Download or read book The Joni Mitchell Companion written by Stacey Luftig and published by Schirmer Trade Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past 30 years, Joni Mitchell has been a world-famous singer/guitar player/writer, known primarily for the poetic lyrics of her folks songs, particularly the classic "Both Sides Now, " made famous by Judy Collins in 1968. Today, her songs have begun to reappear in the work a wide range of artists, from a Janet Jackson remix to the nouveau folk of Lilith Fair. Her own career has continued to grow and expand, with a new record in 1998 and renewed interest in her music.
Download or read book Reckless Daughter written by David Yaffe and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "She was like a storm." —Leonard Cohen Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country. A Canadian prairie girl, a free-spirited artist, Mitchell never wanted to be a pop star. She was nothing more than “a painter derailed by circumstances,” she would explain. And yet, she went on to become a talented self-taught musician and a brilliant bandleader, releasing album after album, each distinctly experimental, challenging, and revealing. Her lyrics captivated listeners with their perceptive language and naked emotion, born out of Mitchell’s life, loves, complaints, and prophecies. As an artist whose work deftly balances narrative and musical complexity, she has been admired by such legendary lyricists as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and beloved by such groundbreaking jazz musicians as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. Her hits—from “Big Yellow Taxi” to “Both Sides, Now” to “A Case of You”—endure as timeless favorites, and her influence on the generations of singer-songwriters who would follow her, from her devoted fan Prince to Björk, is undeniable. In this intimate biography, drawing on dozens of unprecedented in-person interviews with Mitchell, her childhood friends, and a cast of famous characters, Yaffe reveals the backstory behind the famous songs—from Mitchell’s youth in Canada, her bout with polio at age nine, and her early marriage and the child she gave up for adoption, through the love affairs that inspired masterpieces, and up to the present—and shows us why Mitchell has so enthralled her listeners, her lovers, and her friends. Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Singer Songwriter written by Katherine Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most often associated with modern artists such as Bob Dylan, Elton John, Don McLean, Neil Diamond, and Carole King, the singer-songwriter tradition in fact has a long and complex history dating back to the medieval troubadour and earlier. This Companion explains the historical contexts, musical analyses, and theoretical frameworks of the singer-songwriter tradition. Divided into five parts, the book explores the tradition in the context of issues including authenticity, gender, queer studies, musical analysis, and performance. The contributors reveal how the tradition has been expressed around the world and throughout its history to the present day. Essential reading for enthusiasts, practitioners, students, and scholars, this book features case studies of a wide range of both well and lesser-known singer-songwriters, from Thomas d'Urfey through to Carole King and Kanye West.
Download or read book Morning Glory on the Vine written by Joni Mitchell and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2019 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gorgeous compendium of Joni Mitchell's handwritten lyrics and drawings, originally handcrafted as a gift for a select group of friends in 1971 and now available to the public for the first time In 1971, as her album Blue topped charts around the world, Joni Mitchell crafted one hundred copies of Morning Glory on the Vine as a holiday gift for her closest friends. For this stunningly beautiful book, Joni hand-wrote an exquisite selection of her own lyrics and poems and illustrated them with more than thirty of her original pictures. Handcrafted, signed, and numbered in Los Angeles, the existing copies of this labor of love have rarely been seen in the past half-century. Now, during Joni's seventy-fifth birthday year, Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs and Drawings will be widely available for the first time. In this faithfully reproduced edition, Joni's best-loved lyrics and poems spill across the pages in her own elegant script. The lively, full-color drawings depict a superb array of landscapes, still lifes, portraits of friends, self-portraits, innovative abstractions, and more. All the artwork from the original book is included, along with several additional pictures that Joni drew of her friends from the same period. Finally, the refreshed volume features an original introduction written by Joni. Morning Glory on the Vine is a gorgeous and intimate keepsake and an invitation to explore anew the dazzling, visionary world of Joni Mitchell.
Download or read book The Music of Joni Mitchell written by Lloyd Whitesell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career. Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. The Music of Joni Mitchell offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony, melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative license, and spiritual liberation. Previous accounts of Mitchell's songwriting have tended to favor her poetic vision, expansive verse structures, and riveting vocal delivery. Whitesell fills out this account with special attention to musical technique, showing how such traits as complex or conflicting sonorities, dualities of harmonic mode, dialectical tensions of texture and register, intricately layered instrumental figuration, and a variable vocal persona are all essential to her distinctive identity as a songwriter. The Music of Joni Mitchell develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to Mitchell's songs, in order to demonstrate the extent of her technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field.
Download or read book The Music of Joni Mitchell written by Associate Professor Music History Lloyd Whitesell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study of the style and structure of her songs, analysing her technique, poetic nuances and cultural references.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Singer Songwriter written by Katherine Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion explores the historical and theoretical contexts of the singer-songwriter tradition, and includes case studies of singer-songwriters from Thomas d'Urfey through to Kanye West.
Download or read book Joni Mitchell written by Ruth Charnock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings recognizes the importance and innovativeness of the musician and artist Joni Mitchell and the need for a collection that theorizes her work as musician, composer, cultural commentator and antagonist. It showcases pieces by established and early career academics from the fields of popular music and literary studies on subjects such as Mitchell's guitar technique, the politics of aging in her work, and her fractious relationship with feminism. The collection features close readings of specific songs, albums, and performances while also paying keen attention to Mitchell's wider cultural contributions and significance.
Download or read book Elvis Costello Joni Mitchell and the Torch Song Tradition written by Larry David Smith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-04-30 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The torch song has long been a vehicle for expression—perhaps American song's most sheerly visceral one. Two artists in particular have built upon this tradition to express their own unique outlooks on their lives and the world around them. Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello, and the Torch Song Tradition combines biographical material, artist commentary, critical interpretation, and selected exemplars of the writers' work to reveal the power of authorship and the creative drive necessary to negotiate an artistic vision in the complicated mechanisms of the commercial music industry. Author Larry David Smith, as in his Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and American Song, considers the complicated intersection of biography, creative philosophy, artistic imperative, and stylistic tendencies in the work of both Joni Mitchell and Elvis Costello—two songwriters with seemingly nothing in common, one famously confessional and one famously confrontational. Yet, as Smith shows so incisively, they are two personalities that prove fascinatingly complementary. Mitchell and Costello both yielded bodies of work that are cohesive, coherent, and rich in meaning. Both have made historic contributions to the singer-songwriter model, two rebellious respones to the creative and commercial compromises associated with their chosen field, and two distinct thematic responses to the torch song tradition. Smith examines these responses, offering a unique and invaluable exploration of the craft of two of the last century's most towering musical figures.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music since 1900 written by Laura Hamer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of women's work in classical and popular music since 1900 as performers, composers, educators and music technologists.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music since 1900 written by Laura Hamer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Rock Star written by David R. Shumway and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature and meaning of rock stardom—celebrities who embody the most important social and cultural conflicts of their era. "All stars are celebrities, but not all celebrities are stars," states David Shumway in the introduction to Rock Star, an informal history of rock stardom. This deceptively simple statement belies the complex definition and meaning of stardom and more specifically of rock icons. Shumway looks at the careers and cultural legacies of seven rock stars in the context of popular music and culture—Elvis Presley, James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen. Granted, there are many more names that fall into the rock icon category and that might rightfully appear on this list. Partly, that is the point: "rock star" is a familiar and desired category but also a contested one. Shumway investigates the rock star as a particular kind of cultural construction, different from mere celebrity. After the golden age of moviemaking, media exposure allowed rock stars more political sway than Hollywood's studio stars, and rock stars gradually replaced movie stars as key cultural heroes. Because of changes in American society and the media industries, rock stars have become much more explicitly political figures than were the stars of Hollywood’s studio era. Rock stars, moreover, are icons of change, though not always progressive, whose public personas read like texts produced collaboratively by the performers themselves, their managers, and record companies. These stars thrive in a variety of media, including recorded music, concert performance, dress, staging, cover art, films, television, video, print, and others. Filled with memorable photographs, Rock Star will appeal to anyone interested in modern American popular culture or music history.
Download or read book The Songs of Joni Mitchell written by Anne Karppinen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unorthodox musician from the start, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell's style of composing, performing, and of playing (and tuning) the guitar is unique. In the framework of sexual difference and the gendered discourses of rock this immediately begs the questions: are Mitchell's songs specifically feminine and, if so, to what extent and why? Anne Karppinen addresses this question focusing on the kind of music and lyrics Mitchell writes, the representation of men and women in her lyrics, how her style changes and evolves over time, and how cultural context affects her writing. Linked to this are the concepts of subjectivity and authorship: when a singer-songwriter sings a song in the first person, about whom are they actually singing? Mitchell offers a fascinating study, for the songs she writes and sings are intricately woven from the strands of her own life. Using methods from critical discourse analysis, this book examines recorded performances of songs from Mitchell's first nine studio albums, and the contemporary reviews of these albums in Anglo-American rock magazines. In one of the only books to discuss Mitchell's recorded performances, with a focus that extends beyond the seminal album Blue, Karppinen explores the craft of Mitchell's songwriting and her own attitudes towards it, as well as the dynamics and politics of rock criticism in the 1960s and 1970s more generally.
Download or read book A Companion to Creative Writing written by Graeme Harper and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO CREATIVE WRITING A Companion to Creative Writing is a comprehensive collection covering myriad aspects of the practice and profession of creative writing in the contemporary world. The book features contributions from an international cast of creative writers, publishers and editors, critics, translators, literary prize judges, and many other top professionals. Chapters not only consider the practice of creative writing in terms of how it is “done,” but also in terms of what occurs in and around creative writing practice. Chapters address a wide range of topics including the writing of poetry and fiction; playwriting and screenwriting; writing for digital media; editing; creative writing and its engagement with language, spirituality, politics, education, and heritage. Other chapters explore the role of literary critics and ideas around authorship, as well as translation and creative writing, the teaching of creative writing, and the histories and character of the marketplace, prizes, awards, and literary events. With its unprecedented breadth of coverage, A Companion to Creative Writing is an indispensable resource for those who are undertaking creative writing, studying creative writing at any level, or considering studying creative writing.
Download or read book Lit Rock written by Ryan Hibbett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-08-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as soon as it had got rolling, rock music had a problem: it wanted to be art. A mere four years separate the Beatles as mere kiddy culture from the artful geniuses of Sergeant Pepper's, meaning the very same band who represents the mass-consumed, "mindless" music of adolescents simultaneously enjoys status as among the best that Western culture has to offer. The story of rock music, it turns out, is less that of a contagious popular form situated in opposition to high art, but, rather, a story of high and low in dialogue--messy and contentious, to be sure, but also mutually obligated to account for, if not appropriate, one another. The chapters in this book track the uses of literature, specifically, within this relation, helping to showcase collectively its fundamental role in the emergence of the "pop omnivore."
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical written by Jessica Sternfeld and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-16 with total page 763 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical’s evolving relationship to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the past decade-and-a-half, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines and specializations have been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. Musicals have served not only to mirror the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural tenor of the times, but have helped shape and influence it, in America and across the globe: a genre that may seem, at first glance, light-hearted and escapist serves also as a bold commentary on society. Forty-four essays examine the contemporary musical as an ever-shifting product of an ever-changing culture. This volume sheds new light on the American musical as a thriving, contemporary performing arts genre, one that could have died out in the post-Tin Pan Alley era but instead has managed to remain culturally viable and influential, in part by newly embracing a series of complex contradictions. At present, the American musical is a live, localized, old-fashioned genre that has simultaneously developed into an increasingly globalized, tech-savvy, intensely mediated mass entertainment form. Similarly, as it has become increasingly international in its scope and appeal, the stage musical has also become more firmly rooted to Broadway—the idea, if not the place—and thus branded as a quintessentially American entertainment.
Download or read book A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story written by David Malcolm and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-01-30 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story provides a comprehensive treatment of short fiction writing and chronicles its development in Britain and Ireland from 1880 to the present. Provides a comprehensive treatment of the short story in Britain and Ireland as it developed over the period 1880 to the present Includes essays on topics and genres, as well as on individual texts and authors Comprises chapters on women’s writing, Irish fiction, gay and lesbian writing, and short fiction by immigrants to Britain
