Having also spent many years as a composer-arranger-orchestrator and producer has served me well as a guitarist. Because I see myself as a “writer” first, I have used many techniques learned from writing and producing in my guitar performing work. Know this: Playing an instrument is as much mental as it is physical. We performers (especially us guitarists) tend to forget this. We usually are impressed by the physical aspects of playing guitar. I have taught guitar for many years and have f...

Music theory doesn’t need to be complicated, and this guide will show you how to make it simple.Idiot's Guides: Music Theory, Third Edition, is a concise and clear guide that teaches any budding musician or experienced musician how to read musical notation by navigating the basics of reading and composing music. Here’s what you’ll find:• The basics of tones, including pitches, clefs, scales, intervals, and major and minor keys

SchenkerGUIDE is an accessible overview of Heinrich Schenker's complex but fascinating approach to the analysis of tonal music. The book has emerged out of the widely used website, www.SchenkerGUIDE.com, which has been offering straightforward explanations of Schenkerian analysis to undergraduate students since 2001.Divided into four parts, SchenkerGUIDE offers a step-by-step method to tackling this often difficult system of analysis.

Why do people attach importance to the wordless language we call music? Musical Cognition suggests that music is a game. In music, our cognitive functions such as perception, memory, attention, and expectation are challenged; yet, as listeners, we often do not realize that the listener plays an active role in reaching the awareness that makes music so exhilarating, soothing, and inspiring. In reality, the author contends, listening does not happen in the outer world of audible sound, but i...

What do expert drummers do? Why do they do it? Is there anything creative about it? If so, how might that creativity inform their practice and that of others in related artistic spheres? Applying ideas from cultural psychology to findings from research into the creative behaviors of a specific subset of popular music instrumentalists, Bill Bruford demonstrates the ways in which expert drummers experience creativity in performance and offers fresh insights into in-the-moment interactional p...

Described as the perfect fusion of poetry and garage band rock and roll (the original concept was "rock and Rimbaud"), Horses belongs as much to the world of literary and cultural criticism as it does to the realm of musicology. While Horses pays homage to the record's origins in the nascent New York punk scene, the book's core lies in a detailed analysis of Patti Smith's lyrics and includes discussions of lyrical preoccupations: love, sex, gender, death, dreams, god, met...

Program music was one of the most flexible and contentious novelties of the long nineteenth century, covering a diverse range that included the overtures of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, the literary music of Berlioz and Schumann, Liszt's symphonic poems, the tone poems of Strauss and Sibelius, and compositions by groups of composers in Russia, Bohemia, the United States, and France. In this accessible Introduction, Jonathan Kregor explores program music's ideas and repertoire, discussing bot...

Basic Elements of Music introduces readers to a wide range of knowledge essential for a well-rounded understanding of music. This primer surveys the history of music and the composers who made that history; the history of instrument families and how the instruments function; an introduction to the science of sound and sound production; the various types of ensembles; and the fundamentals of music theory, form in music, musical notation, and music vocabulary.Accessible, yet detailed...

'I'm going to camp out on the land … try and get my soul free'. So sang Joni Mitchell in 1970 on 'Woodstock'. But Woodstock is only the tip of the iceberg. Popular music festivals are one of the strikingly successful and enduring features of seasonal popular cultural consumption for young people and older generations of enthusiasts. From pop and rock to folk, jazz and techno, under stars and canvas, dancing in the streets and in the mud, the pleasures and politics of the carnival since the...

Discussions surrounding music and ethical responsibility bring to mind arguments about legal ownership and purchase. Yet the many ways in which we experience music with others are usually overlooked. Musical experience and practice always involve relationships with other people, which can place limitations on how we listen to and act upon music. In Music and Ethical Responsibility, Jeff R. Warren challenges current approaches to music and ethics, drawing upon philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's...

Nowadays we listen to music whenever and wherever we like. Never before has the scope of what is available been so great and varied. The mass media and Internet have given us unlimited paths into the world of music. Just like music is varied and endless, so are our reactions to music. The very same piece of music can generate completely different reactions in different people, and a person can react quite differently to the same piece of music on different occasions. Sometimes the reaction...

When the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded in 1949, its leaders did not position it as a new state. Instead, they represented East German socialism as the culmination of all that was positive in Germany's past. The GDR was heralded as the second German Enlightenment, a society in which the rational ideals of progress, Bildung, and revolution that had first come to fruition with Goethe and Beethoven would finally achieve their apotheosis. Central to this founding myth was the Ger...