Music Then And Now

A "you are there" guide to masterpieces of Western music.

Music Then and Now offers a vivid introduction to Western music by focusing on 28 works in-depth. Its "you are there" approach-demonstrated by each chapter's rich historical and cultural context-engages students in the excitement of hearing the music as original audiences did when the music was first performed. Covering all historical periods and genres, the book gives students all the tools they need for close listening. And with Total Access, every new copy of the book includes access to the ebook, streaming music, dynamic Author Videos, and other online listening tools.

In this collection of essays, interviews, and profiles, William Banfield reflects on his life as an musician and educator, weaving together pieces of cultural criticism that pay homage to artists who have created and sustained Black music for more than forty years.

We tap our foot to a beat or love a favorite melody. It has been a part of human life since earliest times. Why music? It is the most direct means we have to communicate. Today it blares or whispers at us from a thousand venues: we have Tchaikovsky, Tony Bennett, the Beetles, Elvis, and Carry Underwood. What will be the mainstay of musical taste in fifty years -- or even another ten? This is my seventh book. In ten years I will be writing another book, and I will bring you up-to-date on the latest musical tastes. See you then! Bernie Keating

1500 illustrations and superb photographs, original memorabilia, newspaper features together with a detailed chronology of the world's greatest rock band.

Compares the use of things in the past and present, such as toys, games, transportation, learning, methods of communication and leisure activities.

A lively and lyrical picture book jaunt from actor and author John Lithgow! Oh, children! Remember! Whatever you may do, Never play music right next to the zoo. They’ll burst from their cages, each beast and each bird, Desperate to play all the music they’ve heard. A concert gets out of hand when the animals at the neighboring zoo storm the stage and play the instruments themselves in this hilarious picture book based on one of John Lithgow’s best-loved tunes.

DIV Johann Sebastian Bach – celebrated pipe organist, court composer and master of sacred music – was also a technical pioneer. Working in Germany in the early eighteenth century, he invented new instruments and carried out experiments in tuning, the effects of which are still with us today. Two hundred years later, a number of extraordinary musicians have utilised the music of Bach to thrilling effect through the art of recording, furthering their own virtuosity and reinventing the composer for our time. In Reinventing Bach, Paul Elie brilliantly blends the stories of modern musicians with a polyphonic account of our most celebrated composer’s life to create a spellbinding narrative of the changing place of music in our lives. We see the sainted organist Albert Schweitzer playing to a mobile recording unit set up at London’s Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach’s organ works to the world beyond the churches, and Pablo Casals’s Abbey Road recordings of Bach’s cello suites transform the middle-class sitting room into a hotbed of existentialism; we watch Leopold Stokowski persuade Walt Disney to feature his own grand orchestrations of Bach in the animated classical-music movie Fantasia – which made Bach the sound of children’s playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike – and we witness how Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations made Bach the byword for postwar cool. Through the Beatles and Switched-on Bach and Gödel, Escher, Bach – through film, rock music, the Walkman, the CD and up to Yo-Yo Ma and the iPod – Elie shows us how dozens of gifted musicians searched, experimented and collaborated with one another in the service of a composer who emerged as the prototype of the spiritualised, technically savvy artist. /div