Music

Lester Young (1909-1959) was one of the great jazz masters, whose tenor saxophone playing brought new levels of expressiveness and subtlety to the jazz language. This book follows Lester Young through his life in a rapidly changing world, showing how the music of this exceptionally sensitive man was affected by his experiences. more...

Price: $28.45

T. W. Adorno (1903 1969) was one of the main philosophers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. An accomplished musician, Adorno first focused on the theory of culture and art. Later he turned to the problem of the self-defeating dialectic of modern reason and freedom. more...

Price: $27.00

Written by a producer who has worked with some of the biggest names in music more...

Price: $38.95

Without Lou Pearlman, there would have been no Backstreet Boys, no *NSYNC, and possibly no Justin Timberlake. In the late 1990s, Pearlman's boy bands ushered out guitar-and-angst-driven grunge music, and *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys began to dominate the television and radio airwaves. At the core of this squeaky-clean pop revolution was a sinister international fraud conceived by Pearlman, a husky huckster who first honed his crooked business skills as a teenage math nerd and blimp enthusiast in Flushing, Queens. From there in the mid 1980s and from his Orlando, Florida, base in the early 1990s through 2007, he cheated hundreds of investors out of nearly $500 million. When they finally caught on to him and started demanding he return their money, the “Sixth Backstreet Boy” had already fled to Germany and then to Indonesia, where he was eventually nabbed by authorities and charged with a historic federal fraud. Tyler Gray (the only journalist to speak with Pearlman while he was in jail) weaves together the fascinating behind-the-scenes story of the greed and desperation of this boy-band mogul and monumental scam artist. Gray unravels Pearlman's twenty-year long Ponzi scheme and explores persistent rumors about alleged inappropriate behavior by Pearlman toward members of the boy bands and other young men. Along the way, former friends, family members, Pearlman business associates, and band members themselves reveal detailed accounts of everything from the heyday of their stardom to Pearlman's more troubled times. The Hit Charade starts with Pearlman's awkward youth and follows along as his juggling act becomes increasingly complex, then builds to the heartbreaking moments when investors—retirees, relatives, and friends—and government authorities discover that the man they had trusted had been cheating them all along. How did this chubby boy from middle-class Queens, who pioneered some of the music industry's most lucrative pop e more...

Price: $19.99

This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory. Since some of the polyphonic music from the twelfth century and later was written down, scholars have long assumed that it was all composed and transmitted in written form. Our understanding of medieval music has been profoundly shaped by German philologists from the beginning of the last century who approached medieval music as if it were no different from music of the nineteenth century. But Medieval Music and the Art of Memory deftly demonstrates that the fact that a piece was written down does not necessarily mean that it was conceived and transmitted in writing. Busse Berger's new model, one that emphasizes the interplay of literate and oral composition and transmission, deepens and enriches current understandings of medieval music and opens the field for fresh interpretations. more...

Price: $15.95