Now with a new cover! This book offers the inspiring true stories behind 101 of your favorite hymns. It is excellent for devotional reading, sermon illustrations, and bulletin inserts, as well as for historical or biographical research.

The liturgical chant sung in the churches of Southern Italy between the ninth and thirteenth centuries reflects the multiculturalism of a territory in which Romans, Franks, Lombards, Byzantines, Normans, Jews, and Muslims were all present with various titles and political roles. Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas examines a specific genre, the prosulas that were composed to embellish and expand pre-existing liturgical chants. Widespread in medieval Europe, prosulas were highly cultivated in southern Italy, especially by the nuns, monks, and clerics of the city of Benevento. These texts shed light on the creativity of local cantors to provide new meanings to the liturgy in accordance with contemporary waves of religious spirituality, and to experiment with a novel musical style in which a syllabic setting is paired with the free-flowing melody of the parent chant. In their representing an epistemological 'beyond', and in their interconnectedness with the parent chant, these prosulas can be likened to modern hypertexts. In this book, author Luisa Nardini presents the first comprehensive study to integrate textual and musical analyses of liturgical prosulas as they were recorded in Beneventan manuscripts. Discussing general features of prosulas in southern Italy and their relation to contemporary liturgical genres (e.g., tropes, sequences, hymns), Nardini firmly situates Beneventan prosulas within the broader context of European musical history. An invaluable reference for the field, Chants, Hypertext, and Prosulas provides a new understanding of the phonetic and morphological transformations of the Latin language in medieval Italy, and clarifies the use of perennially puzzling features of Beneventan notation.

Described as the "life and soul of British contemporary music", Jane Manning is an internationally celebrated English concert and opera soprano. In this new follow-up to her highly regarded New Vocal Repertory, Volumes I and II, she provides a seasoned expert's guidance and insight into the vocal genre she calls home. Vocal Repertoire for the Twenty-First Century spans the late middle-20th century through the second decade of the 21st. Manning's comprehensive selection of contemporary art songs ranges from the avant-garde to the more easily accessible, including substantial song cycles, shorter encore pieces, and songs suitable for auditions and competitions. The two-volume guide presents expertly-informed selections tailored to particular voice types. Each of the 160 selections is accompanied by a highly detailed performance guide, music examples, levels of difficulty, and a brief encapsulation of vocal characteristics or challenges contained in the piece. A supplemental companion website provides composer biographies and an up-to-date list of recommended recordings. With a focus on younger composers in addition to prominent figures, Manning encourages singers to refresh and expand their recital repertoire into less familiar territory, and discover the rewards therein. Volume 2 features works written from 2000 onwards, including pieces from contemporary composers Mohammed Fairouz ("Annabel Lee"), Missy Mazzoli ("As Long as We Live"), Judith Weir ("The Voice of Desire"), and Raymond Yiu ("The Earth and Every Common Sight").

The foremost American musician of the eighteenth century, William Billings wrote more than three hundred compositions and six musical collections at a time when Americans were singing almost nothing but British music. In this study, David McKay and Richard Crawford depict the man, his music, and his place in the tradition of American psalmody. The authors examine Billings' methods, innovations, and interaction with the Boston society in which he lived, placing overall emphasis on his influence on American Protestant sacred music. David McKay is Associate Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Richard Crawford is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Andrew Law, American Psalmodist (Northwestern, 1968). Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

What should we consider when thinking about the relationship between an onstage performance and the story the performance tells? A Poetics of Handel's Operas explores this question by analyzing the narratives of Handel's operas in relation to the rich representational fabric of performance used to convey them. Nathan Link notes that in most storytelling genres, the audience can naturally discern between a story and the way that story is represented: with film, for example, the viewer would recognize that a character hears neither her own voiceover nor the ambient music that accompanies it, whereas in discussions of opera, some audiences may be distracted by the seemingly artificial nature of such conventions as characters singing their dialogue. Link proposes that when engaging with opera, distinguishing between the performance we see and hear on the stage and the story represented offers a meaningful approach to engaging with and interpreting the work. Handel's operas are today the most-performed works in the Baroque opera seria tradition. This genre, with its intricate dramaturgy and esoteric conventions, stands to gain much from an investigation into the relationships between the onstage performance and the story to which that performance directs us. In his analysis, Link offers theoretical studies on opera and narratological theories of literature, drama, and film, providing rich engagement with Handel's work and what it conveys about the relationship between text, story, and performance.

Popular music in the twenty-first century is increasingly divided into niche markets. How do fans, musicians, and music industry executives define their markets' boundaries? What happens when musicians cross those boundaries? What can Christian music teach us about commercial popular music? In God Rock, Inc., Andrew Mall considers the aesthetic, commercial, ethical, and social boundaries of Christian popular music, from the late 1960s, when it emerged, through the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic research, historical archives, interviews with music industry executives, and critical analyses of recordings, concerts, and music festival performances, Mall explores the tensions that have shaped this evolving market and frames broader questions about commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover in music that defines itself as outside the mainstream.

In" Culture on the Margins, "Jon Cruz recounts the "discovery" of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song making as meaningless "noise." Abolitionists began to attribute social and political meaning to the music, inspired, as many were, by Frederick Douglass's invitation to hear slaves' songs as testimonies to their inner, subjective worlds. This interpretive shift--which Cruz calls "ethnosympathy"--marks the beginning of a mainstream American interest in the country's cultural margins. In tracing the emergence of a new interpretive framework for black music, Cruz shows how the concept of "cultural authenticity" is constantly redefined by critics for a variety of purposes--from easing anxieties arising from contested social relations to furthering debates about modern ethics and egalitarianism.

In focusing on the spiritual aspect of black music, abolitionists, for example, pivoted toward an idealized religious singing subject at the expense of absorbing the more socially and politically elaborate issues presented in the slave narratives and other black writings. By the end of the century, Cruz maintains, modern social science also annexed much of this cultural turn. The result was a fully modern tension-ridden interest in culture on the racial margins of American society that has long had the effect of divorcing black culture from politics.

As the landscape of choral education changes - disrupted by Glee, YouTube, and increasingly cheap audio production software - teachers of choral conducting need current research in the field that charts scholarly paths through contemporary debates and sets an agenda for new critical thought and practice. Where, in the digitizing world, is the field of choral pedagogy moving? Editor Frank Abrahams and Paul D. Head, both experienced choral conductors and teachers, offer here a comprehensive handbook of newly-commissioned chapters that provide key scholarly-critical perspectives on teaching and learning in the field of choral music, written by academic scholars and researchers in tandem with active choral conductors. As chapters in this book demonstrate, choral pedagogy encompasses everything from conductors' gestures to the administrative management of the choir. The contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Choral Pedagogy address the full range of issues in contemporary choral pedagogy, from repertoire to voice science to the social and political aspects of choral singing. They also cover the construction of a choral singer's personal identity, the gendering of choral ensembles, social justice in choral education, and the role of the choral art in society more generally. Included scholarship focuses on both the United States and international perspectives in five sections that address traditional paradigms of the field and challenges to them; critical case studies on teaching and conducting specific populations (such as international, school, or barbershop choirs); the pedagogical functions of repertoire; teaching as a way to construct identity; and new scholarly methodologies in pedagogy and the voice.

Winner of the 2004 ARSC Award for Best Research in Recorded Rock, Rhythm & Blues or Soul, The Holy Profane explores the strong presence of religion in the secular music of twentieth-century African American artists as diverse as Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Tupac Shakur. Analyzing lyrics and the historical contexts which shaped those lyrics, Teresa L. Reed examines the link between West-African musical and religious culture and the way African Americans convey religious sentiment in styles such as the blues, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and gangsta rap. She looks at Pentecostalism and black secular music, minstrelsy and its portrayal of black religion, the black church, "crossing over" from gospel to R&B, images of the black preacher, and the salience of God in the rap of Tupac Shakur.

Traditionally, west European culture has drawn distinct divisions between the secular and the sacred in music. Liturgical music belongs in church, not on pop radio, and artists who fuse the two are guilty of sacrilege. In the West-African worldview, however, both music and the divine permeate every imaginable part of life -- so much so that concepts like sacred and secular were entirely foreign to African slaves arriving in the colonies. The Western influence on African Americans eventually resulted in more polarization between these two musical forms, and black musicians who grew up singing in church were often lamented as hellbound once they found popular success. Even these artists, however, never completely left behind their West-African musical ancestry. Reed's exploration of this trend in African American music connects the work of today's artists to their West-African ancestry -- a tradition that over two-hundred years of Western influence could not completely stamp out.

This is a major collection of organ music for students, players, and church musicians of all levels and abilities. Compiler and editor Anne Marsden Thomas has drawn on her long experience of teaching and playing to select the most attractive, tuneful repertoire in two sets of graded anthologies, one set (3 volumes) for manuals only, the second set (3 volumes) for manuals and pedals. Within each book the pieces are grouped according to service needs into Preludes, Interludes, Processionals, and Postludes. The repertoire spans the 16th to the 21st century, with some new pieces written especially for the collection. A number of pieces throughout the collection have been selected for the ABRSM organ syllabus. The result is a wonderful collection of repertoire for all players, containing a wealth of attractive and varied pieces that will offer much practical support for church musicians and enrich and develop their playing.