Somebody Else S Music

Jane Haddam's stylishly written novels featuring Gregor Demarkian, retired chief of the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, have thrilled and delighted an ever-increasing number of readers over the years. Now, with Somebody Else's Music, Haddam delivers her most compelling crime novel to date - a brilliant exploration of how the past affects the present and the twisted workings of human psyche. Elizabeth Toliver, now an acclaimed author with a rock star lover, was a too-smart, fashion-impaired teen who was the target of abuse from a circle of popular high school girls. The abuse escalated until one summer night she was nailed into an outhouse with over twenty snakes and, while she beat herself into a coma trying to escape, a local teenage boy was murdered just outside. Still haunted by nightmares of that night, Toliver returns to her hometown for the first time in almost 30 years, triggering a deadly chain of events.

2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the Billboard hit about cannibalism in a Pennsylvania coal mine. "Timothy," known as "the worst song ever recorded," was banned by major radio stations, while launching the careers of playwright Rupert Holmes, The Buoys, and Dakota. Their amazing story represents a cautionary tale of substance abuse, the pitfalls of fame, and the true price of the rock and roll fantasy.

The Russian shanson can be heard across the country today, on radio and television shows, at mass events like political rallies, and even at the Kremlin. Yet despite its ubiquity, it has attracted almost no scholarly attention. Anastasia Gordienko provides the first full history of the shanson, from its tenuous ties to early modern criminals’ and robbers’ folk songs, through its immediate generic predecessors in the Soviet Union, to its current incarnation as the soundtrack for daily life in Russia. It is difficult to firmly define the shanson or its family of song genres, but they all have some connection, whether explicit or implicit, to the criminal underworld or to groups or activities otherwise considered subversive. Traditionally produced by and popular among criminals and other marginalized groups, and often marked by characters and themes valorizing illegal activities, the songs have undergone censorship since the early nineteenth century. Technically legal only since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the shanson is today not only broadly popular but also legitimized by Vladimir Putin’s open endorsement of the genre. With careful research and incisive analysis, Gordienko deftly details the shanson’s history, development, and social meanings. Attempts by imperial rulers, and later by Soviet leaders, to repress the songs and the lifestyles they romanticized not only did little to discourage their popularity but occasionally helped the genre flourish. Criminals and liberal intelligentsia mingled in the Gulag system, for instance, and this contact introduced censored songs to an educated, disaffected populace that inscribed its own interpretations and became a major point of wider dissemination after the Gulag camps were closed. Gordienko also investigates the shanson as it exists in popular culture today: not divorced from its criminal undertones (or overtones) but celebrated for them. She argues that the shanson expresses fundamental themes of Russian culture, allowing for the articulation of anxieties, hopes, and dissatisfactions that are discouraged or explicitly forbidden otherwise.

The second part of this volume comprises four essays on Durand’s music, contributed by three of his former composition students -- Christian Asplund, Eric Flesher, and Ryan M. Hare -- and by his colleague, music theorist Jonathan W. Bernard, who has also edited and introduced this absorbing portrait of the composer.

The films of Orson Welles inhabit the spaces of cities—from America's industrializing midland to its noirish borderlands, from Europe's medieval fortresses to its Kafkaesque labyrinths and postwar rubblescapes. His movies take us through dark streets to confront nightmarish struggles for power, the carnivalesque and bizarre, and the shadows and light of human character. This ambitious new study explores Welles's vision of cities by following recurring themes across his work, including urban transformation, race relations and fascism, the utopian promise of cosmopolitanism, and romantic nostalgia for archaic forms of urban culture. It focuses on the personal and political foundation of Welles's cinematic cities—the way he invents urban spaces on film to serve his dramatic, thematic, and ideological purposes. The book's critical scope draws on extensive research in international archives and builds on the work of previous scholars. Viewing Welles as a radical filmmaker whose innovative methods were only occasionally compatible with the commercial film industry, this volume examines the filmmaker's original vision for butchered films, such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Mr. Arkadin (1955), and considers many projects the filmmaker never completed—an immense "shadow oeuvre" ranging from unfinished and unreleased films to unrealized treatments and screenplays.

A truly alternative look at music lists, not one that merely includes the obvious but shows the connections of popular music to the avant garde, the obscure, the experimental, the quirky, and the adventurous, this edition leads the curious reader towards new musical experiences hitherto unknown to them.

During the turbulent decades of the 1970s and 1980s, Papua New Guinea gained political independence from a colonial hold that had lasted almost a century. It was an exciting time for a diverse group of pioneering musicians who formed a band they named "Sanguma." These Melanesian artists heard an imagined future and performed it during a socially and politically critical time for the region. They were united under one goal: to create a sound that represented the birth of a new, sovereign, and distinctly Melanesian nation; and to express their values, identities, and cosmology through their music and performance. Sanguma's experimental music sounded the complex expectations and pressures of their modern nation and helped to steer its postcolonial journey through music. In Hearing the Future, Australian ethnomusicologist Denis Crowdy documents and analyzes the music and activities of the Sanguma band, arguing that their music was a vital form of cultural expression in sync with sociopolitical change then taking place in PNG. Drawing from rock, jazz, and nascent "world music" influences, Sanguma reached audiences far from their home nation, introducing the world to modern music, Melanesia-style, with its fusion of old and new, local and global. Performances ranged from ensembles of Melanesian log drums (garamuts) to extended songs and improvisations involving electric guitars, synthesizers, saxophone, trumpet, bamboo percussion, panpipes, and kuakumba flutes. The band sang in a variety of local vernacular languages, as well as in Tok Pisin and English. To further emphasize their ancestral style, the musicians wore decorative headdresses and body decoration from all around the nation, along with distinctive pants featuring indigenous designs. As the optimism of the early years of the nation faded due to harsh economic and social realities, and as an increasingly commercial popular music scene came to dominate public music culture, tensions between a once heard future and the sounding present emerged. Continuing a theoretical trajectory in ethnomusicology, Crowdy explores the role of music in imagining, constructing, and representing national and regional identity. The analysis reveals inherent tensions between distinctly Melanesian ideals and the complexities in navigating the realities of local neoliberal capitalism.