The power of music, the way it works on the mind and heart, remains an enticing mystery. Now two noted writers on classical music, Michael Steinberg and Larry Rothe, explore the allure of this melodious art--not in the clinical terms of social scientists--but through stories drawn from their own experience. In For the Love of Music, Steinberg and Rothe draw on a lifetime of listening to, living with, and writing about music, sharing the delights and revelatory encounters they have...

Michael Steinberg's highly successful listener's guides--The Symphony and The Concerto--have been universally praised for their blend of captivating biography, crystal clear musical analysis, and delightful humor. Now Steinberg follows these two greatly admired volumes with Choral Masterworks: A Listener's Guide, the only such guide available to this most popular of musical forms. Here are more than fifty illuminating essays on the classic choral masterworks, ran...

This study provides a fresh look at the debate between science and religion that documents how the experiences produced by spiritual practice are surprisingly consistent with the findings of modern biology, despite the difficulty in reconciling scientific theories and religious dogma.This book is unique in its focus on bodily experience as an independent source of knowledge and insight, an important aspect of recent discoveries in neurology and psychology. By rethi...

In this elegant and personal new work, Michael P. Steinberg reflects on the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics—of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law.Modern renderings of the story of Moses, from Michelangelo to Spinoza to Freud to Schoenberg to Derrida, have seized on the story's ambivalences, its critical and self-critical power. These literal returns form the first level of the afterlife of Moses. The...

Michael Steinberg's 1996 volume The Symphony: A Reader's Guide received glowing reviews across America. It was hailed as "wonderfully clear...recommended warmly to music lovers on all levels" (Washington Post), "informed and thoughtful" (Chicago Tribune), and "composed by a master stylist" (San Francisco Chronicle). Seiji Ozawa wrote that "his beautiful and effortless prose speaks from the heart." Michael Tilson Thomas called The Symphony "an es...

Still Pitching is the coming-of-age story of growing up in New York in the ’50s revolving around Steinberg’s passion for baseball.

The power of music, the way it works on the mind and heart, remains an enticing mystery. Now two noted writers on classical music, Michael Steinberg and Larry Rothe, explore the allure of this melodious art--not in the clinical terms of social scientists--but through stories drawn from their own experience. In For the Love of Music, Steinberg and Rothe draw on a lifetime of listening to, living with, and writing about music, sharing the delights and revelatory encounters they have...

In this unique and hybrid book, cultural and music historian Michael P. Steinberg combines a close analysis of Wagnerian music drama with a personal account of his work as a dramaturg on the bicentennial production of The Ring of the Nibelung for the Teatro alla Scala Milan and the Berlin State Opera . Steinberg shows how Wagner uses the power of a modern mythology to heighten music's claims to knowledge, thereby fusing not only art and politics, but truth and lies as wel...

The brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) is an iconic species among fly anglers and cold-water conservationists in eastern North America. This fish registers as a powerful symbol for its beauty and its imagery in art and literature. Its presence also tells us a great deal about the health of the larger environment. When an angler has a brook trout in hand, there is confidence that the water is close to pristine. Besides being an important indicator species, the brook trout, with it...

When a kayaker thought he spotted an ivory-billed woodpecker in 2004, the birding community took notice. Two birders traveled to the bayou where the sighting occurred, well aware that the last confirmed sighting of an ivory-bill had taken place over sixty years ago. Both men caught a glimpse of the bird, and a team began to search the surrounding swamplands. Even after long hours of surveillance and multiple sightings, the scientists cautiously refused to disclose their rediscovery of the ...

This pathbreaking work reveals the pivotal role of music--musical works and musical culture--in debates about society, self, and culture that forged European modernity through the "long nineteenth century." Michael Steinberg argues that, from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, music not only reflected but also embodied modern subjectivity as it increasingly engaged and criticized old regimes of power, belief, and representation. His purview ranges from Mozart to Mahler, and from the sacred...

An acclaimed New York Times Magazine writer brings us into the world of the controversial technology firm Palantir and its very colorful and outspoken CEO, Alex Karp, tracing the ascent of Big Data, the rise of surveillance technology, and the shifting global balance of power in the 21st century.Palantir builds data integration software: its technology ingests vast quantities of information and quickly identifies patterns, trends, and connections that migh...