All Made Of Tunes

Charles Ives is famous for using borrowed material in his music. Almost two hundred individual works or movements, spanning his entire career and representing more than a third of his output, incorporate music by other composers or from his own previous work. In this book, the eminent Ives scholar J. Peter Burkholder identifies the different kinds of "quotations" in Ives's music, explores the complex musical, aesthetic, and psychological motivations behind the borrowings, and shows the purpose, techniques, and effects that characterize each one. Burkholder catalogues fourteen distinct ways that Ives borrowed, ranging from direct quotation to paraphrase, variation, collage, modeling, and stylistic allusion. Arguing that these borrowing procedures were compositional strategies, he provides a new perspective on Ives's process of composition. In addition, by tracing the development of Ives's borrowing practices through his career, he contributes to an understanding of the composer's stylistic evolution. And by showing how much of Ives's music uses borrowing procedures that are common to many composers, he reveals that Ives is not as far removed from the classic-romantic tradition as has been thought. Finally, Burkholder's comprehensive treatment of Ives's borrowing techniques offers a new perspective on the entire field of musical borrowing.

Charles Ives is famous for using borrowed material in his music. Almost two hundred individual works or movements, spanning his entire career and representing more than a third of his output, incorporate music by other composers or from his own previous work. In this book, the eminent Ives scholar J. Peter Burkholder identifies the different kinds of "quotations" in Ives's music, explores the complex musical, aesthetic, and psychological motivations behind the borrowings, and shows the purpose, techniques, and effects that characterize each one. Burkholder catalogues fourteen distinct ways that Ives borrowed, ranging from direct quotation to paraphrase, variation, collage, modeling, and stylistic allusion. Arguing that these borrowing procedures were compositional strategies, he provides a new perspective on Ives's process of composition. In addition, by tracing the development of Ives's borrowing practices through his career, Burkholder contributes to an understanding of the composer's stylistic evolution. And by showing how much of Ives's music uses borrowing procedures that are common to many composers, he reveals that Ives is not as far removed from the classic-romantic tradition as has been thought. Finally, Burkholder's comprehensive treatment of Ives's borrowing techniques offers a new perspective on the entire field of musical borrowing.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse." Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The paperback edition does not include an accompanying CD.

Henderson provides important insights into the composer's body of work.

“An intoxicating blend of music, love, and family from one of the essential writers of the internet generation” (Stephanie Danler). Have you ever wondered what your mother was like before she became your mother, and what she gave up in order to have you? It’s the early days of the new millennium, and Laura has arrived in New York City’s East Village in the hopes of recording her first album. A songwriter with a one-of-a-kind talent, she’s just beginning to book gigs with her beautiful best friend when she falls hard for a troubled but magnetic musician whose star is on the rise. Their time together is stormy and short-lived—but will reverberate for the rest of Laura’s life. Fifteen years later, Laura’s teenage daughter, Marie, is asking questions about her father, questions that Laura does not want to answer. Laura has built a stable life in Brooklyn that bears little resemblance to the one she envisioned when she left Ohio all those years ago, and she’s taken pains to close the door on what was and what might have been. But neither her best friend, now a famous musician who relies on Laura’s songwriting skills, nor her depressed and searching daughter will let her give up on her dreams. “A zippy and profound story of love, loss, heredity, and par­enthood (Emma Straub), Perfect Tunes explores the fault lines in our most important relationships, and asks whether dreams deferred can ever be reclaimed. It is a delightful and poignant tale of music and motherhood, ambition and com­promise—of life, in all its dissonance and harmony.

A Rolling Stone-Kirkus Best Music Book of 2020 The definitive account of pop music in the mid-eighties, from Prince and Madonna to the underground hip-hop, indie rock, and club scenes Everybody knows the hits of 1984 - pop music's greatest year. From "Thriller" to "Purple Rain," "Hello" to "Against All Odds," "What's Love Got to Do with It" to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," these iconic songs continue to dominate advertising, karaoke nights, and the soundtracks for film classics (Boogie Nights) and TV hits (Stranger Things). But the story of that thrilling, turbulent time, an era when Top 40 radio was both the leading edge of popular culture and a moral battleground, has never been told with the full detail it deserves - until now. Can't Slow Down is the definitive portrait of the exploding world of mid-eighties pop and the time it defined, from Cold War anxiety to the home-computer revolution. Big acts like Michael Jackson (Thriller), Prince (Purple Rain), Madonna (Like a Virgin), Bruce Springsteen (Born in the U.S.A.), and George Michael (Wham!'s Make It Big) rubbed shoulders with the stars of the fermenting scenes of hip-hop, indie rock, and club music. Rigorously researched, mapping the entire terrain of American pop, with crucial side trips to the UK and Jamaica, from the biz to the stars to the upstarts and beyond, Can't Slow Down is a vivid journey to the very moment when pop was remaking itself, and the culture at large - one hit at a time.

"Introduction Steve Reich pitched up in San Francisco in September 1961. He was a young musician, one who had been taken by the early-century work of the Hungarian composer and folklorist Béla Bartók, and he had journeyed west from New York in the hope of studying with Leon Kirchner, a composer in the rough-lyric Bartók tradition who'd been teaching at Mills College. But Kirchner had just left for Harvard, so Reich ended up working at Mills under Luciano Berio. Over the course of the previous decade, Berio had become identified as a figurehead of the European post-war avant-garde: his ultramodern serialist work was quite a different proposition to Kirchner's own"--