New essays by noted authorities on music and related arts in early modern Italy, giving special attention to musical sources, poetry, performance, and visual arts. The rich cultural environment of early modern Italy inspired a vast array of musical innovations: this was the first age of the virtuoso performer, the era that witnessed the beginnings of opera, and a moment that saw the intersection and cross-fertilization of madrigals and songs of all sorts. Word, Image, and Song: Essays on Early Modern Italy presents a broad range of approaches to the study of music and related arts in that era. Topics include musical source studies, issues of performance, poetry and linguistics, influences on music from the classical tradition, and the interconnectedness of music and visual art. Their points of departure include well-known musical workssuch as Monteverdi's madrigals, librettos of seventeenth-century operas, the poetry of Giambattista Marino, and the paintings of Titian and his contemporaries. Contributors: Jennifer Williams Brown, Mauro Calcagno, Alan Curtis, Suzanne G. Cusick, Ruth I. DeFord, Dinko Fabris, Beth L. Glixon, Jonathan E. Glixon, Barbara Russano Hanning, Wendy Heller, Robert R. Holzer, Deborah Howard, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Margaret Murata, David Rosand, Susan ParkerShimp, Gary Tomlinson, Alvaro Torrente, Andrew H. Weaver. Rebecca Cypess is Assistant Professor of Music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Beth L. Glixon is Instructor in Musicology at the University of Kentucky School of Music. Nathan Link is NEH Associate Professor of Music at Centre College.

Featured on CNN, C-SPAN, FOX News, NBC's Today Show, Democracy NOW , News Hour with Jim Lehrer and other leading talk shows. In the late 1960s, the bipartisan Eisenhower Violence Commission, formed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson and extended by President Richard Nixon, warned that most civilizations have fallen less from external assault than from internal decay. Over recent years, the internal decay prophesied by the Violence Commission, but also by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his military-industrial complex farewell speech, has been reflected in American public policies. The fault lies on both sides of the political aisle. After Pearl Harbor, "Mr. Republican," Senator Robert A. Taft, said criticism is patriotic. Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Sense assembles more than three dozen patriots. They range from Kevin Phillips, chief political strategist for Richard Nixon's victory in 1968, and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, called a "true American hero" by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, to Jessica Tuchman Mathews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former Oklahoma Senator Fred R. Harris, who advocated grassroots, populist policies when he ran for president in the 1970s. Why have American policies failed? What alternative policies can return America to its promise, internally and in the eyes of a global community shaken by, among other things, American torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners in Iraq? Patriotism, Democracy and Common Sense answers these questions in a preposterous way. It asks citizens and policy makers to actually connect the dots-to move America forward by developing mutually supportive and complementary foreign, national security, Middle East, economic, domestic, inner city, media, campaign finance and voting reform policies. Too much to expect of our civilization? This important and timely effort is published in cooperation with The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation. From Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Se

In 1968, the Kerner Commission concluded that America was heading toward "two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal." Today, America's communities are experiencing increasing racial tensions and inequality, working-class resentment over the unfulfilled American Dream, white supremacy violence, toxic inaction in Washington, and the decline of the nation's example around the world. In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, along with Eisenhower Foundation CEO Alan Curtis, re-examine fifty years later the work still necessary towards the goals set forth in The Kerner Report. This timely volume unites the interests of minorities and white working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Reflecting on America's urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work-and not work. Contributors include: Oscar Perry Abello, Elijah Anderson, Anil N.F. Aranha, Jared Bernstein, Henry G. Cisneros, Elliott Currie, Linda Darling-Hammond, Martha F. Davis, E. J. Dionne, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Delbert S. Elliott, Carol Emig, Jeff Faux, Ron Grzywinski, Michael P. Jeffries, Lamar K. Johnson, Celinda Lake, Marilyn Melkonian, Gary Orfield, Diane Ravitch, Laurie Robinson, Herbert C. Smitherman, Jr., Joseph Stiglitz, Dorothy Stoneman, Kevin Washburn, Valerie Wilson, Gary Younge, Julian E. Zelizer, and the editors

The Coronation Of Poppea. An opera in a prologue and three acts. Text by G.F. Busenello, music attributed to Claudio Monteverdi and Francesco Sacrati. Edited by Alan Curtis and English singing version by Arthur Jacobs.

(Boosey & Hawkes Voice). 'This anthology is the result of the collaboration with the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato who had expressed the wish to record a CD with my ensemble "Il Complesso Barocco." It should not just be another compilation of famous arias by Handel or Vivaldi, but a collection of pieces of quite different styles and from different epochs which are linked by a common superordinate topic. (...) I pointed out to her that there were plenty of wonderful arias and even entire solo scenes which had been sung on the Baroque stage both by female singers and castratos playing the parts of famous historical female rulers and heroines. By suggesting the title "Drama Queens," she reduced the whole thing to a contemporary formula. Our idea was to cultivate extremes, to gather arias that show larger-than-life emotions.' Alan Curtis.