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Christmas Gift Ideas - Books on Music History & Genres
We have selected some books published this year on such diverse topics as jazz and popular music, musicals, and the history of music. Ranging from a definitive collection of Paul McCartney's lyrics, a collaboration between Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, books on piano manufacturers Fazioli and Erard, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Steven Spielberg's new film of Bernstein's classic musical, West Side Story, hopefully you will find the perfect present for music-loving family members and friends!
Jazz, Popular, & World Music
The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire (2nd Edition)
Ted Gioia; Oxford University Press; Hardback
This compendium is an essential, comprehensive guide to some of the most important jazz compositions, telling the story of more than 250 key jazz songs and providing a listening guide to more than 2,000 recordings. This updated edition features fifteen additional selections, hundreds of additional recommended tracks, and enhancements and additions on almost every page.
Available Format: Book
Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History
Kimberly Hannon Teal; University of California Press; Paperback
The social connotation of jazz in American popular culture has shifted dramatically since its emergence in the early twentieth century. Once considered youthful and even rebellious, jazz music is now a firmly established American artistic tradition. As jazz in American life has shifted, so too has the kind of venue in which it is performed. This volume traces the history of jazz performance from private jazz clubs to public, high-art venues often associated with charitable institutions.
Available Format: Book
Acclaimed by jazz critics and fans alike, this magnificent work is now available in an up-to-date third edition that covers the latest developments in the jazz world. From Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Miles Davis's legendary 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, and Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality to current innovators such as Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding, the book takes readers on a sweeping journey through the history of jazz.
Available Format: Book
In this BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, Jackie Kay brings to life the tempestuous story of arguably the greatest blues singer who ever lived. Smith's life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of 'bathtub gin', got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. This remarkable book mixes biography, fiction, poetry, and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life.
Available Format: Book
Paul McCartney recounts his life and art through the prism of 154 songs from all stages of his career - from his earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo albums to the present. Arranged alphabetically, it establishes definitive texts of the lyrics and describes the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what he thinks of them now.
Available Format: Book
Bob Dylan has helped transform music, literature, and even politics. This book chronicles a lifetime of creative invention that has made a global impact. Leading rock and pop critics and music scholars address themes and topics central to Dylan's life and work: the blues, his religious faith, civil rights, gender, race, and American and World literature, incorporating a rich array of new material from never-before-accessed archives.
Available Format: Book
Two long-time friends share an intimate conversation about life, music and their enduring love of America in this stunningly-produced expansion of their ground-breaking Higher Ground podcast. Featuring more than 350 photographs and never-before-seen archival material, this candid and entertaining dialogue between President Barack Obama and legendary musician Bruce Springsteen explores everything from their origins and career-defining moments to their country's polarised politics and the growing distance between the American Dream and the American reality.
Available Format: Book
For this first biography of Ravi Shankar, now available in paperback, Oliver Craske carried out more than 130 new interviews and enjoyed unprecedented access to the Shankar family archives. The book paints a vivid picture of the public and private faces of a captivating, restless workaholic who lived an intense and extraordinary life across ninety-two years. Throughout, this biography seeks to answer the question of what impelled Ravi Shankar on an unending creative and emotional quest.
Available Format: Book
Music History
Why do we make music? Which instruments make up an orchestra? How does music affect our emotions? These are just some of the fascinating questions addressed in this book, which takes children on a musical journey around the world. Readers will meet along the way a diverse cast of composers, musicians and performers who all make music in a variety of different genres, from Bach to Billie Eilish, Mozart to Miriam Makeba.
Available Format: Book
The Life of Music: New Adventures in the Western Classical Tradition
Nicholas Kenyon; Yale University Press; Hardback
This book explores the enduring appeal of the classical canon. Taking us from pianist Myra Hess's performance in London during the Blitz, to John Adams's composition after New York's 9/11 attacks, to Italian opera singers performing from their balconies amidst the 2020 pandemic, it shows that no matter how great the crisis, music has the power to bring us together.
Available Format: Book
This book presents a new theory of how to write music history. In revisiting the philosophy of Alain Badiou it proposes a focus on the subjects of history, the 'faithful', 'reactive, and 'obscure' responses to an 'Event', seeing musical materials (the styles, techniques, and musical 'language' handed down to composers by history) in a dialectical relationship with the human beings who are music's manifold historical actors.
Available Format: Book
Motets constitute the most important polyphonic genre of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This volume aims to provide a comprehensive guide to them, addressing matters such as how the motet developed; the rich interplay of musical, poetic, and intertextual modes of meaning specific to the genre; and the changing social and historical circumstances surrounding motets in medieval France, England, and Italy.
Available Format: Book
With a foreword by Alexander Armstrong, this puzzle book will test your musical knowledge to the very core, with a fiendishly difficult puzzle to challenge you every single day of the year. From quizzes to word searches, logic tests to missing symbols - via emojis, sudoku, crosswords and more - this is a compendium of puzzles to keep you guessing the whole year round.
Available Format: Book
Choral, Opera, & Musicals
This is a loving chronicle of the years of effort that went into bringing a beloved story back to the screen for a new generation in Steven Spielberg's first musical film. Author Laurent Bouzereau was embedded with the cast and crew and conducted original interviews with Spielberg, screenwriter Tony Kushner, Tony Award-winning choreographer Justin Peck, and the cast of Sharks and Jets, among many others, to bring together a first-hand oral history documenting every stage of the film's production.
Available Format: Book
From Show Boat and The Wizard of Oz to Les Miserables and Hamilton, this beautifully-illustrated book covers the complete history of the genre. Discover the history, plots, and stars of musical theatre and movie musicals, go backstage to find out more about choreography and set and costume design, and delve into profiles of successful creators such as Andrew Lloyd Webber in this illustrated celebration.
Available Format: Book
With The Sixteen, Harry Christophers has nurtured a choir of exceptional calibre, establishing a business model that includes a record label and extensive tours to capacity audiences, mining a rich variety of repertoire, and combining enormous popularity with the stamp of approval from experts. This collection of conversations, now available in paperback, will appeal to anyone interested in the sound of the human voice.
Available Format: Book
Vocal Virtuosity: The Origins of the Coloratura Soprano in Nineteenth-Century Opera
Sean M. Parr; Oxford University Press; Hardback
Agile, rapid-fire coloratura singing was originally essential for all singers, but its function changed greatly when it became the speciality of particular sopranos over the course of the nineteenth century. This book reveals the instigators of this change in vocal practice and examines the historical traces of Parisian singers who were the period's greatest exponents of vertiginous vocality as archetypes of the modern coloratura soprano.
Available Format: Book
Instruments
Sebastien Erard's inventions have had an enormous impact on instruments and musical life and are still at the foundation of piano building today. Drawing on an unusually rich set of archives from both the Erard firm and the Erard family, this book shows how the Erard piano played an important and often leading role in the history of the instrument, beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing into the final decades of the nineteenth.
Available Format: Book
This book tells the tale of a company that has been producing grand and concert pianos since it was founded by Paolo Fazioli in 1981. Its history has been characterised by a crescendo of successes, from the first international exhibitions to acquisition by major global retailers, from sales at the world's most prestigious theatres to close collaborations with famous artists who have exclusively requested Fazioli pianos for their concerts.
Available Format: Book
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