Status Quo were one of the most successful, influential and innovative bands of the 1970s. During the first half of the decade, they wrote, recorded and performed a stream of inventive and highly complex rock compositions, developed 12 bar forms and techniques in new and fascinating ways, and affected important musical and cultural trends. But, despite global success on stage and in the charts, they were maligned by the UK music press, who often referred to them as lamebrained three-chord wonders, and shunned by the superstar Disk Jockeys of the era, who refused to promote their music. As a result, Status Quo remain one of the most misunderstood and underrated bands in the history of popular music. Cope redresses that misconception through a detailed study of the band's music and live performances, related musical and cultural subtopics and interviews with key band members. The band is reinstated as a serious, artistic and creative phenomenon of the 1970s scene and shown to be vital contributors to the evolution of rock.

The album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill sold over 420,000 copies in its first week, received ten Grammy nominations (winning five). Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader critically engages the work of Ms. Hill, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of the album. Beyond the album's commercial success, Ms. Hill's radical self-consciousness and exuberance for life led listeners through her Black girl journey of love, motherhood, admonition, redemption, spirituality, sexuality, politics, and nostalgia that affirmed the power of creativity, resistance, and the tradition of African storytelling. Ms. Hill's album provides inspirational energies that serve as a foundational text for Black girlhood. In many ways it is the definitive work of Black girlhood for the Hip Hop generation and beyond because it opened our eyes to a holistic narrative of woman and mother. Twenty years after the release of the album, we pay tribute to this work by adding to the quilt of Black girls' stories with the threads of feminist consciousness, which are particularly imperative in this space where we declare: Black girls matter. Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood is the first book to academically engage the work of the incomparable Ms. Hill. It intellectually wrestles with the interdisciplinary nature of Ms. Hill's album, centering the connection between the music of Ms. Hill and the lives of Black girls. The essays in this collection utilize personal narratives and professional pedagogies and invite students, scholars, and readers to reflect on how Ms. Hill's album influenced their past, present, and future.

A ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR Wayne Kramer, legendary guitarist and co-founder of quintessential Detroit proto-punk legends The MC5, tells his story in The Hard Stuff. 'As gripping as it is sobering.' THE TIMES 'Voyerustically dramatic.' NEW YORK TIMES 'Eye-opening.' GUARDIAN 'One of rock's most engaging and readable memoirs.' ROLLING STONE 'Inspiring and redempetive.' UNCUT 'An endearing read.' MOJO Led by legendary guitarist Wayne Kramer, The MC5 was a reflection of the times: exciting, sexy, violent, out of control - assuring their time in the spotlight would be short-lived. Kramer's story is a revolutionary one, but it is also the deeply personal struggle of an addict and an artist. From the glory days of Detroit to the junk-sick streets of the East Village, from Key West to Nashville and sunny Los Angeles, in and out of prison and on and off of drugs, his is the classic journeyman narrative, but with a twist: he's here to remind us that revolution is always an option.

Beethoven's seventy-two settings of traditional Irish airs constitute his most prolific output in any genre. The arrangements were commissioned in the early nineteenth century by the Scottish editor and publisher, George Thomson, who sent airs, but no texts, to Beethoven. Poetry, mostly by less well-known poets, was attached to the finished settings before publication by Thomson, and perhaps therein lies the reason why the songs never achieved the popularity which they deserve: many of the poems have been judged to be of inferior quality. In this edition, the first in which all Beethoven's Irish folksong settings are published together, the late baritone, broadcaster and musicologist, Tomas O Suilleabhain, selected texts, mostly by Burns and Moore, which he felt were more appropriate to the airs and to Beethoven's settings.

Matt Johnson – founder, songwriter and visionary lynchpin of iconic band The The – created some of the most vital music of his era, be it the intense visual feast of Infected or the prescient politics of Mind Bomb. Then he walked away from it all. In this authorised biography, with free access to the The The archives, Neil Fraser draws on hundreds of hours of interviews with Johnson and his contemporaries and colleagues, including Johnny Marr, Johanna St Michaels, JG Thirlwell and Tim Pope. From the early days in the East End to glory days on a global stage, through Johnson’s retreat from public life and return with The The in 2017, this updated edition addresses the 2018 Comeback Special Tour and beyond. Long Shadows, High Hopes examines the enigma that is Matt Johnson – outspoken political lyricist but intensely private man – and what prompted him to step out of the shadows after so long.

For students learning the principles of music theory, it can often seem as though the tradition of tonal harmony is governed by immutable rules that define which chords, tones, and intervals can be used where. Yet even within the classical canon, there are innumerable examples of composers diverging from these foundational "rules." Drawing on examples from composers including J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms, and more, Bending the Rules of Music Theory seeks to take readers beyond the basics of music theory and help them to understand the inherent flexibility in the system of tonal music. Chapters explore the use of different rule-breaking elements in practice and why they work, introducing students to a more nuanced understanding of music theory.

Morton Feldman viewed Piano and String Quartet as his capstone work-the culminating example of the aesthetic that Feldman spent his life seeking. Written in 1985, the year before Feldman's death, this single movement, roughly 80-minute composition was heralded by Steve Reich as "the most beautiful work [of Feldman's] I know." Ray Fields presents a detailed analysis of the complete piece and examines the elements that contribute to its formal and expressive design, including local and large-scale temporal architecture, pitch/interval formations, texture, timbre, and register. It discusses the aural experience of the music itself and provides insights into Feldman's aesthetic influences. Basic biographical information is provided, describing the music of his early, middle, and late periods and providing an overview of analyses of other Feldman works. By examining this beloved piece, the book addresses the question: what was everything Feldman wanted in his music? Also included are interviews with Kronos Quartet's David Harrington about the origins of Piano and String Quartet and Aki Takahashi providing crucial information about the work.

He was considered a musician's musician, the most gifted artist in that exciting Southern California world dominated by the great emigre composers, the film industry, the brilliant soloists and the avant-gardists who made Los Angeles a musical capital. Ingolf Dahl (1912-1970) was an accomplished composer, conductor, pianist and a mentor to eminent contemporary figures like Michael Tilson Th omas - yet he never achieved the celebrity which others felt he deserved. He was not the man his public knew, a happily married gentile of Swedish extraction. His thirty-year marriage to Etta, one that seemed the epitome of mutual love and devotion, was beset by insoluble problems of identity - for Dahl was a closeted homosexual. He was also a German whose father was a Jew, and his name was not even Ingolf Dahl. His decision to disguise all of these truths, even from members of his own family, lead to fatal distortions in his creative being and public persona. Although he numbered many famous figures among his friends, from Gracie Fields to Igor Stravinsky and Benny Goodman, Dahl always experienced life as an outsider. When he died he left behind an extensive body of correspondence and 42 years worth of intimate daily journals. Etta Dahl (1905-1970) left many written records as well. These sources, never made public before, and the recollections of many survivors, give us a portrait of an intriguingly complex character, noble and self-absorbed, creative and crankish, passionate and repressed. The Lives of Ingolf Dahl has one other unique source, the author himself. Anthony Linick was the child of this famous marriage, the son whose very existence contributed to the elaborate deformations of fact and persona that so disfi gured Dahl's life. With love and respect - and the historian's devotion to the truth - he can tell their whole story at last.

Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) was Victorian Britain's most celebrated and popular composer, whose music to this day reaches a wider audience than that of any of his contemporaries. Yet the comic operas on which Sullivan's reputation is chiefly based have been consistently belittled or ignored by the British musicological establishment, while his serious works have until recently remained virtually unknown. The time is thus long overdue for scholarly re-engagement with Sullivan. The present book offers a new appraisal of the music of this most notable nineteenth-century British composer, combining close analytical attention to his music with critical consideration of the wider aesthetic and social context to his work. Focusing on key pieces in all the major genres in which Sullivan composed, it includes accounts of his most important serious works - the music to The Tempest, the 'Irish' Symphony, The Golden Legend, Ivanhoe - alongside detailed examination of the celebrated comic operas created with W.S. Gilbert to present a balanced portrayal of Sullivan's musical achievement.

Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974-77, revised 1996) has consolidated its position as one of the major operatic works of the twentieth century. Few operas composed since the 1970s have received such numerous productions, bringing the eclectic score to a global audience. Famously dubbed by Ligeti as an 'anti-anti-opera', the piece is a highly ambiguous, apocalyptic fable about the human condition, fear of death and the final judgement. As the first book in English solely dedicated to discussion of this work, Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque offers new perspectives on the opera's musico-dramatic identity in the context of musical postmodernism. Peter Edwards draws on a range of modernist and postmodernist theories to explore the collision of past styles and genre models in the opera, its expressive states and its engagement with the grotesque. This is ably supported by musical analysis and extensive study of Ligeti's sketch materials held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Edwards's analyses culminate in a new approach to examining the opera's rich multiplicities, the composition of the musical material and the nature of Ligeti's relationship with the musical past. This is a key reference work in the fields of musical modernism and postmodernism, opera studies and the music of Ligeti.

The enigmatic character of The Art of Fugue became apparent as early as in its first edition, printed more than a year after the composer's death. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who published both the first and the second editions, raised several unsolved questions regarding this opus. Anatoly P Milka presents a consistent and coherent solution to the unresolved questions about the history, structure and appearance of J.S. Bach's The Art of Fugue, opening new perspectives for further exploration of this musical masterpiece. Milka challenges the present scholarly consensus that there exist two different versions of The Art of Fugue (the Autograph and the Original Edition) and argues that Bach had considered four versions, of which only two are apparent and have been discussed so far. Only Bach's illness and death prevented him from fulfilling his plan and publishing a fourth, conclusive version of his opus.

Since Gyoergy Ligeti's death in 2006, there has been a growing acknowledgement of how central he was to the late twentieth-century cultural landscape. This collection is the first book devoted to exploring the composer's life and music within the context of his East European roots, revealing his dual identities as both Hungarian national and cosmopolitan modernist. Contributors explore the artistic and socio-cultural contexts of Ligeti's early works, including composition and music theory, the influence of East European folk music, notions of home and identity, his ambivalent attitude to his Hungarian past and his references to his homeland in his later music. Many of the valuable insights offered profit from new research undertaken at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, while also drawing on the knowledge of long-time associates such as the composer's assistant, Louise Duchesneau. The contributions as a whole reveal Ligeti's thoroughly cosmopolitan milieu and values, and illuminate why his music continues to inspire new generations of performers, composers and listeners.

A Times, Spectator, TLS and BBC Music Magazine Book of the Year 'Fascinating.' Guardian 'Superlative.' The Times 'Definitive.' Observer As an icon of India, Ravi Shankar ranks not far below Gandhi or the Taj Mahal. He was one of the twentieth century's most important musicians, the breadth of his impact reflected in those he influenced: George Harrison, John Coltrane, Philip Glass and Yehudi Menuhin, to name a few. In this first biography of Ravi Shankar, Oliver Craske presents a full portrait of the man and the artist, painting a vivid picture of the public and private faces of a captivating, restless workaholic who lived an intense and extraordinary life across ninety-two years. 'A masterly chronicle of a life teeming with all-too-human incident but heavenly inspiration.' The Times

Christopher Fox (1955) has emerged as one of the most fascinating composers of the post-war generation. His spirit of experimentalism pervades an oeuvre in which he has blithely created his own version of a range of contemporary musical practices. In his work many of the major expressions of European cultural activity - Darmstadt, Fluxus, spectralism, postminimalism and more - are assimilated to produce a voice which is uniquely resonant and multifaceted. In this, the first major study of his work, musicologists, composers, thinkers and practitioners scrutinize aspects of Christopher Fox's music, each exploring elements that relate to their own distinct areas of practice, tracing Fox's compositional trajectory and situating it within post-war contemporary European music practice. Above all this book addresses the question: How can one person dip his fingers into so many paint pots and yet retain a coherent compositional vision? The range of Fox's musical concerns make his work of interest to anyone who wants to study the development of so-called new music spanning the latter twentieth century into the twenty first century.

This volume brings our story down to 1843, an important era in Richard Wagner's Life, with his entry, as composer, of two successful operas, upon a so-called "practical" career at one of the principal German theatres.

The second volume of Carl Friedrich Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.

Fourth volume of Carl Francis Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.

It is the inner meaning of Handel's music, and its power of searching the profoundest recesses of the soul, that in the following pages the author has endeavoured, so far as the author was able, to elucidate. Its merely technical qualities have already been discussed enough and to spare. Books on Handel written by musicians already abound, but musicians as a rule take more interest in the means by which an end is attained than the end itself. They tell us a great deal about the methods by which a composer expresses himself, but very little about what he actually has to express. The author has tried, how feebly and with what little success no one knows better than himself, to find the man Handel in his music, to trace his character, his view of life, his thoughts, feelings, and aspirations, as they are set forth in his works.

'Probably the most ambitious, generous and thorough volume about a musician to see publication' Mouth Magazine The authorised companion to the music of Nick Drake, compiled, composed and edited by Cally Callomon and Gabrielle Drake, with contributions from Nick's friends, critics, adherents, family and from Nick Drake himself. Remembered For A While is not a biography. It is, rather, an attempt to cast a few shards of light on Nick Drake the poet, the musician, the singer, the friend, son and brother, who was also more than all of these. We hope it will accompany all those in search of an elusive artist, whose haunting presence defies analysis. The book contains: * In-depth interviews with many of Nick's friends, most notably Paul Wheeler, Nick's close friend from Cambridge days, a singer-songwriter who, of all Nick's friends, perhaps best understood, from personal experience, Nick's journey through musical creation to despair and back again. * A selection of photos from all eras - some never seen before - with reproductions of documents such as the scrapbook Molly Drake kept of her son's press cuttings, and the original and rejected album covers. * Images of Nick's handwritten and typed lyrics, including the lyrics of some songs for which the music has never been found. * Newly commissioned pieces by Nick's friends Jeremy Harmer, Brian Wells, Robin Frederick and the poet Will Stone. Contributions also from the sleeve designer Michael Trevithick, Island Records's Ann Sullivan and the photographer and artist Nigel Waymouth. *Extracts from Nick's letters - part of an extensive correspondence that exists between Nick and his parents, which charts their relationship from the time he first went to boarding school until the time he came home, when his depression had settled upon him and he felt he had nowhere else to go. From this point, Nick's life was documented by his father, Rodney Drake, who kept a detailed diary, as he and his wife Molly struggled to understand their son's state of mind and how to help him. Passages from this poignant record are included. * A short musical guide to each song's key and tuning to accompany the lyrics, together with an explanatory interpretation of Nick's guitar performance, the result of several years close study by singer-songwriter Chris Healey. * A comprehensive guide to all of Nick's live performances. * And a lengthy essay by noted music critic Pete Paphides, which includes interviews with Nick's musical collaborators and friends - his producer Joe Boyd, his recording engineer John Wood and his orchestrator, the late Robert Kirby - as well as descriptions of the recording process of each album.

Stephen Morris has had a distinguished career, spanning nearly forty years, as a pivotal member of Joy Division and New Order with his trademark machine-like drumming. After the death of Joy Division's singer, Ian Curtis, in 1980, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Morris and his wife Gillian formed New Order, one of the most critically acclaimed and influential bands of the late twentieth century. New Order became the flagship band for Tony Wilson's Factory Records and, alongside him, opened the infamous Hacienda nightclub, the centre of the acid house movement. In 2015, after a ten-year hiatus, New Order released Music Complete; which charted at #2 in its first week of release (the band's highest position in over twenty years). Stephen's book won't be that typical music autobiography, which tends to be high on mischief and low on the music. Part memoir, part visual scrapbook, part aural history, it will be a hybrid memoir in Stephen's wry and witty voice. Stephen will weave a dual narrative of growing up in the North West during the 1970s with how the music actually works. It will also explore what it is to be part of a mythologised band and the idea of what you do becoming who you are.

The first biography of Richard D'Oyly Carte, this is a critical survey of the career of the impresario whose ambitions went beyond the famous partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan. Errors and misconceptions in current literature are challenged and corrected to give a truer portrayal of one of the most influential music theatre promoters in the nineteenth century.

An updated edition of this bestselling biography that features details of her second album Born This Way and her subsequent tour as well as the release of her long-awaited third album in spring 2013, ARTPOP. Includes her numerous controversies such as that meat dress, her many collaborations with everyone with Elton John to Cher and Tony Bennett, and her movie acting debut in Machete Kills in early 2013. This is the story of her high-speed rise in the fame game, told with a mix of admiration and sharp journalistic insight. Packed with full-colour photographs complete this portrait of one of the biggest names in modern music.

'Genuinely funny; indeed, the story will keep you entertained for a very long time' Sunday Times Joy Division changed the face of music. Godfathers of the enduring alternative scene, they reinvented rock in the post-punk era, creating a sound - dark, hypnotic, intense - that would influence U2, Morrissey, R.E.M., Radiohead and many others. This is the rollercoaster story of Joy Division - the friendships, fights, fall-outs; the rehearsals and recording sessions; the larger than life characters - told by the band's legendary bassist, Peter Hook. 'Hook has restored a flesh-and-blood rawness to what was becoming a standard tale. Few pop music books manage that' Guardian 'An honest, enthusiastic account . . . it's a window like no other into the reality of life in this most aloof of bands' Metro 'An immense account of Joy Division's rise . . . having read Hook's book, you'll feel like you were the fifth member of the band' GQ 'A bittersweet, profanity-filled recollection . . . if you like Joy Division, you really have to read it' Q Magazine 'Hook lifts the lid on the real Ian Curtis' NME 'He's frank, incredibly funny, and it isn't shy' Artrocker

First published in 1989. This study explores Italian attitudes to opera while Vincenzo Bellini was studying and composing. It draws mainly on Italian critical and aesthetic writing dating from the end of an era that was still dominated by the Italian bel canto. Many of the writers considered are unfamiliar today, but they express the accepted views on music, opera, and singing that dominated a particularly insular tradition. This title will be of interest to students of Italian and Music History.