book by Stephen Gislason emerged from his Music Notes collected over many years. The topics cover a wide range of interests from the history of instruments, music theory, composing to the most current technologies involved in music composition and sound recording. A special chapter on the Musical Brain explains current knowledge in the brain processing of sound as it applies to language and music decoding. A chapter on the Music Business reviews the dramatic changes in music marketed and discusses some of the dilemmas and controversies facing musicians. Preface This book emerged from notes I have kept for several decades. I have spent much time studying music theory, electronics applied to sound reproduction and to performance skills. I decided to assemble my music notes so that any person interested in music could benefit from simple, clear explanations. Music descriptions often are too complicated and the use of terms can be inconsistent and confusing. As with other subjects I have tackled, I assumed that with a little extra effort more precise descriptions would be welcomed by readers seeking a practical understanding of music. The book begins with a consideration of what sound is and how animals use sounds to communicate. Music is not a human invention, but we do elaborate sound communication more than other animals in our production of both speech and musical performances. The discussion continues with noise, an important topic that is poorly understood. A well informed musician will refrain from making noise and understand Ambrose Bierce when he stated: Of all noise, music is the less offensive." I include acoustic and electronic instruments in my discussions of music creation. In my world, electronics dominate every aspect of work and play and most music I create and listen to was created, stored and distributed electronically. The art and science of recording is an important study for all 21st century musicians. Increased sophistication about the nature of sound, the art of combining musical sounds, and the effect on the listener's brain are all required for music to advance beyond noise toward a more effective means of human communication. Stephen Gislason 2016

Noted historian of the Broadway musical chronicles the braided lives of two of the twentieth century's most influential artists For the first time, Ethan Mordden chronicles the romance of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in Love Song, a dual biography that unfolds against the background of the tumultuous twentieth century, scored to music from Weil's greatest triumphs: Knickerbocker Holiday, Lost in the Stars, Lady in the Dark, Happy End, One Touch of Venus and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The romance of Weill, the Jewish cantor's son, and Lenya, the Viennese coachman's daughter, changed the history of Western music. With Bertolt Brecht, they created one of the definitive works of the twentieth century, The Threepenny Opera, a smash that would live on in musical theatre history. Weill, the jazz Mozart, was the creator whose work is backstage, unseen. Lenya, his epic-theatre femme fatale, was the performer who put the work into view. They heard the same unique music, but he gave it form while she gave it life. Love Song is ultimately the story of a great romance scored to some of the twentieth century's greatest music.

(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Songbook). We've made this book even better with songs from Broadway's latest blockbusters over 80 songs in all arranged for piano and voice with guitar chord frames! Highlights include: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life * I Wanna Be a Producer * The Last Night of the World * On My Own * Popular * Seasons of Love * The Sound of Music * Younger Than Springtime * dozens more!

The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and blackness mean in the twenty-first century's digital consumer economy. In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and an artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA's dress code, dance, and Moonlight. Analyzing the myriad ways in which people perform, avow, politicize, own, and love blackness, this volume charts the shifting debates in Black popular culture scholarship over the past quarter century while offering new avenues for future scholarship. Contributors. Takiyah Nur Amin, Patricia Hill Collins, Kelly Jo Fulkerson-Dikuua, Simone C. Drake, Dwan K. Henderson, Imani Kai Johnson, Ralina L. Joseph, David J. Leonard, Emily J. Lordi, Nina Angela Mercer, Mark Anthony Neal, H. Ike Okafor-Newsum, Kinohi Nishikawa, Eric Darnell Pritchard, Richard Schur, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, Vincent Stephens, Lisa B. Thompson, Sheneese Thompson

The Song Index features over 150,000 citations that lead users to over 2,100 song books spanning more than a century, from the 1880s to the 1990s. The songs cited represent a multitude of musical practices, cultures, and traditions, ranging from ehtnic to regional, from foreign to American, representing every type of song: popular, folk, children's, political, comic, advertising, protest, patriotic, military, and classical, as well as hymns, spirituals, ballads, arias, choral symphonies, and other larger works. This comprehensive volume also includes a bibliography of the books indexed; an index of sources from which the songs originated; and an alphabetical composer index.

Performance in America demonstrates the vital importance of the performing arts to contemporary U.S. culture. Looking at a series of specific performances mounted between 1994 and 2004, well-known performance studies scholar David Román challenges the belief that theatre, dance, and live music are marginal art forms in the United States. He describes the crucial role that the performing arts play in local, regional, and national communities, emphasizing the power of live performance, particularly its immediacy and capacity to create a dialogue between artists and audiences. Román draws attention to the ways that the performing arts provide unique perspectives on many of the most pressing concerns within American studies: questions about history and politics, citizenship and society, and culture and nation. The performances that Román analyzes range from localized community-based arts events to full-scale Broadway productions and from the controversial works of established artists such as Tony Kushner to those of emerging artists. Román considers dances produced by the choreographers Bill T. Jones and Neil Greenberg in the mid-1990s as new aids treatments became available and the aids crisis was reconfigured; a production of the Asian American playwright Chay Yew’s A Beautiful Country in a high-school auditorium in Los Angeles’s Chinatown; and Latino performer John Leguizamo’s one-man Broadway show Freak. He examines the revival of theatrical legacies by female impersonators and the resurgence of cabaret in New York City. Román also looks at how the performing arts have responded to 9/11, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the second war in Iraq. Including more than eighty illustrations, Performance in America highlights the dynamic relationships among performance, history, and contemporary culture through which the past is revisited and the future reimagined.

The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music Volume 1 provides an overview of media, industry, and technology and its relationship to popular music. In 500 entries by 130 contributors from around the world, the volume explores the topic in two parts: Part I: Social and Cultural Dimensions, covers the social phenomena of relevance to the practice of popular music and Part II: The Industry, covers all aspects of the popular music industry, such as copyright, instrumental manufacture, management and marketing, record corporations, studios, companies, and labels. Entries include bibliographies, discographies and filmographies, and an extensive index is provided.

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More than 70 songs by Huddie Ledbetter, with chord names and musical transcriptions by Jerry Silverman and biographical notes by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Fred Ramsey, and Charles Smith. Includes: Midnite Special, Backwater Blues, John Henry, and House Of The Rising Sun.

Finalist • The Marfield Prize [National Award for Arts Writing] “Not since the late Leonard Bernstein has classical music had a combination salesman-teacher as irresistible as Kapilow.” —Kansas City Star “If you want to understand American history, listen to its popular music,” writes renowned NPR host Rob Kapilow. “If you want to understand America’s popular music, listen to its history.” Through the songs of eight legendary American composers—Kern, Porter, Gershwin, Arlen, Berlin, Rodgers, Bernstein, and Sondheim—Kapilow listens for the history not just of musical theater, but of America itself. Combining close readings of Broadway hits like “Summertime” and “Stormy Weather” with a wide-angled historical point of view, Listening for America shows us how we too can listen along as America discovered its identity through the epochal transformations of the twentieth century.