In Great Composers in Watercolor, artist Douglas Lew offers authentic, refreshing, and imaginative portraits of the great composers of seven historical periods. The urge to connect with a famous person's face and his life is a universal desire. Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are just a few of the many composers Lew highlights in his collection of watercolor paintings, combining a brief history of each musician with a likeness of their face created using minimal brush strokes and inspired colors. With a free flowing, organic, and transparent style, Lew uses the elements of shape, texture, and color to enliven and enrich the rendition. Suitable for a coffee table or as a gift for music and art lovers alike, Great Composers in Watercolor brings to life the faces behind the beautiful music appreciated for centuries. "Doug Lew captures the era and melodic essence of each composer ... each work is a historical gem." -James Riccardo, concert violinist and music director of the Health Sciences Orchestra of the University of Minnesota "Doug's paintings bring these composers to life with the faithfulness all great musicians strive to achieve in performance." -David Herring, bass trombone, Minnesota Orchestra

The Classroom Kit contains Meet the Great Composers Book 2, the companion CD, and reproducible activity sheets.

Book contains important facts about each composer's life, an essay about the composer's music, and an activity for children to do.

Perfect for classroom use, Meet the Great Composers Book 2 Activity Sheets contain profiles of each composer featured in Book 2 and are licensed for reproduction.

Now in paperback, a beautifully illustrated guide to the white and green sign of spring. Elegant flowers dressed in simple white and green, snowdrops look far too fragile to deal with wintry weather. But that’s just what they do, and they have become treasured by horticulturalists for their ability to flower in the earliest parts of the year. In this book, Gail Harland explores the role snowdrops have played in gardens and popular culture alike, as a treasured genus for enthusiast growers and an important symbol of hope and consolation. Harland explores a variety of cultural meanings for the deceptively petit flower. In Victorian England snowdrop bands encouraged chastity among young women. They have been favorite subjects in paintings in many different eras, and today they are the iconic symbols of several hope-giving charities. Poets and writers have written extensively about them, as have pharmacists, who have used their chemical, galantamine, in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Today some of their rarer bulbs can fetch record-breaking sums, and annual festivals that celebrate them draw people from all over the world. Walking among their brilliant white beds, Harland offers an ideal companion for any plant-lover who has ever eagerly awaited this treasured sign of spring.

This book is a kind of a door, through which you will get to know the famous musicians via their relationships with the surrounding world and their colleagues. Here you will learn how the musicians spoke about one another, whom they loved and whom they did not like, with whom they were friends and with whom they competed. In addition, you will learn how their music is born and the beneficial impact it has on us.

Paul Mellon (1907--1999) assembled one of the world’s greatest collections of British drawings and watercolors. In his memoirs he wrote of their “beauty and freshness… their immediacy and sureness of technique, their comprehensiveness of subject matter, their vital qualities, their Englishness.” This catalogue celebrating the centenary of Mellon's birth features eighty-eight outstanding watercolors from the fifty thousand works of art on paper with which he endowed the Yale Center for British Art. The selection spans the emergence of watercolor painting in the mid-18th century to its apogee in the mid-19th. These works highlight the diversity of British watercolors, showcasing both landscape and figurative works by some of the principal artists working in the medium, including Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Rowlandson, William Blake, and J. M.W. Turner.

The Dictionary of American Classical Composers covers over 650 composers active from the 18th century to today. Covering all classical styles, it offers the most comprehensive overview of key composers in the United States available. Entries include basic biographical information and critical analysis of each composer's key works and ideas. Entries also include worklists and bibliographic information. Whenever possible, the entries will have been checked by the composers themselves to assure greatest possible accuracy. This new edition, completely updated and expanded from the 1984 edition, also includes over 200 historic photographs.

Contains a resource book of multicultural materials and includes program ideas, Web sites, and recommended children's books that provide students with information on the traditions, stories, pictures, and music from around the world.

This volume is a greatly expanded version of the classic 1956 anthology by Sam Morgenstern. The editor has added 30 composers to the roster, mostly in the pre-Baroque and contemporary eras, and has taken advantage of recent scholarship to prune and update the entries. The result is a glimpse into the writings of 103 major composers, from Marchetto of Paduo (14th century) on the definition of musician, to the contemporary British composer Oliver Knussen on much the same topic, and Bach's famous memorandum to the Town Council of Leipzig, as well as new discoveries, such as the elegant, cryptic prose of Toru Takemitsu.