“I don't think I'm easy to talk about. I've got a very irregular head. And I'm not anything that you think I am anyway.”—Syd Barrett’s last interview, Rolling Stone, 1971 Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett (1946–2006) was, by all accounts, the very definition of...

Twenty-seven years in the making (1940–67), this tapestry of nearly two hundred American popular and protest songs was created by three giants of performance and musical research: Alan Lomax, indefatigable collector and preserver; Woody Guthrie,...

A vivid, dramatic account of how half a dozen kinds of modern music--punk rock, art rock, disco, salsa, rap, minimalist classical--emerged in new forms and cross-pollinated all at once in the middle seventies in NYC.Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa...

Aspects of beauty in the music of Mozart It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same...

Giangilberto Monti, Veronica Di Pietro. Includes Discographies And Index.

A fascinating celebration of the piano, including tales of its masters from Mozart and Beethoven to Oscar Peterson and Jerry Lee Lewis, told with the expertise of composer and author of Temperament, Stuart Isacoff.  This history takes us back to the...

Universally acclaimed as a musical genius, Miles Davis was one of the most important and influential musicians in the world. Here, Miles speaks out about his extraordinary life.Miles: The Autobiography, like Miles himself, holds nothing back. He speaks...

Girls to the Front is the epic, definitive history of Riot Grrrl—the radical feminist uprising that exploded into the public eye in the 1990s and included incendiary punk bands Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and Huggy Bear. A dynamic...

A Time Magazine Best Book of 2011, Featuring Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Mudhoney and more!Twenty years after the release of Nirvana’s landmark album Nevermind comes Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, the...

A remarkable account of a wildly artistic life, finally restored to its unexpurgated form, with a revealing new introduction by Joan Acocella.The visionary choreographer and dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) not only revolutionized dance in the twentieth...

Blues is the cornerstone of American popular music, the bedrock of rock and roll. In this extraordinary musical and social history, Robert Palmer traces the odyssey of the blues from its rural beginnings, to the steamy bars of Chicago’s South Side, to...

Paul Nelson was, according to Bob Dylan, “a folk-music scholar” who later wrote criticism at Rolling Stone as the last in a great tradition of record-review editors that included Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, and Greil Marcus. But in 1982, Nelson walked away...

The dramatic and spectacular story of an American music icon—the immortal Tina Turner! From Nutbush, Tennessee, to Hollywood stardom; from Ike’s Kings of Rhythm to onstage with Mick Jagger and the Stones; and from the lowest lows to the highest highs,...

The ultimate guide to classical composers and their music-for both the novice and the experienced listener Music, according to Aaron Copland, can thrive only if there are "gifted listeners." But today's listeners must choose between classical and rock,...

Musings gathers together the essays, speeches, liner notes, dictionary entries, and magazine articles of Gunther Schuller, one of the most important musical figures of the century. The writings in this collection cover such artists as Paul Whiteman, Duke...

From the school yards of the South Bronx to the tops of the Billboard charts, rap has emerged as one of the most influential musical and cultural forces of our time. In The Anthology of Rap, editors Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois explore rap as a...

Overthrowing the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history, Elijah Wald traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies—including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television—to give a...

Although some portions of Thayer's original text have been deleted because recent Beethoven research has proved them inaccurate, "the majority of the text used consists of the coordinated treatment of Thayer's notes and manuscript by these three editors...

The classic biography of reggae legend Bob Marley, updated and revised for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his deathBob Marley left an indelible mark on modern music, both as a reggae pioneer and as an enduring cultural icon. Catch a Fire, now a classic...