded on principles of scientific inquiry and physiology, this
tradition became known as the Soviet Violin School, a component of
the larger Russian Violin School. Yuri Yankelevich (1909 - 1973), a
student and assistant of Abraham Yampolsky, was greatly influenced
by the teachers of the Soviet School and in turn he became one of
the most important pedagogues of his generation. Yankelevich taught
at the Moscow Conservatory from 1936 to 1973 and produced a
remarkable array of superb violinists, including forty prizewinners
in international competitions. Extremely interested in the
methodology of violin playing and teaching, Yankelevich contributed
significant texts to the pedagogical literature. Despite its
importance, Yankelevich's scholarly work has been little known
outside of Russia. This book includes two original texts by
Yankelevich: his essay on positioning the hands and arms and his
extensive research into every detail of shifting positions.
Additional essays and commentaries by those close to him examine
further details of his pedagogy, including tone production,
intonation, vibrato, fingerings and bowings, and his general
approach to methodology and selecting repertoire. An invaluable
resource for any professional violinist, Yankelevich's work reveals
an extremely sophisticated approach to understanding the
interconnectivity of all components in playing the violin and is
complete with detailed practical suggestions and broad historical
context.
In 1895, emissaries from the New York Yacht Club traveled to Deer
Isle, Maine, to recruit the nation's best sailors, an "All
American" crew. This remote island in Penobscot Bay sent nearly
thirty of its fishing men to sail "Defender," and under skipper
Hank Haff, they beat their opponents in a difficult and
controversial series. To the delight of the American public, the
charismatic Sir Thomas Lipton sent a surprise challenge in 1899.
The New York Yacht Club knew where to turn and again recruited Deer
Isle's fisherman sailors. Undefeated in two defense campaigns, they
are still considered one of the best American sail-racing teams
ever assembled. Read their fascinating story and relive their
adventure.
Starring New York considers twenty-one films in detail, and more
generally discusses many others, that were shot on location and
released between 1968 and 1981. Corkin looks at their complex
relationship to the fortunes of New York City during that era,
probing the multiple connections among film, history, and
geography. This period was a volatile moment in the history of the
city as it went from the hopefulness of the Lindsay years (1966 to
1973) to financial default in 1975, under the leadership of Abe
Beame to its reemergence as a center of international finance in
the 1980s, under the leadership of Edward I. Koch (1978 to 1989).
These changing regimes and fortunes form the backdrop for films
that picture New York's racial and ethnic populations, its decaying
districts, its violent street-life, and its emerging gentrification
by the later years of the decade. The films, directed by an
emerging generation of filmmakers influenced both by the Italian
neo-realists and the French auteurs, sought a higher realism than
that offered in conventional Hollywood productions. Martin
Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, Woody
Allen, and John Schlesinger, all of whom became noted by a general
audience during this period, capture the excitement and volatility
of the period. More broadly, Starring New York proposes that this
concentration of popular films that picture the city in transition
provide viewers with a means to begin reorienting their view of New
York's space, their significance, and their relation to other
places of the globe.
The history of North Carolina's Outer Banks is as ancient and
mesmerizing as its beaches. Much has been documented, but many
stories were lost--until now. Join local author and historian Sarah
Downing as she reveals a past of the Outer Banks eroded by time and
tides. Revel in the nostalgic days of the Carolina Beach Pavilion,
stand in the shadows of windmills that once lined the coast and
learn how native islanders honor those aviation giants, the Wright
brothers. Downing's vignettes adventure through windswept dunes,
dive deep in search of the lost ironclad the "Monitor" and lament
the decline of the diamondback terrapin. Break out the beach chair
and let your mind soak in the salty bygone days of these famed
coastal extremities.
Audiences have long enjoyed Sergei Prokofievs musical score for
Sergei Eisensteins 1938 film Alexander Nevsky. The historical epic
cast a thirteenth-century Russian victory over invading Teutonic
Knights as an allegory of contemporary Soviet strength in the face
of Nazi warmongering. Prokofievs and Eisensteins work proved an
enormous success, both as a collaboration of two of the twentieth
centurys most prominent artists and as a means to bolster
patriotism and national pride among Soviet audiences. Arranged as a
cantata for concert performance, Prokofievs music for Alexander
Nevsky music proved malleable, its meaning reconfigured to suit
different circumstances and times. Author Kevin Bartig draws on
previously unexamined archival materials to follow Prokofievs
Alexander Nevsky from its inception through the present day. He
considers the musics genesis as well as the surprisingly different
ways it has engaged listeners over the past eighty years, from its
beginnings as state propaganda in the 1930s to showpiece for
high-fidelity recording in the 1950s to open-air concert favorite
in the post-Soviet 1990s.
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