Download or read book Secular Music in Colonial Annapolis written by John B. Talley and published by Urbana : University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Researching Secular Music and Dance in the Early United States written by Laura Lohman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a practical introduction to researching and performing early Anglo-American secular music and dance with attention to their place in society. Supporting growing interest among scholars and performers spanning numerous disciplines, this book contributes quality new scholarship to spur further research on this overshadowed period of American music and dance. Organized in three parts, the chapters offer methodological and interpretative guidance and model varied approaches to contemporary scholarship. The first part introduces important bibliographic tools and models their use in focused examinations of individual objects of material musical culture. The second part illustrates methods of situating dance and its music in early American society as relevant to scholars working in multiple disciplines. The third part examines contemporary performance of early American music and dance from three distinct perspectives ranging from ethnomusicological fieldwork and phenomenology to the theatrical stage. Dedicated to scholar Kate Van Winkle Keller, this volume builds on her legacy of foundational contributions to the study of early American secular music, dance, and society. It provides an essential resource for all those researching and performing music and dance from the revolutionary era through the early nineteenth century.

Download or read book Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era written by John Ogasapian and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-10-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The colonial days of America marked not only the beginnings of a country, but also of a new culture, part of which was the first American music publishers, entrepreneurs, and instrument makers forging musical communities from New England to New Spain. Elements of British, Spanish, German, Scots-Irish, and Native American music all contributed to the many cultures and subcultures of the early nation. While English settlers largely sought to impose their own culture in the new land, the adaptation of native music by Spanish settlers provided an important cultural intersection. The music of the Scots-Irish in the middle colonies planted the seeds of a folk ballad tradition. In New England, the Puritans developed a surprisingly rich—and recreational—musical culture. At the same time, the Regular Singing Movement attempted to reduce the role of the clergy in religious services. More of a cultural examination than a music theory book, this work provides vastly informative narrative chapters on early American music and its role in colonial and Revolutionary culture. Chapter bibliographies, a timeline, and a subject index offer additional resources for readers. The American History through Music series examines the many different types of music prevalent throughout U.S. history, as well as the roles these music types have played in American culture. John Ogasapian's volume on the Colonial and Revolutionary period applies this cultural focus to the music of America's infancy and illuminates the surprisingly complex relationships in music of that time.

Download or read book Bird written by Chuck Haddix and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saxophone virtuoso Charlie "Bird" Parker began playing professionally in his early teens, became a heroin addict at 16, changed the course of music, and then died when only 34 years old. His friend Robert Reisner observed, "Parker, in the brief span of his life, crowded more living into it than any other human being." Like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, he was a transitional composer and improviser who ushered in a new era of jazz by pioneering bebop and influenced subsequent generations of musicians. Meticulously researched and written, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker tells the story of his life, music, and career. This new biography artfully weaves together firsthand accounts from those who knew him with new information about his life and career to create a compelling narrative portrait of a tragic genius. While other books about Parker have focused primarily on his music and recordings, this portrait reveals the troubled man behind the music, illustrating how his addictions and struggles with mental health affected his life and career. He was alternatively generous and miserly; a loving husband and father at home but an incorrigible philanderer on the road; and a chronic addict who lectured younger musicians about the dangers of drugs. Above all he was a musician, who overcame humiliation, disappointment, and a life-threatening car wreck to take wing as Bird, a brilliant improviser and composer. With in-depth research into previously overlooked sources and illustrated with several never-before-seen images, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker corrects much of the misinformation and myth about one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Transforming Women s Education written by Jewel A. Smith and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-01-30 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Female seminaries in nineteenth-century America offered middle-class women the rare privilege of training in music and the liberal arts. A music background in particular provided the foundation for a teaching career, one of the few paths open to women. Jewel A. Smith opens the doors of four female seminaries, revealing a milieu where rigorous training focused on music as an artistic pursuit rather than a social skill. Drawing on previously untapped archives, Smith charts women's musical experiences and training as well as the curricula and instruction available to them, the repertoire they mastered, and the philosophies undergirding their education. She also examines the complex tensions between the ideals of a young democracy and a deeply gendered system of education and professional advancement. An in-depth study of female seminaries as major institutions of learning, Transforming Women's Education illuminates how musical training added to women's lives and how their artistic acumen contributed to American society.

Download or read book George Szell written by Michael Charry and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first full biography of George Szell, one of the greatest orchestra and opera conductors of the twentieth century. From child prodigy pianist and composer to world-renowned conductor, Szell's career spanned seven decades, and he led most of the great orchestras and opera companies of the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the NBC and Chicago Symphonies, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and Opera, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. A protégé of composer-conductor Richard Strauss at the Berlin State Opera, his crowning achievement was his twenty-four-year tenure as musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra, transforming it into one of the world's greatest ensembles, touring triumphantly in the United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, South Korea, and Japan. Michael Charry, a conductor who worked with Szell and interviewed him, his family, and his associates over several decades, draws on this first-hand material and correspondence, orchestra records, reviews, and other archival sources to construct a lively and balanced portrait of Szell's life and work from his birth in 1897 in Budapest to his death in 1970 in Cleveland. Readers will follow Szell from his career in Europe, Great Britain, and Australia to his guest conducting at the New York Philharmonic and his distinguished tenure at the Metropolitan Opera and Cleveland Orchestra. Charry details Szell's personal and musical qualities, his recordings and broadcast concerts, his approach to the great works of the orchestral repertoire, and his famous orchestrational changes and interpretation of the symphonies of Robert Schumann. The book also lists Szell's conducting repertoire and includes a comprehensive discography. In highlighting Szell's legacy as a teacher and mentor as well as his contributions to orchestral and opera history, this biography will be of lasting interest to concert-goers, music lovers, conductors, musicians inspired by Szell's many great performances, and new generations who will come to know those performances through Szell's recorded legacy.

Download or read book Bill Monroe written by Tom Ewing and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-09-07 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From cradle to great, the comprehensive real story of Bill Monroe The Father of Bluegrass Music, Bill Monroe was a major star of the Grand Ole Opry for over fifty years; a member of the Country Music, Songwriters, and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame; and a legendary figure in American music. This authoritative biography sets out to examine his life in careful detail--to move beyond hearsay and sensationalism to explain how and why he accomplished so much. Former Blue Grass Boy and longtime music journalist Tom Ewing draws on hundreds of interviews, his personal relationship with Monroe, and an immense personal archive of materials to separate the truth from longstanding myth. Ewing tells the story of the Monroe family's musical household and Bill's early career in the Monroe Brothers duo. He brings to life Monroe's 1940s heyday with the Classic Bluegrass Band, the renewed fervor for his music sparked by the folk revival of the 1960s, and his declining fortunes in the years that followed. Throughout, Ewing deftly captures Monroe's relationships and the personalities of an ever-shifting roster of band members while shedding light on his business dealings and his pioneering work with Bean Blossom and other music festivals. Filled with a wealth of previously unknown details, Bill Monroe offers even the most devoted fan a deeper understanding of Monroe's towering achievements and timeless music.

Download or read book California Polyphony written by Mina Yang and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be Californian? To find out, Mina Yang delves into multicultural nature of musics in the state that has launched musical and cultural trends for decades. In the early twentieth century, an orientalist fascination with Asian music and culture dominated the popular imagination of white Californians and influenced their interactions with the Asian Other. Several decades later, tensions between the Los Angeles Police Department and the African American community made the thriving jazz and blues nightclub scene of 1940s Central Avenue a target for the LAPD's anti-vice crusade. The musical scores for Hollywood's noir films confirmed reactionary notions of the threat to white female sexuality in the face of black culture and urban corruption while Mexican Americans faced a conflicted assimilation into the white American mainstream. Finally, Korean Americans in the twenty-first century turned to hip-hop to express their cultural and national identities. A compelling journey into the origins of musical identity, California Polyphony explores the intersection of musicology, cultural history, and politics to define Californian.

Download or read book Queer Country written by Shana Goldin-Perschbacher and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Variety Best Music Book of 2022 A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022 A Library Journal Best Arts and Humanities Book of 2022 A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022 A Boot Best Music Book of 2022 A Ticketmaster Best Music Book of 2022 A Happy Magazine Best Music Book of 2022 Though frequently ignored by the music mainstream, queer and transgender country and Americana artists have made essential contributions as musicians, performers, songwriters, and producers. Queer Country blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of these artists and their work. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher delves into the careers of well-known lesbian artists like k.d. lang and Amy Ray and examines the unlikely success of singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, who found fame forty years after releasing the first out gay country album. She also focuses on later figures like nonbinary transgender musician Rae Spoon and renowned drag queen country artist Trixie Mattel; and on recent breakthrough artists like Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah, and chart-topping Grammy-winning phenomenon Lil Nas X. Many of these musicians place gender and sexuality front and center even as it complicates their careers. But their ongoing efforts have widened the circle of country/Americana by cultivating new audiences eager to connect with the artists’ expansive music and personal identities. Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.

Download or read book Ballad Hunting with Max Hunter written by Sarah Nelson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A traveling salesman with little formal education, Max Hunter gravitated to song catching and ballad hunting while on business trips in the Ozarks. Hunter recorded nearly 1600 traditional songs by more than 200 singers from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, all the while focused on preserving the music in its unaltered form. Sarah Jane Nelson chronicles Hunter’s song collecting adventures alongside portraits of the singers and mentors he met along the way. The guitar-strumming Hunter picked up the recording habit to expand his repertoire but almost immediately embraced the role of song preservationist. Being a local allowed Hunter to merge his native Ozark earthiness with sharp observational skills to connect--often more than once--with his singers. Hunter’s own ability to be present added to that sense of connection. Despite his painstaking approach, ballad collecting was also a source of pleasure for Hunter. Ultimately, his dedication to capturing Ozarks song culture in its natural state brought Hunter into contact with people like Vance Randolph, Mary Parler, and non-academic folklorists who shared his values.

Download or read book Flaco s Legacy written by Erin E. Bauer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A combination of button accordion and bajo sexto, conjunto originated in the Texas-Mexico borderlands as a popular dance music and became a powerful form of regional identity. Today, listeners and musicians around the world have embraced the genre and the work of conjunto masters like Flaco Jiménez and Mingo Saldívar. Erin E. Bauer follows conjunto from its local origins through three processes of globalization--migration via media, hybridization, and appropriation--that boosted the music’s reach. As Bauer shows, conjunto’s encounter with globalizing forces raises fundamental questions. What is conjunto stylistically and socioculturally? Does context change how we categorize it? Do we consider the music to be conjunto based on its musical characteristics or due to its performance by Jiménez and other regional players? How do similar local genres like Tejano and norteño relate to ideas of categorization? A rare look at a fascinating musical phenomenon, Flaco’s Legacy reveals how conjunto came to encompass new people, places, and styles.

Download or read book Blue Rhythm Fantasy written by John Wriggle and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind the iconic jazz orchestras, vocalists, and stage productions of the Swing Era lay the talents of popular music's unsung heroes: the arrangers. John Wriggle takes you behind the scenes of New York City's vibrant entertainment industry of the 1930s and 1940s to uncover the lives and work of jazz arrangers, both black and white, who left an indelible mark on American music and culture. Blue Rhythm Fantasy traces the extraordinary career of arranger Chappie Willet--a collaborator of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and many others--to revisit legendary Swing Era venues and performers from Harlem to Times Square. Wriggle's insightful music analyses of big band arranging techniques explore representations of cultural modernism, discourses on art and commercialism, conceptions of race and cultural identity, music industry marketing strategies, and stage entertainment variety genres. Drawing on archives, obscure recordings, untapped sources in the African American press, and interviews with participants, Blue Rhythm Fantasy is a long-overdue study of the arranger during this dynamic era of American music history.

Download or read book Together Let Us Sweetly Live written by Jonathan C. David and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Together Let Us Sweetly Live THE SINGING AND PRAYING BANDS By Jonathan C. David UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Copyright © 2007 the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-252-07419-6 List of Hymn Notations...............................................................................ix Preface..............................................................................................xi Map..................................................................................................xxi Introduction.........................................................................................1 1. Alfred Green (1908-2003)..........................................................................43 2. Mary Allen (b. 1925)..............................................................................59 3. Samuel Jerry Colbert (b. 1950)....................................................................75 4. Gertrude Stanley (b. 1926)........................................................................100 5. Rev. Edward Johnson (1905-91).....................................................................128 6. Cordonsal Walters (b. 1913).......................................................................149 7. Susanna Watkins (1905-99).........................................................................164 8. Benjamin Harrison Beckett (1927-2005) and George Washington Beckett (b. 1929).....................176 9. Gus Bivens (1913-96)..............................................................................197 Sources..............................................................................................209 A Note on the Recording..............................................................................215 Index................................................................................................221 Introduction IN THE EARLY YEARS of the twentieth century, according to the older people of today, many African American residents of tidewater Maryland and Delaware would, in late summer, set aside their tools, leave their cornfields just when the tassels on each stalk turned golden and the tips of each blade changed from green to brown, abandon their tomatoes when a soft blush of red appeared on the hard green fruit, allow, for a time, their beans and sweet potatoes and melons to mature on their own, and make their way by horse and wagon, by car, or by bus to a Methodist camp meeting to attend to their sacred work. Those who had moved to the nearby cities of Baltimore, Wilmington, or Philadelphia in search of the higher wages and the excitement that urban life seemed to offer returned home by land or by water, traveling perhaps on one of the ferries that plied the Chesapeake or Delaware bays from city to town, from shore to shore, and back again. If the camp meeting was nearby, some individuals, families, or groups of unrelated church members might attend nightly services and return home to sleep, to work the next day perhaps, but then steadfastly to make their way right back to that same camp meeting for the next night's service, and the next, until that camp meeting's final, cathartic day. During several of the old-time country camp meetings, however, many would unhitch their horses, arrange all the separate wagons into a circle around a wooden-roofed tabernacle, arch a sheet of canvas over each wagon, and stay right there on the church ground for the duration of the meeting. Women would bring baskets and cheese boxes filled to the brim with fried chicken, home-smoked ham, biscuits, cabbage, and green beans. Men and boys would dig up old pine stumps and pile them high on the campgrounds, to be placed on fire stands and set ablaze to give light to each evening's spectacle. In the heat of the summer, when the ground might be parched and dust might billow-when you couldn't even walk across the ground barefoot, it was so hot-everyone lived in the shade, and "everyone had a good time," as one person recounted later. For two weeks, an intense but relaxed, joyful, communal "laboring in the Spirit" manifested itself in a day-after-day pattern of an exuberant testimony service, followed by a rousing preaching service, followed at last by a climactic, regionally distinct Singing and Praying Band service. During this latter service, in a maneuver that scholars might refer to as a "ring shout," participants formed a circle with a leader in the center; singing and clapping their hands, stamping their feet, and swaying their bodies all the while, they slowly "raised" several hymns and spirituals to a raucous, rejoicing, shouting crescendo, concluding the meeting with an ebullient march around the entire encampment. Although these bands shocked some outsiders and reminded other observers of Africa, committed participants considered them to be the foundation of the church. Camp meetings were not unique to this area or to that time at the dawn of the twentieth century. Drawn by the heady combination of religious salvation and spiritual democracy advocated in these festivals, Americans of various backgrounds had been making such yearly treks to camp meetings for over a hundred years. Those early meetings gave form to a religious movement attuned to the ethos of the new nation. In the frontier areas of Tennessee and Kentucky where they began, camp meetings sponsored by various Protestant denominations became temporary sacred cities, places of equality of souls and social solidarity that tempered the struggle to survive in the wilderness. In the states of the upper South and in Pennsylvania, these meetings also thrived. Here, where the camp meetings were predominantly organized by Methodists, both free and enslaved African Americans participated in large numbers along with English- and German-speaking European Americans. Perhaps because of Methodism's original antislavery witness, in Maryland, for example, this denomination received most of the black converts, while in 1800, approximately one-fifth of the Methodists in Virginia were black. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, white and black people alike frequently attended the same religious services, though often in segregated and unequal seating arrangements. Yet that century witnessed a complex and powerful movement to establish separate religious institutions for black Methodists. First came the effort to set up separate churches for Africans. Eventually the Methodist Episcopal Church organized a separate conference for all black churches within its denomination. A related movement led to the founding of independent, African Methodist denominations. Finally, beginning before Emancipation but accelerating after freedom, a similar but less-remarked effort saw African American Methodists starting camp meetings of their own. In the mid-Atlantic region in particular, these large, outdoor, African American religious events were the meetings that the grandparents and great-grandparents of today's participants built and today's older people witnessed when young. These camp meetings continue even in the twenty-first century. The camp meetings that the old soldiers of today recall were not unique; they were merely one echo of the religious festivals that became a new secular democracy's first religious mass movement. Yet the old-timers of today recall, above all other things, those aspects of their camps that were unique. That is, they speak mostly about the Singing and Praying Bands, for whom the camp meetings in this area became the primary regional showcases; these bands made these meetings special. They tell of the prayer meetings from which the camp meetings originated. They speak also of the march around Jericho, in which the Singing and Praying Bands led those at the camp meeting in a grand march around the entire campground on the final day of the meeting. * * * The Singing and Praying Bands of this area were special not just for the generations of participants in the African American camp meetings of the Atlantic coast states of the upper South. The antecedents of the twentieth-century bands seem to have played a clandestine but significant role in the development of African American culture in general. Therefore, the bands can stake a claim as important forces in the cultural and social history of America as a whole. Here is how it happened. At the end of the eighteenth century, when enslaved Africans in this area began to take to Methodism in a big way, the process of culture building by which Africans of various ethnic backgrounds began to transform themselves into one people was well underway. Yet that process was still incomplete. The new African American identity became consolidated throughout the South only during the first half of the nineteenth century, when hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were traumatically sold from the states of the upper South to cotton-growing areas of the Deep South. In the eighteenth century, prior to this mass transfer of human property, there had been two primary centers of slavery on the Atlantic coast of North America: coastal South Carolina and the Chesapeake Bay area. The ethnic mix of Africans imported into the two areas differed somewhat, leading to the possibility that the emerging African American cultures of these areas might also have differed. Of these two centers, the Chesapeake area had the larger number of slaves. In 1790, of all thirteen states, Virginia had the largest population of Africans, with 305,493 people. Maryland was second, with 111,079. Virginia also had the largest number of enslaved Africans-292,627-while Maryland's enslaved population of 103,036 was third largest. These two states also had the largest population of non-slave Africans at the time. In 1790, nearly 53 percent of the African population and 58 percent of the enslaved Africans in the country were in the upper South, in the states of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. The nearby black populations of southeastern Pennsylvania and southwestern New Jersey had extensive cultural ties to their brethren in the upper South. This area where the upper South meets the mid-Atlantic states seems to have been one of several areas central to the formation of African American culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among the Africans in America of that time, for example, those who lived in the mid-Atlantic region and upper South were pioneers in building specifically black institutions. In 1787, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and others founded a mutual aid organization in Philadelphia called the Free African Society, initiating, in the words of W. E. B. DuBois, "the first wavering step of a people toward organized social life." Numerous other grassroots benevolent and mutual aid organizations sprouted up at this time, aiming to provide members financial assistance in case of sickness or death in the family. Under the leadership of Richard Allen in Philadelphia, a group of black Methodists established the Bethel African Church in that city in 1794. In 1816, Bethel joined ranks with other independent black Methodist churches in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Baltimore to form the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) denomination. In Wilmington, the denomination called the Union Church of Africans was established just prior to the founding of the A.M.E. Church. Along with new institutions, a distinctly African American expressive culture was emerging in the upper South and mid-Atlantic region at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In 1819, for example, a white minister named John Fanning Watson, who lambasted many Methodists for what he saw as excesses in their worship, gave us one of the earliest reports of a specifically black religious song tradition, writing that "the coloured people get together, and sing for hours together, short scraps of disjointed affirmations, pledges, or prayers, lengthened out with long repetition choruses." In the same paragraph, Watson's description of these sacred performances by black worshippers is strikingly evocative of outdoor singing circles that the Singing and Praying Bands continue to this day. This account predates by over twenty-five years the earliest known description of a ring shout from the Atlantic coast area of the Deep South. Another writer, a Quaker schoolboy from Westtown School outside Philadelphia, described black worshippers at an outdoor camp meeting in 1817 marching around an outdoor tabernacle, singing a spiritual chorus and blowing a trumpet, in a reenactment of the march around Jericho by Joshua and the Israelites that is similar to the march that the Singing and Praying Bands continue to do today. If we look at these historical references with minds informed by the bands of today, we can project the current tradition to have been already thriving two hundred years ago, in the early years of the nineteenth century. This nascent African American expressive culture articulated new belief systems that were forming among Africans in this area, also to a certain extent in the context of Protestant evangelism. Africans in America developed a variant of this branch of Protestantism that expressed protonationalist African American identity. According to this theology of resistance, African American Christians began to associate their experience in America with that of the Israelites in Egypt, and the person of Jesus took on some of the qualities of Moses, who would not fail to liberate the enslaved. It was to some extent in the religious meetings of the upper South and in the language of this distinctive African American perspective that Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner situated their rebellions in Virginia. (Continues...) Excerpted from Together Let Us Sweetly Live by Jonathan C. David Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Download or read book Play Like a Man written by Rose Marshack and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a member of Poster Children, Rose Marshack took part in entwined revolutions. Marshack and other women seized a much-elevated profile in music during the indie rock breakthrough while the advent of new digital technologies transformed the recording and marketing of music. Touring in a van, meeting your idols, juggling a programming job with music, keeping control and credibility, the perils of an independent record label (and the greater perils of a major)—Marshack chronicles the band’s day-to-day life and punctuates her account with excerpts from her tour reports and hard-learned lessons on how to rock, program, and teach while female. She also details the ways Poster Children applied punk’s DIY ethos to digital tech as a way to connect with fans via then-new media like pkids listservs, internet radio, and enhanced CDs. An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a Man is the evocative and humorous tale of one woman’s life in the trenches and online.

Download or read book Fritz Reiner Maestro and Martinet written by Kenneth Morgan and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This award-winning book, now available in paperback, is the first solid appraisal of the legendary career of the eminent Hungarian-born conductor Fritz Reiner (1888-1963). Personally enigmatic and often described as difficult to work with, he was nevertheless renowned for the dynamic galvanization of the orchestras he led, a nearly unrivaled technical ability, and high professional standards. Reiner's influence in the United States began in the early 1920s and lasted until his death. Reiner was also deeply committed to serious music in American life, especially through the promotion of new scores. In Fritz Reiner, Maestro and Martinet, Kenneth Morgan paints a very real portrait of a man who was both his own worst enemy and one of the true titans of his profession.

Download or read book Colin McPhee written by Carol J. Oja and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colin McPhee was a performer, writer, and pioneer among Western composers in turning to Asia for inspiration. A close friend of Aaron Copland, Carlos Chavez, Henry Cowell, and Virgil Thomson, he played a vital role in new music activities in New York in the 1920s, but his most important accomplishments came from his devotion to the music of Bali. Carol Oja's Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds traces his life, his influences on fellow musicians, and the profound experience of a composer striving to comprehend an entirely new musical language. After hearing rare recordings of the Balinese gamelan--a percussion orchestra with delicately layered textures and clangorous sounds--McPhee traveled to Bali and worked closely with such Western anthropologists as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. The island may also have appealed to him because of its relatively open attitude toward homosexuality. Gay by inclination, he nevertheless married anthropologist Jane Belo and built a native-style house on the island where they lived for most of the 1930s. During this time, McPhee became a devoted and meticulous chronicler of Balinese musical culture, and his Music of Bali remains a classic in ethnomusicology. Beginning in the mid-1930s, his own compositions became an imaginative hybrid of Balinese and Western music, anticipating the later work of such figures as John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Steve Reich. Finally back in print, Carol Oja's account of McPhee's unconventional life and work evokes key issues in composition and ethnomusicology, sure to be of interest to scholars, musicians or anyone interested in 20th century American or Balinese music.

Download or read book The Bluegrass Reader written by Thomas Goldsmith and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chronological guide to bluegrass music that describes and traces the development of the musical genre.