Love music? Love illustration? Want to know more about some of the best musicians ever to record – from Bowie and the Beastie Boys to The Smiths and St. Vincent? Then A Guide to Music's Cult Artists is for you. Featuring 100 of the coolest artists from the last five decades, A Guide to Music's Cult Artists reveals the influencers and tastemakers who have helped to shape the contemporary music scene. Award-winning illustrator and comic artist John Riordan profiles cult musicians from genres including punk, indie, alternative, hip-hop and electronic music. Not only does John create amazing illustrations, he also outlines key works from the artists and provides engaging trivia to accompany each entry. Enlightening, often amusing and always stunning to look at, A Guide to Music's Cult Artists is a unique blend of the aesthetic and the acoustic and is an essential addition to any music fan’s collection. Music's Cult Artists is a fantastic new edition of the previously published Sound and Vision.

The tercentenary of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's death in 2004 stimulated a surge of activity on the part of performers and scholars, confirming the modern assessment of Charpentier (1643-1704) as one of the most important and inventive composers of the French Baroque. The present book provides a snapshot of Charpentier scholarship in the early years of the new century. Its 13 chapters illustrate not only the sheer variety of strands currently pursued, but also the way in which these strands frequently intertwine and generate the potential for future research. Between them, they examine facets of the composer's compositional language and process, aspects of his performance practice and notation, the contexts within which he worked, and the nature of his legacy. The appendix contains a transcription of the inventory of Charpentier's manuscripts prepared when their sale to the Royal Library was negotiated in 1726 - an invaluable research tool, as numerous chapters in the book demonstrate. The wide variety of topics covered here will appeal both to readers interested in Charpentier's music and to those with a broader interest in the music and culture of the French Baroque, including aspects of patronage, church and theatre. Far from treating his output in isolation, this book places it in the wider context alongside such composers as Lully, Lalande, Marais, FranAois Couperin and Rameau; it also views the composer in relation to his Italian training. In the process, the under-examined question of influence - who influenced Charpentier? whom did he influence? - repeatedly comes to the fore. The book's Foreword was written by H. Wiley Hitchcock shortly before he died. Hitchcock's own part in raising the profile of Charpentier and his music to the level of recognition which it now enjoys cannot be emphasized enough. Appropriately the volume is dedicated to his memory.

The first-ever full-length biography in English of Engelbert Humperdinck, composer of the opera Hansel und Gretel, examining the rest of his substantial output in a historical framework which sets him in the rich musical life of Wilhelmine Germany. Engelbert Humperdinck's opera Hansel und Gretel is one of the best-known in the repertoire, its melodies as familiar as folk-tunes - and yet no full-length biography of Humperdinck (1854-1921) has ever been published in English: although highly regarded a century ago, he has since been overshadowed by the continued success of his own fairy-tale creation. His other works remain essentially unknown, but they include five additional operas, ten furtherstage works (including music for four Shakespeare plays), pieces for orchestra and for chorus, and many songs. This book sets a pioneering examination of Humperdinck's entire output in a biographical framework, with detailed, illustrated descriptions accompanied by quotations from Humperdinck's contemporaries. Humperdinck was a quintessential composer of the Germany of the Kaisers: his maturation coincided with the establishment of the German Empire,and his training with teachers who remembered Beethoven and Schubert culminated in an apprenticeship with Richard Wagner. His talents won him entry to the Bayreuth inner circle and to the home of Johannes Brahms, and earned him areception with Kaiser Wilhelm II and an evening in Theodore Roosevelt's White House. His friends included Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Giacomo Puccini and Isadora Duncan. Kurt Weill, Leo Blech, and Hans Pfitzner were among his hundreds of students. Humperdinck was a prolific writer, too, and the detailed and candid letters and diary entries quoted here provide an inside view of musical life in Wilhelmine Germany, with its extraordinary number of theatres, orchestras, choral societies, music publishers, journals and conservatoires, their principal personalities generously illustrated in the pages of this book. William Melton, born in Philadelphia in 1954, did hisgraduate studies in music history at the University of California Los Angeles and spent his career in the horn section of the Sinfonie Orchester Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). In addition, he is a contributor to The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (2013) and the author of The Wagner Tuba: A History (edition ebenos, Aachen, 2008). Further projects have included biographical essays on lesser-known Romantics like Friedrich Klose, Henri Kling, Felix Draeseke, and Friedrich Gernsheim, and he has researched and edited the scores of the 'Forgotten Romantics' series for the publisher edition ebenos.

A deeply researched and beautifully illustrated study of saxophone legend John Coltrane's signature album. Written with the full co-operation of the Coltrane family and featuring the voices of musicians, producers and writers of the 1960s, Kahn has also unearthed rare, unpublished interviews with Coltrane and bassist Jimmy Garrison. The book also features commentary from contemporary music stars including Carlos Santana, Bono, Phil Lesh, Patti Smith, Ravi Shankar and Steve Reich.

Think Woodstock and the mind turns to the seminal 1969 festival that crowned a seismic decade of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. But the town of Woodstock, New York, the original planned venue of the concert, is located over 60 miles from the site to which the fabled half a million flocked. Long before the landmark music festival usurped the name, Woodstock--the tiny Catskills town where Bob Dylan holed up after his infamous 1966 motorcycle accident--was already a key location in the '60s rock landscape. Drawing on numerous first-hand interviews with the remaining key players in the scene--and on the period when he lived there himself in the 1990s--Hoskyns has produced an East Coast companion to his bestselling L.A. canyon classic Hotel California. This is a richly absorbing study of a vital music scene in a revolutionary time and place.

In the 1990s, Chicago was at the center of indie rock, propelling bands like the Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair to the national stage. The musical ecosystem from which these bands emerged, though, was expansive and diverse. Grunge players comingled with the electronic, jazz, psychedelic, and ambient music communities, and an inventive, collaborative group of local labels-kranky, Drag City, and Thrill Jockey, among others-embraced the new, evolving sound of indie "rock." Bruce Adams, co-founder of kranky records, was there to bear witness. In You're with Stupid, Adams offers an insider's look at the role Chicago's underground music industry played in the transformation of indie rock. Chicago labels, as Adams explains, used the attention brought by national acts to launch bands that drew on influences outside the Nirvana-inspired sound then dominating pop. The bands themselves-Labradford, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Low-were not necessarily based in Chicago, but it was Chicago labels like kranky that had the ears and the infrastructure to do something with this new music. In this way, Chicago-shaped sounds reached the wider world, presaging the genre-blending music of the twenty-first century. From an author who helped create the scene and launched some of its best music, You're with Stupid is a fascinating and entertaining read.

DIY House Shows and Music Venues in the US is an interdisciplinary study of house concerts and other DIY (‘do-it-yourself’) music venues in the US, such as warehouses, all-ages clubs and guerrilla shows, with its primary focus on West Coast American DIY locales. Focusing on DIY houses, music venues, social spaces, and local and translocal cultural geographies, the author examines how American DIY communities constitute themselves in relation to their social and spatial environment. The ethnographic approach shows the inner-workings of American DIY culture, and how the particular people within particular places strive to achieve a social ideal of an "intimate" community.

1) First published book on the revival of Cornish music and dance and the first extended history of music and dance in Cornwall. 2) Based on a combination of qualitative fieldwork and expert interviews, and a meticulous study of the historical and revival material

Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) was one of Britain's leading composers: his music is frequently performed throughout Europe, the United States (where he lived and worked) and Japan. He is particularly renowned for his electro-acoustic music, an aspect on which most previous writing on his work has focused. The present volume is the first detailed study of music from Harvey's considerable body of work for conventional forces. It focuses on two pieces that span one of the most fertile periods in Harvey's output: Song Offerings (1985; awarded the prestigious Britten Award), and White as Jasmine (1999). The book explores the links between the two works - both set texts by Hindu writers, employ a solo soprano, and adumbrate a spiritual journey - as well as showing how Harvey's musical language has evolved in the period between them. It examines Harvey's techniques of writing for the voice, for small ensemble (Song Offerings), and for large orchestra, subtly and characteristically enhanced with electronic sound (White as Jasmine). It shows how Harvey's music is informed by his profound understanding of Eastern religion, as well as offering a clear and accessible account of his distinctive musical language. Both works use musical processes to dramatic and clearly audible effect, as the book demonstrates with close reference to the accompanying downloadable resources. The book draws on interviews with the composer, and benefits from the author's exclusive access to sketches of the two works. It contextualises the works, showing how they are the product of a diverse series of musical influences and an engagement with ideas from both Eastern and Western religions. It also explores how Harvey continued to develop the musical and spiritual preoccupations revealed in these pieces in his later work, up to and including his third opera, Wagner Dream (2007).

Viele Effekte fur viel guten Sound Die Technik macht's moglich: So unscheinbar es wirken mag einem Keyboard konnen Sie vom Klassik-Orchester bis zur Rockband nahezu alle Klange entlocken. Die Moglichkeiten scheinen endlos, umso schwieriger ist es, den Uberblick zu behalten. Aber keine Sorge, Jerry Kovarsky erklart Ihnen, wie Sie mit Ihrem Keyboard schon bald wunderbare Melodien spielen konnen und die vielfaltigen Sounds, Effekte, Rhythmen, Begleitungen und weiteren technischen Features optimal einsetzen. Daruber hinaus erfahren Sie, welches Keyboard das richtige fur Sie ist und was Sie beim Kauf und bei der Pflege des Instruments beachten mussen.

From a skinny beach bum to a brawny headband-wearing blue-collar hero, through to an elder statesman of rock, Springsteen has been one of the most revered songwriters of his and succeeding generations for half a century. Throughout the decades, his anthemic tracks of personal and political strife have chronicled life in America, providing listeners with character-driven narratives that can be read as short stories of lives they live, lived, or have seen first-hand. After getting a recording contract with Columbia Records aged twenty-two, Springsteen wrote and recorded a string of critically acclaimed albums, including Born to Run, which brought him a wider audience, before becoming a superstar with the release of 1984's Born in the U.S.A. In the twenty-first century, Springsteen continues to release landmark albums such as The Rising and Wrecking Ball and, with the stalwart support of the E Street Band, still performs in sold-out stadiums worldwide, with concerts routinely lasting for over three hours. This volume explores Springsteen's discography in detail, examining his worldwide hits alongside his lesser-known but equally moving tracks.

Beast: John Bonham and the Rise of Led Zeppelin is the first-ever biography of the iconic John Bonham, considered by many to be one of the greatest (if not THE greatest) rock drummer of all time. Bonham first learned to play the drums at the age of five, and despite never taking formal lessons, began drumming for local bands immediately upon graduating from secondary school. By the late 1960s, Bonham was looking for a more solid gig in order to provide his growing family with a more regular income. Meanwhile, following the dissolution of the popular blues rock band The Yardbirds, lead guitarist Jimmy Page sought the company of new bandmates to help him record an album and tour Scandinavia as the New Yardbirds. A few months later, Bonham was recruited to join the band who would eventually become known as Led Zeppelin-and before the year was out, Bonham and his three bandmates would become the richest rock band in the world. In their first year, Led Zeppelin released two albums and completed four US and four UK concert tours. As their popularity exploded, they moved from ballrooms and smaller clubs to larger auditoriums, and eventually started selling out full arenas. Throughout the 1970s, Led Zeppelin reached new heights of commercial and critical success, making them one of the most influential groups of the era, both in musical style and in their approach towards the workings of the entertainment industry. They added extravagant lasers, light shows, and mirror balls to their performances; wore flamboyant and often glittering outfits; traveled in a private jet airliner and rented out entire sections of hotels; and soon become the subject of frequently repeated stories of debauchery and destruction while on tour. In 1977, the group performed what would be their final live appearance in the US, following months of rising fervor and rioting from their fandom. And in September of 1980, Bonham-plagued by alcoholism, anxiety, and the after-effects of years of excess-was found dead by his bandmates. To this day, Bonham is posthumously described as one of the most important, well-known, and influential drummers in rock, topping best of lists describing him as an inimitable, all-time great. As Adam Budofsky, managing editor of Modern Drummer, explained, "If the king of rock 'n' roll was Elvis Presley, then the king of rock drumming was certainly John Bonham."

Designed for Music Theory courses, Music Theory Through Improvisation presents a unique approach to basic theory and musicianship training that examines the study of traditional theory through the art of improvisation. The book follows the same general progression of diatonic to non-diatonic harmony in conventional approaches, but integrates improvisation, composition, keyboard harmony, analysis, and rhythm. Conventional approaches to basic musicianship have largely been oriented toward study of common practice harmony from the Euroclassical tradition, with a heavy emphasis in four-part chorale writing. The author's entirely new pathway places the study of harmony within improvisation and composition in stylistically diverse format, with jazz and popular music serving as important stylistic sources. Supplemental materials include a play-along audio in the downloadable resources for improvisation and a companion website with resources for students and instructors.

Play along with your favorite popular and traditional Christmas songs. Arranged specifically for the Level 1 player, this book comes with a play-along CD which includes a backing and performance track for each title. An optional piano accompaniment book is available for wind instruments. Titles: Believe * Deck the Hall * Sleigh Ride * Silent Night * and ten more. This title is available in SmartMusic.

Two writing books are available that are coordinated page-by-page with Lesson Books 1 and 2. Writing exercises, fill-in questions and fun-filled puzzles add to the student's education and enjoyment.

Scottish Dance Beyond 1805 presents a history of Scottish music and dance over the last 200 years, with a focus on sources originating in Aberdeenshire, when steps could be adapted in any way the dancer pleased. The book explains the major changes in the way that dance was taught and performed by chronicling the shift from individual dancing masters to professional, licensed members of regulatory societies. This ethnographical study assesses how dances such as the Highland Fling have been altered and how standardisation has affected contemporary Highland dance and music, by examining the experience of dancers and pipers. It considers reactions to regulation and standardisation through the introduction to Scotland of percussive step dance and caller-facilitated ceilidh dancing. Today's Highland dancing is a standardised and international form of dance. This book tells the story of what changed over the last 200 years and why. It unfolds through a series of colourful characters, through the dances they taught and the music they danced to and through the story of one dance in particular, the Highland Fling. It considers how Scottish dance reflected changes in Scottish society and culture. The book will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the fields of Dance History, Ethnomusicology, Ethnochoreology, Ethnology and Folklore, Cultural History, Scottish Studies and Scottish Traditional Music as well as to teachers, judges and practitioners of Highland dancing and to those interested in the history of Scottish dance, music and culture.

The text is an entertaining exploration of Latin verse including Latin lyrics for 17 songs, English translations, vocabulary, composer biographies, background on social/historical significance of each song, and illustrations.

The cassette features Dr. Clayton Lein of Purdue University directing the Lafayette Chamber Singers.

In this title, the Sussex based author provides accessible text, clear instructions, step-by-step photographs and a full-size plan of the guitar. Readers will learn how to make a steel-stringed OM cutaway guitar with 14 frets from scratch, following the clear step-by-step photographs and straightforward instructions. Suitable even for woodworkers with a basic level of skills, this is a rewarding project to undertake and will no doubt become a family heirloom. Packed full of handy information and expert tips, close guidance through the whole process from choosing the materials to the final stringing up and a full-size plan of the guitar to follow, readers can't go wrong. Plus this revised and updated edition features new and expanded material on: power tools and jigs, bolt-on and dovetail neck joints, alternative ways of making a guitar body, soundboard bracing for a Classical guitar and much more.

The goal of this series is to introduce students to the rhythms, harmonies and other unique characteristics of jazz. Students will be motivated by the variety of styles and sounds that have that special Dennis Alexander sound. From lyrical melodies to infectious rhythms and harmonies, playing jazz styles has never been more fun Titles: As September Goes * Jazz Jam * Purple Sage * Rhythmicon * Smooth as Silk * Sneakin' 'Round * Soft-Shoe Blues * Soul Searcher * Tahitian Nights * A Touch of Rhumba * Valse du jour. "Purple Sage" and "A Touch of Rumba" are Federation Festivals 2014-2016 selections.

Guild Repertoire is divided into three levels, Elementary, Intermediate, and Preparatory (Advanced). Each level is divided into four categories: Classics (includes Baroque), Sonatina (Sonata), Romantic, Modern. For this earliest level of Guild Repertoire the editor selected pieces by many well-known writers of children's music and were also able to include some heretofore unknown Soviet and other foreign writers who have provided outstanding material for the young student. Includes: Autumn Song * Barn Dance Shuffle * Bashkir Song * Caprice * Chipmunkas Lullaby * The Cuckoo * Dance * The Daring Horseman * The Drummer * Elephants Walking * Gadabout Grasshopper * Gavotte * A Gay Waltz * Grandfatheras Dance * Indian Dance * Irish Dance * Irish Washerwoman * Kitten * A Little Story * Minuet * Persistent Motif * Quarrel of Three Chickens * Ride on the Train * Sailoras Song * A Street Organ * Variations on a Folk Song * Waltz of the Prince and Princess * Whirligig

Franz Liszt: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and performer. The second edition includes research published since the publication of the first edition and provide electronic resources. Franz Liszt was born on 22 October 1811 at Raiding, today located in Austria's Burgenland. He received his first piano lessons from his father, Adam Liszt, an employee of the celebrated Eszterhazy family. Young Franz was quickly acclaimed a prodigy, and in 1820 a group of Hungarian magnates offered to underwrite his musical education. Shortly thereafter the Liszts moved to Vienna, where Franz studied piano and composition with Carl Czerny and Anton Salieri. Performances there earned Liszt local fame; even Beethoven expressed interest in him.