New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 4th May 2020
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include a guide to the instruments of the orchestra courtesy of Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra; a biography of American composer Samuel Barber; a collection of essays by noted musicologist, Richard Taruskin; the first biography of renowned Indian musician, Ravi Shankar; the history of the Eurovision Song Contest and its connection to the politics of Europe through the years; and an overview of British musical films between 1929 and 1945.
Classical Music, Dance, & Education
Learn about the different instruments of the orchestra with this beautifully-illustrated book, produced in association with the London Symphony Orchestra and introduced by Sir Simon Rattle. With accompanying CDs, downloadable music, and information on all the pieces featured, this is the perfect introduction to the orchestra for children aged seven and upwards.
Available Format: Book
Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music (Second Edition)
Barbara B. Heyman; Oxford University Press; Hardback
Generously documented by letters, sketches, and interviews with friends, colleagues, and performers, this is the most authoritative biography on Barber. This second edition benefits from new discoveries, including a recently-unearthed Violin Sonata, a diary Barber kept in his seventeenth year, letters and manuscripts that were recovered from a suitcase found in a bin, and documentation that dispels earlier myths about the composition of Barber's Violin Concerto.
Available Format: Book
Speaking of Wagner: Talking to Audiences about The Ring of the Nibelung
William Berger; Academica Press; Hardback
This book compiles author and Metropolitan Opera commentator William Berger's collection of talks and presentations about Wagner. These talks have been successful with diverse audiences, and the book preserves that wide range of tone: erudite but engaging, from lofty to startlingly coarse, and connecting the subject to references from mythology to psychology and even to cutting-edge pop culture.
Available Format: Book
Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices
Richard Taruskin; University of California Press; Paperback
This sweeping collection of essays presents debates in all areas of music studies, including historiography and criticism, representation and aesthetics, musical and professional politics, and the sociology of taste. The writings gathered here form an intellectual biography that showcases the characteristic wit, provocation, and erudition that readers have come to expect from Taruskin.
Available Format: Book
Popular & World Music
For this first biography of Ravi Shankar, published on the centenary of his birth, 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
Eurovision!: A History of Modern Europe Through The World's Greatest Song Contest
Chris West; Melville House; Paperback
The Eurovision Song Contest has been a mirror for cultural, social and political developments in Europe ever since its inauguration in 1956. It has been a voice of rebellion across the Iron Curtain, the voice of liberation for both sexual and regional minorities, and it even once triggered a national revolution. This book charts the history of the contest over the last six decades, and what an amazing journey it has been.
Available Format: Book
The first book to deal exclusively with the British musical film from the very beginning of talking pictures in the late 1920s, up to the end of World War II. The upsurge in production at British studios from 1929 onwards marked the real birth of a genre whose principal purpose was to entertain the British public. Each film is dealt with in order of its release date, allowing for an engaging narrative packed with encyclopaedic information.
Available Format: Book
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