Showing titles in History & Criticism

Inside the chapters of Behind the Boards: Nashville by award-winning music biographer Jake Brown, country music fans for the first time ever are given a front-row seat inside Music Row's most famous recording studios on tours narrated by the town's biggest record producers.

In 2003, Robert Morgan released what would become a future classic for more than a million people, a unique book entitled Then Sings My Soul. This collection of the world’s greatest hymns and the stories behind them stirred an entire generation to better understand the heritage of our faith through song. Now, in the long-awaited third volume of this series, Morgan expands his material to include the great history of worship, the first biblical hymns, biographical sketches of the most interesting composers, and almost 60 generations of hymn singing.

The ska revival in the UK and the 2 Tone label represented unity of black and white in both the content of the songs, and appearance of the bands. While race may have been central to this declaration, where did gender fit in? Many bands had few, if any, women in their lineup and so women had to do it for themselves. Empowered by punk and impassioned by Jamaican ska and reggae, they took up the microphone, the saxophone, drumsticks. Women demanded their space on the stage and in the studio. Through exclusive interviews with more than 50 women involved in ska in the UK during the ‘70s and ...

In a music world that was rougher than rough, where men took monikers of royalty and machismo like Duke and King and Lord; where boastful ringleaders fired guns into the air after descending a throne carried by their legions of followers, bandoliers crisscrossing their chests, ermine on their shoulders; where violent gangs stormed dances to “mash up,” breaking sound system equipment and smashing bottles of beer on brick walls, how was a little girl with a sweet song in her soul to have a chance? Some Jamaican women found a way. They endured harassment and received little or no pay to ...

The national debate over popular music's effect on character is both furious and confused. Conservatives complain primarily about lyrics, appealing to public decency and safety. Liberals, swift to the defense of any self-expression, simultaneously celebrate rock's liberating ethos and deny its cultural influence.

Inside the Godfather brings together, for the first time, those from Brown's inner circle. They will correct the distortions of the past and provide for the listener a clear understanding of the brilliance and generosity that was James Brown, Mr. Dynamite. This audiobook will have you question your assumptions about politics, religion, sports, money, and the entire entertainment industry. You will see inside the man. You will never be the same.

In this magisterial volume, Harvey Sachs, author of the highly acclaimed biography Toscanini, takes listeners into the heart of 10 great works of classical music - works that have endured because they were created by composers who had a genius for drawing music out of their deepest wellsprings. These masters - Mozart and Beethoven; Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Verdi, and Brahms; Sibelius, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky - communicated their life experiences through music, and through music they universalized the intimate.

Power Chord is the story of one man’s epic pilgrimage to gain rock enlightenment from the gods and guitar heroes of the Golden Age of heavy metal. Author Scott McKenzie set off to make contact with the legendary metal superstars he worshipped in his rural Kentucky youth - men like George Lynch of Dokken, Glen Tipton of Judas Priest, and Ace Frehley of KISS - hoping to gain wisdom and a better understanding of the electric guitar mystique.

Why Jazz Happened is the first comprehensive social history of jazz. It provides an intimate and compelling look at the many forces that shaped this most American of art forms and the many influences that gave rise to jazz’s post-war styles. Rich with the voices of musicians, producers, promoters, and others on the scene during the decades following World War II, this book views jazz’s evolution through the prism of technological advances, social transformations, changes in the law, economic trends, and much more.

One-time manager of the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, Japan, Ultravox, Asia, Wham!, and many others, Simon Napier-Bell recollects the 1960s in all its excess and flamboyance. These are frank and scurrilous tales of sex, drugs, and famous stars, encompassing people such as Keith Moon, John Lennon, the Bee Gees, Robert Stigwood, Brian Epstein, the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, and just about everyone else who was there.

House is the first descendant of disco. While Black and Hispanic communities were jamming and party DJs spinning records, a new birth of rhythm gave way to music lovers from Chicago and New York in the form known as house music. Developed in Chicago's underground dance club culture in the early 1980s, today house music is worldwide and continues to dominate most club scenes and has expanded beyond its subculture beginning.

Ehemals Musik junger Abgehängter und Outlaws, ist Heavy Metal heute mehr und mehr in der Mitte der Gesellschaft angekommen: Wohl mehr als 10 Millionen Deutsche hören Heavy Metal. Aber warum tun sie das? Was suchen und was finden sie in dieser Musik, die von Außenstehenden oft als purer Lärm empfunden wird? Warum wimmelt es im Heavy Metal nur so von Monstern und Teufeln - und wieso schweigen auch die Götter und die Engel nicht? Was erleben Metal-Fans, wenn sie ihre Musik hören - und welche Erfahrung treibt sie immer wieder ins Konzert.

Bob Dylan is the prince of self-reinvention and deflection. Whether it's the folkies of Greenwich Village, the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s, born-again Christians, the Chabad Lubavitch community, or English department postmodernists, specific intellectual and sociopolitical groups have repeatedly claimed Bob Dylan as their spokesperson. But in the words of filmmaker Todd Haynes, "The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he's no longer where he was."

Does the opening "pling pling plinggg" of Bette Midler's "The Rose" fill you with existential dread? Do you cringe at the mere whiff of what Phil Collins is spewing "In the Air Tonight"? Have you ever bolted from a restaurant because Celine Dion's cover of "All By Myself" was threatening to drive you over the edge? Well, turn around, bright eyes because Tom Reynolds is here with I Hate Myself and Want to Die, a laugh-out-loud-till-you're sobbing compendium of the world's most hideously depressing pop songs and a guide to what makes them so heartwrenchingly bad.

Have your tickets ready. Keep the aisles clear. And prepare yourself for the heavy-duty epic-ness that’s ahead. This is Lighters in the Sky. In this eight-episode Audible Original we’ll dive deep into the most mind-blowing concerts ever performed. And in each engrossing episode, you’ll feel transported to a time and place that changed the landscape of music forever. Listeners will hear from the people who actually lived the legend, and through the power of immersive sound – you may just feel like you were in attendance too.

The story of two outsiders and obsessives whose collision prompted an evangelistic alliance on the furthest frontiers of underground music. Steve Davis first met Kavus Torabi - guitarist with Gong, Guapo, Cardiacs and Knifeworld - in the mid-2000s at a gig by French underground rock legends Magma. Over the next few years, this unlikely duo's shared affinity for visionary psychedelic music would become the foundation of not only a firm friendship, but also the most infectiously inclusive broadcasting style since the much-mourned death of John Peel.

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.

The invention of music notation by a skittish Italian monk in the eleventh century. The introduction of multilayered hymns in the Middle Ages. The birth of opera in a Venice rebelling against the church’s pious restraints. Baroque, Romantic, and atonal music; bebop and cool jazz; Bach and Liszt; Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In telling the exciting story of Western music’s evolution, Stuart Isacoff explains how music became entangled in politics, culture, and economics, giving rise to new eruptions at every turn.

Esta desternillante antología de ensayos, reseñas, autopsias y semblanzas rescata del más inmisericorde de los olvidos algunas de las piezas más delirantes del impenitente grafómano y crítico por antonomasia del rock.

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's a well-tended garden of Mozart or the thorny thickets on a Schumann page.