A fresh, balanced approach that transcends the exclusively classical music focus of most other music appreciation texts. Gateway to Music: An Introduction to American Vernacular, Western Art, and World Musical Traditions broadens standard notions of music appreciation with an introduction to local and global musical traditions, blended with social, cultural, and historical contexts. It is an ideal text for undergraduate music appreciation courses, a useful supplement for major and non-major courses in music history and world music, and an engaging source for any music lover. No musical background is necessary for this reader-friendly text. Unit One focuses on music in the United States including sacred and secular traditional music, music for the stage and screen, jazz, and popular music. Unit Two takes the reader through western art music chronologically from antiquity through the medieval, renaissance, baroque, classic, romantic, and modern musical eras. Unit Three explores music in the Americas, Oceania, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, India, and Japan. Gateway to Music features playlist options which give readers a choice of musical examples. With each genre description, students are invited to find musical examples online with search terms, observe musical and contextual elements, and ask compelling questions. Diverse, noteworthy musicians speak directly to students in full page portraits with primary source quotations. Illustrated musical elements and musical instruments appendices show students the basic vocabulary and tools of music at a glance.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

As divisive and destructive as the Civil War was, the era nevertheless demonstrated the power that music could play in American culture. Popular songs roused passion on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, and military bands played music to entertain infantry units-and to rally them on to war. The institution of slavery was debated in songs of the day, ranging from abolitionist anthems to racist minstrel shows. Across the larger cultural backdrop, the growth of music publishing led to a flourishing of urban concert music, while folk music became indelibly linked with American populism. This volume, one of the first in the American History through Music series, presents narrative chapters that recount the many vibrant roles of music during this troubled period of American history. A chapter of biographical entries, a dictionary of Civil War era music, and a subject index offer useful reference tools. The American History through Music series examines the many different styles of music that have played a significant part in our nation's history. While volumes in this series show the multifaceted roles of music in culture, they also use music as a lens through which readers may study American social history. The authors present in-depth analysis of American musical genres, significant musicians, technological innovations, and the many connections between music and the realms of art, politics, and daily life. Chapters present accessible narratives on music and its cultural resonations, music theory and technique is broken down for the lay reader, and each volume presents a chapter of alphabetically arranged entries on significant people and terms.

Ned Rorem, composer and writer, is both a gifted memoirist and one of our most acerbic cultural commentators. This anthology of his musings on music, people, and life surveys the full range of his literary achievement and reflects the evolution of his sensibilities. The first part of the book is devoted to writing of an autobiographical nature, including ruminations on being alone and on becoming a composer. The second part focuses on music and individuals from Bartok and Ravel to Edith Piaf and the Beatles. The final part consists of portraits and memorials of such figures as Martha Graham, Paul Bowles, Marc Blitzstein, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Truman Capote. The book also includes a lengthy conversation on the art of the diary.

4200 gigs. 250 Film and TV song placements. 30 years in music. These are some of the bullet points in the resume of author/musician Bill Cinque. THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF A MARGINALLY SUCCESSFUL MUSICIAN is an educational and entertaining look at the world of music.

Honest, insightful and often humorously brutal, Cinque speaks to the beginner, the seasoned pro, and the non-musician "civilian" in a unique and refreshing voice about the rehearsals, recordings and rejections in the life of a self-described "blue collar, working class musician."

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Popular music has long been used to entertain, provoke, challenge and liberate but also to oppress and control. Can popular music be political? What types of popular music work best with politics? How can songs, videos, concerts or any other musical commodity convey ideas about power, politics and identity? Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies (MCDS), this book reveals the deeply political role played by popular music. Lyndon Way demonstrates how MCDS can provide important and timely insights on the political nature of popular music, due to its focus on how communication takes place, as well as its interest in discourse and how ideologies are naturalised and legitimised. The book considers the example of contemporary Turkish society, with its complex and deep ideological divisions increasingly obvious under the stewardship of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his centre-right political party, in power since 2002. It looks at how the authorities seek to harness and control popular music and considers a wide range of popular music genres including rock, rap, protest and folk music. It shows how official promotional videos, protest cut-and-paste offerings, party-political election songs, live music events and internet discussions about popular music emerge as sites of power and resistance in certain venues and particularly across social media. Throughout the book, Lyndon Way shows that popular music is also deeply political.

The eight lively contributions to this volume, appearing concurrently in a special issue of the journal Biblical Interpretation, illustrate a range of exciting approaches to the newly developing area of the reception history of the Bible in literature, music, art and film. (Originally published as issue 4-5 of Volume 15 (2007) of Brill's journal Biblical Interpretation)

This book is a survey and analysis of how deep learning can be used to generate musical content. The authors offer a comprehensive presentation of the foundations of deep learning techniques for music generation. They also develop a conceptual framework used to classify and analyze various types of architecture, encoding models, generation strategies, and ways to control the generation. The five dimensions of this framework are: objective (the kind of musical content to be generated, e.g., melody, accompaniment); representation (the musical elements to be considered and how to encode them, e.g., chord, silence, piano roll, one-hot encoding); architecture (the structure organizing neurons, their connexions, and the flow of their activations, e.g., feedforward, recurrent, variational autoencoder); challenge (the desired properties and issues, e.g., variability, incrementality, adaptability); and strategy (the way to model and control the process of generation, e.g., single-step feedforward, iterative feedforward, decoder feedforward, sampling). To illustrate the possible design decisions and to allow comparison and correlation analysis they analyze and classify more than 40 systems, and they discuss important open challenges such as interactivity, originality, and structure. The authors have extensive knowledge and experience in all related research, technical, performance, and business aspects. The book is suitable for students, practitioners, and researchers in the artificial intelligence, machine learning, and music creation domains. The reader does not require any prior knowledge about artificial neural networks, deep learning, or computer music. The text is fully supported with a comprehensive table of acronyms, bibliography, glossary, and index, and supplementary material is available from the authors' website.

Native Americans supplied the maracas, African slaves brought drums and ritual music, and Spaniards brought guitars, brass instruments, and clarinets along with European ballroom dancing. The advent of blues and jazz gave new forms to styles of songs, notably feeling songs, which joined the more traditional styles of trova and bolero. Cuban culture represents a convergence of these diverse backgrounds, and the musical heritage presented in this book reflects these traditions as well. In colonial times, African ritual sounds mixed with Catholic liturgies and brass bands of the Spanish military academies. Ballroom dances, including French music from Haiti popular in 18th-century Havana society, existed side by side with the cabildos (guilds and carnival clubs) and the plantations. The son, considered the expression of Cuban musical identity, had its origins in a rural setting in which African slaves and small farmers from Andalusia worked and played music together, developing many variations over the years, including big band music. Cuban music is now experiencing a major renaissance, and is enjoyed throughout the world.

From the delectable Conchita Supervia (who made her debut at fourteen!) to the divine Maria Callas; from the gentle Elisabeth Schumann to the fiery Maria Jeritza (adored by the public, feared by several leading tenors and spat at by a fellow diva); from the giant Lauritz Melchior to the versatile Richard Tauber - More Legendary Voices mixes biography, anecdote, opinion, and penetrating analysis of each singer's strengths and weaknesses. Once more Nigel Douglas, the international tenor and well-known radio presenter, brings to this collection his professional knowledge of the world of opera, his infectious enthusiasm for the subject, and a natural gift for distilling the essence of a singer's life and career into one entertaining and instructive chapter.

In the Blue Ridge Mountains along the Virginia-North Carolina border, an extraordinarily rich musical heritage survives and flourishes. Even before the legendary Bill Monroe coined the term "bluegrass" in the mid-1950s, the traditional music of this area was coming into its own as a distinctive style. Early performers from the 1920s through the 1950s, many of whom migrated northward during the Great Depression, popularized the music they had grown up hearing, thereby preserving and celebrating the cultural legacy of their home region.
In A Hot-Bed of Musicians, Paula Anderson-Green tells the stories of several of these legendary performers and instrument makers from the Upper New River Valley-Whitetop Mountain region, including Ola Belle Campbell Reed, Albert Hash, and Dave Sturgill. These men and women began to bring the music of Appalachia to a wider audience well before Nashville became the center of country music. Making extensive use of interviews, the book reveals the fascinating experiences and enduring values behind the practice of old-time music. This musical heritage remains an indispensable component of Appalachian culture, and Anderson-Green traces the traditions down to the present generation of musicians there.
Written for anyone with an interest in mountain music, this book focuses on performers from Alleghany and Ashe Counties in North Carolina and Carroll County and Grayson County in Virginia. It includes a comprehensive appendix of place names and music venues as well as annotated lists of musicians and the songs they have performed.
The Author: Paula Hathaway Anderson-Green is an adjunct professor of English at Kennesaw State University and does research in Appalachian studies.

The historical significance of music-makers, music scenes, and music genres has long been mediated through academic and popular press publications such as magazines, films, and television documentaries. Media Narratives in Popular Music examines these various publications and questions how and why they are constructed. It considers the typically linear narratives that are based on simplifications, exaggerations, and omissions and the histories they construct - an approach that leads to totalizing “official” histories that reduce otherwise messy narratives to one-dimensional interpretations of a heroic and celebratory nature. This book questions the basis on which these mediated histories are constructed, highlights other, hidden, histories that have otherwise been neglected, and explores a range of topics including consumerism, the production pressure behind documentaries, punk fanzines, Rolling Stones covers, and more.

Studies of Latin American music often overlook its Cuban roots and the political policies that brought the musicians to the United States. This work rectifies that omission by examining the Afro-Cuban influence upon Latin American music and its various idioms. A brief history of Afro-Cuban musicians in the United States provides the background and context for the study. Influential pre-revolutionary Afro-Cuban immigrant musicians, such as Mongo SantamarIa, Jesus Caunedo, Charanga and Pup Legarreta, Juan Carlos Formell, and Alfredo Chocolate Armenteros, discuss both their music and their attitudes toward the political policies that led them to flee Cuba. Speaking from firsthand experience, founding figures of Latin music in the United States present unique insights into the Afro-Cuban experience within the Latin musical community.

Adding to the musicians' stories, Gerard provides a history of relations between Cubans, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans in the Latin music community. He also discusses the impact of the mass emigration in the 1980s that brought many more Cubans to the States. This multicultural approach to Latin American music will appeal to music and Latin American history scholars and to jazz and Latin music enthusiasts. An appendix includes album listings for the musicians interviewed."

Computing is transforming how we interact with music. New theories and new technologies have emerged that present fresh challenges and novel perspectives for researchers and practitioners in music and human-computer interaction (HCI). In this collection, the interdisciplinary field of music interaction is considered from multiple viewpoints: designers, interaction researchers, performers, composers, audiences, teachers and learners, dancers and gamers. The book comprises both original research in music interaction and reflections from leading researchers and practitioners in the field. It explores a breadth of HCI perspectives and methodologies: from universal approaches to situated research within particular cultural and aesthetic contexts. Likewise, it is musically diverse, from experimental to popular, classical to folk, including tango, laptop orchestras, composition and free improvisation.

The Last Supper illustrates the definition of an Eat Greedy Girl. You will see that the definition applies to any mini, but how they apply it to themselves is totally different than each other. The Last Supper, illustrates four women with the same purpose going about it in different Eat Greedy Ways . Open this book and see which lady is the Eat Greediest to you, and by the way are you an Eat Greedy Girl?

Situating the close relationship between Latin and music within its historical context, this volume presents an overview of Latin and music in the educational system of the time - schools, choir schools and universities - and the development and pervasive influence of musical humanism. This influence is seen primarily in the writings of music theorists, the documents of dedication found in music publications and above all in the settings of classical and Neo-Latin texts as well as in some liturgical and extra-liturgical ones. Discussion of this repertoire forms the centre of the volume. The emphasis is on practical matters: the study of Latin and music, and the music's composition, performance and reception.

"It is the most singular of sounds, yet among the most ubiquitous. It is the sound of isolation that has sold itself to millions." Miles Davis's Kind of Blue is the best-selling piece of music in jazz history and, for many listeners, among the most haunting works of the twentieth century. It is also, notoriously, the only jazz album many people own. Recorded in 1959 (in nine miraculous hours), there has been nothing like it since. Richard Williams's "richly informative" (The Guardian) history considers the album within its wider cultural context, showing how the record influenced such diverse artists as Steve Reich and the Velvet Underground. In the tradition of Alex Ross and Greil Marcus, the "effortlessly versatile" Williams (The Times) "connects these seemingly disparate phenomena with purpose, finesse and journalistic flair" (Financial Times), making masterly connections to painting, literature, philosophy, and poetry while identifying the qualities that make the album so uniquely appealing and surprisingly universal.

Illustrated throughout with stunning images, this glossy biography tells the story of Taylor Swift's life and music. The definitive biography of a global music icon.

Includes coverage of The Tortured Poets Department and The Eras Tour

Taylor Swift’s rise to mega stardom is the story of the century. Charming fans straight out the gate as a teen country music sensation, Swift has gone on to dominate the music industry as a pop titan.

She is the first woman to have four albums in the Billboard chart’s Top Ten at the same time, is the recipient of fourteen Grammys and forty American Music Awards, and her recent Eras tour broke records to become the highest-grossing tour in history.

A treasured celebrity who has triumphed in the face of haters and intrusive tabloid coverage, Taylor Swift uses her personal life as inspiration for her songwriting, delivering hit after hit, and selling out stadiums the world over. Her music continues to engage, evolve and encapsulate the hearts of fans all over the world.

Taylor’s story is one of love and poetry.