New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 21st January 2019
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include books on Russian and Chinese opera, the relationship between dance and politics in contemporary Buenos Aires, the impact of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring on music of the twentieth century, how technology influenced avant garde music in Cold War Germany, and changes in audience listening habits from the nineteenth century to the present day.
Opera, Ballet, & Dance
This book illuminates the links between theatrical attire and social customs and aesthetics of China, covering both the theory and practice of stage dress. It includes an introduction to performance style, costume conventions, an analysis of the costumes through their historical precedents and theatrical modifications, and the use of garment shape, colour, and embroidery for symbolic effect.
Available Format: Book
Inna Naroditskaya investigates the musical lives of four female monarchs who ruled Russia for most of the eighteenth century - Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great. Engaging with ethnomusicological, historical, and philological approaches, her study traces the tsarinas' deeply invested interest in musical drama, as each built theatres, established drama schools, commissioned operas and ballets, and themselves wrote and produced musical plays. Naroditskaya examines their creative output, revealing significant connections between their personal creative aspirations and contemporary musical-theatrical practices.
Available Format: Book
Moving Otherwise examines how contemporary dance practices in Buenos Aires enacted politics within climates of political and economic violence from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s. Drawing on archival research based in institutional and private collections, over fifty interviews with dancers and choreographers, and the author's embodied experiences as a collaborator and performer with active groups, the book analyses how diverse practices represent, resist, and remember violence and engender new forms of social mobilisation on and off the theatrical stage.
Available Format: Book
Rock & Pop Artists
The Grateful Dead's 100 Essential Songs examines the band's remarkable musical legacy, delving into 100 songs (plus a few extras) performed by the Dead throughout their career. It includes a playlist of performance and studio recordings, as well as other song analyses and first-hand narratives of hundreds of Dead concerts.
Available Format: Book
The Sex Pistols blew away all that had come before them, setting an entirely new bar for rock acts that followed in their wake. Peter Smith explores the impact the band had on the launching of the punk movement as well as its embodiment of 1970s' disenfranchised youth and tense political climate.
Available Format: Book
Reference & Education
For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. This book traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. Composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, nurturing a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics.
Available Format: Book
This handbook asks whether, how, and why practices of music listening changed as the audience moved from pleasure gardens and concert venues in the eighteenth century to living rooms in the twentieth century, and mobile devices in the twenty-first. Through these questions, it enables a differently-conceived history of listening and offers an agenda for future research.
Available Format: Book
This Too is Music guides and motivates teachers to foster playful and motivating classroom conditions that enable elementary students to thrive as musicians in every way - as singers, improvisers, critical listeners, storytellers, dancers, performers, and composers. Told through anecdotes and illustrated with musical examples, the book explores how all of these aspects of music making are intertwined, quelling any doubts teachers may have regarding their abilities to create an environment where children can improvise, dance, compose, and notate their musical offerings.
Available Format: Book
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