This Could… is a guide for everyone wanting to learn how to build self-reliance, create new opportunity, increase creativity, and reduce waste.The book applies principles ranging from permaculture to the circular economy to everything that makes up your daily life. The objects, materials, skills, and everything that shapes your world all contain the ability to do more. The secret to unlocking their extra potential is just two words: “This could…”Th...

“Exceedingly well written and comprehensive.”– Core77Design hacking is the resourcefulness of the individual stepping in when the products and systems we are offered fall short. Design hacking creates new realities, options and possibilities from those we are given, whether commercial, social or civic.It is a democratization of design, enabling the user to be part of the design process and not only on the receiving end of it. There is a triumphant me...

Bringing together reception history, music analysis and criticism, the history of music theory, and the philosophy of music, Beethoven Hero explores the nature and persistence of Beethoven's heroic style. What have we come to value in this music, asks Scott Burnham, and why do generations of critics and analysts hear it in much the same way? Specifically, what is it that fosters the intensity of listener engagement with the heroic style, the often overwhelming sense of identificat...

For several decades, Scott Burnham has sought to bring a ready ear and plenty of humanistic warmth to musicological inquiry. Sounding Values features eighteen of his essays on mainstream Western music, music theory, aesthetics and criticism. In these writings, Burnham listens for the values-aesthetic, ethical, intellectual-of those who have created influential discourse about music, while also listening for the values of the music for which that discourse has been generated. The first half...

An outstanding anthology in which notable musicians, artists, scientists, thinkers, poets, and more**—from Gustavo Dudamel and Carrie Mae Weems to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Paul Muldoon—explore the influence of music on their lives and workContributors include: Laurie Anderson ● Jamie Barton ● Daphne A. Brooks ● Edgar Choueiri ● Jeff Dolven ● Gustavo Dudamel ● Edward Dusinberre ● Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim ● Frank Gehry ● James Gins...

Aspects of beauty in the music of MozartIt is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? In Mozart's Grace, Scott Burnham pro...

Few composers even begin to approach Beethoven's pervasive presence in modern Western culture, from the concert hall to the comic strip. Edited by a cultural historian and a music theorist, Beethoven and His World gathers eminent scholars from several disciplines who collectively speak to the range of Beethoven's importance and of our perennial fascination with him.The contributors address Beethoven's musical works and their cultural contexts. Reinhold Brinkmann explores t...

Combining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman's Beethoven is both a richly drawn portrait of the man and a guide to his music. Kinderman traces the composer's intellectual and musical development from the early works written in Bonn to the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, looking at compositions from different and original perspectives that show Beethoven's art as a union of sensuous and rational, of expression and structure. In analyses of individual piec...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A beautifully written, witty memoir that is also an immersive exploration of classical music—its power, its meanings, and what it can teach us about ourselves—from the MacArthur “Genius” Grant–winning pianistLONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • “Jeremy Denk has written a love letter to the music, and especially to the music teachers, in his life.”—Conrad Tao, pianist and composerONE OF THE ...

In the latest of his books exploring a lifetime's passion for music, bestselling author and philosopher Roger Scruton brings his immense critical faculties to bear on a panoply of different musical genres, both contemporary and classical.Music as an Art begins by examining music through a philosophical lens, engaging in discussions about tonality, music and the moral life, music and cognitive science and German idealism, as well as recalling the author's s...

With Understanding Music and The Aesthetics of Music (1997)Roger Scruton set a new standard of rigour and seriousness in the philosophy of music. This collection of wide-ranging essays covers all aspects of the theory and practice of music, showing the significance of music as an expression of the moral life. The book is split into two parts, the first is devoted to the aesthetics and theory of music and the second consists of critical studies of individual compo...

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