Author Kim Norman (Crocodaddy) and illustrator Liza Woodruff have whipped up a rollicking, jolly, snow-filled adventure! In the land of the midnight sun, all the animals are having fun speeding down the hill on Caribous sled. But as they go faster and faster, Seal, Hare, Walrus, and the others all fall off…until just Caribous left, only and lonely. Now, a reindeer likes flying-but never alone, so…one through ten, all leap on again! An ideal picture book for reading-and singing along with-over and over.
The legendary critic and author of Mystery Train “ingeniously retells the tale of rock and roll” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Unlike previous versions of rock ’n’ roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs and dramatizes how each embodies rock ’n’ roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts out—a new language, something new under the sun. “Transmission” by Joy Division. “All I Could Do Was Cry” by Etta James and then Beyoncé. “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” first by the Teddy Bears and almost half a century later by Amy Winehouse. In Marcus’s hands these and other songs tell the story of the music, which is, at bottom, the story of the desire for freedom in all its unruly and liberating glory. Slipping the constraints of chronology, Marcus braids together past and present, holding up to the light the ways that these striking songs fall through time and circumstance, gaining momentum and meaning, astonishing us by upending our presumptions and prejudices. This book, by a founder of contemporary rock criticism—and its most gifted and incisive practitioner—is destined to become an enduring classic. “One of the epic figures in rock writing.”—The New York Times Book Review “Marcus is our greatest cultural critic, not only because of what he says but also, as with rock-and-roll itself, how he says it.”—The Washington Post Winner of the Deems Taylor Virgil Thomson Award in Music Criticism, given by the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers
In 1887 Gustav Mahler (1860 1911) came upon what would be for him a great treasure: "Des Knaben Wunderhorn: alte deutsche Lieder" (The Youth's Miraculous Horn: Old German Songs), an anthology of more than 700 folk songs and poems (named for the first piece in the collection) that had been published in the early 1800s by the German poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. For the next 14 years Mahler made use of this anthology for all but one of his song texts. The first 10 of these 15 celebrated songs come together here both in the original German and in English translations: "Der Schildwache Nachtleid" (The sentinel's nightsong), "Verlone Muh'"(Labor lost), "Trost im Ungluck" (Solace in sorrow), "Wer had dies Liedel erdacht?" (Up there on the hill), "Das irdische Leben" (Earthly life), "Lied des Verfolgten im Turm" (Song of the persecuted man in the tower), "Wo die Schonen Trompeten blasen" (Where the beautiful trumpets blow), "Lob des hohen Verstandes" (In praise of lofty intelligence), "Rheinlegendchen" (little legend of the Rhine), and "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" (Antonius of Padua's fish sermon). This volume, rich in exceptional music reprinted from authoritative sources, is sure to delight Mahler devotees as well as all lovers of art songs."
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people. If you can't be kind, at least be vague. An aphorism is a pithy observation that attempts to communicate a truth about the human experience, often with a dash of wit. History's greatest thinkers and writers have viewed the aphorism as a potent tool, and it is remarkable how many of their most memorable observations have been introduced with the biggest little word in the human language: If. These ifferisms, as they have been dubbed by quotation anthologist Dr. Mardy Grothe, demonstrate the powerful role that hypothetical and conditional thinking play in our lives. This novel compendium of wisdom, wit, and wordplay presents nearly two thousand quotations that all begin with the word if. Alongside history's most famous sayings, readers will find—and often learn the fascinating story behind—such modern classics as "If you build it, they will come" and "If anything can go wrong, it will." In chapters on sex, love, sports, politics, advice, gender dynamics, and more, quotation lovers will savor scintillating observations from the usual suspects—Twain, Wilde, Shaw, Emerson, and Franklin—as well as scores of contemporary wits and wordsmiths.
An indispensable resource on Samuel Barber's complete oeuvre-more than 100 published and nearly twice as many unpublished compositions-with an abundance of information on song texts, first performances, genesis of composition, duration, revisions, editions, arrangements, selected discography of historical and contemporary recordings, and detailed description of the hundreds of holograph manuscripts, sketches, drafts, and significant publisher's proofs founded in libraries and private collections throughout the United States. Illuminating quotations drawn from Barber's letters and diaries will be of special interest not only to scholars but conductors, composers, performers, and the general music enthusiast.
This commemorative songbook features 20 of David Bowie’s greatest hits, spanning his entire career from 1969 to 2016. Each song is arranged for Piano, Vocal and Guitar, with full lyrics and Guitar chord boxes. David Bowie was an actor, a fashion icon, an artist, a mime and a writer, but above all, his creative output as a musician brought him the respect, admiration and adoration enjoyed by few other pop stars before or since. His consistent re-invention of his aesthetic, style and sound, as well as his mysterious alter egos enabled him to mould his music to a number of genres, eluding easy classification and producing a string of widely acclaimed albums and singles. This collection represents this musical icon, from his first single Space Oddity, to Lazarus, with a lengthy introductory tribute from renowned music journalist Chris Charlesworth. This is the perfect way to pay tribute to the legendary Starman. Songlist: - Absolute Beginners - Ashes To Ashes - Changes - Golden Years - Heroes - The Jean Genie - Lazarus - Let’s Dance - Life On Mars? - The Man Who Sold The World - Modern Love - Oh! You Pretty Things - Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide - Sound And Vision - Space Oddity - Starman - Suffragette City - Where Are We Now? - Wild Is The Wind - Ziggy Stardust
(E-Z Play Today). 26 of Stevie Wonder's best songs arranged in our world-famous, easy-to-play notation that features large notes with the note names in the note heads. Includes: For Once in My Life * Higher Ground * I Just Called to Say I Love You * My Cherie Amour * Overjoyed * Part Time Lover * Ribbon in the Sky * Send One Your Love * Sir Duke * Superstition * That Girl * more.
Some pieces of music survive. Most fall into oblivion. What gives the ten masterpieces selected for this book their exceptional vitality? In this penetrating volume, Harvey Sachs, acclaimed biographer and historian of classical music, takes readers into the hearts of ten extraordinary works of classical music in ten different genres, showing both the curious novice and the seasoned listener how to recognize, appreciate, and engage with these masterpieces on a historical and compositional level. Far from what is often thought, classical music is neither dead nor dying. As a genre, it is constantly evolving, its pieces passing through countless permutations and combinations yet always retaining that essential élan vital, or life force. The works collected here, composed in the years between 1784 and 1966, are a testament to this fact. As Sachs skillfully demonstrates, they have endured not because they were exceptionally well-made or interesting but because they were created by composers—Mozart and Beethoven; Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Verdi, and Brahms; Sibelius, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky—who had a particular genius for drawing music out of their deepest wellsprings. “Through music,” Sachs writes, “they universalized the intimate.” In describing how music actually sounds, Ten Masterpieces of Music seems to do the impossible, animating the process of composing as well as the coming together of disparate scales and melodies, trills and harmonies. It tells us, too, how particular compositions came to be, often revealing that the pieces we now consider “classic” were never intended to be so. In poignant, exquisite prose, Sachs shows how Mozart, a former child prodigy under constant pressure to produce new music, hastily penned Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, one of his finest piano concertos, for a teenage student, and likewise demonstrates how Goethe’s Faust, Part One, became a springboard for the musical imagination of the French composer Berlioz. As Sachs explains, these pieces are not presented as candidates for a new “Top Ten.” They represent neither the most well-known nor the most often-performed works of each composer. Instead, they were chosen precisely because he had something profound to say about them, about their composers, about how each piece fits into its composer’s life, and about how each of these lives can be contextualized by time and place. In fact, Sachs encourages readers to form their own favorites, and teaches them how to discern special characteristics that will enhance their own listening experiences. With Ten Masterpieces of Music, it becomes evident that Sachs has lived with these pieces for a veritable lifetime. His often-soaring descriptions of the works and the dramatic lives of the men who composed them bring a heightened dimension to the musical perceptions of all listeners, communicating both the sheer improbability of a work becoming a classic and why certain pieces—these ten among them—survive the perilous test of time.
"Nothing defines the songs of the great American songbook more richly and persuasively than their urban sensibility. During the first half of the twentieth century, songwriter such as Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Dorothy Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, and Thomas 'Fats' Waller flourished in New York City, the home of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Harlem. Many of these remarkably deft and forceful creators were native New Yorkers. Others got to Gotham as fast as they could. Either way, it was as if, from their vantage point on the West Side of Manhattan, these artists were describing America--not its geography of politics, but its heart--to Americans and to the world at large. In City songs and American life, 1900-1950, renowned author and broadcaster Michael Lasser offers an evocative and probing account of the popular songs--including some written originally for the stage or screen--that America heard, and sang, and danced to during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. Lasser demonstrates how the spirit of the teeming city pervaded these wildly diverse songs. Often that spirit took form overtly in songs that portrayed the glamor of Broadway of the energy and jazz age culture of Harlem. But a city-bred spirit--or even a specifically New York City way of feeling and talking--also infused many other widely known and loved songs, stretching from the early decades of the century to the twenties (the age of the flapper, bathtub gin, and women's right to vote), the Great Depression, and, finally, World War II. Throughout this remarkable book, Lasser emphasizes how the soul of city life, as echoes in the nation's songs, developed and changed in tandem with economic, social, and political currents in America as a whole"--Dust jacket flap.
This work explores the literary and musical connections between Hispano-Arabic strophic songs of the muwashshaha-zajal genre, and their medieval Romance cognates, the ballata, cantiga, dansa, rondeau, villancico, and virelai. The authors begin with a general essay based on recent scholarship in Arabic, Romance, and ethnomusicological studies and then present a translation of Al-Tifashi's key 13th-century Arabic treatise on the musical tradition of Arab Spain. The appendices provide texts and translations of ten poems that modern scholarship attributes to or authenticates as part of the Hispano-Arabic song repertory, and musical notations of these texts as sung in Arab countries today. The authors suggest that the living tradition of Andalusian music surviving in the Arab world preserves a priceless echo, be it ever so distorted, of the lost tradition of Hispano-Arabic songs. They conclude that this tradition was a subtle blending of imported Oriental elements combined with others native to the Romance-singing Iberian Peninsula.
