Criticism category: 58377 books
Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Faber
A Library of America Special Publication
Language: English
Release Date: February 2, 2016
Manny Farber (1917–2008) was a unique figure among American movie critics. Champion of what he called "termite art" (focused, often eccentric virtuosity as opposed to "white elephant" monumentality), master of a one-of-a-kind prose style whose jazz-like phrasing and incandescent...
True Traveller
A Reader
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2017
W.H. Davies (1871–1940) was popularly though reductively known as the 'tramp-poet' due to his remarkable journey from vagrancy, in Britain and the United States, to considerable literary success. 'Discovered' in part by Edward Thomas, who admired his poetry, Davies became a prolific memoirist and...
Everybody's Autonomy
Connective Reading and Collective Identity
Language: English
Release Date: May 29, 2015
Experimental texts empower the reader by encouraging self-governing approaches to reading and by placing the reader on equal footing with the author. Everybody's Autonomy is about reading and identity.
Contemporary avant garde writing has often been overlooked by those who study literature and...
American Poetry in Performance
From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop
Language: English
Release Date: July 2, 2013
"Tyler Hoffman brings a fresh perspective to the subject of performance poetry, and this comes at an excellent time, when there is such a vast interest across the country and around the world in the performance of poetry. He makes important connections, explaining things in a manner that remains...
by John Elsom
Language: English
Release Date: October 14, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: October 14, 2014
This book, first published in 1981, sets out the critical reaction to some fifty key post-war productions of the British theatre, as gauged primarily through the contemporary reviews of theatre critics. The plays chosen are each, in their different ways, important in their contribution to the development...
Music and the French Enlightenment
Rameau and the Philosophes in Dialogue
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2016
Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the leading figures of the French Enlightenment engaged in a philosophical debate about the nature of music. The principal participants-Rousseau, Diderot, and d'Alembert-were responding to the views of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, who was...
by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2010
"Jones has learned-and this has been very rare in jazz criticism-to write about music as an artist."-Nat Hentoff ks
Black Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie...
by RJ Wheaton
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2011
An album which distilled a genre from the musical, cultural, and social ether, Portishead's Dummy was such a complete artistic achievement that its ubiquitous successes threatened to exhaust its own potential. RJ Wheaton offers an impressionistic investigation of Dummy that imitates the cumulative...
Freedom and the Arts
Essays on Music and Literature
Language: English
Release Date: April 4, 2012
Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is perpetual negotiation required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work.
Bach's Works for Solo Violin
Style, Structure, Performance
Language: English
Release Date: September 30, 1999
J. S. Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin have been central to the violin repertoire since the mid-eighteenth century. This engaging volume is the first comprehensive exploration of the place of these works within Bach's music: it focuses on their structural and stylistic features as they...
Schumann on Music
A Selection from the Writings
Language: English
Release Date: November 13, 2012
Schumann's genius as a composer is well known; perhaps less well known is the fact that he was also a gifted music critic who wrote hundreds of perceptive essays, articles, and reviews for the Neue Zeitschrift fur Müsik, the influential music journal he founded in 1834.The present work, translated and...
Stravinsky and the Russian Period
Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2012
Van den Toorn and McGinness take a fresh look at the dynamics of Stravinsky's musical style from a variety of analytical, critical and aesthetic angles. Starting with processes of juxtaposition and stratification, the book offers an in-depth analysis of works such as The Rite of Spring, Les Noces...
Ocean of Sound
Ambient sound and radical listening in the age of communication
Language: English
Release Date: August 2, 2018
David Toop's extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson.
Beginning in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard...
Kerouac on Record
A Literary Soundtrack
Language: English
Release Date: March 8, 2018
He was the leading light of the Beat Generation writers and the most dynamic author of his time, but Jack Kerouac also had a lifelong passion for music, particularly the mid-century jazz of New York City, the development of which he witnessed first-hand during the 1940s with Charlie Parker, Dizzy...