A look at the contemporary blues scene of greater Boston, including dozens of interviews with musicians, blues radio DJs and photographers; regional festival listings; radio stations, and a brief history of the blues in Boston. (Music)

Elvis Presley was never accused of a crime, but for years the FBI kept a file on Presley because of the crimes that went on in the background of his world: death threats made against him; a major extortion attempt while he was in the Army in Germany; complaints about his public performances, a mention of a paternity suit; the theft by larceny of an executive jet which he owned and the alleged fraud surrounding a 1955 Corvette which he owned. These formerly Top Secret Files show dramatically how the FBI and other law enforcement agencies had to react to crimes in Presley's world.

This major work, the result of years of careful study and analysis, places Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life and music in the context of the intellectual, political and artistic currents of eighteenth-century Europe. The result is a fresh interpretation of Mozart's genius, as Robert Gutman shows the great composer in a new light. With an informed and sensitive handling, Mozart emerges as an affectionate and generous man with family and friends, self-deprecating, witty, and winsome but also an austere moralist, incisive and purposeful. The major genres in which Mozart worked-chamber music, liturgical, theater and keyboard compositions, concertos, operas, symphonies, and oratorios-are unfolded to reveal a man of luminous intellect. Mozart is an extraordinary portrait of a man and his times and a brilliant distillation of musical thought.

This essential guidebook is designed for all travelers interested in exploring the historic musical sites of Paris -- in person or from an armchair. Paris is a uniquely rich music capital, its streets echoing with centuries of great music that has been created and performed there. Virtually every neighborhood boasts a concert hall, church, museum, or home that has played a significant role in the extraordinary musical tradition of the city. This gazetteer will guide you to the important musical landmarks in Paris and explain why each is noteworthy.

Nearly all the celebrated French composers of the last four centuries have called Paris home, and dozens of other eminent composers -- Chopin, Liszt, Mozart, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Verdi, and Wagner among them -- have spent extended periods there as well. They, along with performers, teachers, instrument makers, and publishers, have bequeathed to the city a wealth of historic landmarks, ranging from the opulent grandeur of the Opera to Erik Satie's tiny room in Montmartre.

Featured in the gazetteer:
-- biographical portraits of major composers, all their known Paris addresses and favorite meeting places, with the nearest Metro stops
-- locations of monuments and graves of composers
-- information on churches, theaters, concert venues, and important musical institutions
-- listings of libraries, museums, and galleries holding materials related to music
-- an index of locations, arranged by arrondissement and by street
-- four recommended walking tours
-- more than 120 contemporary and historical photographs

San Francisco's Grateful Dead brought its psychedelic blend of folk, bluegrass, and blues to the 1960s counterculture, along with a romance for the Beats and a love of anarchy that made it something more than a bond. Without radio play and virtually unnoticed by the press, the Dead forged a vast underground following whose loyalty survives to the present day.

National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Carol Brightman returns to the bond's roots -- to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, the acid tests and the heady days of Haight-Ashhury, the free concerts in Golden Gate Park and the formative shows of New York's Fillmore East -- to uncover the secrets of the band's longevity. Drawing on exclusive interviews With band members, staff and crew, Deadheads, other musicians, journalists -- and her own experience as a '60s activist -- Brightman shows us how, amid the turbulent Free Speech Movement and antiwar rallies, the Grateful Dead's abandonment to music, drugs, and dance offered the faithful a shelter in the storm. Her riveting, in-depth portrait of Jerry Garcia, the "nonleader leader" who held to a vision of the Grateful Dead's destiny even as he recoiled from the juggernaut it became, shows us how it was that a Dead concert become something halfway between a revival meeting and a family reunion.

An absorbing and exhilarating exploration, Sweet Chaos offers, at last, a complete understanding of the Dead phenomenon and its place in American culture.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story " With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

Designed for courses in beginning and advanced counterpoint, this established text introduces the contrapuntal style of 17th and 18th century music through analysis and writing. While a limited understanding of contrapuntal elements may be gained through analysis alone, these elements are grasped in a more intimate way through the actual writing of contrapuntal examples. Also, by linking the study of counterpoint to music of a specific period, the text provides a clear model for students to emulate and a definite basis for the criticism of student work.

Would you like a text that gives students a command of writing contrapuntal examples and is well organized to insure clarity of presentation?

Exoticism has flourished in western music since the seventeenth century. A blend of familiar and unfamiliar gestures, this vibrant musical language takes the listener beyond the ordinary by evoking foreign cultures and forbidden desires.
In this pioneering collection, distinguished musicologists explore the ways in which western composers have used exotic themes for dramatic and striking effect. Interweaving historical, musical, and cultural perspectives, the contributors examine the compositional use of exotic styles and traditions in the works of artists as diverse as Mozart and George Harrison.
The volume sheds new light on a significant yet largely neglected art form, and it makes a valuable contribution to music history and cultural studies.

This collection of lectures, talks, and essays focuses on three major composers of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Contemporary Christian music has an increasing yet controversial influence on church worship today. This book discusses the topic from a biblical viewpoint and makes a case for using contemporary music in worship -- with theological integrity.

Sam Morgenstern's classic anthology, now thoroughly updated with new selections and commentary reflecting recent music scholarship.

When The Oxford Dictionary of Music first appeared, it was hailed by Music and Musicians as "without question the most comprehensive, detailed, reliable one-volume reference work on music now avaiable in the English language." Extensively revised and expanded for this new edition, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, Fourth Edition is a rich mine of information for lovers of music of all periods and styles, providing over 10,000 entries on musical terms, works, composers, librettists, musicians, singers, and orchestras. The dictionary's coverage is exceptional, providing comprehensive work-lists for major composers, detailed entries on living composers and performers, important ballets and operas, as well as descriptions of musical instruments and their histories.

Written to appeal to general readers, musicians and musicologists alike, this volume is an indispensable addition to the reference shelf of the concert goer, the opera buff, the record buyer, or anyone involved in music, whether amateur or professional.

Musical genius, polemicist, explosive personality--that was the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner, who paid as much attention to his reputation as to his genius. Often maddening, and sometimes called mad, Wagner wrote with the same intensity that characterized his music. The letters and essays collected in "Judaism in Music and Other Essays" were published during the 1850s and 1860s, the period when he was chiefly occupied with the creation of The Ring of the Nibelung. Highlighting this collection is the notorious 1850 article "Judaism in Music," which caused such a firestorm that nearly twenty years later Wagner published an unapologetic appendix. Other prose pieces include "On the Performing of Tannhauser," written while he was in political exile; "On Musical Criticism," an appeal for a more vital approach to art undivorced from life; and "Music of the Future." This volume concludes with letters to friends about the intent and performance of his great operas; estimations of Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz, and others; and suggestions for the reform of opera houses in Vienna, Paris, and Zurich. The Bison Book edition includes the full text of volume 3 of William Ashton Ellis's 1894 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society.

The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato's comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy - involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives - whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers - from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini - were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Here, for the first time, is a book which analyses popular music from a musical, as opposed to a sociological, biographical, or political point of view. Peter van der Merwe has made an extensive survey of Western popular music in all its forms - blues, ragtime, music hall, waltzes, marches, parlour ballads, folk music - uncovering the common musical language which unites these disparate styles. The book examines the split between `classical' and`popular' Western music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shedding light, in the process, on the `serious' music of the time. With a wealth of musical illustrations ranging from Strauss waltzes to Mississippi blues and from the Middle Ages to the 1920s, the author lays bare the tangled roots of the popular music of today in a book which is often provocative, always readable, and outstandingly comprehensive in its scope.