California Press: 1495 books
Frontier Figures
American Music and the Mythology of the American West
Language: English
Release Date: April 18, 2012
Frontier Figures is a tour-de-force exploration of how the American West, both as physical space and inspiration, animated American music. Examining the work of such composers as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Farwell, Beth E. Levy addresses questions...
Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature
Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2015
Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new...
Grand Opera
The Story of the Met
Language: English
Release Date: September 22, 2014
The Metropolitan has stood among the grandest of opera companies since its birth in 1883. Tracing the offstage/onstage workings of this famed New York institution, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron tell how the Met became and remains a powerful actor on the global cultural scene. In this first...
by Janice Dockendorff Boland
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 1998
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 1998
This indispensable manual for present-day players of the one-keyed flute is the first complete method written in modern times. Janice Dockendorff Boland has compiled a manual that can serve as a self-guiding tutor or as a text for a student working with a teacher. Referencing important eighteenth-century...
Sovereign Feminine
Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany
Language: English
Release Date: May 9, 2013
In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics...
1989
Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About
Language: English
Release Date: November 6, 2009
In a tour de force of lyrical theory, Joshua Clover boldly reimagines how we understand both pop music and its social context in a vibrant exploration of a year famously described as "the end of history." Amid the historic overturnings of 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, pop...
by Lawrence Kramer
Language: English
Release Date: November 2, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: November 2, 2010
Interpreting Music is a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfully—"interpreting music" in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of highly influential work, Lawrence Kramer fundamentally rethinks the concepts of work,...
by Arved Ashby
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2010
Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of "absolute" instrumental music. In this original, provocative book, Arved Ashby argues that recording technology has transformed our understanding of art music. Contesting the laments of nostalgic...
by Lawrence Kramer
Language: English
Release Date: January 12, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: January 12, 2016
What, exactly, is knowledge of music? And what does it tell us about humanistic knowledge in general? The Thought of Music grapples directly with these fundamental questions—questions especially compelling at a time when humanistic knowledge is enmeshed in debates about its character and future....
The Secular Commedia
Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Music
Language: English
Release Date: June 7, 2014
Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s The Secular Commedia is a stimulating and original rethinking of the music of the late eighteenth century. Hearing the symphonies and concertos of Haydn and Mozart with an ear tuned to operatic style, as their earliest listeners did, Allanbrook shows that this familiar music...
Russian Music at Home and Abroad
New Essays
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2016
This new collection views Russian music through the Greek triad of “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” to investigate how the idea of "nation" embeds itself in the public discourse about music and other arts with results at times invigorating, at times corrupting. In our divided,...
What Is Cinema? Volume I
Volume I
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2004
André Bazin's What Is Cinema? (volumes I and II) have been classics of film studies for as long as they've been available and are considered the gold standard in the field of film criticism. Although Bazin made no films, his name has been one of the most important in French cinema since World War...
What Is Cinema? Volume II
Volume II
Language: English
Release Date: December 13, 2004
André Bazin's What Is Cinema? (volumes I and II) have been classics of film studies for as long as they've been available and are considered the gold standard in the field of film criticism. Although Bazin made no films, his name has been one of the most important in French cinema since World War...
Funky Nassau
Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music
Language: English
Release Date: May 19, 2011
This book examines the role music has played in the formation of the political and national identity of the Bahamas. Timothy Rommen analyzes Bahamian musical life as it has been influenced and shaped by the islands’ location between the United States and the rest of the Caribbean; tourism; and Bahamian...