New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 13th July 2020
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include books on the music of Poulenc, Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Georges Auric, Beethoven, and John Cage; an assessment of the legacy of Bach's music; thoughts on listening to music by conductor John Mauceri; an examination of the thirteenth-century manuscript, Codex Buranus; an analysis of chromatic harmony and desire; a handbook of yoga as an aid to teaching music; a study of the compositions of jazz musician, Charlie Parker; books on Latin jazz and Latin-American music; the story of Chinese music around the turn of the nineteenth century; and an investigation into the rebirth and resurgence of vinyl in recent years.
Classical Composers & Performers
Francis Poulenc is widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's most significant masters of vocal music. This seminal biography shows that it is in his songs that we discover the composer's essential artistic being. With song translations by Jeremy Sams and the insight that comes from a lifetime of performing this music, Graham Johnson provides an essential volume for anyone interested in Poulenc's artistic milieu.
Available Format: Book
Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, this book sets a fresh and exciting tone for research on the composer. Opening new ways of understanding Mendelssohn, the contributing scholars pay particular attention to Mendelssohn's views on the relationship between art and religion, analysis of his instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously-neglected contribution to German song.
Available Format: Book
Bach's Legacy: The Music as Heard by Later Masters
Russell Stinson; Oxford University Press; Hardback
Johann Sebastian Bach's legacy is undeniably one of the richest in music, with a vast influence that has only grown since his rediscovery in the early nineteenth century. This study examines how four of the greatest composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, and Elgar - engaged with Bach's legacy, not only as composers, but also as performers, conductors, and scholars.
Available Format: Book
Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto (Oxford Keynotes)
Tina Ramnarine; Oxford University Press; Paperback
This book investigates the history and legacy of one of the most recorded concertos in the violin repertoire. Considering how violinists engage with the work, it discusses technology's central role in the concerto's transmission from Jascha Heifetz's seminal 1935 recording to contemporary online performances, gender issues in violin solo careers, and nature-based musical aesthetics that lead to thinking about the ecology of virtuosity in an era of environmental crisis.
Available Format: Book
Georges Auric wrote well over 100 film scores, and was notably affiliated with Les Six, a group of French composers reacting to the musical establishment of the 1920s. But his life and work spanned far beyond this limited sphere. Drawing from three dozen untapped archives, including the private archives of Auric's widow, this first English-language biography rethinks the conventional ideas of what it means to be a composer.
Available Format: Book
Imagined as an extended mushroom-foraging expedition, this book gathers together John Cage's mushroom-themed compositions, photographs, illustrations and ephemera. Readers are drawn through the landscape of Cage's mycologically-centred oeuvre and interests, discovering assorted works, images, compositions, philosophies and ephemera, as one might encounter assorted fungi and flora while foraging.
Available Format: Book
This is a collection of ten chapters that approach Beethoven and his music from a range of critical standpoints: aesthetic, analytical, biographical, historical, and performance. Alongside essays that offer new information on Beethoven's compositional practice and broaden understanding of the music's contemporary and posthumous appeal, there are essays on his interaction with specific environments, Bonn and post-Napoleonic Austria, and vocal and piano performance practice.
Available Format: Book
The Encyclopedia of Music: A guide to the greatest composers and the instruments of the orchestra
Max Wade-Matthews & Wendy Thompson; Lorenz Books; Hardback
This beautifully-illustrated reference book is a guide to the history of music, instruments of the orchestra and the most influential classical composers. All sections of the orchestra are covered, as well as historical, rare and non-Western instruments. An authoritative guide to over 100 of the most famous classic composers then follows.
Available Format: Book
Revisiting the Codex Buranus - Contents, Contexts, Composition
Tristan E. Franklinos & Henry Hope (editors); Boydell & Brewer; Hardback
The Codex Buranus, compiled in the first half of the thirteenth century, has fascinated modern scholars ever since its rediscovery in 1803. Its diverse range of texts (some famously featuring in Orff's Carmina Burana) and music gives testimony to the vibrant milieu in which it was compiled. These essays enable the less well-known aspects of the Codex to receive greater scrutiny, and bring new perspectives on the more familiar parts of the manuscript.
Available Format: Book
This new edition offers students a manageable introduction to the forces that shaped music. Combining concision with the imaginative pedagogy that her text pioneered, Barbara Hanning focuses on an essential repertoire of 109 characteristic works from the Middle Ages to the present, providing students with the cultural and historical context to illuminate the music and remember its significance.
Available Format: Book
Music Theory & Education
Desire in Chromatic Harmony: A Psychodynamic Exploration of Fin de Siecle Tonality
Kenneth M. Smith; Oxford University Press; Hardback
This book analyses works from the turn of the twentieth century to yield a new theory of how chromatic chord progressions direct the listener on intricate journeys through harmonic space, using examples from philosophically-engaged composers such as Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin, Josef Suk, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland.
Available Format: Book
Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practices
Paola Crespi & Sunil Manghani (editors); Edinburgh University Press; Hardback
Twelve new essays from a range of specialists that define, contextualise and challenge the concepts of rhythm and rhythm analysis. The collection begins with a genealogy of rhythm as it occurs through critical theory literatures of the twentieth century, enabling the reader to situate philosophical and contemporary readings that further define rhythm as a critical term and mode of analysis.
Available Format: Book
The Art of Becoming: How Group Improvisation Works
Raymond MacDonald & Graeme Wilson; Oxford University Press; Paperback
Drawing on emerging psychological literature as well as research with musicians, this book proposes new ideas on what defines improvisation in music, exploring the cognitive processes involved, the role of specialist skills or knowledge in improvised interaction, and the nature of understanding between improvisers. The investigation lays out how we develop as improvisers, alongside health benefits derived from music participation.
Available Format: Book
Teaching Music Theory: New Voices and Approaches
Jennifer Snodgrass; Oxford University Press; Paperback
In recent years, music theory educators have developed new and innovative teaching approaches, reintroducing a sense of purpose into their classrooms. This book, based on three years of field study spanning seventeen states, highlights real-life teaching approaches from effective instructors from a wide range of institutions, emphasising the importance of a diverse, progressive, and inclusive teaching environment.
Available Format: Book
This book brings the practice of yoga to music teachers and students, enabling teachers to help their students concentrate, listen more attentively, relax, and play their best - whether before a performance or just during lessons - all through the practice of yoga. Step-by-step illustrations of practical stretches and useful poses guide the teacher to the practices that suit their individual needs and those of their students.
Available Format: Book
Jazz, World, & Popular Music
As a brilliant improviser and founding father of bebop, Charlie Parker has secured a reputation and legacy second to none since his birth nearly 100 years ago. Because of his excellence as an improviser, however, his compositions have taken a back seat. This volume rebalances our understanding of Parker by spotlighting his significance as a jazz composer, critically analysing Parker's compositions and situating them within both his individual musicianship and early bebop style.
Available Format: Book
Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, this book corrects the record, providing an historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.
Available Format: Book
Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film
Kevin Whitehead; Oxford University Press; Hardback
Jazz stories have been entwined with cinema since the 1920s, giving us origin tales and biopics, spectacles and low-budget quickies, comedies, musicals, and dramas, and stories of composers at work. Spanning 93 years of film history, this book looks closely at movies, cartoons, and TV shows that tell jazz stories, from early talkies to modern times, with an eye to narrative conventions and common story points.
Available Format: Book
The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History
Pablo Palomino; Oxford University Press; Paperback
The ethnically and geographically heterogeneous countries that comprise Latin America have each produced music in unique styles and genres - but how and why have these disparate musical streams come to fall under the single category of "Latin American music"? Reconstructing how this category came to be, author Pablo Palomino tells the dynamic history of the modernisation of musical practices in Latin America.
Available Format: Book
Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770-1839
Thomas Irvine; University of Chicago Press; Hardback
From bell-ringing to fireworks, gongs to cannon salutes, a dazzling variety of sounds and soundscapes marked the China encountered by the West around 1800. These sounds were gathered by diplomats, trade officials, missionaries, and other travelers and transmitted back to Europe. This book gathers these stories and explores how the sonic encounter with China shaped perceptions of Europe's own musical development.
Available Format: Book
Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age
Dominik Bartmanski & Ian Woodward; Bloomsbury; Paperback
Recent years have seen a rebirth of the analogue record. More than merely a nostalgic craze, vinyl has become a cultural icon. As music consumption migrated to digital and online, this seemingly obsolete medium became the fastest-growing format in music sales. Presenting vinyl as a multifaceted cultural object, this book investigates the reasons behind its persistence within our technologically accelerated culture.
Available Format: Book
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