Robert M. Garcia, a professional drummer from the age of 17, attended Florida A&M University (FAMU), in Tallahassee, and later studied at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, Massachusetts. During his freshman and sophomore years at FAMU (1968-1970), he was on the drum line of the world famous band, the FAMU Marching 100. Through the years, Garcia became widely known as a master drummer. However, later in his life, for reasons revealed in this book, he switched his focus from drums to the grand harp. Robert Garcia became a skilled and versatile harpist. His music was a joy to the many people who saw and heard him perform. . . . The fact that Robert was able to move over to the harp is a sign that he always had a pitched-instrument player nestled within his musical gift. It is a great blessing that he was able to express this part of his musical personality later in his career. The fact that he enjoyed such success at this is clearly a testament to the versatility and depth of his musical talent. Vern C. Falby, Ph.D. Faculty, Music Theory Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University
Harps and harp music have enjoyed a renaissance over the past century and today can be heard in a broad array of musical contexts. Guide to the Contemporary Harp is a comprehensive resource that examines the vibrant present-day landscape of the harp. The authors explore the instrument from all angles, beginning with organology; moving through composition, notation, and playing techniques; and concluding with the contemporary repertoire for the harp. The rapid diversification in these areas of harp performance is the result of both technological innovations in harp making, which have produced the electric harp and MIDI harp, and innovative composers and players. These new instruments and techniques have broadened the concept of what is possible and what constitutes harp music for today. Guide to the Contemporary Harp is an essential guide for any harpist looking to push the instrument and its music to new heights.
The bibliography lists nearly 5,000 compositions by 200 composers of jazz and "art" music, indicating where scores or realizations can be purchased, rented, or borrowed, and which Boston area libraries have them in their collections.
A biography on the legendary gay American composer of contemporary classical music. American composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) is perhaps best known for challenging the traditional musical establishment along with his contemporaries and close colleagues: composers John Cage, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Leonard Bernstein; Living Theater founder, Judith Malina; and choreographer, Merce Cunningham. Today, musicians from Bang on a Can to Björk are indebted to the cultural hybrids Harrison pioneered half a century ago. His explorations of new tonalities at a time when the rest of the avant-garde considered such interests heretical set the stage for minimalism and musical post-modernism. His propulsive rhythms and ground-breaking use of percussion have inspired choreographers from Merce Cunningham to Mark Morris, and he is considered the godfather of the so-called “world music” phenomenon that has invigorated Western music with global sounds over the past two decades. In this biography, authors Bill Alves and Brett Campbell trace Harrison’s life and career from the diverse streets of San Francisco, where he studied with music experimentalist Henry Cowell and Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, and where he discovered his love for all things non-traditional (Beat poetry, parties, and men); to the competitive performance industry in New York, where he subsequently launched his career as a composer, conducted Charles Ives’s Third Symphony at Carnegie Hall (winning the elder composer a Pulitzer Prize), and experienced a devastating mental breakdown; to the experimental arts institution of Black Mountain College where he was involved in the first “happenings” with Cage, Cunningham, and others; and finally, back to California, where he would become a strong voice in human rights and environmental campaigns and compose some of the most eclectic pieces of his career. “Lou Harrison’s avuncular personality and tuneful music coaxed affectionate regard from all who knew him, and that affection is evident on every page of Alves and Campbell’s new biography. Eminently readable, it puts Harrison at the center of American music: he knew everyone important and was in touch with everybody, from mentors like Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives and Harry Partch and Virgil Thomson to peers like John Cage to students like Janice Giteck and Paul Dresher. He was larger than life in person, and now he is larger than life in history as well.” —Kyle Gann, author of Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays After a Sonata
Yonder Come the Blues combines three influential and much-quoted books: Savannah Syncopators; Blacks, Whites and Blues and Recording the Blues. Updated with additional essays, this 2001 volume discusses the crucial early development of the blues as a music of Blacks in the United States, explaining some of the most significant factors that shaped this music. Together, these three texts emphasise the significance of the African heritage, the mutuality of much white and black music and the role of recording in consolidating the blues, thus demonstrating the importance of these formative elements in its complex but combined socio-musical history. Redressing some of the misconceptions that persist in writing on African-American music, this book will be essential reading for all enthusiasts of blues, jazz and country music and will be important for students of African-American studies and music, popular music and popular culture.
