Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde documents the collaborations and conflicts essential to the history of the post-war avant-garde. It offers a study of composer Morton Feldman's associations and friendships with artists like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Moorman, and others. Arguing that friendship and mourning sustained the collective aesthetics of the New York School, Dohoney has written an emotional and inti...

Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel tells the story of the 1972 premier of Morton Feldman's music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Built in 1971 for "people of all faiths or none," the chapel houses 14 monumental paintings by famed abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, who had committed suicide only one year earlier. Upon its opening, visitors' responses to the chapel ranged from spiritual succor to abject tragedy--the latter being closest to Ro...

Composer-performer Julius Eastman (1940-90) was an enigma, both comfortable and uncomfortable in the many worlds he inhabited: black, white, gay, straight, classical music, disco, academia, and downtown New York. His music, insistent and straightforward, resists labels and seethes with a tension that resonates with musicians, scholars, and audiences today. Eastman's provocative titles, including Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and others, assault us wit...

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at

A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own.With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff—pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization—unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and ...

The story of a revolution in music and technology, told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian BachIn Reinventing Bach, his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach's music new in our time, at once restoring Bach as a universally revered composer and revolutionizing the ways that music figures into our lives.As a musician in eighteenth-century Germany, Bach was ...

This book was designed for use in a one-semester dance appreciation survey class. As such, I have attempted to limit the information provided to that which can be covered comfortably. This means that many noteworthy choreographers and dancers do not appear in this text. Teachers may wish to add other important contributors to the art of dance, particularly in Chapters five, six, and seven.Tami M. White is an adjunct faculty member with the Dance Department at Old Dominion Universit...

There is more to sound recording than just recording sound. Far from being simply a tool for the preservation of music, the technology is a catalyst. In this award-winning text, Mark Katz provides a wide-ranging, deeply informative, consistently entertaining history of recording's profound impact on the musical life of the past century, from Edison to the Internet. Fully revised and updated, this new edition adds coverage of mashups and Auto-Tune, explores recent developments in file-shari...

"With their intellectual brilliance, humor and wonderful eye for detail, Leonard Bernstein's letters blow all biographies out of the water."— The Economist (2013 Book of the Year)Leonard Bernstein was a charismatic and versatile musician—a brilliant conductor who attained international superstar status, and a gifted composer of Broadway musicals ( West Side Story), symphonies ( Age of Anxiety), choral wor...

John Cage was a man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents: musician, inventor, composer, poet. He became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Now award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. We follow Cage from his Los Angeles childhood—his father was a successful inventor—through his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where im...

Composer John Cage is often described as the most influential musician of the last half-century. He has defined - and continues to define - our whole concept of "avant-garde", not just in music but increasingly as writer and visual artist. "The Roaring Silence" is the first full-length biography of Cage. It documents his life in unrivalled detail, interweaving a close account of the evolution of his work with an exploration of his aesthetic, political and philosophical ideas. David Revil m...

These lively, informative essays, all related to music, are as accessible as a chatty bedside reader.A central theme is listener response, and the techniques and structures that mold it.The story starts with sound waves, the ear, and the brain.Did song come before speech?Was it a factor in evolution?Some think singing helps complete the wiring of that organic work-in-progress, the infant brain.Check out the frequency doubling that built our familiar scale.Learn where the wo...