Music category: 21679 books

Real Music by Anthony Esolen is a comprehensive and fascinating guide, in print and song, to the great hymns of the Church. It shows that, unlike much of what is sung in too many Catholic churches today, good music, “Real Music”, combines great poetry with doctrinally sound lyrics and beautiful...

Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could...

Of Bach's four sons who became composers, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-88) was the most prolific, the most original, and the most influential both during and after his lifetime. This is the first comprehensive study of his music, examining not only the famous keyboard sonatas and concertos but...

From the Romantic era onwards, music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and recurrence of events, music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world,...

From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. In The Music between Us, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable...

The attempt to play music with the styles and instruments of its era--commonly referred to as the early music movement--has become immensely popular in recent years. For instance, Billboard's "Top Classical Albums" of 1993 and 1994 featured Anonymous 4, who sing medieval music, and the best-selling...

Finally, an easy to understand resource that gives musicians essential facts about intellectual property and residual income. In a matter of minutes, this book helps you to understand the technical aspects of music publishing that would otherwise take years to learn. It is pragmatic in its approach to...

While music lovers and music historians alike understand that folk music played an increasingly pivotal role in American labor and politics during the economic and social tumult of the Great Depression, how did this relationship come to be? Ronald D. Cohen sheds new light on the complex cultural history...

Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. From the field of natural philosophy, involving the science of sounds and acoustics, to the realm of imagination, involving resounding...

'World music' emerged as an invention of the West from encounters with other cultures. This book draws readers into a remarkable range of these historical encounters, in which music had the power to evoke the exotic and to give voice to the voiceless. In the course of the volume's eight chapters the...

Revisit the Golden Age of classical music in America through the witty and adventurous reviews of our greatest critic-composer: For fourteen memorable years Virgil Thomson surveyed the worlds of opera and classical music as the chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. An accomplished composer...

Occult traditions have inspired musical ingenuity for centuries. From the Pythagorean concept of a music of the spheres to the occult subculture of 20th-century pop and rock, music has often attempted to express mystical states of mind, cosmic harmony, the demonic and the divine—nowhere more so,...

Pierre Bourdieu has been an extraordinarily influential figure in the sociology of music. For over four decades, his concepts have helped to generate both empirical and theoretical interventions in the field of musical study. His impact on the sociology of music taste, in particular, has been profound,...

Throughout history and across the globe, governments have taken a strong hand in censoring music. Whether in the interests of "safeguarding" the moral and religious values of their citizens or of promoting their own political goals, the character and severity of actions taken to suppress and control...