Music Library: What's new in the Music Library?

Stravinsky in Context offers an alternative to chronological biography. Thirty-five short, specially commissioned essays explore the eventful life-tapestry from which Stravinsky's compositions emerged. The opening chapters draw on new research into the composer's childhood in St. Petersburg. Stravinsky's early, often traumatic upbringing is examined in depth, particularly in the context of his brother Roman's death, and religious sensibilities within the family. Further essays consider Stravinsky's years in exile at the centre of dynamic and ever-evolving cultural environments, the composer constantly refining his idiom and re-defining his aesthetics against a backdrop of world events and personal tragedy. The closing chapters review new material regarding Stravinsky's complicated relationship with the Soviet Union, whilst also anticipating his legacy from the varied perspectives of publishing, research and even - in the iconic example of The Rite of Spring - space exploration. The book includes previously unpublished images of the composer and his family.

Experimentations provides a detailed historical and theoretical analysis of the first three decades of experimental composer John Cage's aesthetic production (ca. 1940-1972). Paying particular attention to Cage's inter- and cross-disciplinary engagements with the visual arts and architecture during this period, the book sheds new light on some of Cage's most controversial and influential innovations, such as the use of noise, chance techniques, indeterminacy, electronic technologies, and computerization, as well as upon lesser known but important ideas and strategies such as transparency, multiplicity, virtuality, and actualization. Ultimately, it traces the development of Cage's avant-garde aesthetic and political project as it transformed from the emulation of historical avant-garde precedents such as futurism and the Bauhaus, to the development of important precedents for the post-World War II movements of happenings and Fluxus, to its ultimate abandonment in the aftermath of problems encountered in the vast, multimedia composition HPSCHD (1967-69).

A fascinating history of the piano explored through 100 pieces chosen by one of the UK's most renowned concert pianists   "Tomes . . . casts her net widely, taking in chamber music and concertos, knotty avant-garde masterworks and (most welcome) jazz."--Richard Fairman, Financial Times, "Best Books of 2021: Classical Music"   "[One of] the most beautiful books I got my hands on this year. . . . About the shaping of this maddening, glorious, unconquerable instrument."--Jenny Colgan, Spectator, "Books of the Year"   An astonishingly versatile instrument, the piano allows just two hands to play music of great complexity and subtlety. For more than two hundred years, it has brought solo and collaborative music into homes and concert halls and has inspired composers in every musical genre--from classical to jazz and light music.   Charting the development of the piano from the late eighteenth century to the present day, pianist and writer Susan Tomes takes the reader with her on a personal journey through 100 pieces including solo works, chamber music, concertos, and jazz. Her choices include composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Gershwin, and Philip Glass. Looking at this history from a modern performer's perspective, she acknowledges neglected women composers and players including Fanny Mendelssohn, Maria Szymanowska, Clara Schumann, and Amy Beach.

A Women's History of the Beatles is the first book to offer a detailed presentation of the band's social and cultural impact as understood through the experiences and lives of women. Drawing on a mix of interviews, archival research, textual analysis, and autoethnography, this scholarly work depicts how the Beatles have profoundly shaped and enriched the lives of women, while also reexamining key, influential female figures within the group's history. Organized topically based on key themes important to the Beatles story, each chapter uncovers the varied and multifaceted relationships women have had with the band, whether face-to-face and intimately or parasocially through mediated, popular culture. Set within a socio-historical context that charts changing gender norms since the early 1960s, these narratives consider how the Beatles have affected women's lives across three generations. Providing a fresh perspective of a well-known tale, this is a cultural history that moves far beyond the screams of Beatlemania to offer a more comprehensive understanding of what the now iconic band has meant to women over the course of six decades.

Re-Making Sound is concise and flexible primer to sound studies. It takes students through six ways of conceptualizing sound and its links to other social phenomena: soundscapes; noise; sound and semiotics of the voice; sound and/through/in text; background sound/sound design; and sound art. Each chapter summarizes the history and scholarly theoretical underpinnings of these areas and concludes with a student activity that concretizes the historical and theoretical discussion via sound-making projects. With chapters designed to be flexible and non-sequential, the text fits within various course designs, and includes an introduction to key concepts in sound and sound studies, a cumulative concluding chapter with sound accompanying podcast exercise, and an extensive bibliography for students to pursue sound studies beyond the book itself.

Opera in Performance elucidates the performative dimension of contemporary opera productions. What are the most striking and decisive moments in a performance? Why do we respond so strongly to stagings that transform familiar scenes, to performers' bodily presence, and to virtuosic voices as well as ill-disposed ones? Drawing on phenomenology and performance theory, Clemens Risi explains how these moments arise out of a dialogue between performers and the audience, representation and presence, the familiar and the new. He then applies these insights in critical descriptions of his own experiences of various singers, stagings, and performances at opera houses and festivals from across the German-speaking world over the last twenty years. As the first book to focus on what happens in performance as such, this study shifts our attention to moments that have eluded articulation and provides tools for describing our own experiences when we go to the opera. This book will particularly interest scholars and students in theater and performance studies, musicology, and the humanities, and may also appeal to operagoers and theater professionals.

Introduction to Digital Music with Python Programming provides a foundation in music and code for the beginner. It shows how coding empowers new forms of creative expression while simplifying and automating many of the tedious aspects of production and composition. With the help of online, interactive examples, this book covers the fundamentals of rhythm, chord structure, and melodic composition alongside the basics of digital production. Each new concept is anchored in a real-world musical example that will have you making beats in a matter of minutes. Music is also a great way to learn core programming concepts such as loops, variables, lists, and functions, Introduction to Digital Music with Python Programming is designed for beginners of all backgrounds, including high school students, undergraduates, and aspiring professionals, and requires no previous experience with music or code.

This volume is a journey through musics that emerged at the turn of the 20th Century and were neither exclusively tonal nor serial. They fall between these labels as they are metatonal, being both with and after tonality, in their reconstruction of external codes and gestures of Common Practice music in new and idiosyncratic ways.  The composers and works considered  are approached from analytic, cultural, creative, and performance angles by musicologists, performers and composers to enable a deeper reading of these musics by scholars and students alike. Works include those by Frank Bridge, Ferruccio Busoni, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Rebecca Clarke, John Foulds, Percy Grainger, Mary Howe, Carl Nielsen, Franz Schreker, Erwin Schulhoff, Cyril Scott and Alexander Scriabin.  In the process of engaging with this book the reader, will find an enrichment to their own understanding of music at the turn of the 20th Century.  

Can music feel pain? Do songs possess dignity? Do symphonies have rights? Of course not, you might say. Yet think of how we anthropomorphize music, not least when we believe it has been somehow mistreated. A singer butchered or mangled the "Star-Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl. Anunderrehearsed cover band made a mockery of Led Zeppelin's classics. An orchestra didn't quite do justice to Mozart's Requiem. Such lively language upholds music as a sentient companion susceptible to injury and in need of fierce protection.There's nothing wrong with the human instinct to safeguard beloved music . . . except, perhaps, when this instinct leads us to hurt or neglect fellow human beings in turn: say, by heaping outsized shame upon those who seem to do music wrong; or by rushing to defend a conductor's beautiful recordingswhile failing to defend the multiple victims who have accused this maestro of sexual assault. Loving Music Till It Hurts is a capacious exploration of how people's head-over-heels attachments to music can variously align or conflict with agendas of social justice. How do we respond when loving musicand loving people appear to clash?

Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick oncetermed paranoid readings-interpretative feats that aim to prove a point,persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees.Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tendsto drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forcefulargument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform,care, and accessibility. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out inour serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths ofparanoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academicwork, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects,William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientationstoward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think aboutthe perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses mayultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin-or, if we choose, repair.With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion,and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparativeattitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of betterworlds.

This Companion explores women's work in music since 1900 across a broad range of musical genres and professions, including the classical tradition, popular music, and music technology. The crucial contribution of women to music education and the music industries features alongside their activity as composers and performers. The book considers the gendered nature of the musical profession, in areas including access to training, gendered criticism, sexualization, and notions of 'gender appropriate' roles or instruments. It covers a wide range of women musicians, such as Marin Alsop,  Grace Williams, Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell and Adele. Each thematic section concludes with a contribution from a practitioner in her own words, reflecting upon the impact of gender on her own career. Chapters include suggestions for further reading on each of the topics covered, providing an invaluable resource for students of Feminist Musicology, Women in Music, and Music and Gender.