This Nearly Was Mine

This Nearly Was Mine

Author: Nancy Farkas

Publisher: Archway Publishing

Published: 2013-04-03

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1480800430

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In the summer of 1980, Annie, fresh out of graduate school, escapes a doomed engagement by fleeing to the Costa del Sol in Spain. The young traveler is seduced by the striking landscape and the shimmering sea, but not as profoundly as she was by Francisco, a local musician with a complicated past and a troubled soul. Her adventures propel her into adulthood and a life teased with what might have been. Twenty-six years later, Annies teenage daughter Marielle, curious about her mothers stories, searches for Francisco while on a backpacking trip through Spain. When Marielles search is successful, Annies thoughts return to her romantic past amidst the magnificent backdrop of the steamy Mediterranean coast. Franciscos unexpected reappearance ignites powerful feelings she didnt know were still simmering. Annie obsessively questions every decision she made that summer and wonders about a life that could have been hers had she stayed. She is torn between her love and devotion to her husband and the intercontinental pull to the life she has fantasized about for decades. Will she sacrifice the life shes built with her husband for one that nearly was hers so many years ago?


America's Songs

America's Songs

Author: Philip Furia

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0415972469

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First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.


South Pacific

South Pacific

Author: Jim Lovensheimer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-08-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0199779708

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Rodgers and Hammerstein's Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical "South Pacific" has remained a mainstay of the American musical theater since it opened in 1949, and its powerful message about racial intolerance continues to resonate with twenty-first century audiences. Drawing on extensive research in the Rodgers and the Hammerstein papers, including Hammerstein's personal notes on James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, Jim Lovensheimer offers a fascinating reading of "South Pacific" that explores the show's complex messages and demonstrates how the presentation of those messages changed throughout the creative process. Indeed, the author shows how Rodgers and especially Hammerstein continually refined and softened the theme of racial intolerance until it was more acceptable to mainstream Broadway audiences. Likewise, Lovensheimer describes the treatment of gender and colonialism in the musical, tracing how it both reflected and challenged early Cold War Era American norms. The book also offers valuable background to the writing of "South Pacific," exploring the earlier careers of both Rodgers and Hammerstein, showing how they frequently explored serious social issues in their other works, and discussing their involvement in the political movements of their day, such as Hammerstein's founding membership in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Finally, the book features many wonderful appendices, including two that compare the original draft and final form of the classic songs "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out-a My Hair" and "I'm In Love With a Wonderful Guy." Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, this superb book offers a rich, intriguing portrait of a Broadway masterpiece and the era in which it was created.


Black Music

Black Music

Author: LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

Publisher: Akashic Books

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1933354933

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Discusses modern jazz movements and musicians, including Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, and Sun-Ra.


The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies

The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies

Author: Nicholas Gebhardt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 645

ISBN-13: 1315315785

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The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies presents over forty articles from internationally renowned scholars and highlights the strengths of current jazz scholarship in a cross-disciplinary field of enquiry. Each chapter reflects on developments within jazz studies over the last twenty-five years, offering surveys and new insights into the major perspectives and approaches to jazz research. The collection provides an essential research resource for students, scholars, and enthusiasts, and will serve as the definitive survey of current jazz scholarship in the Anglophone world to-date. It extends the critical debates about jazz that were set in motion by formative texts in the 1990s, and sets the agenda for the future scholarship by focusing on key issues and providing a framework for new lines of enquiry. It is organized around six themes: I. Historical Perspectives, II. Methodologies, III. Core Issues and Topics, IV. Individuals, Collectives and Communities, V. Politics, Discourse and Ideology and VI. New Directions and Debates.


Hearing Double

Hearing Double

Author: Brian Kane

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0190600500

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When we talk about a jazz "standard" we usually mean one of the many songs that jazz musicians repeatedly play. But unlike classical musical works, standards are always being transformed in performance. They are rearranged and improvised, which raises the question: what gives a standard its identity? Hearing Double answers that question. Filled with case studies and music analysis, this book will draw your attention to unheard aspects of jazz performance as well as unrecognized philosophical, social, and cultural dimensions of the jazz repertoire.


Richard Rodgers

Richard Rodgers

Author: Geoffrey Block

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0300127545

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Richard Rodgers was an icon of the musical theater, a prolific composer whose career spanned six decades and who wrote more than a thousand songs and forty shows for the American stage. In this absorbing book, Geoffrey Block examines Rodgers’s entire career, providing rich details about the creation, staging, and critical reception of some of his most popular musicals. Block traces Rodgers’s musical education, early work, and the development of his musical and dramatic language. He focuses on two shows by Rodgers and Hart (A Connecticut Yankee and The Boys from Syracuse) and two by Rodgers and Hammerstein (South Pacific and Cinderella), offering new insights into each one. He concludes with the first serious look at the five neglected and often maligned musicals that Rodgers composed in the 1960s and 1970s, after the death of Hammerstein.


Abstractionist Aesthetics

Abstractionist Aesthetics

Author: Phillip Brian Harper

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-12-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1479867985

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An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. Arguing against the need for “positive” representations, Abstractionist Aesthetics displaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and elevates experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. Drawing on examples across a variety of artistic production, including the visual work of Fred Wilson and Kara Walker, the music of Billie Holiday and Cecil Taylor, and the prose and verse writings of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and John Keene, this book poses urgent questions about how racial blackness is made to assume certain social meanings. In the process, African American aesthetics are upended, rendering abstractionism as the most powerful modality for Black representation.


South Pacific

South Pacific

Author:

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1493083309

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Music by Richard Rodgers Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II Book by Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony for Best Musical, South Pacific flourished as the golden musical of Broadway's post-WWII golden era. Nearly 60 years after its 1949 premiere, South Pacific returned to Broadway in Lincoln Center Theater's glorious Tony-winning production, setting box-office records and bringing this timely and timeless musical to new generations. With a score by Rodgers & Hammerstein and a libretto by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan, based on James A. Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tales of the South Pacific, this landmark musical combines compassionate love stories with the saga of a world at war. Richly developed characters are faced with life-changing moments in a complex world, their thoughts and yearnings powerfully expressed in the lyrics to such songs as “This Nearly Was Mine ” “Younger Than Springtime ” and “Some Enchanted Evening.”


Birds With Broken Wings

Birds With Broken Wings

Author: Samuel D. G. Heath

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2005-09

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0595370888

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A lovely bookstore owner asked me why she should read this book? I explained that in writing this book, I undertook a purposeful investigation leading where angels (and all good Baptists) fear to tread. It was during this attempt at explanation the picture formed in my mind of addressing an auditorium full of women. My opening remark to them is: 'Women hunger and thirst for romance. What is it that men want?" The entire audience responds with a resounding chorus in unison with one word: 'SEX!" I then ask: 'No, really ladies, what do men really want?" Again, with a single voice the chorus returns, loudly: 'SEX!" Seeing that I am getting nowhere fast I decide to try a new tack. I ask: 'Please, ladies, as a Romantic, a Poet, what do I, as a man, want?" Back it comes: 'SEX!" There is a definite mind set at work here. Okay, honestly, as a Romantic, a Poet, what do I want from a woman: SEX! Satisfied? But my admission of common guilt is only true to a point. Believe it or not, ladies, some men like myself want romance as much as you do. It is in searching for this elusive thing that I have discovered so much that betrays you ladies in the very areas you are supposed to excel in the romance department. I treat the causes and results of such betrayal in this book.