Download or read book Composers in the Movies written by John C. Tibbetts and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amadeus . . . Yankee Doodle Dandy . . . Swanee River . . . Rhapsody in Blue. Even before movies had sound, filmmakers dramatized the lives of composers. Movie biographies—or biopics—have depicted composers as diverse as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George M. Cohan, Stephen Foster, and George Gershwin. In this enticing book, the first devoted entirely to such films, John C. Tibbetts surveys different styles and periods from the Hollywood of the 1920s and 1930s to the international cinema of today, exploring the role that film biographies play in our understanding of history and culture. Tibbetts delves into such questions as: How historically accurate are composer biopics? How and why have inaccuracies and distortions been perpetrated? What strategies have been used to represent visually the creative process? The book examines the films in several contexts and considers their role in commodifying and popularizing music. Extensive archival research, dozens of illustrations, and numerous interviews make this an appealing book for film and music enthusiasts at all levels.
Download or read book Wicked written by Paul R. Laird and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2011-06-24 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2004, the original Broadway production of Wicked earned 10 Tony nominations, including best musical. Based on the best-selling novel by Gregory Maguire, the show continues to run on Broadway and has touring companies throughout the United States and around the world. In Wicked: A Musical Biography, author Paul Laird explores the creation of this popular Broadway musical through an examination of draft scripts, interviews with major figures, and the study of primary musical sources such as sketches, drafts, and completed musical scores. Laird brings together an impressive amount of detail on the creation of Wicked, including a look at Maguire's novel, as well as the original source material, The Wizard of Oz. This volume also offers a history of the show's genesis along with examinations of the draft scenarios and scripts that demonstrate the show's development. Laird also explores Stephen Schwartz's life and work, providing an analysis of the composer and lyricist's work on the show through song drafts, sketches, and musical examples. Laird also surveys the show's critical reception in New York and London, noting how many critics failed to appreciate its qualities or anticipate its great success. The unusual nature of Wicked's story—dominated by two strong female leads—is also placed in the context of Broadway history. A unique look into a successful Broadway production, Wicked: A Musical Biography will be of interest to musicologists, theatre scholars, students, and general readers alike.
Download or read book Beastie Boys written by Jonathan A. Zwickel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise musical biography traces the Beastie Boys' story from the New York punk scene through a blockbuster career that spans more than 20 years. Ever since they hit the big time with their 1986 rock/rap debut Licensed to Ill, the first rap album to reach #1 on the Billboard 200, the Beastie Boys have been a cultural bellwether, the likes of which was unseen before or since. Their association with MTV made the Beasties instant poster children for an unprecedented phase of integration, both musical and racial. Their music, a pastiche of sounds that spans decades and genres, influenced the course of popular music and continues to do so today. Beastie Boys: A Musical Biography tells the story of the band, from its beginnings through its ongoing critical and commercial success. Fans can read about the group's origins, the training of its members, its awards and accomplishments, and its influence on pop culture. Authoritative yet concise, this lively overview covers everything from the band's unique sound to their collaborations with leading filmmakers on their award-winning videos.
Download or read book Green Day written by Kjersti Egerdahl and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-12-21 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is an up-to-date, thoroughly researched biography of the world's most popular pop-punk band. Green Day is almost certainly the world's most popular pop-punk band. How they got there is the subject of Green Day: A Musical Biography, the first book to follow the band from their beginnings through the spring 2009 release of 21st Century Breakdown. Tracing the band's evolution from fiercely independent punks to a global powerhouse, Green Day starts with the members' earliest musical influences and upbringing and the founding of the punk club 924 Gilman Street that shaped their sense of community. Discussion of their conflicted feelings about signing to a major label explores the classic rock 'n' roll conundrum of "selling out," while details of their decline and 2004 rebirth offer an inspirational story of artistic rejuvenation. Interviews with the band members and key figures in their lives, excerpted from punk 'zines and other publications, offer a perspective on their methods of self-promotion and the image they have chosen to project over time.
Download or read book Blind But Now I See written by Kent Gustavson and published by Blooming Twig Books. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Handbook of Musical Biography written by David Baptie and published by London : W. Morley. This book was released on 1883 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Music in 1853 written by Hugh Macdonald and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one composer is at the centre of this fascinating story, but a larger picture emerges of a shift in musical scenery, from the world of the innocent Romanticism of Berlioz and Schumann to the more potent musical politics of Wagner, and of his antidote (as many saw him), Brahms. Why 1853? For many leading composers this year brought far-reaching changes to their lives: Brahms emerged from obscurity to celebrity, Schumann ceased to be an active composer, and both Berlioz and Wagner became active again after long silences. By limiting the perspective to a single year yet extending it to a group of musicians, their constant interconnections become the central motif: Brahms meets Berlioz and Liszt as well as Schumann; Liszt is a constant link in every chain; Joachim is close to all of them; Wagner is on everyone's mind. No one composer is at the centre of the story, but a network of musicians spreads across the map of Europe from London and Paris to Leipzig and Zurich. Music in 1853 shows how musicians were now more closely connected than ever before, through the constant exchange of letters and the rapidly expanding railway network. The book links geography and day-to-day events to show how international the European musical scene had become. A larger picture emerges of a shift in musical scenery, from the world of the innocent Romanticism of Berlioz and Schumann to the more potent musical politics of Wagner and of his antidote (as many saw him) Brahms. HUGH MACDONALD is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University, St Louis. He has authored books on Skryabin and Berlioz and has previously published Beethoven's Century: Essays on Composers and Themes with Boydell/URP.
Download or read book San Antonio Rose written by Charles E. Townsend and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fine, engaging, and valuable biography of a man who merged the spontaneity of country fiddling with the Big Band Sound, giving birth to Western Swing. A landmark in country music!
Download or read book The Black Church written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.
Download or read book No One Here Gets Out Alive written by Jerry Hopkins and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2029-03-06 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is Jim Morrison in all his complexity-singer, philosopher, poet, delinquent-the brilliant, charismatic, and obsessed seeker who rejected authority in any form, the explorer who probed "the bounds of reality to see what would happen..." Seven years in the writing, this definitive biography is the work of two men whose empathy and experience with Jim Morrison uniquely prepared them to recount this modern tragedy: Jerry Hopkins, whose famous Presley biography, Elvis, was inspired by Morrison's suggestion, and Danny Sugerman, confidant of and aide to the Doors. With an afterword by Michael McClure.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century written by Paul Watt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rarely studied in their own right, writings about music are often viewed as merely supplemental to understanding music itself. Yet in the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in music flourished in fields as disparate as philosophy and natural science, dramatically shifting the relationship between music and the academy. An exciting and much-needed new volume, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century draws deserved attention to the people and institutions of this period who worked to produce these writings. Editors Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis, along with an international slate of contributors, discuss music's fascinating and unexpected interactions with debates about evolution, the scientific method, psychology, exoticism, gender, and the divide between high and low culture. Part I of the handbook establishes the historical context for the intellectual world of the period, including the significant genres and disciplines of its music literature, while Part II focuses on the century's institutions and networks - from journalists to monasteries - that circulated ideas about music throughout the world. Finally, Part III assesses how the music research of the period reverberates in the present, connecting studies in aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and intertextuality to their nineteenth-century origins. The Handbook challenges Western music history's traditionally sole focus on musical work by treating writings about music as valuable cultural artifacts in themselves. Engaging and comprehensive, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century brings together a wealth of new interdisciplinary research into this critical area of study.
Download or read book America the Band written by Jude Warne and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As if recovering from a raucous dream of the 1960s, Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell, and Dan Peek arrived on 1970s American radio with a sound that echoed disenchanted hearts of young people everywhere. The three American boys had named their band after a country they’d watched and dreamt of from their London childhood Air Force base homes. What was this country? This new band? Classic and timeless, America embodied the dreams of a nation desperate to emerge from the desert and finally give their horse a name. Celebrating the band’s fiftieth anniversary, Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell share stories of growing up, growing together, and growing older. Journalist Jude Warne weaves original interviews with Beckley, Bunnell, and many others into a dynamic cultural history of America, the band, and America, the nation. Reliving hits like “Ventura Highway,” “Tin Man,” and of course, “A Horse with No Name” from their 19 studio albums and incomparable live recordings, this book offers readers a new appreciation of what makes some music unforgettable and timeless. As America’s music stays in rhythm with the heartbeats of its millions of fans, new fans feel the draw of a familiar emotion. They’ve felt it before in their hearts and thanks to America, they can now hear it, share it, and sing along.
Download or read book Musical Biographies written by Michal Ben-Horin and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the second half of the twentieth century various routes, including history and literature, are offered in dealing with the catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Historiographies and novels are of course written with words; how can they bear witness to and reverberate with traumatic experience that escapes or resists language? In search for an alternative mode of expression and representation, this volume focuses on postwar German and Austrian writers who made use of music in their exploration of the National Socialist past. Their works invoke, however, new questions: What happens when we cross the line between narration and documentation, and between memory and a musical piece? How does identification and fascination affect our reading of the text? What kind of ethical issues do these testimonies raise? As this volume shows, reading these musical biographies is both troubling and compelling since they ‘fail’ to come to terms with the past. In playing the haunting music that does not let us put the matter to rest, they call into question not only the exclusion of personal stories by official narratives, but also challenge writers’ and readers’ most intimate perspectives on an unmasterable past.
Download or read book Real Frank Zappa Book written by Frank Zappa and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1989 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the career of the rock music performer.
Download or read book Bach written by Peter Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Williams revisits Bach's biography through the lens of his music, revealing the development of the composer's interests and priorities.
Download or read book Asha Bhosle written by Raju Bharatan and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive saga, at once riveting and revelatory – studded with rare nuggets of information and fascinating anecdotes – that sparkingly brings out the life and times of an internationally acclaimed incredibly versatile singer. Asha Bhosle – a Guinness world record holder plus recipient of the Padma Vibhushan and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award – has held one and all spellbound for six decades now. Her voice, both fluid and flexible, has infused neo life into a variety of genres – from the melancholy melody to the rollicking rock-’n’-roll; from the soulful creation to the vibrant disco; from the romantic rhapsody to the rambunctious folk song; from the dainty ghazal to the boisterous qawwali; and from the pathos-filled rendition to the naughty-naugthy seductive number. The author – on the strength of his vast and varied exposure and experience – turns the focus on enthralling behind-the-scenes happenings that shaped the advance of this artiste with a remarkable range and a noteworthy body of work. ‘The world has no time for losers’ has remained Asha’s performing credo. This volume captures Asha Bhosle in her numberless shades. It is about how – in her silken rivalry with elder sister Lata Mangeshkar – she moved with panache from O. P. Nayyar to S. D. Burman to R. D. Burman. It is about how she served a galaxy of composers; about how, in the end, she reached the pinnacle all by herself. Against odds that would have driven any other woman into quitting. No quitter ever, Asha Bhosle, as the supernova supreme, just went on to underline the adage: ‘No power like woman power’. No more can you stay away from this marvel of a musical biography than you can stay away from the matchless musicality of Asha Bhosle. If she is one of a kind, so is this musical masterpiece capturing all the resonances and nuances going with her piquant persona. Here is a long-awaited career study shedding light on the twists and turns marking the starry-eyed world of Hindustani film music.
Download or read book Mozart written by Konrad Küster and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there are many accounts of Mozart's life, and countless descriptions and analyses of his music, this is the first attempt to portray Mozart's creative life as a composer. K ster selects forty works or groups of works covering virtually every important stage in Mozart's career, from the first keyboard works of the young Wunderkind to Mozart's final days and the composition of the Requiem. Each chapter deals with the developments and events in the lives of the Mozarts as associated with or highlighted by a particular work or constellation of works. The bulk of the book--the is concerned with Mozart's life and compositions from his arrival in Vienna in 1781 to his death there some ten years later. Drawing on the tremendous advances in Mozart research over the last thirty years, and the publication of the New Mozart Edition, K ster's book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the creative development of the composer who represents for most musicians and music lovers the highest pinnacle of musical achievement.
