An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, a legendary pianist and organist, and an accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized in his lifetime, he is best remembered today for several staples of the concert hall and for such popular music as "The Wedding March" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."
Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making
Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) was one of jazz's greatest and most enigmatic figures. As a composer, pianist, and bandleader, Monk both extended the piano tradition known as Harlem stride and was at the center of modern jazz's creation during the 1940s, setting the stage for the experimentalism of the 1960s and '70s. This pathbreaking study combines cultural theory, biography, and musical analysis to shed new light on Monk's music and on the jazz canon itself. Gabriel Solis shows how the work of this stubbornly nonconformist composer emerged from the jazz world's fringes to find a central place in its canon.
Grunge is dead: The oral history of Seatle rock music
Weaving together the definitive story of the Seattle music scene through a series of interviews with the people who were there, this book contains more than 130 interviews, along with essential background information. Digging deeper than other accounts, this history begins in the early 1960s, tracing the chain of events that spawned some of the greatest rock acts of all time in the 1990s, including Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden.
In the story of the great lyric poet Simonides, Mary Renault brings alive a time in Greece when tyrants kept an unsteady rule and poetry, music, and royal patronage combined to produce a flowering of the arts.
Ellie is mad about music: she dreams of becoming a singer and she desperately wants to go to the Glastonbury Festival, where her favourite singer, Murphy, will be playing. But with an overprotective Dad and important exams to take, it seems that Ellie’s dreams will have to remain just that, dreams. But one day she sees a competition in a music magazine…