History & Criticism

"Highway 61 Revisited" resonates because of its enduring emotional appeal. Few songwriters before Dylan or since have combined so effectively the intensely personal with the spectacularly universal. In "Like a Rolling Stone", his gleeful excoriation of...

Since the dawn of modernism, visual and music production have had a particularly intimate relationship. From Luigi Russolo's 1913 Futurist manifesto L'Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise) to Marcel Duchamp's 1925 double-sided discs Rotoreliefs, the 20th...

Do you know which country won the very first Eurovision Song Contest in 1956? And can you name the five members of Kalush Orchestra, the 2022 contest winners? How about which iconic song ABBA won with in 1974?Celebrating the Eurovision Song Contest, this...

The first detailed study of the working relationship and productive friendship between Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) and Adrian Boult (1889-1983). From 1918 onwards, Boult became one of Vaughan Williams's most important interpreters, giving the...

Passionate about music from childhood and much-respected as a teenage guitarist in his native Birmingham, Jeff Lynne rose through the ranks of various semi-professional local groups to become the frontman of the critically acclaimed Idle Race in the late...

One Day: Saturday 13 July 1985, nearly two billion people woke up with one purpose. Nearly a third of humanity knew where they were going to be that day. Watching, listening to, attending: Live Aid. One Decade: Britain in the Eighties was different. The...

The tensions between utopian dreams and dystopian anxieties permeate science fiction as a genre, and nowhere is this tension more evident than in Star Trek. This book breaks new ground by exploring music and sound within the Star Trek franchise across...

Set against a backdrop of world-changing historical and political events, Fire and Rain tells the extraordinary story of one pivotal year in the lives and music of four legendary artists, and reveals how these artists and their songs both shaped and...

The first book-length study of musical education and culture in twentieth-century Oxford. Music has always played a central role in the life of Oxford, in both the city and university, through the great collegiate choral foundations, the many amateur...

'The ideal interpreter of the Ring ... a fascinating and valuable study ... absorbing and convincing' Sunday TimesThe Ring of the Nibelung is one of the greatest works of art created in modern times. Roger Scruton's brilliant and passionate exploration...

'Lovingly detailed and exhaustively researched - easily the most readable and comprehensive guide I've seen to this fascinating hidden history' Tom Robinson, musician, broadcaster and long-time LGBT rights activist From Sia to Elton John, Dusty...

He's the only person to whom The Velvet Underground ever played as an audience of one, the first British writer to talk to Patti Smith after her seventeen-year hiatus from rock. One reviewer hailed his previous book England is Mine as "surely the...

A miracle of still-plentiful hair, raw sex-appeal, and strutting talent . The frontman of one of the most influential and controversial groups of all time. A musical genius with a career spanning over four decades. He is a testament to British glamour,...

Sonic Writing explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media. Studying the domains of instrument design, musical notation, and sound recording under the rubrics of material, symbolic, and...

Two decades after the Sex Pistols and the Ramones birthed punk music into the world, their artistic heirs burst onto the scene and changed the genre forever. While the punk originators remained underground favorites and were slow burns commercially,...

When singer Amy Winehouse was found dead at her London home in 2011, the press inducted her into what Kurt Cobain's mother named the 27 Club. "Now he's gone and joined that stupid club," she said in 1994, after being told that her son, the front man of...

The Eagles are the most popular, enduring rock band in America. With singles and albums hitting the top of the charts for a quarter century and a greatest hits collection that has sold more copies than any other recording in history, the Eagles have...

The definitive survey, combining current scholarship with a vibrant narrative. Carefully informed by feedback from dozens of scholars, it remains the book that students and teachers trust to explain what's important, where it fits, and why it matters...

In this book, Wilson Neate gets beneath the surface of a punk band with a difference. In contrast with many of their punk peers, Wire were enigmatic and cerebral, always keeping a distance from the crowd. Although Pink Flag appeared before the end of...

1970 was a year of change in pop and rock music, with divisions between both becoming ever more blurred. More ambitiously-constructed epics, heavy rock numbers and contemporary folk songs competed with mainstream and easy listening fare on Top of the...

WInner of the Best First Book from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award Winner of the Ann Saddlemyer Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre ResearchReimagining...

From schoolboy band to sold-out stadium tours and worldwide album sales of over 100 million, Genesis were one of the defining progressive rock bands of the seventies, playing a huge part in shaping the genre. Over a career spanning forty years from...

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...

Discover the stories behind the songsTHE LIFE OF A SONG contains the stories of 100 songs exploring each song's biography and how they took on a new life following their release. Packed with intriguing factoids, these bite-sized essays will delight music...

'Literally changed the course of my life' James Murphy'The chapter on Larry Levan alone transformed me into wanting to be your favorite DJ' Questlove'The original and still the best' Gilles Peterson'We can't tell the story of dance music without speaking...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780825672842Author Rob BowmanFormat PaperbackPage Count 402Imprint Schirmer BooksPublisher Cengage GaleWeight(grams) 567gDimensions(mm) 235mm * 152mm * 25mm

'If you stay alive long enough, people eventually catch up' Born in rural Georgia in 1947, Jayne moved to New York and became part of the 60s art scene surrounding Andy Warhol's Factory. Jayne's story follows the arc of LGBT liberation in the US - she...

This book brings together an extensive and varied collection of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's written and spoken-word items for the first time. Spanning the composer's entire career, this compendium offers a balanced selection of Davies's articles and...

'A great writer' 'A music journalist of integrity' 'There's only one Ted Kessler!'Paul Weller Billy Childish ...

**WINNER of Presto Books' Best Composer Biography**NINE WORKS OF BEETHOVEN, NINE WINDOWS INTO THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF A MUSICAL GENIUS. 'We are doubly blessed that Beethoven should have led such an extraordinary life. Laura has combined the two - the...

Have you ever listened to an incredible piece of music and wondered exactly why it makes you want to dance or cry? Are you mystified by how musicians just 'know' what notes to play next when they're improvising? Or why certain notes sound great together...

It was the year the Sixties really started swinging - the Summer of Love, when the Rolling Stones said 'We Love You' and The Beatles pointed out that 'All You Need Is Love'. The piper was at the gates of dawn, a strange brew was bubbling in the mellow,...

The prequel to Bob Stanley's universally acclaimed Yeah Yeah Yeah, Let's Do It is the only book that brings together all genres to tell the definitive story of the birth of Pop, from 1900 to the mid-fifties. 'An absolute landmark/joy/gossip-fest/door to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781506703152Author IchijinshaFormat PaperbackPage Count 136Imprint Dark Horse Comics,U.S.Publisher Dark Horse Comics,U.S.

No-one, least of all Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi themselves, expected the six-time former World Snooker champion and a British-Iranian underground rock musician to become one of the most trusted brands in British alternative music. In their weekly radio...

All recordings document life, arising from a specific time and place, and if that place is artificial, the results will be as well. Culled from a lifetime of learning through failure and designed to provoke thought and inspiration for artists in every...

A riveting look at the transformative year in the lives and careers of the legendary group whose groundbreaking legacy would forever change music and popular culture. They started off as hysteria-inducing pop stars playing to audiences of screaming...

This book is a riveting investigation of what it means to love music and what it means to hate music, both of good and bad taste.Non-fans regard Celine Dion as ersatz and plastic, yet to those who love her, no one could be more real, with her...

Take a deep dive into one of the best-selling albums ever on the 50th anniversary of its release with this beautifully produced and authoritatively written slipcased edition. Veteran rock critic Martin Popoff leaves no stone unturned in taking apart The...

Joel Sachs offers the first complete biography of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American music. Henry Cowell, a major musical innovator of the first half of the century, left a rich body of compositions spanning a wide range of...