With the coronation fast approaching, the Cathedral of St. George the Dragonslayer cannot afford trouble. But come it does, while the cathedral choir director is at the Dragon's Breath Organ, practicing the anthem he wrote at King William's own request. While explaining some technical terms to his understudy, the choir director decides to show off a little. In the process, he releases an ancient menace from long before humanity came through the worldgate to this place. An entity that strikes him blind, and threatens further harm to anyone who tries to play the Dragon's Breath Organ. However, they dare not disappoint His Majesty, not on the most momentous day of his reign. Someone must cleanse the Dragon's Breath Organ of this malicious entity, and the choir director cannot. So the task falls to Miss Anne Teesdale, understudy organist. Now she must delve into the history of the cathedral, and the mysterious ancient magic that fills the organ's windchest. A secret that may well cost this young woman her life. Or worse, her sanity. An Ixilon story.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad. It's 1934, and the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad's Communist Party chief, has rocked the Soviet Union. When an up and coming young Party official is assigned to investigate, it looks like an open and shut case. The further Nikolai Yezhov looks into the case, the stranger things become. Mysterious entities lie beneath the swamps upon which Leningrad was founded. Because he has stumbled upon these secrets older than humanity itself, Yezhov must be eliminated. But first he must be led to commit acts that will ensure that history will forever remember him as a vicious criminal.

What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong? To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity? Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself. HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far. What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?

Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human? Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn't find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi's side, he knows he's found a kindred spirit. But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish. A short story of the Grissom timeline.

All three books of the Space Race Trilogy, now together with two exclusive new essays. Time Slips What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong? To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity? Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself. HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far. What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with? The Secret of Pad 34 Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space? That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol. His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find. HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary. Beach House on the Moon The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings. But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be? She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mind-bending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice. Her life will never be the same. Miskatonic University in the Cold War and Contemporary Era How would H.P. Lovecraft's famous fictional institution of higher education have developed through the second half of the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first? Space: Gernsbeck vs. Lovecraft A look at the fundamental worldviews underlying the approaches of Hugo Gernsbeck and H.P. Lovecraft to the portrayal of outer space, aliens, and space travel.

In Greek myth, the phoenix is a bird that rises from its own ashes. Growing up in the city named for it, Toni knew the story well, and being a gamer made her used to death being negotiable. During a visit to her grandfather's ranch, she discovered a cache of books and videos from the lost golden age of space travel. Entranced by the enthusiasm of Roger Chaffee for his upcoming spaceflight, she was shocked and angered to learn the disaster that happened only days after his interview. When she expressed her desire to get him his spaceflight, her family's anger came as an even bigger shock. But she refused to forget, no matter how hard her parents tried to distract her, to prevent her from researching online. Her determination would lead her along strange paths that would end in a desperate cross-country chase and the realization of a dream decades deferred.

This book comprises twelve articles which cover a range of topics from musical instrument acoustics to issues in psychoacoustics and sound perception as well as neuromusicology. In addition to experimental methods and data acquisition, modeling (such as FEM or wave field synthesis) and numerical simulation plays a central role in studies addressing sound production in musical instruments as well as interaction of radiated sound with the environment. Some of the studies have a focus on psychoacoustic aspects in regard to virtual pitch and timbre as well as apparent source width (for techniques such as stereo or ambisonics) in music production. Since musical acoustics imply subjects playing instruments or singing in order to produce sound according to musical structures, this area is also covered including a study that presents an artificial intelligent agent capable to interact with a real ('analog') player in musical genres such as traditional and free jazz.

Anyone who listens to or plays classical music often wants to put the pieces they encounter in context - to check information ranging from who wrote the piece, or the date of its first performance, to how it acquired its title, or whether it was commissioned for a specific person or occasion. General dictionaries of music only cover a limited number of musical works, and include very little detail. The new Oxford Dictionary of Musical Works provides short articles on over 1750 musical works from earliest times to the present day, providing a comprehensive but handy reference. Entries encompass a broad spectrum of genres - from opera, ballet, choral and vocal music, orchestral, chamber and instrumental pieces, to nicknamed works, collections, national anthems, hymn tunes, and traditional melodies. Each entry outlines the genre to which the piece belongs; the librettist or author of the text, including any literary source; the number of acts or movements; the scoring - includingdetails of the instrumentalists and vocalists needed to perform the piece; how it came to be commissioned; the place and date of its first performance; any subsequent arrangements or revisions; and any additional important or entertaining information.

Charming, moving, uplifting. Why can't all love stories be like this? Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal This is a charming and uplifting book. Piers Morgan Seventeen-year-old schoolboy Kim is an idle drifter at one of Britain's most extraordinary institutions, Eton College - crammed with over a thousand boys and not a girl in sight. His head is full of the Falklands War and a possible army career, until the day he hears his new piano teacher, the beautiful but pained India, playing Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Kim's life is destined never to be the same again. An intensely passionate affair develops and he wallows in the wild and unaccustomed thrill of first love. Twenty-five years on, Kim recalls that heady summer and how their fledgling relationship was so brutally snuffed out - finished off by his enemies, by the constraints of Eton, and by his own withering jealousy. "The Well-Tempered Clavier" is the bittersweet story of a life-changing love.

Bach's Well-tempered Clavier (or the 48 Preludes and Fugues) stands at the core of baroque keyboard music and has been a model and inspiration for performers and composers ever since it was written. This invaluable guide to the 96 pieces explains Bach's various purposes in compiling the music, describes the rich traditions on which he drew, and provides commentaries for each prelude and fugue. In his text, David Ledbetter addresses the main focal points mentioned by Bach in his original 1722 title page. Drawing on Bach literature over the past three hundred years, he explores German traditions of composition types and Bach's novel expansion of them; explains Bach's instruments and innovations in keyboard technique in the general context of early eighteenth-century developments; reviews instructive and theoretical literature relating to keyboard temperaments from 1680 to 1750; and discusses Bach's pedagogical intent when composing the Well-tempered Clavier. Ledbetter's commentaries on individual preludes and fugues equip readers with the concepts necessary to make their own assessment and include information about the sources when details of notation, ornaments, and fingerings have a bearing on performance.