What The Music Said

First Published in 1999. In What the Music Said, Mark Anthony Neal provides a timely study of from be-bop to Hip Hop. This book looks at the last fifty years of black popular music and provides an intriguing portrait of the existential and social forces that drove black communities to make music in protest, reaction and to fulfil their material and spiritual needs.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

_______________ 'Edward Said had a lifelong passion for music, and possessed the rare ability to write about it for the general reader with a lucid and penetrating intelligence' - TLS 'There are few whose command of words is sufficient not only to illuminate music, but to help music illuminate the world of those who make and listen to it. Said was one' - Daily Telegraph 'The sheer eloquence of Said's writings reminds us that with his untimely death we have lost one of our most distinguished music critics.' - Maynard Solomon, The Julliard School _______________ WITH A FOREWORD BY DANIEL BARENBOIM Music at the Limits brings together three decades of Edward W. Said's essays and articles on music. Addressing the work of a wide variety of composers and performers, Said analyses music's social and political contexts, and provides rich and often surprising assessments. He reflects on the censorship of Wagner in Israel; the relationship between music and feminism; and the works of Beethoven, Bruckner, Rossini, Schumann, Stravinsky and others. Always eloquent and often surprising, Music at the Limits reinforces Said's reputation as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. _______________ 'This fine collection by one of the most perceptive music critics of the last half-century is highly recommended' - Library Journal

On Late Style examines the work produced by great artists -Beethoven, Thomas Mann, Jean Genet among them - at the end of their lives. Said makes it clear that, rather than the resolution of a lifetime's artistic endeavour, most of the late works discussed are rife with contradiction and almost impenetrable complexity. He helps us see how, though these works often stood in direct contrast to the tastes of society, they were, just as often, announcements of what was to come in the artist's discipline - works of true artistic genius.

The John Coltrane Church began in 1965, when Franzo and Marina King attended a performance of the John Coltrane Quartet at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop and saw a vision of the Holy Ghost as Coltrane took the bandstand. Celebrating the spirituality of the late jazz innovator and his music, the storefront church emerged during the demise of black-owned jazz clubs in San Francisco, and at a time of growing disillusionment with counter-culture spirituality following the 1978 Jonestown tragedy. For 50 years, the church has effectively fought redevelopment, environmental racism, police brutality, mortgage foreclosures, religious intolerance, gender disparity and the corporatization of jazz. This critical history is the first book-length treatment of an extraordinary African-American church and community institution.

A murder in Istanbul is entangled with international politics and deadly secrets when an embassy official is shot trying to swim the Dardanelles Straits. Special Branch officer Seymour’s investigation ranges through Istanbul’s graveyards, box shops, and crowded coffee houses, leading to the heart of Topkapi Palace. From the Trade Paperback edition.