New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 22nd July 2019
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include two publications discussing the music of Claude Debussy; memoirs from Scottish composer James MacMillan and Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin; a history of electronic music from the 1950s to the present day; a new paperback edition of Theodor Adorno's classic text, Philosophy of New Music; a detailed, exhaustive celebration of the life and work of cultural icon Barbra Streisand; a social history of American musical theatre; and pedagogical guides to teaching piano and jazz.
François Lesure's critical biography of Claude Debussy is widely recognised as the most comprehensive and reliable account of the composer's life and career. Marie Rolf's English translation augments Lesure's numerous notes with several thousand new ones, providing more precise information on crucial and sometimes contentious points. It also reflects Debussy scholarship that has appeared since 2003, updating Lesure's seminal work.
Available Format: Book
Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism
Alexandra Kieffer; Oxford University Press
This book explores the music of Debussy and its early reception in light of the rise of the empirical human sciences in Western Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. Foregrounding the dynamic exchange between sounds and ideas, it reveals how listening to Debussy's music compelled early audiences to re-imagine the most fundamental premises of the European art-music tradition.
Available Format: Book
Evgeny Kissin's musicality and extraordinary virtuosity have earned him worldwide veneration and admiration. He is renowned for his interpretations of Classical and Romantic works, and has appeared with many of the world's great conductors. Newly available in paperback, this book displays the intensity of Kissin's thinking and of his very being.
Available Format: Book
Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of Adorno's Philosophy of New Music was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Despite the controversy, it became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. It is now available in this new paperback edition.
Available Format: Book
What began as the otherworldly sounds of the film score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and the rarefied, new timbres of Stockhausen's Kontakte a few years later, is now a common soundscape. This book explores how the five key electronic technologies - the tape recorder, circuit, computer, microphone and turntable - revolutionised musical thought.
Available Format: Book
German Operetta on Broadway and in the West End, 1900-1940
Derek B. Scott; Cambridge University Press
Academic attention has focused on America's influence on European stage works, and yet dozens of operettas from Austria and Germany were produced on Broadway and in the West End. Derek B. Scott examines the cultural transfer of operetta from the German stage to Britain and the USA, and offers an historical and critical survey of these operettas and their music.
Available Format: Book
Vanessa Cornett offers guidelines to help musicians cultivate artistic vision, objectivity, freedom, quiet awareness, and self-compassion, both on- and off-stage in order to become more resilient performers. Her contemplative techniques provide greater space for artistic self-expression and satisfaction, providing a method to promote focus, self-assessment, emotional awareness, and creativity.
Available Format: Book
This book outlines a new approach for a socio-cultural analysis of classical music, asking how musical institutions, practices, and aesthetics are shaped by wider conditions of economic inequality, and how music might enable and entrench such inequalities or work against them. This approach is put into practice through a detailed ethnography which locates classical music within one of the cultures that produces it - middle-class English youth.
Available Format: Book
Our Musicals, Ourselves - A Social History of the American Musical Theatre
John Bush Jones; University Press of New England
This is the first full-scale social history of American musical theatre from the imported Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas of the late nineteenth century to such recent musicals as The Producers and Urinetown. Musicals are discussed according to their social relevance and the extent to which they engage, directly or metaphorically, with contemporary politics and culture.
Available Format: Book
Teaching Piano Pedagogy: A Guidebook for Training Effective Teachers
Courtney Crappell; Oxford University Press
Providing essential tools to transform students into professional piano teachers, Courtney Crappell helps teachers develop pedagogy course curricula, design and facilitate practicum-teaching experiences, and guide research projects in piano pedagogy. The book investigates course materials and explores unique methods to introduce students to course concepts, helping to put those concepts into practice.
Available Format: Book
Teaching School Jazz: Perspectives, Principles, and Strategies
Mike Titlebaum & Chad West (editors); Oxford University Press
Written by an experienced line-up of jazz educators, Teaching School Jazz is thoroughly grounded in the latest research; chapters are supported by case studies woven into the narrative. The book therefore provides not only a wealth of school jazz teaching strategies but also the perspectives and principles from which they are derived.
Available Format: Book
This critical analysis of Streisand looks past the mainstream show-business figure to deconstruct the revolutionary that she really is. Beginning with a broad outline of her landmark achievements, it also contains a work-by-work analysis of the stage shows, the television shows and concerts, the movies, and the recordings.
Available Format: Book
James Longstaffe - Head of Retail
