This book is unique in offering practical advice on writing song lyrics within a critically informed framework. Part I provides the theoretical underpinning, while Part II covers the creative process, pulling together all the best songwriting advice and offering practical exercises. Fusing creative guidance with rigorous criticism, this is an essential companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students of songwriting, creative writing and music. Lively and accessible, it is a one-stop shop for all aspiring songwriters.

The Poetics of American Song Lyrics is the first collection of academic essays that regards songs as literature and that identifies intersections between the literary histories of poems and songs. The essays by well-known poets and scholars including Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson, Peter Guralnick, Adam Bradley, David Kirby, Kevin Young, and many others, locate points of synthesis and separation so as to better understand both genres and their crafts. The essayists share a desire to write on lyrics in a way that moves beyond sociological, historical, and autobiographical approaches and explicates songs in relation to poetics. Unique to this volume, the essays focus not on a single genre but on folk, rap, hip hop, country, rock, indie, soul, and blues. The first section of the book provides a variety of perspectives on the poetic history and techniques within songs and poems, and the second section focuses on a few prominent American songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Stipe. Through conversational yet in-depth analyses of songs, the essays discuss sonnet forms, dramatic monologues, Modernism, ballads, blues poems, confessionalism, Language poetry, Keatsian odes, unreliable narrators, personas, poetic sequences, rhythm, rhyme, transcription methods, the writing process, and more. While the strategies of explication differ from essay to essay, the nexus of each piece is an unveiling of the poetic history and poetic techniques within songs.

The composers, writers and musicologists who contributed to this issue embrace aesthetics as far apart as neo-romanticism and post-Darmstadt "complexity," whole-scale computerization and non-computerization and deal with problems of word-setting and operatic composition in English, German, Italian and Swedish.

Expanding the notion of translation, this book specifically focuses on the transferences between music and text. The concept of 'translation' is often limited solely to language transfer. It is, however, a process occurring within and around most forms of artistic expression. Music, considered a language in its own right, often refers to text discourse and other art forms. In translation, this referential relationship must be translated too. How is music affected by text translation? How does music influence the translation of the text it sets? How is the sense of both the text and the music transferred in the translation process? Combining theory with practice, the book questions the process and role translation has to play in a musical context. It provides a range of case studies across interdisciplinary fields. It is the first collection on music in translation that is not restricted to one discipline, including explorations of opera libretti, surtitling, art song, musicals, poetry, painting, sculpture and biography, alongside looking at issues of accessibility.

A series of in-depth examinations of the motion picture many consider to be Hollywood's finest western film.

Up-to-date and case-study laden analysis of how children and adolescents interact with the media.

This second edition of Song Sheets to Software includes completely revised and updated listings of music software, instructional media, and music-related Internet Web sites of use to all musicians, whether hobbyist or professional. This book is a particularly valuable resource for the private studio and classroom music teacher.

lxxi + 527 pp.The MUSA series is copublished with the American Musicological Society.

Simon Frith has been one of the most important figures in the emergence and subsequent development of popular music studies. From his earliest academic publication, The Sociology of Rock (1978), through to his recent work on the live music industry in the UK, in his desire to ’take popular music seriously’ he has probably been cited more than any other author in the field. Uniquely, he has combined this work with a lengthy career as a music critic for leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic. The contributions to this volume of essays and memoirs seek to honour Frith’s achievements, but they are not merely ’about Frith’. Rather, they are important interventions by leading scholars in the field, including Robert Christgau, Antoine Hennion, Peter J. Martin and Philip Tagg. The focus on ’sociology and industry’ and ’aesthetics and values’ reflect major themes in Frith’s own work, which can also be found within popular music studies more generally. As such the volume will become an essential resource for those working in popular music studies, as well as in musicology, sociology and cultural and media studies.

Drawing generously from four centuries of Italian, German and French art song, Exploring Art Song Lyrics embraces the finest of the literature and presents the repertoire with unprecedented clarity and detail. Each of the over 750 selections comprises the original poem, a concise English translation, and an IPA transcription which is uniquely designed to match the musical setting. Enunciation and transcription charts are included for each language on a single, easy to read page. A thorough discussion of the method of transcription is provided in the appendix. With its wide-ranging scope of repertoire, and invaluable tools for interpretation and performance, Exploring Art Song Lyrics is an essential resource for the professional singer, voice teacher, and student.