Launched in 1995, Bach Perspectives has become the premier English-language serial book series dedicated to cutting-edge Bach scholarship. The University of Illinois Press now offers the first four volumes in open access editions available for free to all interested readers.The fourth volume of Bach Perspectives analyzes J. S. Bach’s orchestral works, especially his concertos, and the interpretation and performance of his music in general. The diverse contributors...

First published in in 1976, Hermann Levin Goldschmidt's Contradiction Set Free, (Freiheit für den Widerspruch), reflects the push to explore new forms of critical thinking that gained momentum in the decade between Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics of 1966 and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method in 1975.The book articulates Goldschmidt's reclamation of an epistemologically critical position that acknowledges the deep underlying link between the modes of production...

A story of espionage that could have changed the course of history and saved thousands of American and British lives - and millions of Asian lives. ‘On the night of 3 December 1941, I could not fall asleep,’ Kilsoo Haan remembered. ‘I went to the Chop Suey House, the Chinese Lantern, and ordered a bowl of Chinese soup. Next to my table, a Japanese was trying to sell a Chinese a second-hand automobile. After the Japanese left, the Chinese said to me, “You like to buy cheap automobile?” Afte...

Americans have long debated the cause of the December 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. Many have argued that the attack was a brilliant Japanese military coup, or a failure of U.S. intelligence agencies, or even a conspiracy of the Roosevelt administration. But despite the attention historians have paid to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the truth about that fateful day has remained a mystery—until now. In Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor,...

On December 7, 1941, the nation of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and prompted the United States’ entry into the bloodiest war in human history. Americans have long debated the cause of the bombing; many have argued that the attack was a brilliant Japanese military coup or a failure of US intelligence agencies or even a conspiracy of the Roosevelt administration. But despite the attention historians have paid to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the truth about that fateful day has remained a myst...

"A fascinating and genuinely accessible guide....Educating, enjoyable, and delightfully unscary."—Classical MusicWhat if Bach and Mozart heard richer, more dramatic chords than we hear in music today? What sonorities and moods have we lost in playing music in "equal temperament"—the equal division of the octave into twelve notes that has become our standard tuning method? Thanks to How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, "we may soon be able to hear...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian.The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramati...

An authoritative work offering a fresh look at Beethoven’s life, career, and milieu. “Magisterial” —New York Review of Books.This brilliant portrayal weaves Beethoven's musical and biographical stories into their historical and artistic contexts. Lewis Lockwood sketches the turbulent personal, historical, political, and cultural frameworks in which Beethoven worked and examines their effects on his music. "The result is that rarest of achievements, a profoundly humane work...

A BRACING ACCOUNT OF A WAR THAT IS EITHER MISUNDERSTOOD, FORGOTTEN, OR WILLFULLY IGNORED.For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953. But for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long struggle that still haunts contemporary events. With access to new evidence and secret materials from both here and abroad, including an archive of captured North Korean documents, Bruce Cumings reveals the war as it was actually fought. He describe...

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...

From a journalist and bestselling author of The Best and the Brightest, the culmination of forty-five years of writing about America's postwar foreign policy.**"In a grand gesture of reclamation and remembrance, Mr. Halberstam has brought the war back home." —**The New York TimesDavid Halberstam's magisterial and thrilling The Best and the Brightest was the defining book about the Vietnam conflict. More than three decades ...

Written by a leading authority and artist of the historical transverse flute, The Notation Is Not the Music offers invaluable insight into the issues of historically informed performance and the parameters—and limitations—of notation-dependent performance. As Barthold Kuijken illustrates, performers of historical music should consider what is written on the page as a mere steppingstone for performance. Only by continual examination and reexamination of the sources to discover original inte...