In Music in Disney’s Animated Features James Bohn investigates how music functions in Disney animated films and identifies several vanguard techniques used in them. In addition, he also presents a history of music in Disney animated films, as well as biographical information on several of the Walt Disney Studios’ seminal composers.The popularity and critical acclaim of Disney animated features truly is built as much on music as it is on animation. Beginning with Steamb...

The thought-provoking, aesthetically pleasing animated films of Hayao Miyazaki attract audiences well beyond the director's native Japan. Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away were critically acclaimed upon U.S. release, and the earlier My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service have found popularity with Americans on DVD. This critical study of Miyazaki's work begins with an analysis of the visual conventions of manga, Japanese comic books, and anime; an overview of Japanese animated fi...

Revered former Metal Maniacs editor Jeff Wagner analyzes the heady side of metal in this exhaustive narrative history of a relentlessly ambitious musical subculture. Beginning with the hugely influential mid-1970s efforts of Rush and King Crimson, Wagner unfurls a huge tapestry of sounds and styles, including Queensryche, Fates Warning, and Dream Theater; extreme prog pioneers Voivod and Celtic Frost; Norways post-black metal avant garde acts Ulver and Arcturus; and the 1990s glob...

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...

The Paris audience in 1875 was shocked by the sexually explicit realism of Bizet's exotic operatic masterpiece, its 'verismo' depiction of low life and brutal passion. But since the disastrous première – a sensational failure which hastened Bizet's premature death – it has been the greatest operatic success. It led to a film opera, a jazz opera, a rock ballet and a Broadway musical. Equally, it impressed great composers including Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Vaughan Williams.The story, w...

No nineteenth-century composer had more diverse ties to his contemporary world than Franz Liszt (1811-1886). At various points in his life he made his home in Vienna, Paris, Weimar, Rome, and Budapest. In his roles as keyboard virtuoso, conductor, master teacher, and abbé, he reinvented the concert experience, advanced a progressive agenda for symphonic and dramatic music, rethought the possibilities of church music and the oratorio, and transmitted the foundations of modern pianism.

Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic, historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Verdi's Il trovatore to its initial and later audiences. It shows how modernist opera rethought the nature of theatricality and often challenged its viewers by means of both musical and theatrical...

Shortly before his death, Percy Grainger (1882-1961) lodged over twenty unpublished sketches in his Australian Museum. Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger draws exclusively from these sketches, revealing for the first time an illuminating portrait of the composer's life. With such titles as "The Aldridge-Grainger-Strom Saga," "Thunks," "Ere-I-Forget," "The Love-Life of Helen and Paris," and "Anecdotes," these manuscripts were intended as precursors to Grainger's autobiography, My ...

Although David Bowie has famously characterized himself as a "leper messiah," a more appropriate moniker might be "rock god": someone whose influence has crossed numerous sub-genres of popular and classical music and can at times seem ubiquitous. By looking at key moments in his career (1972, 1977-79, 1980-83, and 1995-97) through several lenses-theories of sub-culture, gender/sexuality studies, theories of sound, post-colonial theory, and performance studies Waldrep examines Bowie's work ...

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers and debates in philosophy and music. Over fifty entries by an international team of contributors are organised into six clear sections:general issuesemotionhistoryfigureskinds of musicmusic, philosophy and related disciplinesThe Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Musi...

Blondie's Parallel Lines mixed punk, disco and radio-friendly FM rock with nostalgic influences from 1960s pop and girl group hits. This 1978 album kept one foot planted firmly in the past while remaining quite forward-looking, an impulse that can be heard in its electronic dance music hit “Heart of Glass.” Bubblegum music maven Mike Chapman produced Parallel Lines, which was the first massive hit by a group from the CBGB punk underworld. By embracing the diversity of New...

Schoenberg and Redemption presents a new way of understanding Schoenberg's step into atonality in 1908. Reconsidering his threshold and early atonal works, as well as his theoretical writings and a range of previously unexplored archival documents, Julie Brown argues that Schoenberg's revolutionary step was in part a response to Wagner's negative charges concerning the Jewish influence on German music. In 1898, and especially 1908, Schoenberg's Jewish identity came into confrontation with ...