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History & Criticism eBooks

If you like History & Criticism eBooks, then you'll love these top picks.
Showing 1 - 24 of 5726 Results
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  • Musical Canada

    Words and Music Honouring Helmut Kallmann

    Edited by John Beckwith, Frederick Hall ...
    Series series Heritage
    The foremost historian of Canadian music and musical life, Helmut Kallmann is the inspiration for this volume. Its twenty-three contributions, written by prominent composers and writers representing many different regions and both national languages, present a cross-section of current work in historical research, bibliography, analysis, criticism, and creative composition.Among the subjects ... Read more

    $36.99 USD

  • Japanese Music & Musical Instruments

    This interesting and authoritative book includes essential facts about the various forms of Japanese music and musical instruments and their place in the overall history of Japan.Japanese Music and Musical Instruments has three main orientations:The history of Japanese musicConstruction of the instrumentsAnalysis of the music itself.The book covers in a lucidly written text and a wealth of ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • Not Since Carrie

    Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops

    Not Since Carrie is Ken Mandelbaum's brilliant survey of Broadway's biggest flops. This highly readable and entertaining book highlights almost 200 musicals created between 1950 and 1990, framed around the notorious musical adaptation of Carrie, and examines the reasons for their failure. "Essential and hilarious," raves The New Yorker, and The New York Times calls the book "A must-read." ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • Roy Acuff

    The Smoky Mountain Boy

    This biography of a Nashville legend is “one of the best studies of a country music personality that has been issued to date” (The Journal of Country Music).Roy Acuff was the first living performer to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He was an artist whose devotion to his work boosted not only his own career, but also the credibility and popularity of his field. This country music ... Read more

    $12.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Extended Play

    Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein

    by John Corbett ...
    In Extended Play, one of the country's most innovative music writers conducts a wide-ranging tour through the outer limits of contemporary music. Over the course of more than twenty-five portraits, interviews, and essays, John Corbett engages artists from lands as distant as Sweden, Siberia, and Saturn. With a special emphasis on African American and European improvisers, the book explores the ... Read more

    $21.99 USD

  • Distant Cycles

    Schubert and the Conceiving of Song

    Franz Schubert's song cycles Schone Mullerin and Winterreise are cornerstones of the genre. But as Richard Kramer argues in this book, Schubert envisioned many other songs as components of cyclical arrangements that were never published as such. By carefully studying Schubert's original manuscripts, Kramer recovers some of these "distant cycles" and accounts for idiosyncrasies in the songs which ... Read more

    $35.99 USD

  • Our Own Sweet Sounds

    A Celebration of Popular Music in Arkansas

    A rich portrait of the community that is Arkansas manifested in song, Our Own Sweet Sounds celebrates the diversity of musical forms and music makers that have graced the state since territorial times. Beginning with the earliest references to Quapaw and Caddo music as first reported by seventeenth-century European explorers and continuing forward to the “bizarrely named grunge bands” who will be ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • Text and Act

    Essays on Music and Performance

    Over the last dozen years, the writings of Richard Taruskin have transformed the debate about "early music" and "authenticity." Text and Act collects for the first time the most important of Taruskin's essays and reviews from this period, many of which now classics in the field. Taking a wide-ranging cultural view of the phenomenon, he shows that the movement, far from reviving ancient traditions, ... Read more

    $49.99 USD

  • The American Reed Organ and the Harmonium

    Covers the history, construction, manufacturing, tuning, restoration, and music of these classic American and European parlor instruments. ... Read more

    $20.99 USD

  • Robert Schumann

    Herald of a "New Poetic Age"

    by John Daverio ...
    Forced by a hand injury to abandon a career as a pianist, Robert Schumann went on to become one of the world's great composers. Among many works, his Spring Symphony (1841), Piano Concerto in A Minor (1841/1845), and the Third, or Rhenish, Symphony (1850) exemplify his infusion of classical forms with intense, personal emotion. His musical influence continues today and has inspired many other ... Read more

    $71.99 USD

  • Meter As Rhythm

    In this book Christopher Hasty presents a striking new theory of musical duration. Drawing on insights from modern "process" philosophy, he advances a fully temporal perspective in which meter is released from its mechanistic connotations and recognized as a concrete, visceral agent of musical expression. Part one of the book reviews oppositions of law and freedom, structure and process, ... Read more

    $224.99 USD

  • Antonio Gardano, Venetian Music Printer, 1538-1569

    A Descriptive Bibliography and Historical Study, 1550-1559

    by Mary S. Lewis ...
    Antonio Gardano's publications are among the most important sources of 16th-century music. The second volume describes the output of this leading Italian music press in its cultural, bibliographical, and musical context. The first part of the book consists of an overview of Gardano's repertory from the fifties and the cultural and musical milieu in which he worked. It includes discussions of the ... Read more

    $52.99 USD

  • Understanding Rock

    Essays in Musical Analysis

    Edited by John Covach, Graeme M. Boone ...
    Amid the recent increase in scholarly attention to rock music, Understanding Rock stands out as one of the first books that subjects diverse aspects of the music itself to close and sophisticated analytical scrutiny. Written by some of the best young scholars in musicology and music theory, the essays in this volume use harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, formal, and textual approaches in order to show ... Read more

    $80.99 USD

  • Prions en Chantant

    Devotional Songs of the Trouvères

    Edited by Marcia Epstein ...
    Series series Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations
    The rich medieval French tradition of vernacular devotional songs has not received much scrutiny. With 'Prions en chantant', Marcia Epstein aims to remedy that situation by offering an edition of largely anonymous trouvère devotional songs, designed for both scholars and performers, from two late-thirteenth-century manuscripts.The majority of the music is published here for the first time. Sixty ... Read more

    $28.99 USD

  • The Organ in Manitoba

    A History of the Instruments, the Builders, and the Players

    Pipe organs were once a central (and sometimes hotly debated) part of Manitoba's cultural life. The Organ in Manitoba portrays that history—the instruments, builders, players and critics—from the date of the earliest known installations to the 1990s, and includes information on musical organizations such as the Royal Canadian College of Organists. It documents over a century of evolution and ... Read more

    $17.99 USD

  • Performing Rites

    On the Value of Popular Music

    by Simon Frith ...
    Who's better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks ... Read more

    $29.99 USD

  • Five against One

    by Kim Neely ...
    More than any other band, Pearl Jam embodies the alternative style that dominates rock today. From their early days as fame-ducking grunge pioneers, through their headline-making battle with Ticketmaster, to their current status as self-assured survivors, Five Against One brings to life Pearl Jam's tumultuous ascent to superstardom in rich detail. A compelling portrait of the band's elusive leader ... Read more

    $14.99 USD $11.99 USD

  • Rocking My Life Away

    Writing about Music and Other Matters

    Rocking My Life Away represents nearly twenty years of writing by one of the premier critics of popular music in America today. In these pieces from Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and other publications, Anthony DeCurtis reveals his ongoing engagement with rock & roll as artistic forum, source of personal inspiration, and compelling site of cultural struggle. Including significant new work ... Read more

    $8.99 USD

  • Gellerman's International Reed Organ Atlas

    This second edition of Gellerman's classic reference work is a must for collectors and aficionados of reed organs. ... Read more

    $23.99 USD

  • Reading Country Music

    Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky Tonk Bars

    Edited by Cecelia Tichi ...
    With its steel guitars, Opry stars, and honky-tonk bars, country music is an American original. The most popular music in America today, it’s also big business. Amazing, then, that country music has been so little studied by critics, given its predominance in American culture. Reading Country Music acknowledges the significance of country music as part of an authentic American heritage and turns a ... Read more

    $23.99 USD

  • Visions of Jazz : The First Century

    The First Century

    by Gary Giddins ...
    Poised to become a classic of jazz literature Visions of Jazz: The First Century offers seventy-nine chapters illuminating the lives of virtually all the major figures in jazz history. From Louis Armstrong's renegade-style trumpet playing to Sarah Vaughan's operatic crooning and from the swinging elegance of Duke Ellington to the pioneering experiments of Ornette Coleman jazz critic Gary Giddins ... Read more

    $25.99 USD

  • More Than Words Can Say

    The Ink Spots and Their Music

    by Marv Goldberg ...
    The story of the Ink Spots is a rags-to-riches story beloved in American mythology. The success of the Ink Spots inspired many others to attempt (some merely mimicking) their popular and musical success. They were, without question, the most influential black vocal group of the 1940s, and one of the earliest to sing "sweet ballads," which they elevated to an art form (although an increasingly ... Read more

    $80.99 USD

  • Fifty Years at the Grand Ole Opry

    Country music reflects a way of life uniquely and unmistakably American. Mirroring the hopes, the problems, the sorrows, and the independence of millions of citizens, country music sprang up in the rural South, began to thrive during the bitter depression years, and has gone on to sweep the globe.The worldwide symbol of this earthy, straightforward, enduring brand of music was and will remain the ... Read more

    $12.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Mozart

    A Life

    by Peter Gay ...
    A biography of the greatest musical mind in Western historyMozart'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 ... Read more

    $14.99 USD