Maestros Of The Pen

The first history of music criticism in the United States.

This award-winning book, now available in paperback, is the first solid appraisal of the legendary career of the eminent Hungarian-born conductor Fritz Reiner (1888-1963). Personally enigmatic and often described as difficult to work with, he was nevertheless renowned for the dynamic galvanization of the orchestras he led, a nearly unrivaled technical ability, and high professional standards. Reiner's influence in the United States began in the early 1920s and lasted until his death. Reiner was also deeply committed to serious music in American life, especially through the promotion of new scores. In Fritz Reiner, Maestro and Martinet, Kenneth Morgan paints a very real portrait of a man who was both his own worst enemy and one of the true titans of his profession.

America's Gilded Age was a time of great musical evolution. As the country continued to develop a musical style apart from Europe, its church and religious music and opera took on new forms. Music-as-entertainment also evolved, with marching bands at public events and the new musicals in theaters. This volume presents the composers, musicians, songwriters, instruments and musical forms that uniquely identify the Gilded Age. Chapters include: Concerts and Symphony orchestras; Grand Opera; Composers, Critics, and Conservatories; Amateurs and Music at Home; Sacred Music, Black and White; Ragtime, Vaudeville, and the American Musical Stage; Music, Politics, and the Progressive Movement; and Music Industries and Technology

Critics, Ratings, and Society is the first comprehensive study of the review as social institution. Its theories and data encompass reviews of all types of products--including the arts (e.g. theater, books, and music) and consumer products (e.g. cars, software, and appliances). According to Blank, the core problem of reviews is credibility. Concerns about credibility organize the formulation of reviews and audiences. The connoisseurial-procedural distinction describes the production of credibility and its assessment under different types of rating systems.

The year 1908 was not remarkable by most accounts, but it was an auspicious year for journalism. As newspapers sought to recover from big-city yellow journalism and circulation wars that reached their boiling point a few years earlier during the Spanish-American War, press clubs began to champion higher education. And schools dedicated to journalism education, led by the University of Missouri, began to emerge. Now sanctioned by universities, journalism could teach acceptable behavior and establish credentials. It was nothing less than the birth of a profession. Journalism—1908 opens a window on mass communication a century ago. It tells how the news media in the United States were fundamentally changed by the creation of academic departments and schools of journalism, by the founding of the National Press Club, and by exciting advances that included early newsreels, the introduction of halftones to print, and even changes in newspaper design. Journalism educator Betty Houchin Winfield has gathered a team of well-known media scholars, all specialists in particular areas of journalism history, to examine the status of their profession in 1908: news organizations, business practices, media law, advertising, forms of coverage from sports to arts, and more. Various facets of journalism are explored and situated within the country’s history and the movement toward reform and professionalism—not only formalized standards and ethics but also labor issues concerning pay, hours, and job differentiation that came with the emergence of new technologies. This overview of a watershed year is national in scope, examining early journalism education programs not only at Missouri but also at such schools as Colgate, Washington and Lee, Wisconsin, and Columbia. It also reviews the status of women in the profession and looks beyond big-city papers to Progressive Era magazines, the immigrant press, and African American publications. Journalism—1908 commemorates a century of progress in the media and, given the place of Missouri’s School of Journalism in that history, is an appropriate celebration of that school’s centennial. It is a lode of information about journalism education history that will surprise even many of those in the field and marks a seminal year with lasting significance for the profession.

A history of the villains and heroes of contemporary classical music, looking at the star system, commercialism, recording and management politics, concert agencies, and the festival racket. Includes bandw photos. For general readers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Jean Baudrillard is characterized as the “Last Prophet of Europe”: not just because he was a prominent thinker, French philosopher and author of more than 50 works and essays that examine modern consumer society in depth. Events and phenomena described by Baudrillard in his works 20-30 years ago are taking place today. By means of his writings he described his view of the world and explained why people and society are the way they are. He “encrypted” in his works a system that allows for making accurate prognosis. There was no book until this that could have demonstrated the integral system of Baudrillard’s philosophy. Baudrillard did not share it with anybody and did not describe it explicitly as a whole. Figuratively speaking, he deconstructed his system into “bricks” (his writings), then built a building out of them, numbered each brick, and dismantled the building and burned the schemes. In the book Baudrillard. Maestro. The Last Prophet of Europe, Oleg Maltsev thoroughly analyzes each brick and constructs Baudrillard’s system presenting to readers for the first time a complete model, the tools used by Baudrillard and his philosophy. Throughout the 16 chapters of this book, the author looks into all kinds of subjects raised by Baudrillard with practical examples, among which the “masses”, the “kingdom of the blind”, the “silent majority”, “perfect crime”, European mysticism, the “symbolic system” and many other phenomena are examined from the viewpoint of the scholar. The author also shares his research results based on the philosophy and sociology of Baudrillard. Dr. Maltsev then examines Jean Baudrillard’s works (some of which had been translated into Russian for the first time), his photographic pieces, and interviews people who personally knew Baudrillard, his critics and fellow researchers. This work is a practical book for modern people who want to have an objective view of the current state of affairs and take responsibility for their present and future. It provides an idea for the use of the philosophy, sociology, and radical anthropology of Baudrillard as the foundation of personal achievement, efficiency, and safety in such unstable and uncertain conditions of a constantly changing environment.