What is the point of reading about the music written before 1600? There are two good reasons. First, much of it is very beautiful and most enjoyable. The timeless dignity of plainchant, the mellow consonance of Dufay's chansons, and the dramatic delights of the Renaissance madrigals - these count among life's great pleasures to those who know them. Second, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, European musicians, theorists and craftsmen laid the technical foundations for their successors, the foundations of the classical music that is enjoyed across the world today.

Discovering Music Theory is a suite of workbooks and corresponding answer books that offers all-round preparation for the updated ABRSM Music Theory exams from 2020, including the new online papers. This full-colour workbook will equip students of all ages with the skills, knowledge and understanding required for the ABRSM Grade 1 Music Theory exam. Written to make theory engaging and relevant to developing musicians of all ages, it offers: - straightforward explanations of all new concepts - progressive exercises to build skills and understanding, step by step - challenge questions to extend learning and develop music-writing skills - helpful tips for how to approach specific exercises - ideas for linking theory to music listening, performing and instrumental/singing lessons - clear signposting and progress reviews throughout - a sample practice exam paper showing you what to expect in the new style of exams from 2020 As well as fully supporting the ABRSM theory syllabus, Discovering Music Theory provides an excellent resource for anyone wishing to develop their music literacy skills, including GCSE and A-Level candidates, and adult learners.

Chapel Royal meets country choir in this collection of eleven strophic psalm-settings, one anthem and two Christmas hymns, for four-part choir without organ. These elaborate settings with fugal passages are suitable for a reasonably competent choir and could provide useful material for evensongs and concerts. The introduction attempts to explain how this London composer, who was trained in the Chapel Royal, came to write music for a country church in Hertfordshire.

Influenced by Robert and Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim, Johannes Brahms not only learned to play the organ at the beginning of his career, but also wrote significant compositions for the instrument as a result of his early counterpoint study. He composed for the organ only sporadically or as part of larger choral and instrumental works in his subsequent career. During the final year of his life, however, he returned to pure organ composition with a set of chorale preludes--though many of these are thought to have been revisions of earlier works. Today, the organ works of Johannes Brahms are recognized as beautifully-crafted compositions by church and concert organists across the world and have become a much-cherished component of the repertoire. Until now, however, most scholarly accounts of Brahms's life and work treat his works for the organ as a minor footnote in his development as a composer.
Precisely because the collection of organ works is not extensive, the pieces--composed at different times during Brahms's lifetime--help to map his path as a composer, pinpointing various stages in his artistic development. In this volume, Barbara Owen offers the first in-depth study of this corpus, considering Brahms's organ works in relation to his background, methods, and overall artistic development, his contacts with organs and organists, the influence of his predecessors and contemporaries, and analyses of each specific work and its place in Brahms's career. Her expert history and analysis of Brahms's individual organ works and their interpretation also investigates contemporary practices relative to the performance of these pieces. The book's three valuable appendices present aguide to editions of Brahms's organ works, a discussion of the organ in Brahms's world that highlights some organs the composer would have heard, and a listing of the organ transcriptions of Brahms's work.
Blending unique insights into composition and performance practice, this book will be read eagerly by performers, students, and scholars of the organ, Brahms, and the music of the Nineteenth Century.

The Music Tree series continues the development of complete musicianship by providing the beginner with delightful and varied repertoire. The pupil learns a variety of idioms encompassing folk, jazz and pop. The creativity of the students is emphasized since they are given musical segments to rearrange, transpose, complete or to use as the basis for a new composition. Technical aspects are also addressed including greater facility, blocked intervals and chords, and more hands together playing. Guided training steps are used to encourage intelligent practice skills.

This best-selling, progressive encyclopedia of rock/funk patterns for all tempos utilizes a new contemporary teaching style for independence, rudiments, styles and more. 46 pages.

Founded in 1915 by the musicologist William Gillies Whittaker, the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Bach Choir is one of the oldest Bach choirs in the United Kingdom. This book celebrates the centenary of the choir with a multi-author account of the choir's contributions to musical life and the many personalities who made that possible. It contains almost 200 illustrations, many of them not previously seen.

In 1946, Harry Choates, a Cajun fiddle virtuoso, changed the course of American musical history when his recording of the so-called Cajun national anthem "Jole Blon" reached number four on the national Billboard charts. Cajun music became part of the American consciousness for the first time thanks to the unprecedented success of this issue, as the French tune crossed cultural, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic boundaries. Country music stars Moon Mullican, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, and Hank Snow rushed into the studio to record their own interpretations of the waltz-followed years later by Waylon Jennings and Bruce Springsteen. The cross-cultural musical legacy of this plaintive waltz also paved the way for Hank Williams Sr.'s Cajun-influenced hit "Jamabalaya."
Choates' "Jole Blon" represents the culmination of a centuries-old dialogue between the Cajun community and the rest of America. Joining into this dialogue is the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of Cajun music yet published, Cajun Breakdown. Furthermore, the book examines the social and cultural roots of Cajun music's development through 1950 by raising broad questions about the ethnic experience in America and nature of indigenous American music. Since its inception, the Cajun community constantly refashioned influences from the American musical landscape despite the pressures of marginalization, denigration, and poverty. European and North American French songs, minstrel tunes, blues, jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing all became part of the Cajun musical equation. The idiom's synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture, extinguishing the myth that Cajuns were an isolated folk group astray in the American South. Ryan Andre Brasseaux's work constitutes a bold and innovative exploration of a forgotten chapter in America's musical odyssey."

Popular Christmas carols are arranged in graded order with optional duet parts to provide pleasure and satisfaction during the Christmas season for students using Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course.

A basic method of building finger technique, intonation and tonguing through the performance of folk, classical and familiar songs.

Jonathan G. Laniyan is privileged to study music up to Higher National Diploma level (H.N.D.) at the Polytechnic Ibadan Nigeria. He also holds Royal Schools of Music Grade 5 in Jazz Piano, Theory and Grades 7 and 8 in Practical Musicianship. He is a composer and arranger of works in Western and African Idiom, hoping to go for further studies to complete a Master's Degree (in music) in the near future.

Stephen C. Ferguson II provides a philosophical examination of Black popular culture for the first time. From extensive discussion of the philosophy and political economy of Hip-Hop music through to a developed exploration of the influence of the postmodernism-poststructuralist ideology on African American studies, he argues how postmodernism ideology plays a seminal role in justifying the relationship between corporate capitalism and Black popular culture. Chapters cover topics such as cultural populism, capitalism and Black liberation, the philosophy of Hip-Hop music, and Harold Cruse’s influence on the “cultural turn” in African American studies. Ferguson combines case studies of past and contemporary Black cultural and intellectual productions with a Marxist ideological critique to provide a cutting edge reflection on the economic structure in which Black popular culture emerged. He highlights the contradictions that are central to the juxtaposition of Black cultural artists as political participants in socioeconomic struggle and the political participants who perform the rigorous task of social criticism. Adopting capitalism as an explanatory framework, Ferguson investigates the relationship between postmodernism as social theory, current manifestations of Black popular culture, and the theoretical work of Black thinkers and scholars to demonstrate how African American studies have been shaped.

This bibulous, drug-indulgent and anarchic rock legend was born on a small farm in Tipperary, won a scholarship to Westminster, was rapidly expelled, became a rent boy, then a central figure of punk and the hugely influential star of The Pogues. MacGowan's music, innovative and powerful, is as distinctive as his chaotic, breakdown-scarred, drug and alcohol-fuelled lifestyle. MacGowan has an enormous fan-base hungry for stories of his wild behaviour, but this is also a book that celebrates this unique and charming musician, and offers insight into his remarkable perspective on this world - and the next!

This is a true life story account of Len Garry's childhood memories of his childhood days spent with John Lennon and Paul McCartney and the forming of the band The Quarrymen. Also the day John Lennon met Paul McCartney for the very first time at St. Peter's Church fete on 6th July 1957, this book is a first hand account of what took place on that day plus more stories.

In The Eyeline of Furtherance, charts John Howard's rise from 70's pop idol to a career in A & R and marketing. The '90s opened up new vistas, ever bigger and better opportunities, working with Elkie Brooks, Madness, Barry Manilow and rock 'n' roll heroes Lonnie Donegan and The Crickets. As John puts it, "I was propelled onwards and upwards, not this time by my own ambition, but by the plans of others who had clearly decided that I was going places in a direction I would never have imagined twenty years earlier." John Howard's first book, Incidents Crowded With Life, followed the ambitions of a young gay singer-songwriter in London in the '70s which were realised after being signed by CBS Records and recording his debut LP at Abbey Road studios. En route, he wrote the theme song for a Peter Fonda movie and was heralded as The Next Big Thing. And all the while navigating a series of disastrous personal events, not least when he broke his back in 1976.