Download or read book The Rest Is Noise written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Download or read book The Way We Listen Now and Other Writings on Music written by Bayan Northcott and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selection from the musical writing of Bayan Northcott, one of the foremost musical critics of our time.
Download or read book Wintering written by Katherine May and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! AS HEARD ON NPR MORNING EDITION AND ON BEING WITH KRISTA TIPPETT “Katherine May opens up exactly what I and so many need to hear but haven't known how to name.” —Krista Tippett, On Being “Every bit as beautiful and healing as the season itself. . . . This is truly a beautiful book.” —Elizabeth Gilbert "Proves that there is grace in letting go, stepping back and giving yourself time to repair in the dark...May is a clear-eyed observer and her language is steady, honest and accurate—capturing the sense, the beauty and the latent power of our resting landscapes." —Wall Street Journal An intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down. Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered. A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May's story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas. Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.
Download or read book Ways of Hearing written by Damon Krukowski and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A writer-musician examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. Our voices carry farther than ever before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? In this book, Damon Krukowski examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. In Ways of Hearing—modeled on Ways of Seeing, John Berger's influential 1972 book on visual culture—Krukowski offers readers a set of tools for critical listening in the digital age. Just as Ways of Seeing began as a BBC television series, Ways of Hearing is based on a six-part podcast produced for the groundbreaking public radio podcast network Radiotopia. Inventive uses of text and design help bring the message beyond the range of earbuds. Each chapter of Ways of Hearing explores a different aspect of listening in the digital age: time, space, love, money, and power. Digital time, for example, is designed for machines. When we trade broadcast for podcast, or analog for digital in the recording studio, we give up the opportunity to perceive time together through our media. On the street, we experience public space privately, as our headphones allow us to avoid “ear contact” with the city. Heard on a cell phone, our loved ones' voices are compressed, stripped of context by digital technology. Music has been dematerialized, no longer an object to be bought and sold. With recommendation algorithms and playlists, digital corporations have created a media universe that adapts to us, eliminating the pleasures of brick-and-mortar browsing. Krukowski lays out a choice: do we want a world enriched by the messiness of noise, or one that strives toward the purity of signal only?
Download or read book BBC Music in the Glock Era and After written by Leo Black and published by Plumbago Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leo Black's memoir not only recalls 'the Glock Era and After' in a series of informative, poignant, witty and judicious vignettes, but is also a key text for understanding one of the great ages of British music.
Download or read book Lipsynching written by Merrie Snell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-01-09 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean when a singing voice is detached from an originating body through recording? And how does this affect consumers of recorded song? This book examines the practice of lipsynching to pre-recorded song in both professional and vernacular contexts, covering over a century of diverse artistic practices from early cinema through to the current popularity of self-produced internet lipsynching videos. It examines the ways in which we listen to, respond to, and use recorded music, not only as a commodity to be consumed but as a culturally-sophisticated and complex means of identification, a site of projection, introjection, and habitation, and, through this, a means of personal and collective creativity.
Download or read book Listen to This written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.
Download or read book The Way We Live Now written by Anthony Trollope and published by . This book was released on 1875 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Every Song Ever written by Ben Ratliff and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is music in the age of the cloud? Today, we can listen to nearly anything, at any time. It is possible to flit instantly across genres and generations, from 1980s Detroit techno to 1890s Viennese neo-romanticism. This new age of listening brings with it astonishing new possibilities--as well as dangers. In Every Song Ever, the veteran New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff reimagines the very idea of music appreciation for our times. In the age of the cloud, the genre of the recording and the intention of the composer matter less and less. Instead, we can savor our own listening experience more directly, taking stock of qualities like repetition, speed, density, or loudness. The result is a new mode of listening that can lead to unexpected connections. When we listen for slowness, we may detect surprising affinities between the drone metal of Sunn O))), the mixtape manipulations of DJ Screw, and the final works of Shostakovich. And if we listen for more elusive qualities like closeness, we might notice how the tight harmonies of bluegrass vocals illuminate the virtuosic synchrony of John Coltrane's quartet. Encompassing the sounds of five continents and several centuries, Ratliff's book is a definitive field guide to our musical habitat, and a foundation for the new aesthetics our age demands.
Download or read book Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo written by John Lithgow and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and lyrical picture book jaunt from actor and author John Lithgow! Oh, children! Remember! Whatever you may do, Never play music right next to the zoo. They’ll burst from their cages, each beast and each bird, Desperate to play all the music they’ve heard. A concert gets out of hand when the animals at the neighboring zoo storm the stage and play the instruments themselves in this hilarious picture book based on one of John Lithgow’s best-loved tunes.
Download or read book Film Music and Beyond written by Hans Keller and published by Plumbago Books and Arts. This book was released on 2006 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1946 and 1959, the most outspoken voice in British film music was that of the Austrian emigre Hans Keller. This work is a collection of writings on film music by the celebrated critic.
Download or read book Music Ways of Listening written by Elliott Schwartz and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Music: Ways of Listening" is intended for use in introductory college courses for students with little or no prior background in music, and is focused upon the development of perceptive listening skills and a broad survey of the Western concert literature. -- From preface.
Download or read book The Way I Heard It written by Mike Rowe and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emmy-award winning gadfly Rowe presents a ridiculously entertaining, seriously fascinating collection of his favorite episodes from America's #1 short-form podcast, The Way I Heard It, along with a host of memories, ruminations, illustrations, and insights.
Download or read book You re Not Listening written by Kate Murphy and published by Celadon Books. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When was the last time you listened to someone, or someone really listened to you? "If you’re like most people, you don’t listen as often or as well as you’d like. There’s no one better qualified than a talented journalist to introduce you to the right mindset and skillset—and this book does it with science and humor." -Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take **Hand picked by Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink for Next Big Ideas Club** "An essential book for our times." -Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone At work, we’re taught to lead the conversation. On social media, we shape our personal narratives. At parties, we talk over one another. So do our politicians. We’re not listening. And no one is listening to us. Despite living in a world where technology allows constant digital communication and opportunities to connect, it seems no one is really listening or even knows how. And it’s making us lonelier, more isolated, and less tolerant than ever before. A listener by trade, New York Times contributor Kate Murphy wanted to know how we got here. In this always illuminating and often humorous deep dive, Murphy explains why we’re not listening, what it’s doing to us, and how we can reverse the trend. She makes accessible the psychology, neuroscience, and sociology of listening while also introducing us to some of the best listeners out there (including a CIA agent, focus group moderator, bartender, radio producer, and top furniture salesman). Equal parts cultural observation, scientific exploration, and rousing call to action that's full of practical advice, You're Not Listening is to listening what Susan Cain's Quiet was to introversion. It’s time to stop talking and start listening.
Download or read book Elliott Carter Studies written by Marguerite Boland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international team of scholars presents historic, philosophic, philological and theoretical perspectives on Carter's extensive musical repertoire.
Download or read book The Scientific Life written by Steven Shapin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who are scientists? What kind of people are they? What capacities and virtues are thought to stand behind their considerable authority? They are experts—indeed, highly respected experts—authorized to describe and interpret the natural world and widely trusted to help transform knowledge into power and profit. But are they morally different from other people? The Scientific Life is historian Steven Shapin’s story about who scientists are, who we think they are, and why our sensibilities about such things matter. Conventional wisdom has long held that scientists are neither better nor worse than anyone else, that personal virtue does not necessarily accompany technical expertise, and that scientific practice is profoundly impersonal. Shapin, however, here shows how the uncertainties attending scientific research make the virtues of individual researchers intrinsic to scientific work. From the early twentieth-century origins of corporate research laboratories to the high-flying scientific entrepreneurship of the present, Shapin argues that the radical uncertainties of much contemporary science have made personal virtues more central to its practice than ever before, and he also reveals how radically novel aspects of late modern science have unexpectedly deep historical roots. His elegantly conceived history of the scientific career and character ultimately encourages us to reconsider the very nature of the technical and moral worlds in which we now live. Building on the insights of Shapin’s last three influential books, featuring an utterly fascinating cast of characters, and brimming with bold and original claims, The Scientific Life is essential reading for anyone wanting to reflect on late modern American culture and how it has been shaped.
Download or read book Walking to Listen written by Andrew Forsthoefel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of one young man’s coming of age on a journey across America--told through the stories of the people of all ages, races, and inclinations he meets along the way. Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us. At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read "Walking to Listen." He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn’t know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide. In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt. But he also encountered incredible kindness from strangers. Thousands shared their stories with him, sometimes confiding their prejudices, too. Often he didn’t know how to respond. How to find unity in diversity? How to stay connected, even as fear works to tear us apart? He listened for answers to these questions, and to the existential questions every human must face, and began to find that the answer might be in listening itself. Ultimately, it’s the stories of others living all along the roads of America that carry this journey and sing out in a hopeful, heartfelt book about how a life is made, and how our nation defines itself on the most human level.
