To feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually?Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition,...

In this inspiring memoir, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush recounts the lessons he learned from his small Southern hometown.Welcome to Madison Park, a small community in Alabama founded by freed slaves in 1880. Eric Motley came of age in this remarkable place, where lessons in self-determination, hope, and an unceasing belief in the American dream taught him everything he needed for his life's journey—a journey that led him to the Oval Office a...

Welcome to Madison Park, a small community in Alabama founded by freed slaves in 1880. And meet Eric Motley, a native son who came of age in this remarkable place where constant lessons in self-determination, hope, and unceasing belief in the American dream taught him everything he needed for his journey to the Oval Office as a Special Assistant to President George W. Bush.Eric grew up among people whose belief was to “give” and never turn away from your neighbor’s need. There was ...

A collection of Christmas stories written by African-American journalists, activists, and writers from the late 19th century to the modern civil rights movement.Back in print for the first time in over a decade, this landmark collection features writings from well-known black writers, activists, and visionaries such as Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, and John Henrik Clark along with literary gems from rediscovered writers. Originally published in African American...

In The N Word, a renowned cultural critic untangles the twisted history and future of racism through its most volatile word.In 2003, the book Nigger started an intense conversation about the use and implications of that epithet. The N Word moves beyond that short, provocative book by revealing how the word has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America.Asim claims that, even when uttered by hipsters and hip-hop icons, the slur hel...

A self-training manual as well as a classroom text, this book is a complete step-by-step course to develop the musician's ability to hear and notate any style of music. Personal training, thoery and exercises produce techniques which are combined in an integrated craft which may be applied to composition, orchestration, arranging, improvisation and performance. A kind of finishing school for those who wish to pursue a career in composing, orchestrating, arranging or performing. -- The Scor...

Electronic music evokes new sensations, feelings, and thoughts in both composers and listeners. Opening the door to an unlimited universe of sound, it engages spatialization as an integral aspect of composition and focuses on sound transformation as a core structural strategy. In this new domain, pitch occurs as a flowing and ephemeral substance that can be bent, modulated, or dissolved into noise. Similarly, time occurs not merely as a fixed duration subdivided by ratios, but as a plastic...

Film music often tells us how to feel, but it also guides us how to hear. Filmgoing is an intensely musical experience, one in which the soundtrack structures our interpretations and steers our emotions. Hollywood Harmony explores the inner workings of film music, bringing together tools from music theory, musicology, and music psychology in this first ever book-length analytical study of this culturally central repertoire. Harmony, and especially chromaticism, is emblematic of th...

Twentieth-Century Music Theory and Practice introduces a number of tools for analyzing a wide range of twentieth-century musical styles and genres. It includes discussions of harmony, scales, rhythm, contour, post-tonal music, set theory, the twelve-tone method, and modernism. Recent developments involving atonal voice leading, K-nets, nonlinearity, and neo-Reimannian transformations are also engaged. While many of the theoretical tools for analyzing twentieth century music have b...

Music Outside the Lines is an informative and practical resource for all who are invested in making music composition an integral part of curriculum. Author Maud Hickey offers both a well-grounded justification for teaching music composition and also a compendium of useful instructional ideas and classroom activities. Hickey begins with a rationale for teachers to begin composition activities in their own classrooms, with a thoughtful argument that demonstrates that all music teac...

First Published in 2007. This volume is a collection of a series of six illustrated lectures that demonstrate a picture of the author’s evolved thinking about the composing of music: both from a more general, overall perspective and from that of the particular moment-to-moment decision making that, gradually accumulating, brings a whole into being.

Composing with Constraints: 100 Practical Exercises in Music Composition provides an innovative approach to the instruction of the craft of music composition based on tailored exercises to help students develop their creativity. When composition is condensed to a series of logical steps, it can then be taught and learned more efficiently. With this approach in mind, Jorge Variego offers a variety of practical exercises to help student composers and instructors to create tangible w...