Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: musicology

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  The Rest Is Noise

  Listening to the Twentieth Century

  by Alex Ross

  The scandal over modern music has not died down. While paintings by Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, shocking musical works from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring onward still send ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, the influence of modern music can be felt everywhere. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalist music... (more)
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  Musicophilia

  Tales of Music and the Brain

  by Oliver Sacks

  Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat.  But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does—humans are a musical species. Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people... (more)
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  This Is Your Brain on Music

  The Science of a Human Obsession

  by Daniel J. Levitin

  A fascinating exploration of the relationship between music and the mind—and the role of melodies in shaping our lives Whether you load your iPod with Bach or Bono, music has a significant role in your life—even if you never realized it. Why does music evoke such powerful moods? The answers are at last be- coming clear, thanks to revolutionary neuroscience and the emerging field of evolutionary ... (more)
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  Listen to This

  by Alex Ross, Alex Ross

  Alex Ross’s award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise , has become a contemporary classic, establishing him as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This , which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross described his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of Ross’s writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker . These... (more)
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  Johannes Brahms: A Biography

  by Jan Swafford

  A New York Times Notable Book "This brilliant and magisterial book is a very good bet to...become the definitive study of Johannes Brahms."-- The Plain Dealer Judicious, compassionate, and full of insight into Brahms's human complexity as well as his music, Johannes Brahms is an indispensable biography. Proclaimed the new messiah of Romanticism by Robert Schumann when he was only twenty, Johannes Brahms... (more)
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  Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart

  by Gavin Hopps

  Morrissey is arguably the greatest disturbance popular music has ever known. Even more than the choreographed carelessness of punk and the hyperbolic gestures of glam rock and the New Romantics, Morrissey's early bookish ineptitude, his celebration of the ordinary, and his subversive endorsement of celibacy, abstinence and rock `n' roll revolutionized the world of British pop. As an increasingly pugnacious solo... (more)
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  Penguin Lives

  Mozart

  by Peter Gay

  A biography of the greatest musical mind in Western history Mozart’s unshakable hold on the public’s consciousness can only be strengthened by historian and biographer Peter Gay’s concise and deft look at the genius’s life. Mozart traces the development of the man whose life was a whirlwind of achievement, and the composer who pushed every instrument to its limit and every genre of classical music... (more)
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  Hip Hop World: A Groundwork Guide (Groundwork Guides)

  by Dalton Higgins

  In Hip Hop World, Dalton Higgins comprehensively examines the hip hop scene as it exists throughout the world. The book reveals the form's musical inspirations from Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, African American sex satirists, comedians, civil rights-fuelled funk musicians, spoken word luminaries, and dub and Nuyorican poetry. Author Higgins examines hip hop's racial, multicultural, and multilingual... (more)
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  Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy

  How Music Captures Our Imagination

  by Robert Jourdain

  What makes a distant oboe's wail beautiful? Why do some kinds of music lift us to ecstasy, but not others? How can music make sense to an ear and brain evolved for detecting the approaching lion or tracking the unsuspecting gazelle? Lyrically interweaving discoveries from science, psychology, music theory, paleontology, and philosophy, Robert Jourdian brilliantly examines why music speaks to us in ways that words... (more)
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  Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas

  by Ace Collins

  These true, fascinating stories of the inspiration, heartache, trials, and faith that inspired some of the greatest Christmas carols, hymns, and popular songs will enrich the joy and celebration of the Christmas season.
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  The Joy of Music

  by Leonard Bernstein

  Leonard Bernstein was one of the twentieth century’s preeminent American composers. This classic work, perhaps the maestro’s finest collection of conversations on the meaning and wonder of music, is now available in this special reprinting with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Washington Post music critic Tim Page. Nearly fifteen years after Bernstein’s death, The Joy of Music continues to be a... (more)
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  What's That Sound?: An Introduction to Rock and Its History

  by John Rudolph Covach

  Informed by John Covach’s skills as a teacher, music theorist, and performer, What’s That Sound? provides a balanced, deeply musical look at rock from its roots to the present. Offering strong coverage of the music business, rock’s visual culture, and contemporary music, the text is complemented by listening guides to over 70 major works. .
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  While My Guitar Gently Weeps : The Music of George Harrison

  by Simon Leng

  Far from being "the quiet one," George Harrison was a writer and arranger of terrific power and beauty, and his guitar playing was fundamental to the Beatles' sound and success. 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... (more)
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  Richard Strauss

  Man, Musician, Enigma

  by Michael Kennedy

  Was Richard Strauss the most incandescent composer of the twentieth century or merely a bourgeoisie artist and Nazi sympathizer? For the fifty years since his death on September 8, 1949, Richard Strauss has remained dogmatically elusive in the wider body of musical and historical criticism. Lauded as nothing less than the "greatest musical figure" of his time by Canadian musician, Glenn Gould, in 1962, Strauss... (more)
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  Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology

  by Elisabeth Le Guin

  In this elegant study of the works of the undeservedly neglected composer Luigi Boccherini, Elisabeth Le Guin uses knowledge gleaned from her own playing of the cello as the keystone of her original approach to the relationship between music and embodiment. In analyzing the striking qualities of Boccherini's music--its virtuosity, repetitiveness, obsessively nuanced dynamics, delicate sonorities, and rich palette... (more)
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  The Lost Steps

  by Alejo Carpentier

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  Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine)

  by Jeremy S. Begbie

  Theology, Music and Time shows ways in which music can deepen our understanding of the Christian God and his involvement with the world. Without assuming any specialist knowledge of music, the author explores rhythm, meter, resolution, repetition and improvisation, and through them opens up some of the central themes of the Christian faith--creation, salvation, eschatology, time and eternity, eucharist, election... (more)
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  The New Grove Bach Family

  by Christoph Wolff

  Christoph Wolff , William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University, is co-author of The Bach Compendium , co-editor of Bach-Jahrbuch , and author of The New Grove Bach Family .
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  Are You Ready for the Country: Elvis, Dylan, Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock

  by Peter Doggett

  Country Rock, as played by the Byrds, the Eagles, and The Flying Burrito Brothers, was the dominant style in American music during the 1970s. But the artistically fertile relationship between rock and country music has-since their first encounter in the 1950s-been uneasy and often explosive. Are You Ready for the Country traces their tumultuous history and introduces us to all the main personalities-from... (more)
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  On Michael Jackson

  by Margo Jefferson

  Michael Jackson was once universally acclaimed as a song-and-dance man of genius; Wacko Jacko is now, more often than not, dismissed for his bizarre race and gender transformations and confounding antics, even as he is commonly reviled for the child molestation charges twice brought against him. Whence the weirdness and alleged criminality? How to account for Michael Jackson’s rise and fall? In On Michael Jackson... (more)