Singing in Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera offers a bold and refreshing assessment of the state of opera study as seen through the lens of semiotics. At its core, the volume responds to Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker's Analyzing Opera, utilizing a semiotic framework to embrace opera on its own terms and engage all of its constituent elements in interpretation. Chapters in this collection resurrect the larger sense of serious operatic study as a multi-faceted, interpretive discipline, no longer in isolation. Contributors pay particular attention to the musical, dramatic, cultural, and performative in opera and how these modes can create an intertext that informs interpretation. Combining traditional and emerging methodologies, Singing in Signs engages composer-constructed and work-specific music-semiotic systems, broader socio-cultural music codes, and narrative strategies, with implications for performance and staging practices today.

Aural Skills in Context by Matthew Shaftel, Evan Jones, and Juan Chattah is the first complete text covering sight singing, ear training, and rhythm practice that features real musical examples (from classical to folk and jazz) as the composer wrote them. Other texts either feature simple melody lines that are edited from the standard repertoire or author-composed examples. By offering the melodies with the addition of the related harmony part, the book parallels the full Music Theory curriculum, resulting in a more comprehensive engagement than the typical sight-singing text. This approach reinforces the relevance of the aural skills curriculum to the students' other classes, as well as to their performance and listening interests. It exposes students to many examples of music that they will surely revisit as performers, scholars, or educators. It also gives a wealth of options for the instructor and students, going well beyond simply singing the melodies or writing them down from dictation. Improvisation; performance by multiple voices; switching between melody and accompanying lines; and creating new melodies above a given bass line, or an additional obbligato voice above the given melody or between the outer voices are all possible.

Leading authorities explore, in direct and accessible language, chamber-music masterpieces by twenty-one prominent composers since 1900. Two volume set: Modern composers as diverse as Bela Bartok, Maurice Ravel, Benjamin Britten, and John Cage have confided some of their most personal and intense thoughts to the medium of the string quartet. The resulting repertoire has won the allegiance of string players and of listeners in the concert hall and at home. Yet, until now, no book has addressed the language of these remarkable works, their interactions with the masterpieces of Beethoven and others, and their new approaches to musical expression. Intimate Voices, organized in rough chronological order, offers the observations and intuitions of twenty leading authorities on quartets by twenty-one composers from eleven countries. Its two volumes -- available separately or together -- comprise an indispensable guide to amateur and professional chamber musicians, scholars, students, and anyone seeking a deeper acquaintance with the great achievements of twentieth-century music. Edited by Evan Jones, Associate Professor of Music Theory, Florida State University College of Music Contents and authors: Volume 1: Debussy and Ravel (MarianneWheeldon); Sibelius (Joseph Kraus); Bartok (Joseph N. Straus); Hindemith (David Neumeyer); Schoenberg (Matthew R. Shaftel); Berg (Dave Headlam); Webern (David Clampitt); Villa-Lobos (Eero Tarasti); Prokofiev (Neil Minturn) Volume 2: Shostakovich [Patrick McCreless]; Britten [Christopher Mark]; Ligeti [Jane Piper Clendinning]; Berio [Richard Hermann]; Xenakis [Evan Jones]; Scelsi [Eric Drott]; Cage [David W. Bernstein]; Babbitt [Andrew Mead]; Carter [Jonathan W. Bernard]; Mel Powell [Jeffrey Perry]; Shulamit Ran [Robert W. Peck]