Eternal Troubadour

As Bing Crosby once put it, Tiny Tim represents 'one of the most phenomenal success stories in show business'. In 1968, after years of playing dive bars and lesbian cabarets on the Greenwich Village scene, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce, the forty-something falsetto-voiced, ukulele-playing Tiny Tim landed a recording contract with Sinatra's Reprise label and an appearance on NBC's Laugh-In. The resulting album, God Bless Tiny Tim, and its single, 'Tip-toe Thru' The Tulips With Me', catapulted him to the highest levels of fame. Soon, Tiny was playing to huge audiences in the USA and Europe, while his marriage to the seventeen-year-old 'Miss' Vicki was broadcast on The Tonight Show in front of an audience of fifty million. Before long, however, his star began to fade. Miss Vicki left him, his earnings evaporated, and the mainstream turned its back on him. He would spend the rest of his life trying to revive his career, with many of those attempts taking a turn toward the absurd. But while he is often characterized as an oddball curio, Tiny Tim was a master interpreter and student of early American popular song, and his story is one of Shakespearean tragedy framed around a bizarre yet loveable public persona. Here, drawing on dozens of new interviews, never-before-seen diaries, and years of original research, author Justin Martell brings that story to life with the first serious biography of one of the most fascinating yet misunderstood figures in popular music.

This monograph arose from thinking about the literary tradition as described by the Anglo-American modernist writers Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. In their view, the tradition of European love-lyrics crystallized in the work of the medieval Occitan troubadours, who represented the cultural and political milieu of the Occitanie of that period and whose work reflected the religious influences of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The main subject of their poetry was the worship of a divinized feminine character resembling the Virgin Mary, the Gnostic Sophia, or the ancient Mother Goddess. Their literary preoccupations further flourished in Tuscany, as well as among the German Minnesängers, and at the court of the Sicilian King Frederick II (1194–1250), from where they infiltrated into English literature during the Renaissance. In this period, Classical literature, in combination with troubadour poetry, became the cornerstone of English artistic production. However, it is not so well known that troubadour poetry took as its model the medieval poetry written in Andalusian Arabic. This enigmatic essence is what makes this literature so relevant as it is the first instance of the synthesizing of religions, mythologies, philosophies, literatures, symbols, and motifs coming from cultures other than our own. Nowadays, it is not surprising that contemporary artists draw on the troubadour poets and that they are even contrasted with them by critics. Such is the case of Leonard Cohen, who, during his career, revealed erudition in medieval poetry and religion and whose work shows many parallels with the work of his Occitan and Andalusian predecessors. For this reason, the book presents a comparison of the texts and motifs present in their works and refers to another important facet of their œuvre: religion and mysticism. The purpose is to highlight the importance of troubadour poetry in the rise of popular culture in the second half of the 20th century.

This work offers an edition and translation of some 30 poems by the trobairitz, a remarkable group of women poets from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who composed in the style and language of the troubadours. Introductory essays and notes by specialists in the field place the poems in literary, linguistic, historical, social and cultural contexts. English versions facing Occitan texts elucidate the original language and themes, while supplying poems that can be enjoyed by contemporary readers . The varied corpus includes love songs (cansos), debate poems (tensos), political satires (sirventes) and other lyrical sub-genres (including dawn-song, lament, ballad, chanson de mal mariee). To represent the range of female voices available in the lyric corpus of the troubadours, the editors have selected songs consistently attributed to historically documented women poets, as well as songs whose authorship is open to question. The latter may be presented by the manuscripts with or without a named woman poet, but all offer female speakers personae characteristic of troubadour poets in general.

A vivid, dramatic account of how half a dozen kinds of modern music--punk rock, art rock, disco, salsa, rap, minimalist classical--emerged in new forms and cross-pollinated all at once in the middle seventies in NYC. Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented—block by block, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless. Will Hermes's Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era's music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year's Day 1973 to New Year's Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGB and the Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation.

Articles on masterpieces of European religious music, from the middle ages to Stravinsky and Tavener. The late Wilfrid Mellers, who occupies a special place among music critics, described himself as a non-believer; but his preference for music that "displays a sense of the numinous" (in his words) will strike a chord with many wholisten to religious music nowadays, and who share his view that music that confronts first and last things is likely to offer more than music that evades them. The essays form five groups, which together offer a survey of religious music from around the first millennium to the beginning of the second, in the context of the difficult issues of what religious music is, and, for good measure, what is religion? The parts are: The Ages of Christian Faith; The Re-birth of a Re-birth: From Renaissance to High Baroque; From Enlightenment to Doubt; From "the Death of God" to "the Unanswered Question"; and The Ancient Law and the Modern Mind. Musical discussion, with copious examples, is conducted throughout the book in a context that is also religious - and indeed philosophical, social, and political, with the open-endedness that such an approach demands in the presentation of ideas aboutmusic's most fundamental nature and purposes. COMPOSERS: Hildegard of Bingen; Perotin; Machaut; Dunstable, Dufay; William Corniyshes father and son; Tallis; Byrd; Monteverdi; Schutz; J.S. Bach; Couperin; Handel; Haydn;Mozart; Beethoven; Schubert; Bruckner; Berlioz, Faure; Verdi, Brahms; Elgar, Delius; Holst, Vaughan Williams, Howells; Britten; Janacek; Messiaen, Poulenc; Rachmaninov; Stravinsky; Part, Tavener, Gorecki, Macmillan, Finnissy; Copland.

Martin Sharp was an integral part of international Pop Art in the 1960s, magnified through his covers for OZ magazine in Sydney and London, his covers for Cream, and posters of Dylan, Hendrix and Donovan. His efforts at making The Yellow House and Luna Park cultural precincts, were aided by his screen prints and exhibitions to flaunt the work of others, especially the singer Tiny Tim. In this second of two volumes, Lowell Tarling offers us a way into the enigmatic and reclusive artist, through his extensive interviews with Sharp and all of his trusted friends, touching on the many dramas of life at Sharp's home studio, Wirian; his productions and search for meaning with regard to the Luna Park Fire; his spiritual search and death in 2013. 'I think what Lowell has done here is admirable, removing himself from the narrative. This book will be of interest to a wider audience who don't even know who Martin is. I predict this book will become a genuine hit.' - Peter Kingston.

Federico García Lorca (1889-1936) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish poet of the twentieth century; Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) is Spain’s most performed composer of the same period. The two were very different – Lorca was gay, liberal, and a member of the avant garde, while Falla was a devout Catholic – yet they had a profound mutual influence. The two developed an intimate friendship, which ended when Lorca was shot by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Lorca in Tune with Falla is the first book to trace Lorca’s impact on Falla’s music, and Falla’s influence on Lorca’s writings. Nelson R. Orringer explores the music underlying Poem of Deep Song, Gypsy Ballads, and Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, bringing out the analogous sounds and ideas that emerge in the active, ongoing connection between the artworks of both creators. The book emphasizes how this harmony increases knowledge and appreciation of both artists.

Outsider musicians can be the product of damaged DNA, alien abduction, drug fry, demonic possession, or simply sheer obliviousness. This book profiles dozens of outsider musicians, both prominent and obscure—figures such as The Shaggs, Syd Barrett, Tiny Tim, Jandek, Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnston, Harry Partch, and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy—and presents their strange life stories along with photographs, interviews, cartoons, and discographies. About the only things these self-taught artists have in common are an utter lack of conventional tunefulness and an overabundance of earnestness and passion. But, believe it or not, they're worth listening to, often outmatching all contenders for inventiveness and originality. A CD featuring songs by artists profiled in the book is also available.