Henry Sutherland Edwards (1828-1906) wrote this volume in Francis Hueffer's 'Great Musicians' series, published by Novello, in 1881. It was unusual for this series because of the addition of 'the School': most of the other books dealt with an individual composer, but Edwards discusses Bellini and provides chapters on Donizetti and Verdi (still alive, and at the height of his powers, at the time this book was published) as well as his main subject. The book covers Rossini's life and deals in detail with what the author regarded as his most significant works - a selection which may surprise or even outrage Rossini enthusiasts today.

From school punk to modern day film producer, Richard Jobson has lived a full and colourful life. A harrowing incident as a child left him suffering with epilepsy but he was a mere fifteen-year-old when he launched the punk rock band The Skids in 1977 with his songwriting partner Stuart Adamson. With hit singles including the immortal 'Into The Valley', after four albums The Skids folded and Jobson formed The Armoury Show whilst Adamson had moved on to form the successful eighties band Big Country. In this cathartic story, Jobson talks candidly about the many trials and tribulations that have shaped his life. He talks openly of his breakdown during the making of The Skids' third album The Absolute Game, detailing the suicidal thoughts going through his mind at the time. More pertinent than he could have imagined given that writing partner Stuart Adamson was to take his own life two decades later. They had remained friends following The Skids break-up and their relationship is explored in detail throughout. In the 1980s Jobson became a familiar face on television as a presenter and film reviewer for Sky Television. In June 2013, he was awarded an honorary degree (Doctor of Arts) from Edinburgh Napier University. Today he is a successful filmmaker but his life has also gone full circle. In 2017 he reactivated The Skids. A successful UK tour prompted demand for more shows in 2018 as well as the band's first new album for over three decades, making this the perfect time to write his memoirs of his time in the band. Into The Valley is a riveting read and a perfect illustration of how one man overcame his disability to become successful in the world of music and film. A first hand account of the late 1970s and early 80s that will appeal not only to punk rock fans but to anyone identifying with Jobson's triumph over adversity.

This volume is a journey through musics that emerged at the turn of the 20th Century and were neither exclusively tonal nor serial. They fall between these labels as they are metatonal, being both with and after tonality, in their reconstruction of external codes and gestures of Common Practice music in new and idiosyncratic ways. The composers and works considered are approached from analytic, cultural, creative, and performance angles by musicologists, performers and composers to enable a deeper reading of these musics by scholars and students alike. Works include those by Frank Bridge, Ferruccio Busoni, Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, Rebecca Clarke, John Foulds, Percy Grainger, Mary Howe, Carl Nielsen, Franz Schreker, Erwin Schulhoff, Cyril Scott and Alexander Scriabin. In the process of engaging with this book the reader, will find an enrichment to their own understanding of music at the turn of the 20th Century.

This revised, enhanced edition of the life and works of composer and Admiral Jean Cras traces, through new research, the remarkable career of this celebrated composer, decorated war hero, scientist and inventor. As Henri Duparc's only protege, his "spiritual son" enjoyed the same level of esteem during the 1920s as his friends Ravel and Roussel. This edition sustains the renaissance of Jean Cras and includes a new chapter devoted to the composer's early songs, to be released concurrently. " Le Canadien Paul-Andre Bempechat, est parfaitement francophone mais c'est en anglais qu'il redige cette somme dediee a Jean Cras ... Tout y est, ... sa carriere marine, ... l'inventeur brilliant, l'esthete petri d'humanisme, le musicien dans son oeuvre. ... Le portrait est vivant, Jean Cras se tient devant vous et tous les secrets de son art subtil sont demontres. " - Diapason "There is no doubt that, in subsequent studies of Jean Cras's life and works, this book will be the first source to which the researcher turns. Bempechat's deft and skilful blending of a beautifully written and engaging biography with lucid and erudite musical analysis, interspersed with tales of military history and scientific discovery, has resulted in a book that is absolutely engaging on its own, as it tells the life story of a most extraordinary man." - Nineteenth-Century Music Review

DJ Screw, a.k.a. Robert Earl Davis Jr., changed rap and hip-hop forever. In the 1990s, in a spare room of his Houston home, he developed a revolutionary mixing technique known as chopped and screwed. Spinning two copies of a record, Screw would "chop" in new rhythms, bring in local rappers to freestyle over the tracks, and slow the recording down on tape. Soon Houstonians were lining up to buy his cassettes-he could sell thousands in a single day. Fans drove around town blasting his music, a sound that came to define the city's burgeoning and innovative rap culture. June 27 has become an unofficial city holiday, inspired by a legendary mix Screw made on that date. Lance Scott Walker has interviewed nearly everyone who knew Screw, from childhood friends to collaborators to aficionados who evangelized Screw's tapes-millions of which made their way around the globe-as well as the New York rap moguls who honored him. Walker brings these voices together with captivating details of Screw's craft and his world. More than the story of one man, DJ Screw is a history of the Houston scene as it came of age, full of vibrant moments and characters. But none can top Screw himself, a pioneer whose mystique has only grown in the two decades since his death.

The founding in 1777 of the Journal de Paris, France's first daily and distinctly commercial paper, represents an early use of disinformation as a tool for political gain, profit, and societal division. To attract a large readership and bar competition for C.W. Gluck's works at the Paris Opera, it launched a prolonged campaign of anonymous lies, mockery, and defamation against two prominent members of the Academie Francaise who wished the Opera to be open to all deserving composers but lacked a comparable daily forum with which to defend themselves. In this unique episode, music served as a smokescreen for nefarious activity. No musical knowledge is necessary to follow this purely political drama.

Presenting a fresh picture of the life and work of Joseph Haydn, this biography captures all the complexities and contradictions of the composer's long career. In his lifetime Haydn achieved a degree of fame that easily surpassed that of Mozart and Beethoven. Later his historical significance was more restricted, regarded exclusively as the composer who first recognised the potential of the symphony and the quartet. However, Haydn had also composed operas, oratorios and church music with similar enthusiasm and self-regard. Too easily buttonholed as a Viennese composer, he interacted consistently with the musical life of Vienna only during the earliest and latest periods of his life; London was at least as important in fashioning the composer's fame and legacy. To counter the genial view of the composer, this biography probes the darker side of Haydn's personality, his commercial opportunism and double dealing, his penny-pinching and his troubled marriage.

This selective annotated bibliography places Alma Mahler with three other female composers of her time, covering the first generation of active female composers in the twentieth century. It uncovers the wealth of resources available on the lives and music of Mahler, Florence Price, Yuliya Lazarevna Veysberg, and Maria Teresa Prieto and supports emerging scholarship and inquiry on four women who experienced both entrenched sexual discrimination and political upheaval, which affected their lives and influenced composers of subsequent generations.

Fanny Hensel: A Research and Information Guide provides scholars in Hensel studies with a resource to navigate the research surrounding the composer's over 450 musical works. As part of the larger blossoming of women's music history, new research in the 1980s and 1990s promoted an awareness of Hensel's output, in particular in the genres of the lied and the solo piano work. This research guide includes an introductory chapter, a summary paragraph at the beginning of each chapter, and annotations for more than 500 entries, focusing on scholarly works as well as selected articles from trade publications, catalogs, and Internet resources.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Research and Information Guide presents the most extensive annotated bibliography of its subject yet produced. It offers comprehensive coverage of the English composer's prose works and accounts for over 1,000 secondary sources from all critical and scholarly eras. A single-numbering format and substantial indexes facilitate efficient searches of what is the most complete bibliography of Ralph Vaughan Williams since Neil Butterworth's guide to research was published by Garland in 1990.

Neither Spem in alium, the widely acclaimed 'songe of fortie partes' by Thomas Tallis, nor Alessandro Striggio's forty-part Mass is the largest-scale counterpoint work in Western music. The actual winner is Gregorio Ballabene, a relatively unknown Roman maestro di cappella, a contemporary of Giovanni Paisiello, Joseph Haydn and Luigi Boccherini, who composed in forty-eight parts for twelve choirs. Ballabene's Mass has remained completely unstudied until today, even though the score survives in prominent collections. This study offers, for the first time, a historical and analytical perspective on this overlooked manifestation of a very individual musical intelligence.

Presenting a fresh approach to Mozart's achievements as a composer for the stage, John A. Rice outlines the composer's place in the operatic culture of his time. The book tells the story of how Mozart's operas came into existence, following the processes that Mozart went through as he brought his operas from commission to performance. Chapters trace the fascinating series of interactions that took place between Mozart and librettists, singers, stage designers, orchestras, and audiences. In linking the operas by topic, Rice emphasizes what Mozart's operas have in common, regardless of when he wrote them and the genres to which they belong. Overall, the book demonstrates how Mozart's entire operatic oeuvre is the product of a single extraordinary mind and a single pan-European operatic culture.

One of the most influential hard rock bands of all time, Motoerhead mixed rock, punk, and heavy metal into an aggressive blend of pure explosive energy. Between 1977 and 1982, the classic "three amigos" lineup of the band (Lemmy Kilmister, Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor, and "Fast" Eddie Clarke) toured relentlessly, and recorded a half dozen classic albums that continue to impact the music world today. During that period, Graham Mitchell was, in his own words, "their tour manager, their babysitter, their procurer of women, their procurer of drugs, procurer of everything." Somehow, in the midst of the whirlwind, Graham managed to pick up his camera and snap amazing images of the group that document the raw power of the band with an intimacy that only an insider could capture. Presented in large format, and featuring nearly 100 snapshots, many that have never been seen before, Fast & Loose is an inside look at a one-of-a-kind group that is essential for any diehard fan.

This volume makes available Rodrigo's writings to English-speaking readers throughout the world. The generous selection reveals an outstanding critical mind, equally illuminating on the main developments in the history of classical music and its most important composers, from Bach and Mozart to Verdi and Puccini, as well as Rodrigo's contemporaries. Rodrigo's writings also cover many aspects of the culture and music of Spain and the country's major composers, as well as being an invaluable guide to an understanding and appreciation of Rodrigo's own works. The composer's style of writing is extremely varied: by turns incisive, eloquent, poetic, or delightfully humorous. Given the world-wide fame and popularity of his music, the availability in English of a large number of the composer's many articles and critical reviews will be of the greatest interest to musicians, scholars, music critics, and music-lovers alike.

The Original Portrayal of Mozart's Don Giovanni offers an original reading of Mozart's and Da Ponte's opera Don Giovanni, using as a lens the portrayal of the title role by its creator, the baritone Luigi Bassi (1766-1825). Although Bassi was coached in the role by the composer himself, his portrayal has never been studied in depth before, and this book presents a large number of new sources (first- and second-hand accounts), which allows us to reconstruct his performance scene by scene. The book confronts Bassi's portrayal with a study of the opera's early German reception and performance history, demonstrating how Don Giovanni as we know it today was not only created by Mozart, Da Ponte and Luigi Bassi but also by the early German adapters, translators, critics and performers who turned the title character into the arrogant and violent villain we still encounter in most of today's stage productions. Incorporating discussion of dramaturgical thinking of the late Enlightenment and the difficult moral problems that the opera raises, this is an important study for scholars and researchers from opera studies, theatre and performance studies, music history as well as conductors, directors and singers.

As one of the most popular classical composers in the performance repertoire of professional and amateur orchestras and choirs across the world, Gustav Mahler continues to generate significant interest, and the global appetite for his music, and for discussions of it, remains large. Editor Jeremy Barham brings together leading and emerging scholars in the field to explore Mahler's relationship with music, media, and ideas past and present, addressing issues in structural analysis, performance, genres of stage, screen and literature, cultural movements, aesthetics, history/historiography and temporal experience. Rethinking Mahler counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions and preferences that configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. Over the course of 17 chapters drawing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the book pursues ideas of nostalgia, historicism and 'pastness' in relation to an emergent modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments, yielding a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of Mahler's works, their historical reception and understanding, and their resounding impact within diverse cultural contexts. Rethinking Mahler will be an essential resource for scholars and students of Mahler and late Romantic era music more generally, and will also find an audience among the many devotees of Mahler's music.

This fresh interpretation explains how an untutored musician changed music while at the same time playing an inadvertent role in the youth rebellion that has shaped the Baby Boomer generation into the 21st century. Elvis Aaron Presley was born in a two-room house in Tupelo, MS, on January 8, 1935. He died at his Memphis home, Graceland, on August 16, 1977. In those 42 years, Elvis made an indelible impression on pop culture the world over. Elvis Presley, Reluctant Rebel: His Life and Our Times probes both the man and his influence, delving deeply into the personality of its protagonist, his needs and motivations, and the social and musical forces that shaped his career. Elvis's musical talents and liabilities are explored, as are his records, films, and live performances and his relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, whom he allowed to manipulate him as a money-making machine. Readers will learn about Elvis's personal life, his devotion to conventional religious and political beliefs, and his decline into self-destruction and death. Finally, the book explores Elvis's impact on the musical and racial revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s, his legacy, and his importance in shaping a generation of Baby Boomers. Photographs A bibliography

"An expedition into the troubled soul of one of the world's greatest songwriters."-Haaretz "Not only is a hidden side of Cohen revealed but so too a hidden side of Israel."-David Bezmozgis The little-known story of Leonard Cohen's concert tour to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War, including never-before-seen selections from an unfinished manuscript by Cohen and rare photographs In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen-thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end-traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men and women at the worst moment of their lives. Those who survived never forgot the experience. And the war transformed Cohen. He had announced that he was abandoning his music career, but he instead returned to Hydra and to his family, had a second child, and released one of the best albums of his career. In Who by Fire, journalist Matti Friedman gives us a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai, drawing on Cohen's previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, formative moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a crossroads.

Self-described as a 'spotty, chubby, ginger teenager' with a love for Damien Rice and Nizlopi, Ed Sheeran was never an obvious bet to become a global superstar. And yet that's exactly what he's achieved, winning plenty of awards (and hearts) along the way. But how did a young musician go from selling CDs from his rucksack to becoming the millennial record-breaking international stadium act? Tracing his story from his bohemian childhood in Yorkshire and Suffolk to the release of his third album Divide, music journalist David Nolan chronicles Sheeran's musical life and times. Featuring exclusive interviews with friends, relatives, musical collaborators and key figures in his rise to stardom, Divide and Conquer tells the story of how Ed Sheeran went from school drop-out to one of the world's most successful musicians.

In Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles, Revised Edition, Kenneth Womack brings the band's story vividly to life-from their salad days as a Liverpool Skiffle group and their apprenticeship in the nightclubs and mean streets of Hamburg through their early triumphs at the legendary Cavern Club and the massive onslaught of Beatlemania itself. By mapping the group's development as an artistic fusion, Womack traces the Beatles' creative arc from their first, primitive recordings through Abbey Road and the twilight of their career. In this revised edition, Womack addresses new insights in Beatles-related scholarship since the original publication of Long and Winding Roads, along with hundreds of the group's outtakes released in the intervening years. The updated edition also affords attention to the Beatles' musical debt to Rhythm and Blues, as well as to key recent discoveries that vastly shift our understanding of formative events in the band's timeless story.

Antonio Carlos Jobim has been called the greatest of all contemporary Brazilian songwriters. He wrote both popular and serious music and was a gifted piano, guitar and flute player. One of the key figures in the creation of the bossa nova style, Jobim's music made a lasting impression worldwide, and many of his songs are now standards of the popular music repertoire. In The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, one of the first extensive musicological analyses of the Brazilian composer, Peter Freeman examines the music, philosophy and circumstances surrounding the creation of Jobim's popular songs, instrumental compositions and symphonic works. Freeman attempts to elucidate not only the many musical influences that formed Jobim's musical output, but also the stylistic peculiarities that were as much the product of a gifted composer as the rich musical environment and heritage that surrounded him.

Following a run of New Year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, with no design yet heeding signs, including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger's words, "Anything is possible: after all, it's the year of the monkey." For Patti Smith - inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life's gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.

Smith melds the Western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from Southern California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places - this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment. But as Patti Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope of a better world.

Riveting, elegant, often humorous, illustrated by Smith's signature Polaroids, Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times.

The French composer Olivier Messiaen is one of the major figures of twentieth-century music. This collection of scholarly essays offers new cultural, historical, biographical and analytical perspectives on Messiaen??'s musical ??uvre from 1941 to 1992. The volume includes: a fascinating snapshot of Messiaen??'s life in occupied France; a study of the Surrealist poetics of Messiaen??'s song cycle Harawi; a chapter on Messiaen??'s iconoclastic path to the avant-garde heritage that he bequeathed to his pupils; discussion on Messiaen??'s place in twentieth-century music; and detailed analysis of specific works, including his opera St Fran??ois d'Assise. The chapters provide fresh insights on the origins, style and poetics of Messiaen??'s music, and therefore provide an inspiration and foundation for future scholarship. Reflecting and expanding upon the broad range of Messiaen??'s own interdisciplinary interests, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of music, art, literature and theology.

Although David Bowie has famously characterized himself as a "leper messiah," a more appropriate moniker might be "rock god" someone whose influence has crossed numerous sub-genres of popular and classical music and can at times seem ubiquitous. By looking at key moments in his career (1972, 1977-79, 1980-83, and 1995-97) through several lenses--theories of sub-culture, gender/sexuality studies, theories of sound, post-colonial theory, and performance studies Waldrep will examine Bowie's work in terms not only of his auditory output but his many reinterpretations of it via music videos, concert tours, television appearances, and occasional movie roles. Future Nostalgia will look at all aspects of Bowie's career--musical recordings, live concerts, music videos, film performances, and television appearance--in an attempt to trace Bowie's contribution to the performative paradigms that constitute contemporary rock music.