The biography of a giant in the history of blues music. With just forty-one recordings to his credit, Robert Johnson (1911-38) is a giant in the history of blues music. Johnson's vast influence on twentieth-century American music, combined with his mysterious death at the age of twenty-seven, has allowed speculation and myths to obscure the facts ......
Available in English for the first time, Prosdocimo's Tractatus plane musice (1412) and Tractatus musice speculative (1425) are exemplary texts for understanding the high sophistication of music theory in the early fifteenth century. Known for considering music as a science based on demonstrable mathematical principles, Prosdocimo praises ......
John H. McDowell provides an in-depth study of the Mexican ballad form known as the corrido, a body of poetry that takes violence as its subject. Through interviews with corrido composers and performers, both male and female, and a generous sampling of ballad texts, McDowell reveals a living vernacular tradition that chronicles local and regional ......
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2009An engaging reassessment of the seminal American composerCharles Ives Reconsidered reexamines a number of critical assumptions about the life and works of this significant American composer, drawing on many new sources to explore Ives's creative activities within broader historical, social, cultural, and ......
A compelling account of contemporary Sacred Harp singing, Traveling Home describes how this vibrant musical tradition brings together Americans of widely divergent religious and political beliefs. Named after the most popular of the nineteenth-century shape-note tunebooks--which employed an innovative notation system to teach singers to read ......
Exploding the assumption that black women's only important musical contributions have been in folk, jazz, and pop.Helen Walker-Hill's unique study provides a carefully researched examination of the history and scope of musical composition by African-American women composers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exploding the assumption that ......
Now available for the first time in English translation, this new edition of Gallus Dressler's Praecepta musicae poeticae corrects and expands upon earlier editions of one of the most important sixteenth-century treatments of musical theory and rhetoric. Robert Forgács's detailed study of the Latin text reveals significant and original insights ......
Together Let Us Sweetly Live offers a rare look at the unique grassroots African American religious institutions called the Singing and Praying Bands. This folksong and ring shout tradition began in Chesapeake Bay country in the early nineteenth century, with a fusion of Methodist prayer meeting worship and African religious, danced song ......
