Most famous for his military marches, John Philip Sousa led a group of devoted musicians around the world and shaped a new cultural landscape. This book documents almost every aspect of the "March King's" band: its history, its star performers, its appearances on recordings, and the problems the group faced on their 1911 trip around the world.
John Philip Sousa's mature career as the indomitable leader of his own touring band is well known, but the years leading up to his emergence as a celebrity have escaped serious attention. In this revealing biography, Patrick Warfield explains how the March King came to be by documenting Sousa's early life and career. Covering the period 1854 to 1893, this study focuses on the community and training that created Sousa, exploring the musical life of late nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia as a context for Sousa's development. Warfield examines Sousa's wide-ranging experience composing, conducting, and performing in the theater, opera house, concert hall, and salons, as well as his leadership of the United States Marine Band and the later Sousa Band, early twentieth-century America's most famous and successful ensemble. Sousa composed not only marches during this period but also parlor, minstrel, and art songs; parade, concert, and medley marches; schottisches, waltzes, and polkas; and incidental music, operettas, and descriptive pieces. Warfield's examination of Sousa's output reveals a versatile composer much broader in stylistic range than the bandmaster extraordinaire remembered as the March King. In particular, Making the March King demonstrates how Sousa used his theatrical training to create the character of the March King. The exuberant bandmaster who pleased audiences was both a skilled and charismatic conductor and a theatrical character whose past and very identity suggested drama, spectacle, and excitement. Sousa's success was also the result of perseverance and lessons learned from older colleagues on how to court, win, and keep an audience. Warfield presents the story of Sousa as a self-made business success, a gifted performer and composer who deftly capitalized on his talents to create one of the most entertaining, enduring figures in American music.
Each composer addresses the following topics: Biographical information, The creative process ... how a composer works, Orchestration, Views from the composer to the conductor, Commissioning new works, The teaching of composition, Influential individuals, Ten works all band conductors at all levels should study, Ten composers whose music speaks in especially meaningful ways, The future of the wind band, Other facets of everyday life, Comprehensive list of works for band.
Celebrating 25 years of Green Day, from renowned photographer Bob Gruen It’s been 25 years since the breakthrough album Dookie put punk rock pioneers Green Day on the musical map, and renowned photographer Bob Gruen has been taking photos of the band ever since. Green Day includes behind-the-scenes photos as well as concert images from their international tours, many of which are previously unpublished—along with photographs from their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in 2015 and in the recording studio. The book has the full support of the band, with quotes and commentary from Billie Joe Armstrong, TreÌ? Cool, and Mike Dirnt throughout.
"The Victorian cup on my shelf--a present from my mother--reads 'Love the Giver.' Is it because the very word patronage implies the authority of the father that we have treated American women patrons and activists so unlovingly in the writing of our own history? This pioneering collection of superb scholarship redresses that imbalance. At the same time it brilliantly documents the interrelationship between various aspects of gender and the creation of our own culture."--Judith Tick, author of Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music "Together with the fine-grained and energetic research, I like the spirit of this book, which is ambitious, bold, and generous minded. Cultivating Music in America corrects long-standing prejudices, omissions, and misunderstandings about the role of women in setting up the structures of America's musical life, and, even more far-reaching, it sheds light on the character of American musical life itself. To read this book is to be brought to a fresh understanding of what is at stake when we discuss notions such as 'elitism, ' 'democratic taste, ' and the political and economic implications of art."--Richard Crawford, author of The American Musical Landscape "We all know we are indebted to royal patronage for the music of Mozart. But who launched American talent? The answer is women, this book teaches us. Music lovers will be grateful for these ten essays, sound in scholarship, that make a strong case for the women philanthropists who ought to join Carnegie and Rockefeller as household words as sponsors of music."--Karen J. Blair, author of The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America
The way birds behave is one of the vital keys to accurate identification and this book provides the experienced instruction needed to understand and get the most out of watching birds. The guide covers all the fundamental types of bird behaviour, including movement, feeding, breeding, migration, navigation, distribution, range, life and death, all of which are illustrated with beautiful photographs. There is a whole section dedicated to the behaviour of different species groups, from divers and grebes through to sparrows, buntings and finches.
The subject of this book is accurately defined by its subtitle. Music in a New Found Land does not pretend to be a comprehensive history of American music. Nor does Mellers strive to catalog what he considers to be authentic American music. Instead, he deals, in some detail, with comparatively few composers, most of whom have wellestablished reputations. It has always been difficult to separate American music from its immediate relevance to the twentieth century. Mellers' theme involves the relationship between "art" music, jazz and pop music; he sees the segregation of these genres as both illogical and artifi cial. If the pop music of Tin Pan Alley may be anti-art, it has also produced Gershwin, Ellington, and composing improvisers such as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis. The study of American music is as relevant into any inquiry into a national culture as the study of American literature and painting. This book contains a large number of quotations from American writers, because Mellers thought American sensibility should parallel, reinforce, and comment on American music. In sum, this is the closest available one-volume history of American music, and a window into American culture.
