Roar Chestra

Musical terms come to life, and kids get to join in! A rhythmic poem is paired with exuberant illustrations of a conductor and his animal orchestra to convey the meanings of seven musical terms. The text contains a succinct physical definition for each term. For example, to define glissando the text reads, “Gently gliding, slipping, sliding.” And in the illustrations, the animals use movement to interpret this description, flowing across the spread as if rolling on a wave. Readers will find it easy to learn the terms — and will have great fun playing along! Staccato. Adagio. Allegro. Fortissimo. What child can resist pronouncing these words — or performing them!

Musical terms come to life, and kids get to join in! A rhythmic poem is paired with exuberant illustrations of a conductor and his animal orchestra to convey the meanings of seven musical terms. The text contains a succinct physical definition for each term. For example, to define glissando the text reads, “Gently gliding, slipping, sliding.” And in the illustrations, the animals use movement to interpret this description, flowing across the spread as if rolling on a wave. Readers will find it easy to learn the terms — and will have great fun playing along! Staccato. Adagio. Allegro. Fortissimo. What child can resist pronouncing these words — or performing them!

William Castle, for instance, was a master promoter. In one scheme involving The Tingler, Vincent Price warns in the movie that "the only way to stop the monster is to scream. That's the signal to the projectionist to throw the switch. Under ten or twelve seats were some electric motors, war surplus things that Castle got a bargain on. The motors vibrated the seat, in the hope of scaring a scream out of someone. Just in case it didn't Castle planted someone in the audience to get the screams rolling." This book is about flamboyant promotion, the con artist side of the movie world--everything the ballyhoo boys did to separate the customer from the price of a movie ticket--Emergo, HypnoVista, 3-D, Wide Screen, Cinemagic, Duo-Vision, Dynamation, Smell-O-Vision, plenty more. Supporting the text are 107 photos and illustrations, some never-before-published, and a filmography.

Gustav Mahler and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra Tour America documents Mahler's tours with the orchestra during the 1909 and 1910 seasons, detailing the conditions and preparations for each tour, the outcome of each concert, and the perceptions of audience beyond New York City.

Japan’s jazz community—both musicians and audience—has been begrudgingly recognized in the United States for its talent, knowledge, and level of appreciation. Underpinning this tentative admiration, however, has been a tacit agreement that, for cultural reasons, Japanese jazz “can’t swing.” In Blue Nippon E. Taylor Atkins shows how, strangely, Japan’s own attitude toward jazz is founded on this same ambivalence about its authenticity. Engagingly told through the voices of many musicians, Blue Nippon explores the true and legitimate nature of Japanese jazz. Atkins peers into 1920s dancehalls to examine the Japanese Jazz Age and reveal the origins of urban modernism with its new set of social mores, gender relations, and consumer practices. He shows how the interwar jazz period then became a troubling symbol of Japan’s intimacy with the West—but how, even during the Pacific war, the roots of jazz had taken hold too deeply for the “total jazz ban” that some nationalists desired. While the allied occupation was a setback in the search for an indigenous jazz sound, Japanese musicians again sought American validation. Atkins closes out his cultural history with an examination of the contemporary jazz scene that rose up out of Japan’s spectacular economic prominence in the 1960s and 1970s but then leveled off by the 1990s, as tensions over authenticity and identity persisted. With its depiction of jazz as a transforming global phenomenon, Blue Nippon will make enjoyable reading not only for jazz fans worldwide but also for ethnomusicologists, and students of cultural studies, Asian studies, and modernism.