Music

A familiar narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s, then released arguably the worst music of his career in the 1980s--only to be resurrected in 2016, when he was controversially awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan's concerts once began with an announcer intoning a deadpan version of just such a narrative.

That is not this story.

Here, instead, is Dylan's second thirty years. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since 1991--since that rainy February night in New York City when Dylan, then forty-nine, accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, signaling in effect that his extraordinary vocation as a vital and indispensable creative force had ended, was over--After the Flood reveals Dylan's creative output during the last three decades as his most ambitious and accomplished yet.

Drawing on thousands of pages from Dylan's newly opened archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and anatomizing hundreds of published and unpublished lyrics, liner notes, and more, celebrated poet and biographer Robert Polito demonstrates how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has equally embodied and resisted its era, interweaving folk process and American and world history, and transforming spectral cultural memory into devastating inspiration. Polito thus establishes Dylan as an intensely literary songwriter whose recent writings, especially, are dynamic, intricate, and far-reaching collages.

Between Good as I Been to You (1992) and Shadow Kingdom (2023), across Desert Storm, 9/11, and COVID-19, Polito shows that Dylan revitalized lines and contexts from sources as diverse as classical Greece and Rome, the American Civil War, and film noir, tipping Henry Timrod, poet laureate of the Confederacy, into Muddy Waters; slanting Herman Melville, John Winthrop, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow into Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, and Al Jolson; and secreting Marcel Proust into his own literal California backyard--to touch on just a few of the storerooms inside Dylan's astonishing "memory palace."

Imaginatively researched, boldly arranged, and with elegiac insights into the cunning behind his songs, After the Flood is an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga, and a must-read for all Dylan enthusiasts.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The brilliant coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of one of the greatest artists of all time, in his own words--featuring never-before-seen photos, original scrapbooks and lyric sheets, and the exquisite memoir he began writing before his tragic death

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE GUARDIAN - NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD

Prince was a musical genius, one of the most beloved, accomplished, and acclaimed musicians of our time. He was a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of "Uptown" to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of "Paisley Park." But his most ambitious creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, one of the greatest pop stars of any era.

The Beautiful Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince--a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him. The book is told in four parts. The first is the memoir Prince was writing before his tragic death, pages that bring us into his childhood world through his own lyrical prose. The second part takes us through Prince's early years as a musician, before his first album was released, via an evocative scrapbook of writing and photos. The third section shows us Prince's evolution through candid images that go up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which we see in the book's fourth section: his original handwritten treatment for Purple Rain--the final stage in Prince's self-creation, where he retells the autobiography of the first three parts as a heroic journey.

The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring's riveting and moving introduction about his profound collaboration with Prince in his final months--a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he'd so carefully cultivated--and annotations that provide context to the book's images.

This work is not just a tribute to an icon, but an original and energizing literary work in its own right, full of Prince's ideas and vision, his voice and image--his undying gift to the world.

A man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents--musician, inventor, composer, poet, and even amateur mycologist--John Cage became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. Silverman begins with Cage's childhood in interwar Los Angeles and his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where immersion in the burgeoning new musical and artistic movements triggered an explosion of his creativity. Cage continued his studies in the United States with the seminal modern composer Arnold Schoenberg, and he soon began the experiments with sound and percussion instruments that would develop into his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. Cage's unorthodox methods still influence artists in a wide range of genres and media. Silverman concurrently follows Cage's rich personal life, from his early marriage to his lifelong personal and professional partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as his friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers.

Drawing on interviews with Cage's contemporaries and friends and on the enormous archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs, facsimiles of musical scores, and Web links to illustrative sections of his compositions, Silverman gives us a biography of major significance: a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century.

A career-spanning account of the artistry and politics of Bob Dylan's songwriting

Bob Dylan's reception of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has elevated him beyond the world of popular music, establishing him as a major modern artist. However, until now, no study of his career has focused on the details and nuances of the songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (originally published as Bob Dylan's Poetics) is the first comprehensive book on both the poetics and politics of Dylan's compositions. It studies Dylan, not as a pop hero, but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of music and lyric, it traces Dylan's innovative use of musical form, his complex manipulation of poetic diction, and his dialogues with other artists, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud. Moving from Dylan's earliest experiments with the blues, through his mastery of rock and country, up to his densely allusive recent recordings, Timothy Hampton offers a detailed account of Dylan's achievement. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, the book studies the relationship between form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross Dylan's work. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change.

A revealing look at French composer and virtuoso Camille Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns--perhaps the foremost French musical figure of the late nineteenth century and a composer who wrote in nearly every musical genre, from opera and the symphony to film music--is now being rediscovered after a century of modernism overshadowed his earlier importance. In a wide-ranging and trenchant series of essays, articles, and documents, Camille Saint-Saëns and His World deconstructs the multiple realities behind the man and his music. Topics range from intimate glimpses of the private and playful Saint-Saëns, to the composer's interest in astronomy and republican politics, his performances of Mozart and Rameau over eight decades, and his extensive travels around the world. This collection also analyzes the role he played in various musical societies and his complicated relationship with such composers as Liszt, Massenet, Wagner, and Ravel. Featuring the best contemporary scholarship on this crucial, formative period in French music, Camille Saint-Saëns and His World restores the composer to his vital role as innovator and curator of Western music.

The contributors are Byron Adams, Leon Botstein, Jean-Christophe Branger, Michel Duchesneau, Katharine Ellis, Annegret Fauser, Yves Gérard, Dana Gooley, Carolyn Guzski, Carol Hess, D. Kern Holoman, Léo Houziaux, Florence Launay, Stéphane Leteuré, Martin Marks, Mitchell Morris, Jann Pasler, William Peterson, Michael Puri, Sabina Teller Ratner, Laure Schnapper, Marie-Gabrielle Soret, Michael Stegemann, and Michael Strasser.

This volume contains Debussy's last three chamber works, written between 1915 and 1917, all of them sonatas of individual charm and distinctive twentieth-century character. Debussy described his Cello Sonata, rich in its unconventional, sometimes surrealistic effects, as Pierrot angry at the moon. The Violin Sonata integrates jazz influences with Debussy's customary impressionism. Of the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, a work sparkling with spontaneity and innovation, Debussy commented, I don't known whether it should move us to laughter or to tears. Perhaps both. All three of these frequently performed and recorded works are reprinted from authoritative French editions.

Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin present a definitive edition of Albert Murray's collected nonfiction, including his 1971 memoir South to a Very Old Place, inspiration for Imani Perry's South to America.

In his 1970 classic The Omni-Americans, Albert Murray (1916-2013) took aim at protest writers and social scientists who accentuated the "pathology" of race in American life. Against narratives of marginalization and victimhood, Murray argued that black art and culture, particularly jazz and blues, stand at the very headwaters of the American mainstream, and that much of what is best in American art embodies the "blues-hero tradition"-- a heritage of grace, wit, and inspired improvisation in the face of adversity. Murray went on to refine these ideas in The Blue Devils of Nada and From the Briarpatch File, and all three landmark collections of essays are gathered here for the first time, together with Murray's memoir South to a Very Old Place--inspiration for Imani Perry's South to America, his brilliant lecture series The Hero and the Blues, his masterpiece of jazz criticism Stomping the Blues, and eight previously uncollected pieces.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

How does music work? Indeed, what is (or isn't) music? We are all instinctively musical, but why? Adam Ockelford has the answers.

A tap of the foot, a rush of emotion, the urge to hum a tune; without instruction or training we all respond intuitively to music. Comparing Notes explores what music is, why all of us are musical, and how abstract patterns of sound that might not appear to mean anything can, in fact, be so meaningful. Taking the reader on a clear and compelling tour of major twentieth century musical theories, Professor Adam Ockelford arrives at his own important psychologically grounded theory of how music works. From pitch and rhythm to dynamics and timbre, he shows how all the elements of music cohere through the principle of imitation to create an abstract narrative in sound that we instinctively grasp, whether listening to Bach or the Beatles. Authoritative, engaging, and full of wonderful examples from across the musical spectrum, Comparing Notes is essential reading for anyone who's ever loved a song, sonata, or symphony, and wondered why.

This superbly produced volume brings together a group of Bach's most performed compositions: nine works that masterfully reveal the deeply resonant glories of the cello and the viola da gamba. Reprinted here from the definitive Bach-Gesellschaft edition published by Breitkopf & Härtel of Leipzig, they include the six suites for unaccompanied cello (BWV 1007-1012) and three sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord (BWV 1027-1029), the latter most commonly played today on the cello. Alternative versions of the last two cello suites -- providing notation at concert pitch for the scordatura Suite No. 5, and normal cello clefs in place of the original alto and soprano clefs of Suite No. 6 -- appear in an appendix.
The cello suites, long neglected until Pablo Casals began to perform them early in the twentieth century, richly demonstrate Bach's intuitive feel for the cello, and his technical grasp of this instrument's extraordinary capabilities for musical expression. The three sonatas, among the few duo sonatas Bach composed, exuberantly demonstrate how Bach freed the harpsichord from a mere accompanying role and made it an equal partner in the duo texture.
This sturdily bound playing edition features wide margins and large noteheads clearly printed on fine-quality paper. It offers both amateur and professional musicians -- along with music lovers who enjoy following a live or recorded performance, score in hand -- a lifetime of pleasurable study and intimate enjoyment of a select group of Bach's most universally loved and admired works.

(Vocal Score). Italian/English. Translated by Martin.

Featuring more than 600 entries in all, this reference book covers four decades of popular music, providing information on artists' career histories, vital statistics, chart positions, and influences on the music world. Black-and-white photographs.

This edition includes a line by line English translation together with the native Russian (written in Cyrillic) for the opera goer.