Music in the Galant Style is an authoritative and readily understandable study of the core compositional style of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of eighteenth-century music,...

**Remember When All You Wanted Was Your MTV?The perfect gift for the music fan or child of the eighties in your life.Named One of the Best Books of 2011 by NPR – Spin - USA Today – CNBC - Pitchfork - The Onion - The Atlantic - The Huffington Post – VEVO - The Boston Globe - The San Francisco Chronicle**Remember the first time you saw Michael Jackson dance with zombies in "Thriller"? Diamond Dave karate kick with Van Hale...

Now the subject of the movie Love & Mercy, starring John Cusack!Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, along with Mike Love and Al Jardine--better known as the Beach Boys--rocketed out of a working-class Los Angeles suburb in the early sixties, and their sun-and-surf sound captured the imagination of kids across the world. In a few short years, they rode the wave all the way to the top, standing with the Beatles as one of the world's biggest bands.Despite their utopian vi...

For the first time, Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the epic story of the precipitous rise and fall of the recording industry over the past three decades, when the incredible success of the CD turned the music business into one of the most glamorous, high-profile industries in the world -- and the advent of file sharing brought it to its knees. In a comprehensive, fast-paced account full of larger-than-life personalities, Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Kno...

The first official account of the iconic record label.An NME Book of the Year 2013A Rough Trade Book of the Year 2013A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2013This Mortal Coil, Birthday Party, Bauhaus, Cocteau Twins, Pixies, Throwing Muses, Breeders, Dead Can Dance, Lisa Germano, Kristin Hersh, Belly, Red House Painters.Just a handful of the bands and artists who started out recording for 4AD, a record label founded by Ivo Watts-Russell and Pe...

Roxy Music and Art-Rock Glamour is a detailed exploration of the origins of the glam scene in the early seventies. Fronted by the deeply charismatic Bryan Ferry - equal parts fifties crooner and stylish spaceman - and with the visionary Brian Eno on keyboards, Roxy Music melded high-art intentions with commercial savvy to redefine what we understand pop culture to mean, and in the course of so doing created some of the twentieth century's most adventurous music.

If the opera world is full of “intrigue, double meanings, and devious dramatics,” then no place exemplifies this more than the world-famous Metropolitan Opera, where politics, ambition, and oversized egos have traditionally taken center stage along with some of the world’s richest music. Drawing on her fifteen years as its press representative, Johanna Fiedler explodes the traditional secrecy that surrounds the Met in this wonderfully entertaining account of its tumuluous history.F...

“The days of poets moping around castle steps wearing black capes is over. The poets of today are amplified.”— LEONARD COHENPicking up where Samuel Johnson left off more than two centuries ago, Ray Robertson’s Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) offers up an amplified gathering of thirteen portraits of rock & roll, blues, folk, and alt-country’s most inimitable artists. Irreverent and riotous, Robertson explores the “greater or lesser heat” with which...

Walls Come Tumbling Down charts the pivotal period between 1976 and 1992 that saw politics and pop music come together for the first time in Britain's musical history; musicians and their fans suddenly became instigators of social change, and 'the political persuasion of musicians was as important as the songs they sang'. Through the voices of campaigners, musicians, artists and politicians, Daniel Rachel follows the rise and fall of three key movements of the time: Rock Against R...

The basis of a full-length documentary."Moondog is one of America’s great originals."-Alan Rich, New York MagazineHere is a revised edition of a book that celebrates one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century: a blind and homeless man who became the most famous eccentric in New York and who, with enormous diligence, rose to prominence both in major label pop music recordings in addition to symphonic concerts of his compositions....

Courtney Love has never been less than notorious. Her intelligence, ambition and appetite for confrontation have made her a target in a music industry still dominated by men. As Kurt Cobain's wife she was derided as an opportunistic groupie; as his widow she is pitied, and scorned, as the madwoman in rock's attic. Yet Hole's second album, Live Through This, awoke a feminist consciousness in a generation of young listeners.Live Through This arrived in 1994, at a tu...

Anarchism in Music: In this volume we focus on the vehicle of music. From early folk music to the rise of rock ‘n' roll; to cabaret and the classical avant garde; to anarchist punk and every other cliché-ridden adjective slapped onto the art form by a parasitic music press keen to impose marketing demographics, we examine the phenomenon of music as protest and song as insurrectionary oral tradition. We hear from street musicians and singer-songwriters, players and...