Adopted as a child from the Masonic Home for Children at Oxford, Tommy Malboeuf grew up in Troutman, North Carolina before enlisting in the Navy in the early 1950s. After his military service, Tommy found occasional work surveying and operating heavy equipment, and he also found a personal passion in bluegrass fiddling. He performed and recorded with A.L. Wood and the Smokey Ridge Boys, Roy McMillan's High Country Boys, the Border Mountain Boys, L.W. Lambert and the Blue River Boys, C.E. Ward and his band, Garland Shuping, and Wild Country, among others. In the late 1990s, Tommy began teaching fiddle, maintaining a steady stream of students until at least the early 2000s. He continued to perform as a fiddler, filling in for a variety of local bands and recording cuts on records for bands such as Big Country Bluegrass. This text documents Tommy's life, from his humble beginnings to his lengthy fiddle career. Contextualizing Tommy's work within the Statesville-Troutman bluegrass "scene," chapters also explore the local bluegrass culture of the time. Tommy's extensive repertoire is also listed, including his spectacular fiddle contest wins, band recordings, local jam field recordings, and songs recorded for students, all of which highlight his talent and expertise as a fiddler.

The first English-language book on Czerny, and the broadest survey of his activity in any language. Within the history of European music, Carl Czerny (1791-1857) is simultaneously all too familiar and virtually invisible. During his lifetime, he was a highly successful composer of popular piano music, and his pedagogical works remain fundamental to the training of pianists. But Czerny's reputation in these areas has obscured the remarkable breadth of his activity, and especially his work as a composer of serious music, which recent performances and recordings have shown to hold real musical interest. Beyond "The Art of Finger Dexterity" explores Czerny's multifaceted career and its legacy and provides the first broad assessment of his work as a composer. Prominent North American and European musicians and scholars explore topics including Czerny's life and its context; his autobiographical writings and efforts to promote his teacher, Beethoven; his activity as a pedagogue, both as teacher of Liszt and as the authority held up to innumerable amateur women pianists; his role in shaping performance traditions of classical music; the development of his image during and after his lifetime; and his work in genres including the Mass, the symphony, the string quartet, and the piano fantasy. This is the first English-language book on Czerny, and the broadest survey of his activity in any language. Contributors: George Barth, Otto Biba, Attilio Bottegal, Deanna C. Davis, James Deaville, Ingrid Fuchs, David Gramit, Alice M. Hanson, Anton Kuerti, Marie Sumner Lott, James Parakilas, Michael Saffle, Franz A. J. Szabo, Douglas Townsend, and John Wiebe. DavidGramit [University of Alberta] is the author of Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848.

This book delves into the aural splendor of the Beatles' discography, breaking down each song and taking a close look at how the group's music sounds through headphones rather than external speakers. Mistakes, studio chatter, secret meanings and other audio esoterica are all identified and discussed. Thousands of books have been written about the Beatles' music, but this is the first to look at their discography through the prism of headphones, which yield a unique, artistic listening experience. The author argues that the Beatles should be heard through headphones to appreciate the real depth of their musical creativity and to fully understand the timeless songs that remain influential to this day.

An ode to Beethoven's revolutionary masterpiece, his Third Symphony In 1805, the world of music was startled by an avant-garde and explosive new work. Intellectually and emotionally, Beethoven's Third Symphony, the "Eroica," rudely broke the mold of the Viennese Classical symphony and revealed a powerful new expressiveness, both personal and societal. Even the whiff of actual political revolution was woven into the work-it was originally inscribed to Napoleon Bonaparte, a dangerous hero for a composer dependent on conservative royal patronage. With the first two stunning chords of the "Eroica," classical music was transformed. In Sinfonia Eroica, James Hamilton-Paterson reconstructs this great moment in Western culture, the shock of the music and the symphony's long afterlife.

An investigation of the considerable influence of Wagner's stay in Zurich from 1849 to 1858 -- a period often discounted by scholars -- on his career. When the people of Dresden rose up against their king in May 1849, Richard Wagner went from Royal Kapellmeister to republican revolutionary overnight. He gambled everything, but the rebellion failed, and he lost all. Now a wantedman in Germany, he fled to Zurich. Years later, he wrote that the city was "devoid of any public art form" and full of "simple people who knew nothing of my work as an artist." But he lied: Zurich boasted arguably the world's greatest concentration of radical intellectuals and a vibrant music scene. Wagner was accepted with open arms. This book investigates Wagner's affect on the musical life of the city and the city's impact on him. Mathilde Wesendonck emerges not as Wagner's passive muse but as a self-assured woman who exploited gender expectations to her own benefit. In 1858, Wagner had to flee Zurich after again gambling everything -- this time on Mathilde -- and again losing.But it was in Zurich that Wagner wrote his major theoretical works; composed Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, and parts of Siegfried and Tristan und Isolde; first planned Parsifal; held the first festival of his music; and conceived of a theater to stage his own works. If Wagner had been free in 1849 to choose a city in which to seek heightened intellectual stimulation among the like-minded and the similarly gifted, he could have come to nomore perfect place. Chris Walton teaches music history at the Musikhochschule Basel in Switzerland. He is the recipient of the 2010 Max Geilinger Prize honoring exemplary contributions to the literary and cultural relationship between Switzerland and the English-speaking world.

The Art of Tango offers a systematic exploration of the performance, arrangement and composition of the universally popular tango. The author discusses traditional practices, the De Caro school and the pioneering oeuvre of four celebrated innovators: Pugliese, Salgan, Piazzolla and Beytelmann. With an in-depth focus on both reception and practice, the volume and its companion website featuring supplementary audio-visual materials analyse, decode, compare and discuss literature, scores and recordings to provide a deeper understanding of tango's artistic concepts, characteristics and techniques. River Plate tango is explored through the lens of artistic research, combining the study of oral traditions and written sources. In addition to a detailed examination of the various approaches to tango by the musicians featured in this book, three compositions by the author embodying creative applications of the research findings are discussed. The volume offers numerous tools for developing skills in practice, inspiring new musical output and the continuation of research endeavours in the field. Illustrating the many possibilities of this musical language that has captivated musicians and audiences worldwide, this book is a valuable resource for everyone with an interest in tango, whether they be composers, performers, arrangers, teachers, music lovers or scholars in the field of popular music studies.

During the five years it has taken to collate this work, authors Weird and Gilly have spoken to over fifty family members, close friends and colleagues including exclusive interviews with Suzi Ronson, David and Maggi Ronson (brother and sister), Minnie Ronson (mother), Steve Popovich (manager), Lou Reed, Mick Jones, Ian Hunter, Chrissie Hynde, Glen Matlock, Cherry Vanilla, Steve Harley, Bob Harris, Joe Elliott and a host of others. As a result, this book provides a deeply intimate and compelling insight into the life and times of an extraordinarily talented guitarist. A man who was tender and caring off the stage, yet fierce and electrifying on it. Jeff Beck, David Bowie, Ian Hunter and Annette Peacock are just a few of the names that were to become associated with the Mick Ronson legend. He toured with Bob Dylan, played with Mott The Hoople, worked with Lou Reed and produced an impressive number of albums with arresting originality. From his days as a mobile grocer to his performances at Wembley Stadium, this minutely detailed biography also includes scores of unpublished photographs and unseen rarities including: a hand-written six-page autobiography by the man himself, love letters to his first girlfriend, family album photographs and an exhaustive discography. After losing his battle with cancer, Mick passed away in the spring of 1993 at the young age of 46. This book is a salute to his remarkable music and legacy. Fully revised and updated with scores of new unpublished photographs and even more rare memorabilia.

Clarinetist Kenny Davern ranked among the best jazz musicians for over 50 years. The unique and instantly recognizable sound of his clarinet, coupled with a wide ranging intellect and quick sense of humor drew praise and applause and endeared him to his fans and friends. The Life and Music of Kenny Davern tells the story of this fascinating musician who had a vision of how he wanted his music to sound and who persisted in the face of adversity until he achieved that vision. Edward N. Meyer conducted interviews with friends, family, colleagues, and critics of Kenny Davern, as well as the man himself, to gain a comprehensive and personal narrative of the artist's life. Beginning with the tragic events that shaped his early life, Meyer traces Davern's growth from a young boy raised in an atmosphere of conflict into an acclaimed, self-assured musician and a warm and loving husband and father. Meyer describes the state of the jazz music business in the last half of the 20th century and fully establishes Davern's status within that scene. Meyer also explores a side of Davern that the public never saw: Davern's hunger for reading made him a knowledgeable and well-respected person with experts outside the world of jazz. With more than 30 photos, a comprehensive discography, bibliography, and index, this volume will fascinate jazz students, fans, and scholars.

This is the first scholarly work to document the musical life of Joseph Holbrooke, one of Britain's most prolific and controversial composers during the first half of the twentieth century. Holbrooke was outspoken on many issues, including the maligned fortunes of British composers, which he believed were brought about by apathy and indifference on the part of critics and the public. Despite doubts in various quarters over Holbrooke's ability to forge a unique compositional idiom, many of his works were performed to critical acclaim in Britain, Europe, and the United States. Today, Holbrooke's music is increasingly enjoyed and recorded. Joseph Holbrooke: Composer, Critic, and Musical Patriot opens with a biographical overview of Holbrooke that concentrates on his relationship with Granville Bantock and Wales and the role that Lord Howard de Walden played in Holbrooke's work and development. Contributors offer studies of a selection of repertory by Holbrooke, including his chamber music, the operas Pierrot and Pierrette and The Enchanted Garden, and his tone poem "The Raven." The final chapter describes Holbrooke's patriotism by examining his book Contemporary British Composers, which was published in 1925. Included is an appendix that provides the first comprehensive and corrected list of Holbrooke's compositions. This book will interest not only musicologists, musicians and listeners interested in the repertory of the British classical music tradition but also scholars and general readers interested in the ways Celticism, poetic inspiration, and nationalist ideology were expressed in the work of classical composers in the early twentieth century.

Vladimir de Pachmann was perhaps history's most notorious pianist. Widely regarded as the greatest player of Chopin's works, Pachmann embedded comedic elements-be it fiddling with his piano bench or flirting with the audience-within his classic piano recitals to alleviate his own anxiety over performing. But this wunderkind, whose admirers included Franz Liszt and music critic James Gibbons Huneker (who cheekily nicknamed Pachmann the "Chopinzee"), would by the turn of the century find his antics on the concert stage scorned by critics and out of fashion with listeners, burying his pianistic legacy. In Chopin's Prophet: The Life of Pianist Vladimir de Pachmann, the first biography ever of this remarkable figure, Edward Blickstein and Gregor Benko explore the private and public lives of this master pianist, surveying his achievements within the context of contemporary critical opinion and preserving his legacy as one of the last great Romantic pianists of his time. Chopin's Prophet paints a colorful portrait of classical piano performance and celebrity at the turn of the 20th century while also documenting Pachmann's attraction to men, which ultimately ended his marriage but was overlooked by his audiences. As the authors illustrate, Pachmann lived in a radically different world of music making, one in which eccentric personality and behavior fit into a much more flexible, and sometimes mysterious, musical community, one where standards were set not by certified experts with degrees but by the musicians themselves. Detailing the evolution of concert piano playing style from the era of Chopin until World War I, Chopin's Prophet tells the fantastic and true story of an artist of and after his time.

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

- Applies cutting-edge musical-linguistic approach to the music of early modern England - Uses analysis of emphasis to produce new insights into composers' liturgical music, showing how their settings create different interpretations of the religious text - Relevant to musicology, music theory, and religious history

Reveals the great twentieth-century Italian composer's innovative handling of harmony, form, and text setting. Luigi Dallapiccola was one of twentieth century's most accomplished and admired composers. His music incorporated many of the twelve-tone techniques developed by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, but blended their expressionistic impulses with an Italianate sense of lyricism. Brian Alegant's The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola traces the evolution of Dallapiccola's compositional technique over a thirty-year period (1942-74). Using both historical and music-analytical lenses, this book documents the influences of Webern and Schoenberg, highlights Dallapiccola's innovative handling of harmony, form, and text setting, and sheds light on several worksthat have been virtually ignored. Alegant's book will be a crucial source of insights for scholars and other readers interested in twentieth-century music. Brian Alegant is Professor of Music Theory at the Oberlin College Conservatory.

Though The Velvet Underground were critically and commercially unsuccessful in their time, in ensuing decades they have become a constant touchstone in art rock, punk, post-punk, indie, avant pop and alternative rock. In the 1970s and 80s Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico produced a number of works that traveled a path between art and pop. In 1993 the original band members of Reed, Cale, Morrison and Tucker briefly reunited for live appearances, and afterwards Reed, Cale and briefly Tucker, continued to produce music that travelled the idiosyncratic path begun in New York in the mid-1960s. The influence of the band and band members, mediated and promoted through famous fans such as David Bowie and Brian Eno, seems only to have expanded since the late 1960s. In 1996 the Velvet Underground were in inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, demonstrating how far the band had traveled in 30 years from an avant-garde cult to the mainstream recognition of their key contributions to popular music. In these collected essays, Pattie and Albiez present the first academic book-length collection on The Velvet Underground. The book covers a range of topics including the band's relationship to US literature, to youth and cultural movements of the 1960s and beyond and to European culture - and examines these contexts from the 1960s through to the present day.

Beyonce is not simply a pop sensation. She is a cultural phenomenon empowering the oppressed and dispossessed, challenging white privilege and misogyny and exploding gender politics. But who is Beyonce Knowles-Carter? And how did a small girl from Houston become the strong confident woman whose albums sell in their millions and whose songs have become anthems against racial and sexual discrimination and oppression? This biography sets out to reveal exactly that.

The Sunday Times bestseller Growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s and '70s, when skinheads, football violence and fear of just about everything was the natural order of things, a young Will Sergeant found the emerging punk scene provided a shimmer of hope amongst a crumbling city still reeling from the destruction of the Second World War. From school-day horrors and mud flinging fun to nights at Liverpool's punk club, Eric's, Sergeant was fuelled by and thrived on music. It was this devotion that led to the birth of the Bunnymen, to the days when he and Ian McCulloch would muck around with reel-to-reel recordings of song ideas in the back parlour of his parents' council estate house, and to finding a community - friends, enemies and many in between - with those who would become post-punk royalty from the likes of Dead or Alive, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Teardrop Explodes to name a few. It was an uphill struggle to carve their name in the history of Liverpool music, but Echo and the Bunnymen became iconic, with songs like 'Lips Like Sugar,' 'The Cutter' and 'The Killing Moon'. By turns wry, explicit and profound, Bunnyman reveals what it was really like to be part of one of the most important British bands of the 1980s.

His name was Prince, and he was funky. He was also inspiring, infuriating, visionary and otherworldly. Channelling contradictions in search of his own unique truth, he eventually changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph that merged the male and female symbols in an outward expression of his inner dualities. Gifted with the ability to play almost every instrument on his records, and shifting between musical styles as much as he switched-up his looks, he refused to acknowledge boundaries. Instead, he brought opposing forces together in a life-long quest to reconcile a dirty mind with a love for God. In doing so, the mini Minneapolis genius became a world-conquering icon whose towering legacy continues to shape pop culture.

Prince, Pink Floyd, Metallica, Toto, James Taylor, Keith Richards—these stars and thousands of others all owe a debt of gratitude to Rob Turner who revolutionized the electric guitar and bass. Chasing Tone tells Rob Turner’s story from humble beginnings rewiring his father’s transistor radio components to founding EMG and, finally, to the world’s largest concert stages. Jim Reilly provides a wealth of fascinating insights by weaving together many exclusive interviews with top artists and colleagues, including James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, and Robert Trujillo of Metallica; legendary session musician Leland Sklar; Vernon Reid of Living Colour; Victor Wooten; Béla Fleck; Nili Brosh; Jim Root of Slipknot; and guitar builders Mike McGuire and John Carruthers. Along the way, Reilly not only sheds light on the history of the electric guitar and bass and how EMG pickups forever altered their course but also explores the elusive relationship between builder and creator, showing how these artists found their sound. This book takes a deep dive into the creative process while providing a history of popular music told from a side of the stage previously underexplored.

Experiencing Alice Cooper: A Listener's Companion takes a long overdue look at the music and stage act of rock music's self-styled arch-villain. A provocateur from the very start of his career in the mid-1960s, Alice Cooper, aka Vince Furnier, son of a lay preacher in the Church of Jesus Christ, carved a unique path through five decades of rock'n'roll. Despite a longevity that only a handful of other artists and acts can match, Alice Cooper remains a difficult act and artist to pin down and categorize. During the last years of the 1960s and the heydays of commercial success in the 1970s, Cooper's groundbreaking theatricality, calculated offensiveness, and evident disregard for the conventions of rock protocols sowed confusion among his critics and evoked outrage from the public. Society's watchdogs demanded his head, and Cooper willingly obliged at the end of each performance with his on-stage self-guillotining. But as youth anthem after youth anthem - "I'm Eighteen," "School's Out," "Elected," "Department of Youth"-rang out in his arena concerts the world over and across airwaves, fans flocked to experience Cooper's unique brand of rock. Critics searched for proper descriptions: "pantomime," "vaudeville," "retch-rock," "Grand Guignol." In 1973 Cooper headlined in Time magazine as "Schlock Rock's Godzilla." In Experiencing Alice Cooper: A Listener's Companion, Ian Chapman surveys Cooper's career through his twenty-seven studio albums (1969-2017). While those who have written about Cooper have traditionally kept their focus on the stage spectacle, too little attention has been paid to Cooper's recordings. Throughout, Chapman argues that while Cooper may have been rock's most accomplished showman, he is first and foremost a musician, with his share of gold and platinum albums to vouch for his qualifications as a musical artist.

The Routledge Handbook to the Music of Alfred Schnittke is a comprehensive study of the work of one of the most important Russian composers of the late 20th century. Each piece is discussed in detail, with particular attention to the composer's groundbreaking polystylism, as well as his unique approach to musical symbolism and his deep engagement with Christian themes. This is the first publication to look at Schnittke's output in its entirety, and for most works it represents either the first ever published analysis or the first in a language other than Russian. The volume presents new research from the Ivashkin-Schnittke Archive at Goldsmiths, University of London and the collection of Schnittke's compositional sketches at the Julliard Library in New York. It also draws on the substantial research on Schnittke's music published in the Russian language. Including a work list and bibliography of primary and secondary sources, this is an essential reference for all those interested in Russian music, 20th-century music and performance studies.

The Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899-1944) is commonly positioned in the history of twentieth-century music as a representative of Leos Janacek's compositional school and as one of the Jewish composers imprisoned by the Nazis in the concentration camp of Terezin (Theresienstadt). However, the nature of Janacek's influence remains largely unexplained and the focus on the context of the Holocaust tends to yield a one-sided view of Haas's oeuvre. The existing scholarship offers limited insight into Haas's compositional idiom and does not sufficiently explain the composer's position with respect to broader aesthetic trends and artistic networks in inter-war Czechoslovakia and beyond. This book is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive (albeit necessarily selective) discussion of Haas's music since the publication of Lubomir Peduzzi's 'life and work' monograph in 1993. It provides the reader with an enhanced understanding of Haas's music through analytical and hermeneutical interpretation as well as cultural and aesthetic contextualisation, and thus reveal the rich nuances of Haas's multi-faceted work which have not been sufficiently recognised so far.