Contemporary World Musicians

Music lovers, researchers, students, librarians, and teachers can trace the personal and artistic influences behind music makers from Elton John to Leontyne Price. Individual entries on over 400 of the world's most renowned and accomplished living performers, composers, conductors, and band leaders in musical genres from opera to hip-hop. Also includes an in-depth Index covering musicians of all eras, so that readers can learn which artists, alive or dead, influenced the work of today's most important figures in the music industry.

Contemporary Musicians provides comprehensive information on more than 4,500 musicians and groups from around the world. Entries include a detailed biographical essay, selected discographies, contact information and a list of sources.

Spanning 40 years, this book covers 200 of the most widely exhibited international artists, organized A-Z.

A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art. The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.

Provides comprehensive information on musicians and groups from around the world. Entries include a detailed biographical essay, selected discographies, contact information, and a list of sources.

This survey of great contemporary artists is the perfect introduction to the exciting world of art today. Artists working after the Second World War faced a confounding array of challenges, as stylistic barriers were broken, technology advanced, and issues of sexuality and race came to the forefront. From painters and photographers to sculptors and performance artists, fifty of the most influential contemporary artists are profiled in this colorful and engaging book that traces the various artistic movements and radical changes of the second half of the twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Presented chronologically, each artist is featured in 2 or 4-page spreads that include brilliant reproductions of their most important works, an illuminating biography, key dates in their career, and informative background on major developments in the art world. Throughout the volume a timeline places each artist within the context of contemporary art. As diverse and inspiring as the artists themselves, this book is a voyage of discovery into art's cutting edge.

The purpose of this book of essays is to provide a novel sort of introduction to music. Struck by the fact that most introductions to the art are oriented toward an historical approach or, on the other hand, cover the field of music systematically by giving attention to selected parameters such as melody, rhythm, and harmony, or to genres of music such as symphony, opera, and song, the authors were impressed by the attractiveness of an approach that focuses on music in the contemporary world, and particularly on the way in which it interacts with those social, political, and cultural processes that distinguish the twentieth century. The authors have attempted to produce a group of original essays, each of which is devoted to an approach to the study of music and musical culture, and which has one repertory or culture as its main topic of discussion. The authors view the contemporary world as consisting of the industrialized nations of the West and the developing countries of the Third World; they include among contemporary musics all sorts of musical styles that have come into existence in the twentieth century, whether their background is part and parcel of the twentieth century or whether it is to be ultimately sought in the distant past. The authors feel also that the reader will be interested in musics of the educated and elite as well as those of the broad masses of urban and rural population.