All Music Guide Required Listening

Collects reviews for one thousand enduring classic rock albums ranging from the extremely popular to more obscure works.

The industry CD guide "bible" is revised and updated. Since it's first guide was published in 1992 the All Music Guide has become the final word in music, an indispensable buying tool, and essential for every music fan's library. It's the mother of all music reference books and the most respected book of its type - nothing can compare in scope, detail, and authority. Revised edition features: * Over 20,000 CDs from over 4,000 artists in 16 genres * All up to date, rated and reviewed by AMG's ace music critics * Compilations, box sets, reissues, and collections from the past and present as well as artist bios and discographies From blues to jazz to rock to rap, reggae, and beyond, the All Music Guide is every music lover's ultimate handy reference.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

What defines pop music? Why do we consider some styles as easier listening than others? Arranged in three parts: Aesthetics and Authenticity - Groove, Sampling and Industry - Subjectivity, Ethnicity and Politics, this collection of essays by a group of international scholars deals with these questions in diverse ways. This volume prepares the reader for the debates around pop's intricate historical, aesthetic and cultural roots. The intellectual perspectives on offer present the interdisciplinary aspects of studying music and, spanning more than twenty-five years, these essays form a snapshot of some of the authorial voices that have shaped the specific subject matter of pop criticism within the broader field of popular music studies. A common thread running through these essays is the topic of interpretation and its relation to conceptions of musicality, subjectivity and aesthetics. The principle aim of this collection is to demonstrate that pop music needs to be evaluated on its own terms within the cultural contexts that make it meaningful.

This profoundly and comprehensively explores the requirements and techniques of teaching listening and speaking skills. Additionally, it examines the challenges of teaching these skills and the practical techniques for overcoming them in order to have successful teaching and learning processes. More importantly, this book provides highly engaging multi-tiered assessment tools that empower teachers to activate and enrich students’ listening potentials and trigger their speaking creativity through evaluating their current listening and speaking capabilities, rectifying their points of weaknesses and building on their points of strengths. This book also demonstrates various ways of using technology in order to add more vividness and diversity to teaching and enhancing both listening and speaking skills. In a nutshell, this book is an extremely useful springboard for teaching, acquiring and boosting these core skills owing to its practicality, diversity and rich resources.

"Music: Ways of Listening" is intended for use in introductory college courses for students with little or no prior background in music, and is focused upon the development of perceptive listening skills and a broad survey of the Western concert literature. -- From preface.