- Bach and the Patterns of Invention
- Laurence Dreyfus
- In this major new interpretation of the music of J.S. Bach, we gain a striking picture of the composer as a unique critic of his age. By reading Bach's music "against the grain" of contemporaries, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach's approach to musical invention posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 2004
- Blows Like a Horn
- Preston Whaley
- Reopening the canons of the Beat Generation, Whaley traces the creative counterculture movement as it cooked in the heat of Bay Area streets and exploded into spectacles, such as the scandal of the Howl trial and the pop culture joke of beatnik caricatures. The book breaks new ground in showing how jazz, much more than an ambient soundtrack, shaped the very structures of Beat art and social life. The poetry, the music, the style--all of these helped transform U.S. culture in ways that are still with us.
- Hardcover 2004
- Brahms and the German Spirit
- Daniel Beller-McKenna
- Beller-McKenna counters music historians's reluctance to address Brahms's Germanness, wary perhaps of fascist implications. He gives an account of the intertwining of nationalism, politics, and religion that underlies major works, and enriches both our understanding of his art and German culture.
- Hardcover 2004
- The Century of Bach & Mozart
- Edited by Thomas Forrest Kelly
- Edited by Sean Gallagher
- For many today Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stand as towering representatives of European music of the eighteenth century, composers whose works reflect intellectual, religious, and aesthetic trends of the period. This collection of essays by leading authorities in the field offers a variety of new perspectives on the two composers, as well as some of their important contemporaries, Haydn in particular.
- Hardcover 2008
- Chopin at the Boundaries
- Jeffrey Kallberg
- The complex status of Chopin in our culture--he was a native Pole and adopted Frenchman, and a male composer writing in "feminine" genres--is the subject of Jeffrey Kallberg's absorbing book. Combining social history, literary theory, musicology, and feminist thought, this is the first book to situate Chopin's music within the construct of his somewhat marginal sexual identity.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
- Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century
- Joel Lester
- Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century is the most comprehensive account ever given of the theory behind the music of Baroque and Classical composers, from Bach to Beethoven. While giving preeminent theorists their due in this panoramic survey of musical thought, Joel Lester also examines the works of more than one hundred seventeenth- and eighteenth century writers to show how prominent theories were received and applied in actual teaching situations. Beginning with the influence of Zarlino and seventeenth-century theorists, Lester then focuses on central traditions emerging from definitive works in the early eighteenth century. Lester's historic overview is leavened throughout with accounts of individual composers grappling with theoretical issues.
- Paperback
- Critical Entertainments
- Charles Rosen
- An extraordinarily gifted musician and writer, Charles Rosen is a peerless commentator on the history and performance of music. Critical Entertainments brings together many of the essays that have established him as one of the most influential and eloquent voices in the field of music in our time. These essays cover a broad range of musical forms, historical periods, and issues, courting controversy and offering enlightenment on subjects as diverse as music dictionaries and the aesthetics of stage fright.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
- Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David G. Hughes
- Edited by Michael E. Smith
- Hardcover
- Handel as Orpheus
- Ellen T. Harris
- Handel wrote over 100 cantatas, compositions for voice and instruments that describe the joy and pain of love. In the first comprehensive study of the cantatas, Harris investigates their place in Handel's life as well as their extraordinary beauty. This work brings greater understanding of Handel's development as a composer and new insight into the role of sexuality in artistic expression.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004
- Historical Anthology of Music, Volume I, Oriental, Medieval, and Renaissance Music
- Archibald T. Davison, Editor
- Willi Apel, Editor
- Hardcover 1949
- Historical Anthology of Music, Volume II, Baroque, Rococo, and Pre-Classical Music
- Archibald T. Davison, Editor
- Willi Apel, Editor
- Hardcover
- The King's Theatre Collection
- Morris S. Levy
- John Milton Ward
- With over 1,400 entries and 33 illustrations, this volume provides a window into the historical significance of the King's Theatre to the cultural life of London and abroad, and will appeal to musicologists, historians, theater scholars, and librarians interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera and ballet.
- Paperback 2006
- Music Manuscripts at Harvard
- Barbara Wolff
- A catalogue of music manuscripts from the 14th to the 20th centuries in the Houghton Library and the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library. Includes descriptions of works by Bach, Liszt, Mahler, Mozart, Purcell, Schoenberg, Schubert, Strauss, Wagner, and many others.
- Paperback 2005
- Music and the Historical Imagination
- Leo Treitler
- Leo Theitler is a central figure in American musicology, both for his writings on medieval and Renaissance music and for his influential work on historical analysis. In this elegant book he develops a powerful statement of what music analysis and criticism in relation to historical understanding can be. His aim is an understanding of the music of the past not only in its own historical context but also as we apprehend it now, and as we assimilate it to our current interests and concerns. He elucidates his views through unique new interpretations of major works from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.
- Hardcover 1989 / Paperback 1990
- Performing Rites
- Simon Frith
- In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject--and discloses their place at the very center of the aesthetics that structure our culture and color our lives.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
- The Sex Revolts
- Simon Reynolds
- Joy Press
- The first book to look at rock rebellion through the lens of gender, The Sex Revolts captures the paradox at rock's dark heart--the music is often most thrilling when it is most misogynistic and macho. And, looking at music made by female artists, the authors ask: must it always be this way? Provocative and passionately argued, the book walks the edgy line between a rock fan's excitement and a critic's awareness of the music's murky undercurrents.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- Sources for 20th-Century Music History
- Helmut Hell
- Sigrid von Moisy
- Barbara Wolff
- The catalog highlights material from the Colletion of Hans Moldenhauer and the Estate of Rudolf Kolisch included in a joint exhibition between Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich) and Houghton Library in 1988. Written in English and German.
- Hardcover 2005
- Spanish Music in the 20th C
- Tomas Marco
- Cola Franzen, Translator
- Hardcover
- Symphonic Aspirations
- Karen Painter
- Painter examines the politicization of musical listening in Germany and Austria, showing how nationalism, anti-Semitism, liberalism, and socialism profoundly affected the experience of serious music. Her analysis draws on a vast collection of writings on the symphony, particularly those of Mahler and Bruckner, to offer compelling evidence that music can and did serve ideological ends. She traces changes in critical discourse that reflected but also contributed to the historical conditions of various eras.
- Hardcover 2008
- This Is Pop
- Eric Weisbard
- About the vast and diverse topic of pop music, scholars and critics, journalists and musicians have much to say, but rarely to each other. A crossover venture begun at Seattle's Experience Music Project, this book captures the academic and the critical, the musical and the literary in an impromptu dialogue that suggests the breadth and vitality of pop inquiry today. Robert Christgau and Gary Giddins, pivotal critics, encounter Simon Frith and Robert Walser, pioneers in the study of popular music. Musicians Carrie Brownstein and Sarah Dougher, both active in the riot grrl scene of the Pacific Northwest, examine how audience responses affect their craft. John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats attends to the web postings of hair metal fans. This Is Pop illustrates what can happen when the best of scholarship, criticism, and pop's inherent unruliness intersect.
- Paperback 2004 / Hardcover 2004
- The Triumph of Music
- Tim Blanning
- Hardcover 2008
- When We Were Good
- Robert S. Cantwell
- When We Were Good traces the many and varied cultural influences on the folk revival of the late fifties and sixties. In his capacious analysis of the ideologies, traditions, and personalities that created an extraordinary moment in American popular culture, Cantwell explores the idea of folk at the deepest level. Taking up some of the more obdurate problems in cultural studies--racial identity, art and politics, regional allegiances, class differences--he shows how the folk revival was a search for authentic democracy, with compelling lessons for our own time.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1997