New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 4th January 2022
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include a biography of Shostakovich; a companion to Steven Spielberg's critically-acclaimed film version of Leonard Bernstein's musical, West Side Story; a guide to Rossini's opera, The Barber of Seville; studies on the compositions of Clara Schumann and Thomas Adès; a collection of essays exploring the creative worlds of Joseph Joachim; a history of British musical theatre; the collected lyrics of Paul McCartney from 1956 to the present day; biographies of Harry Styles, Led Zeppelin, and Will Smith; and an analysis of Maria Callas's 1954 album of operatic arias with Tullio Serafin and the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Classical Composers & Performers
Dmitri Shostakovich was the most popular Soviet composer of his generation. Internationally esteemed, he is widely considered to have been the last great classical symphonist, and his reputation has continued to increase since his death in 1975. His music became increasingly popular with audiences as he established himself as the most popular composer of serious art music in the middle years of the twentieth century.
Available Format: Book
Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville (Oxford Keynotes)
Hilary Poriss; Oxford University Press; Paperback
This book surveys the opera's fascinating performance history, mapping out the myriad changes that have affected the work since its premiere, exploring many of the personalities responsible for those alterations, and taking into account the range of reactions that these changes have prompted. It closes with a consideration of operatic consumerism from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring the ways that one can now experience The Barber of Seville in all its recorded and commodified glory.
Available Format: Book
Thomas Adès is a dominant force in contemporary music, whose work attracts significant attention and acclaim, and has been performed by many renowned ensembles. This volume offers authoritative accounts of his major compositions from a variety of analytical, critical, cultural and historical perspectives., providing a multi-faceted portrait of Ades's work that opens up new ways of thinking about and engaging with his music.
Available Format: Book
This book brings together a team of leading scholars to reappraise Clara Schumann in three particular respects: first, by delving deeper into her social and musical contexts; secondly, by offering fresh analytical perspectives on her songs and instrumental music; and thirdly, by reconsidering her legacy as a pianist and teacher.
Available Format: Book
The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim
Valerie Woodring Goertzen & Robert Whitehouse Eshbach (editors); Boydell & Brewer; Hardback
Joseph Joachim was one of the most eminent and influential musicians of the nineteenth century. Born in a tiny Jewish community on the Austro-Hungarian border, he rose to a position of unsurpassed prominence in European cultural life. This collection of essays explores important yet little-known aspects of Joachim's life and art.
Available Format: Book
A natural boundary-pusher and musical adventurer, Nigel Kennedy became the best-selling violinist of all time. This book is structured like a musical performance, with 'Interludes', 'Outros' and an 'Encore' separating the regular chapters which cover Nigel's life story, from his humble beginnings to his flourishing career and break-through as a world-class superstar.
Available Format: Book
Using one of Maria Callas's first recital recordings from 1954, this book envisions each aria as a lens to examine various aspects of vocalisation and cultural reception of the feminised voice in both classical and pop culture, from Homer's Sirens to Star Trek. Each chapter explores phenomena unique to the singing voice, including the operatic screaming point, the politics of listening, and the singing simulacrum.
Available Format: Book
Music History
Whether you prefer Baroque or pop, theremins or violins, the music you love and listen to shapes your world. Ranging across time and space, this book takes us on a tour from music's origins in prehistory right up to the twenty-first century. Charting the leaps in technology, thought and practice that led to extraordinary revolutions of music in each age, it takes us through medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy and jazz-era America to reveal the rich history of music we still listen to today.
Available Format: Book
Popular Opera in Eighteenth-Century France: Music and Entertainment before the Revolution
David Charlton; Cambridge University Press; Hardback
This book describes the comedic and musical nature of eighteenth-century popular French opera, considering topics such as Gherardi's theatre, Fair Theatre and the 'musico-dramatic art' created in the mid-eighteenth century. Performance practices, singers, audience experiences and theatre staging are included, as well as a pioneering account of the formation of a core of 'canonical' popular works.
Available Format: Book
Dvořák's Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
Joseph Horowitz; WW Norton & Co; Hardback
In 1893 Antonin Dvořák prophesied a "great and noble" school of American classical music based on the searing "negro melodies" he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would found popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. This book ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations.
Available Format: Book
For 175 years, a Glasgow institution has been teaching the performing arts to students who have become some of the world's most distinguished artists. This celebratory history raises the curtain on the inner life of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Peek into the bustling backstage world of Scotland's national conservatoire, feast your eyes on never-before-seen archival material and bask in dazzling production photography that captures the creative effervescence of its students.
Available Format: Book
British Music, Musicians and Institutions, c. 1630-1800: Essays in Honour of Harry Diack Johnstone
Peter Lynan & Julian Rushton (editors); Boydell & Brewer; Hardback
British music in the era from the death of Henry Purcell to the so-called 'Musical Renaissance' of the late nineteenth century was once considered barren. This view has been overturned in recent years through a better-informed historical perspective, able to recognise that all kinds of British musical institutions continued to flourish, and not only in London. This book builds on this developing picture of the importance of British music, musicians and institutions during the period.
Available Format: Book
Discovering Medieval Song: Latin Poetry and Music in the Conductus
Mark Everist; Cambridge University Press; Paperback
The Conductus repertory is the body of monophonic and polyphonic non-liturgical Latin song that dominated European culture from the middle of the twelfth century to the beginning of the fourteenth. This book demonstrates how the poetry and music interact, exploring how musical structures are created, and discussing the geographical and temporal reach of the genre, including its significance for performance today.
Available Format: Book
Staging Euridice: Theatre, Sets, and Music in Late Renaissance Florence
Tim Carter & Francesca Fantappie; Cambridge University Press; Hardback
Jacopo Peri's Euridice was one of several works commissioned to celebrate the wedding of Maria de' Medici and King Henri IV of France in October 1600. As the first opera to survive complete, it has been viewed as a landmark work. This book explores how newly-discovered documents can be used to precisely reconstruct every aspect of its original stage and sets in the room for which it was intended in the Palazzo Pitti.
Available Format: Book
Musicals & Jazz
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
Pick a Pocket Or Two: A History of British Musical Theatre
Ethan Mordden; Oxford University Press; Hardback
From Gilbert and Sullivan to Andrew Lloyd Webber, from Julie Andrews to Hugh Jackman, from Half a Sixpence to Matilda, this book tells the story of the British musical: where it began and how it developed. Anecdotal and evincing a strong point of view, it covers not only the shows and their authors but the personalities as well. from W. S. Gilbert trying out his stagings on a toy theatre to Ivor Novello going to jail for abusing wartime gas rationing during World War II.
Available Format: Book
The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire (Second 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
Popular Music
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
From Liverpool to Beatlemania, the impact of The Beatles exploded during their heyday, and has endured in the decades following their disbandment. This volume, now available in paperback, brings together key themes in which to better explore their lives and work and understand their cultural legacy, focusing on the people and places central to their careers, the visual media that contributed to their continuing success, and the culture and politics of their time.
Available Format: Book
From the opening notes of their first album, Led Zeppelin announced itself as something different, a collision of grand artistic ambition and brute primal force, of delicate English folk music and hard-driving African-American blues. This account of the melding of Page and Jones, the virtuosic London sophisticates, with Plant and Bonham, the wild men from the Midlands, into a band out of the ashes of the Yardbirds, in a scene dominated by the Beatles and the Stones but changing fast, is a revelation.
Available Format: Book
For many people, the words "evangelical worship" will bring a picture to mind: a mass of worshippers with eyes closed, faces tilted upward, and hands raised to the sky. Yet despite the centrality of this image, many scholars have underestimated evangelical worship as little more than a manipulative effort to arouse devotional exhilaration. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in seven congregations, this book weaves together insights from American religious history and liturgical studies to bring contemporary evangelical worship to life.
Available Format: Book
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