Showing titles in History & Criticism

Exploding on the music scene in the early 1970s, the rock group KISS combined raw energy with theatrical showmanship—not to mention face painting! Founding member Gene Simmons—an outrageous star whose superlong tongue, legendary sexual exploits, and demonic makeup have made him a rock icon—recounts his own story as well as the history of the band. In KISS and Make-Up, Simmons shares a wild, shocking, and unbelievable tale about an immigrant boy from Israel who studied to be a rabbi but was saved by rock and roll and became one of the most notorious rock stars in the world.

Highly original and fascinating cultural and political history told through Belfast’s popular music scene in the 1960s in the context of Northern Ireland’s sociopolitical milieu. With particular emphasis on Van Morrison, Them, and Ottilie Patterson; also features the Peter Whitehead film of The Rolling Stones.

Now fully revised and expanded, this new edition of While My Guitar Gently Weeps: The Music of George Harrison is the most comprehensive evaluation of George Harrison's musical career ever published. Treating each of Harrison's songs with unprecedented analysis, author Simon Leng reveals Harrison's eclectic approach – from teenage Nashville twang through Indian raga, psychedelia, gospel, soul, and pure pop – and thoroughly defines Harrison's role in the Beatles.

Derived from a popular series of lecture-recitals presented by Carol Montparker over the past several years, The Composer's Landscape features eight insightful essays on the piano repertoire. Each chapter focuses on a single composer: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. Montparker uses landscape as a metaphor for the score, whether it be a well-tended garden of Mozart or the thorny thickets on a Schumann page: the topographical peaks and valleys, the circuitous melodic lines, the thoroughfares where all the voices convene, and so on.

In Michael Rabin: America's Virtuoso Violinist, Anthony Feinstein tells the poignant story of the life and career of one of history's greatest violinists. As a child prodigy, Rabin had the classical music world at his feet. Notable successes abounded. Yet no sooner had Rabin taken his place alongside such illustrious colleagues as Heifetz, Milstein, and Stern than he abruptly and inexplicably disappeared from the concert stage. For three years, the public saw and heard little of him.

In Plunderphonics, Matthew Blackwell tells the story of a group of musicians who advocated for changes to the copyright system by deploying unlicensed samples in their recordings. Though the legal terrain did not shift in the favor of plunderphonic musicians, they changed public perception of fair use and enabled more widespread sampling in underground music.

20th Century Ambient details a crucial period in which ambient music became a fully realized idea and is secretly one of the most popular genres in the world. This book walks through ambient's ambiguous timeline to uncover not just the genre's evolution but to understand why it resonates so deeply with the human spirit.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A kaleidoscopic history of the Grateful Dead that explores the American counterculture through the life of iconoclastic frontman Jerry Garcia, and his merry band “By writing this book, Jim Newton informs the rest of the world what Deadheads have known for years: that...

Sung in moments of personal isolation or on state occasions watched by millions, “Amazing Grace” has become an unparalleled anthem for humankind. How did a simple Christian hymn, written in a remote English vicarage in 1772, come to hold such sway in all corners of the modern world? With this short, engaging cultural history, James Walvin offers an explanation.

You know his work—Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, The King and I. But you don't really know Oscar Hammerstein II, the man who, more than anyone else, invented the American musical. Among the most commercially successful artists of his time, he was a fighter for social justice who constantly prodded his audiences to be better than they were.

Descubre las historias que viven en las canciones de Los Bunkers. Canción para mañana es un relato que habla de música y de una banda, de sus cinco integrantes, y de Chile y México, del siglo XX y el XXI, y de las historias que hay detrás de las canciones más conocidas de Los Bunkers, temas que los llevan desde Talcahuano a la Plaza Dignidad, del Estadio Víctor Jara a los mayores escenarios de Latinoamérica. Mauricio Durán nos entrega en este, su primer libro, una serie de imágenes de épocas extraordinarias, meticulosas y emotivas: una hermosa narración sobre la juventud y los grandes cambios.

The Great Gate of Kiev resounds to the tumultuous bell rings that end Pictures an an Exhibition, one of the most magnificent and virtuosic of all piano pieces. However, to some of his contemporaries, Modest Mussorgsky was ‘insane’ and ‘a perfect idiot’. Born into a wealthy land-owning family, what drove this tormented man and why did he suffer psychological breakdowns and alcoholism? How did he achieve his command of the realist idiom in his stage works? d, of course, Pictures at an Exhibition.

The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way of understanding his unique, and often controversial, methods of composition.

Run the Song is also the story of how a professional critic, frustrated with conventional modes of criticism, finds his way back to a deeper relationship with music. When stumped or preoccupied by a piece of music, Ratliff starts to think that perhaps running can tell him more about what he’s listening to—let’s run it, he’ll say. And with that, the listener in turn is invited to listen alongside one of the great listeners of our day in this wildly inventive and consistently thought-provoking chronicle of a profoundly unsettling time.

In April 1998, legendary southern jam band Widespread Panic held a free open-air record release show in downtown Athens, Georgia, its home base. No one involved could have known that the predicted crowd of twenty thousand would prove to be nearly five times that size. The show, now known as "Panic in the Streets," went on to become a cult favorite of fans and a decisive moment in Athens music history. This event holds the record for the world's largest record release party, but the story of how the it came to be has not been told until now.

In this beautifully crafted book, Freddy Cristobal Dominguez makes a provocative case for Dylan as a historian, offering a deep consideration of the musician's historical influences and practices. Utilizing interviews, speeches, and the close analysis of lyrics and live performances, Bob Dylan in the Attic is the first book to consider Dylan's work from the point of view of historiography.

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. This entertaining book charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers.

Con New Wave si definisce un movimento musicale e artistico incredibilmente eterogeneo, sviluppatosi tra la seconda metà degli anni Settanta e i primi Ottanta: difficile immaginare qualcosa in comune tra i Duran Duran di Rio e i Joy Division di Love Will Tear Us Apart, eppure c’è: sfruttando l’energia, gli stimoli e il dinamismo ancora in circolazione del punk, numerose band hanno scelto di reinventare estetiche e suoni, creando così un’onda musicale nuova e multiforme.

Was ergibt Paul McCartney inkognito + Punk + 2263 Shows in 22 Jahren? RAMONES! Zu Gast begrüßt Andy Brings den Frontmann der DONOTS und Fan von RAMONES Ingo Donot sowie George Dubose, den Hoffotografen der Band. Doch den ultimativen Einblick garantiert Marky Ramone höchstpersönlich! Der Schlagzeuger bringt die ROCK`N`ROLL HALL OF FAME ins ROCK SCHOOL Studio und in Eure Wohnzimmer! "ROCK SCHOOL", die Hörbuch-Serie mit Andy Brings, in Kooperation mit dem ROCK CLASSICS- Magazin, veröffentlicht im Hause LAUSCH.

Wolfgang Kos erzählt das 20. Jahrhundert in 99 besonderen Liedern. Der historische Scheinwerfer richtet sich auf Zeitstimmungen, Lebensbedingungen und Moden ebenso wie auf kollektive Sehnsüchte, Ängste und neue Ideen, die mittels Songs unter die Leute kamen. In den Songs spiegeln sich Armut und Wohlstand, Konsum­träume und Weltschmerz, gesellschaftliche oder Generationskonflikte. Songs "wirken", weil sie emotionale Identifikation bieten und unmittelbarer als andere Kulturmedien ihre Zeit und ihre Welt auf den Punkt bringen.