New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 4th April 2022
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include 100 things for children to know about music; an examination of subjectivity in the music of Schumann; a study of Morton Feldman's associations with artists such as John Cage and Jackson Pollock; the importance of wood in the art of making string instruments; the relationship between music and the body in late medieval England; a handbook regarding the perception of time in music; an exploration of music and urban life in baroque Germany; an analysis of the Golden Age musicals of Darryl F. Zanuck; a musical journey through modern Black Britain; and a collection of essays on the albums that helped to shape the lives of fifty authors.
Which tunes could save a life, and which should come with a health warning? How do talking drums tell the history of Africa? What happens in your brain when you listen to music? Find the answers to these questions and more in this exciting book exploring all corners of the diverse world of music.
Available Format: Book
The concept of subjectivity is one of the most popular in recent scholarly accounts of music; it is also one of the obscurest and most ill-defined. This book offers a critical examination of the notion of musical subjectivity and the first extended account of its applicability to one of the composers with whom it is most closely associated. Adopting a fluid and multivalent approach, it seeks to provide a critical refinement of this idea and to elucidate both its importance and limits.
Available Format: Book
Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde
Ryan Dohoney; Bloomsbury; Paperback
This book offers a study of composer Morton Feldman's associations and friendships with artists like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Moorman, and others. Arguing that friendship and mourning sustained the collective aesthetics of the New York School, it provides an emotional and intimate revision of New York modernism from the point of view of Feldman's agonistic community.
Available Format: Book
Masters of Tonewood: The Hidden Art of Fine Stringed-Instrument Making
Jeffrey Greene; University of Virginia Press; Hardback
The wood used by master craftsmen to create many of the world's legendary stringed instruments comes from seven European forests. This book delves into those woodlands to show how the finest instruments not only contribute to great musical art but are works of art in themselves. Furthermore, it recounts the experiences of tonewood millers, luthiers, and musicians, and discusses their concerns about environmental issues in a tradition dependent on ancient woodlands in a modern world.
Available Format: Book
Sonic Bodies: Text, Music, and Silence in Late Medieval England
Tekla Bude; University of Pennsylvania Press; Hardback
This book starts from the simple premise that music requires a body to perform it in order to rethink the relationship between music, matter, and the body in the late medieval period. Progressing by way of a series of case studies of texts by Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Margery Kempe, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and others, it argues that writers thought of "music" and "the body" not as separate objects or ontologically prior categories, but as mutually dependent and historically determined processes that called each other into being in complex and shifting ways.
Available Format: Book
Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain
Sarah Collins; Cambridge University Press; Paperback
In the aftermath of World War I, a sense of impasse and thwarted promise shaped the political and cultural spheres in Britain. Uncovering the work of composer-critics including Peter Warlock, Cecil Gray and Kaikhosru Sorabji, this book traces the shared tendencies of literary and musical modernisms in interwar Britain, exploring the political investments underpinning these tendencies, as well as the influence of English Nietzscheanism and related intellectual currents.
Available Format: Book
The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music
Mark Doffman, Emily Payne, & Toby Young (editors); Oxford University Press; Hardback
Music represents one of humanity's most vivid contemplations on the nature of time itself. This handbook provides a range of compelling new scholarship that examines the making of musical time, its effects and structures. Bringing together philosophical, psychological, and socio-cultural understandings of time in music, the chapters highlight the act of 'making' not just as cultural construction but also in terms of the perceptual, cognitive underpinnings that allow us to 'make' sense of time in music.
Available Format: Book
This book offers a new narrative of Baroque music, in which the era is defined in terms of social dynamics rather than style and genre development. It explores how performance was integrated into and indispensable to everyday routines, celebrations, and political culture, showing that sonic communication was linked to the music and musicians heard in homes, taverns, and churches.
Available Format: Book
The Golden Age Musicals of Darryl F. Zanuck: The Gentleman Preferred Blondes
Bernard F. Dick; University Press of Mississippi; Hardback
Beginning with The Jazz Singer (1927) and 42nd Street (1933), legendary Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck revolutionised the movie musical. This book spotlights how he placed his personal imprint on the genre and how, especially at Twentieth Century Fox, he nurtured and showcased several blonde female stars who headlined the studio's musicals, including Shirley Temple, Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Vivian Blaine, June Haver, Marilyn Monroe, and Sheree North.
Available Format: Book
This fifth edition includes new and expanded entries including UK Grime, Black Lives Matter, streaming, the music industries and sound studies. A unique A-Z student reference book, it covers many topics students will encounter during the four years of their undergraduate degree. With cross-referencing, further reading and listening included throughout, it is an essential reference text for all students studying the social and cultural dimensions of popular music.
Available Format: Book
Musical Truth: A Musical Journey Through Modern Black Britain
Jeffrey Boakye; Faber & Faber; Paperback
Lord Kitchener, Neneh Cherry, Smiley Culture, Stormzy: groundbreaking musicians whose songs have changed the world. This exhilarating book tracks some of the key shifts in modern British history, exploring the emotional impact of twenty-eight songs and the artists who performed them. In doing so, it redefines British history, the Empire and postcolonialism, inviting the reader to think again about the narratives and key moments in history.
Available Format: Book
Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock and Finding My Voice, 1967-75
Richard Thompson; Faber & Faber; Paperback
Richard Thompson came of age during an extraordinary moment in 1960s Britain - as music began to reflect a great cultural awakening, the guitarist and songwriter co-founded Fairport Convention, ushering in the era of folk rock. An intimate memoir of personal discovery and creative intensity, this account vividly captures the life of an international music icon in a world on the cusp of change.
Available Format: Book
Fifty authors write about the albums that changed their lives, from Deborah Levy on Bowie to Daisy Johnson on Lizzo, Ben Okri on Miles Davis to David Mitchell on Joni Mitchell, and Sarah Perry on Rachmaninov to Bernardine Evaristo on Sweet Honey in the Rock. Part meditation on the album form and part self-portrait, each essay reveals music's power to transport the listener to a particular time and place, spanning the golden age of vinyl and the streaming era, and showing how a single LP can shape a writer's mind.
Available Format: Book
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