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This page is for anyone interested in music appreciation and creation. Click on each title to learn more.
eBooks
Music Appreciation
Hutchinson Concise Dictionary of Music
AUTHOR: Helicon Publishing
Description: Core information on composers and comprehensive works listings from the earliest exponents of polyphony to the present day.
Making Music Your Business : A Practical Guide to Making $ Doing What You Love
AUTHOR: Traci Truly
Description: There is nothing you love more than making music and performing. But you also realize that to make money doing what you love, there is a lot you need to learn. To be successful you need more than talent. Making Music Your Business gives working musicians what they need to make more money with their music and take their passion to the next level. Get inside information and learn how to: -Sign a manager and booking agent. -Sell more CDs and merchandise. -Deduct the cost of equipment from money you make. -Legally sample and cover other artists’ music -Use your press kit to book shows. -Protect the music you write. -Rid your band of deadbeat members. -Decide which publishing company to join. Make more at shows. -Succeed with a better website and by using online music sources. -The music business is as much about the business as the music. Be a success at both. Sphinx® Publishing An Imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.® Naperville, Illinois www.SphinxLegal.com
Threading the Concept : Powerful Learning for the Music Classroom
AUTHOR: Debra Gordon Hedden
Description: This book provides both preservice and seasoned music educators with a unique and powerful way of teaching. The premise of the book is to offer a pedagogical approach that emphasizes focus on conceptual learning that is sensory oriented. From the musical concepts we teach_melody, harmony, rhythm, and form_the teacher targets one concept per lesson (e.g., melody), and provides learning experiences in singing, listening, performing, moving, reading/writing, and improvising/composing that are all focused on only that concept. Essentially, the learners are bombarded visually, aurally, and kinesthetically, gaining a firm grasp of the concept because they have heard, sung, moved, performed, written, and created in that class, all in small time segments. The teacher has a greater ability to reach all students' learning needs and engage them in active learning in each class. The book not only offers background information about the learning process, but also specific lesson templates that serve as conceptual models for music classes.
Punk Rock: An Oral History
AUTHOR: John Robb
Description: John Robb is the founder of the 1970s punk rock band the Membranes and is a current member of the group Goldblade. He is the author of Death to Trad Rock, The North Will Rises Again: Manchester Music City 1976–1996, and The Stone Roses. He lives in Manchester, England. Lars Fredriksen is a member of the punk rock band Rancid. He lives in Oakland, California.
To the Break of Dawn : A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic
AUTHOR: William Jelani Cobb
Description: 2007 Arts Club of Washington's National Award for Arts Writing - Finalist. With roots that stretch from West Africa through the black pulpit, hip-hop emerged in the streets of the South Bronx in the 1970s and has spread to the farthest corners of the earth. To the Break of Dawn uniquely examines this freestyle verbal artistry on its own terms. A kid from Queens who spent his youth at the epicenter of this new art form, music critic William Jelani Cobb takes readers inside the beats, the lyrics, and the flow of hip-hop, separating mere corporate rappers from the creative MCs that forged the art in the crucible of the street jam. The four pillars of hip hop, break dancing, graffiti art, deejaying, and rapping find their origins in traditions as diverse as the Afro-Brazilian martial art Capoeira and Caribbean immigrants turnstile artistry. Tracing hip-hop's relationship to ancestral forms of expression, Cobb explores the cultural and literary elements that are at its core. From KRS-One and Notorious B.I.G. to Tupac Shakur and Lauryn Hill, he profiles MCs who were pivotal to the rise of the genre, verbal artists whose lineage runs back to the black preacher and the bluesman. Unlike books that focus on hip-hop as a social movement or a commercial phenomenon, To the Break of Dawn tracks the music's aesthetic, stylistic, and thematic evolution from its inception to today's distinctly regional sub-divisions and styles. Written with an insider's ear, the book illuminates hip-hop's innovations in a freestyle form that speaks to both aficionados and newcomers to the art."
Inventions in Music : From the Monochord to MP3s
AUTHOR: Lisa Hiton and Caitlyn Miller
Description: Music's roots begin at the dawn of humanity, when the earliest humans used rudimentary sounds to communicate for survival. Inventions in Music: From the Monochord to MP3s traces the evolution of music through technologies that shaped the medium: the monochord, the phonograph, magnetic tape, and MP3 files. The book describes these inventions in chronological order, considers their influence on one another, and examines these innovations' impact beyond music.
Essential Song : Three Decades of Northern Cree Music
AUTHOR: Lynn Whidden
Description: Audio Files located on Soundcloud Essential Song: Three Decades of Northern Cree Music, a study of subarctic Cree hunting songs, is the first detailed ethnomusicology of the northern Cree of Quebec and Manitoba. The result of more than two decades spent in the North learning from the Cree, Lynn Whidden's account discusses the tradition of the hunting songs, their meanings and origins, and their importance to the hunt. She also examines women's songs, and traces the impact of social change--including the introduction of hymns, Gospel tunes, and country music--on the song traditions of these communities. The book also explores the introduction of powwow song into the subarctic and the Crees struggle to maintain their Aboriginal heritage--to find a kind of song that, like the hunting songs, can serve as a spiritual guide and force. Including profiles of the hunters and their songs and accompanied (online) by original audio tracks of more than fifty Cree hunting songs, Essential Song makes an important contribution to ethnomusicology, social history, and Aboriginal studies.
Chicano Rap : Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio
AUTHOR: Louis Pancho McFarland
Description: Powered by a driving beat, clever lyrics, and assertive attitudes, rap music and hip hop culture have engrossed American youth since the mid-1980s. Although the first rappers were African Americans, rap and hip hop culture quickly spread to other ethnic groups who have added their own cultural elements to the music. Chicano Rap offers the first in-depth look at how Chicano/a youth have adopted and adapted rap music and hip hop culture to express their views on gender and violence, as well as on how Chicano/a youth fit into a globalizing world.
Pancho McFarland examines over five hundred songs and seventy rap artists from all the major Chicano rap regions―San Diego, San Francisco and Northern California, Texas, and Chicago and the Midwest. He discusses the cultural, political, historical, and economic contexts in which Chicano rap has emerged and how these have shaped the violence and misogyny often expressed in Chicano rap and hip hop. In particular, he argues that the misogyny and violence of Chicano rap are direct outcomes of the "patriarchal dominance paradigm" that governs human relations in the United States. McFarland also explains how globalization, economic restructuring, and the conservative shift in national politics have affected Chicano/a youth and Chicano rap. He concludes with a look at how Xicana feminists, some Chicano rappers, and other cultural workers are striving to reach Chicano/a youth with a democratic, peaceful, empowering, and liberating message.
Reading Song Lyrics
AUTHOR: Lars Eckstein
Description: Reading Song Lyrics offers the first systematic introduction to lyrics as a vibrant genre of (performed) literature. It takes lyrics seriously as a complex form of verbal art that has been unjustly neglected in literary, music, and, to a lesser degree, cultural studies, partly as it cuts squarely across institutional boundaries. The first part of this book accordingly introduces a thoroughly transdisciplinary interpretive framework. It outlines theoretical approaches to issues such as performance and performativity, generic convention and cultural capital, sound and songfulness, mediality and musical multimedia, and step by step applies them to the example of a single song. The second part then offers three extended case studies which showcase the larger cultural and historical viability of this model. Probing into the relationship between lyrics and the ambivalent performance of national culture in Britain, it offers exemplary readings of a highly subversive 1597 ayre by John Dowland, of an 1811 broadside ballad about Sara Baartman, 'The Hottentot Venus', and of a 2000 song by 'jungle punk' collective Asian Dub Foundation. Reading Song Lyrics demonstrates how and why song lyrics matter as a paradigmatic art form in the culture of modernity.
Bad Moon Rising : The Unauthorized History of Creedence Clearwater Revival
AUTHOR: Hank Bordowitz
Description: Rightly called the saddest story in rock 'n' roll history, this Creedence biographynewly updated with stories from band members, producers, business associates, close friends, and familiesrecounts the tragic and triumphant tale of one of America’s most beloved bands. Hailed as the great American rock band from 1968 to 1971, Creedence Clearwater Revival captured the imaginations of a generation with classic hits like Proud Mary,” Down on the Corner,” Green River,” Born on the Bayou,” and Who’ll Stop the Rain.” Mounting tensions among bandmates over vibrant guitarist and lead vocalist John Fogerty’s creative control led to the band's demise. Tracing the lives of four musicians who redefined an American roots-rock sound with unequaled passion and power, this music biography exposes the bitter end and abandoned talent of a band left crippled by debt and dissension.
I Mix What I Like! : A Mixtape Manifesto
AUTHOR: Jared Ball
Description: A manifesto on the journalistic purpose of the hip-hop mixtape.
Songs in the Key of Z : The Curious Universe of Outsider Music
AUTHOR: Irwin Chusid
Description: Outsider musicians can be the product of damaged DNA, alien abduction, drug fry, demonic possession, or simply sheer obliviousness. This book profiles dozens of outsider musicians, both prominent and obscurefigures such as The Shaggs, Syd Barrett, Tiny Tim, Jandek, Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnston, Harry Partch, and The Legendary Stardust Cowboyand presents their strange life stories along with photographs, interviews, cartoons, and discographies. About the only things these self-taught artists have in common are an utter lack of conventional tunefulness and an overabundance of earnestness and passion. But, believe it or not, they’re worth listening to, often outmatching all contenders for inventiveness and originality. A CD featuring songs by artists profiled in the book is also available.
The Encyclopedia of Country Music : The Ultimate Guide to the Music
AUTHOR: The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Michael McCall, John Rumble, Paul Kingsbury, and Vince Gill
Description: Immediately upon publication in 1998, the Encyclopedia of Country Music became a much-loved reference source, prized for the wealth of information it contained on that most American of musical genres. Countless fans have used it as the source for answers to questions about everything from country's first commercially successful recording, to the genre's pioneering music videos, to what conjunto music is.This thoroughly revised new edition includes more than 1,200 A-Z entries covering nine decades of history and artistry, from the Carter Family recordings of the 1920s to the reign of Taylor Swift in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Compiled by a team of experts at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the encyclopedia has been brought completely up-to-date, with new entries on the artists who have profoundly influenced country music in recent years, such as the Dixie Chicks and Keith Urban. The new edition also explores the latest and most critical trends within the industry, shedding light on such topics as the digital revolution, the shifting politics of country music, and the impact of American Idol (reflected in the stardom of Carrie Underwood). Other essays cover the literature of country music, the importance of Nashville as a music center, and the colorful outfits that have long been a staple of the genre.The volume features hundreds of images, including a photo essay of album covers; a foreword by country music superstar Vince Gill (the winner of twenty Grammy Awards); and twelve fascinating appendices, ranging from lists of awards to the best-selling country albums of all time.Winner of the Best Reference Award from the Popular Culture Association
Music, Music Therapy and Trauma : International Perspectives
AUTHOR: Julie P. Sutton and Diane Snow Austin
Description: Music communicates where words fail, and music therapy has been proven to connect with those who were thought to be unreachable, making it an ideal medium for working with those who have suffered psychological trauma. Music, Music Therapy and Trauma addresses the need for an exploration of current thinking on music and trauma. With chapters written by many of today's leading specialists in this area, music and trauma is approached from a wide range of perspectives, with contributions on the following: * neurology of trauma and music; * music and trauma in general; * social and cultural perspectives on trauma; * contextualising contemporary classical music and conflict; * music and trauma in areas where there is war, community unrest and violence (Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, South Africa); * music, trauma and early development. Including specific examples and case studies, this book addresses the growing interest in the effects of trauma and how music therapy can provide a way through this complex process.
Making Music
Making Music and Having a Blast! : A Guide for All Music Students
AUTHOR: Bonnie Blanchard and Cynthia Blanchard Acree
Description: In her follow-up to Making Music and Enriching Lives: A Guide for All Music Teachers, Bonnie Blanchard offers students a set of tools for their musical lives that will help them stay engaged, even during the challenging times in their musical development. Blanchard discusses issues such as finding an instructor, selecting the right instrument, and choosing a college or conservatory. The book includes lessons on music theory and history as well as a guide to finding additional materials in print and online. Blanchard's strategies for making practice productive and preparing for auditions are useful tips students can return to again and again.
Music Theory Secrets : 94 Strategies for the Starting Musician
AUTHOR: Brent Coppenbarger
Description: Modeled on the brilliant approach first formulated by distinguished professor of music and master clarinetist Michele Gingras in Clarinet Secrets and More Clarinet Secrets (both available from Rowman and Littlefield), Music Secrets is designed for instrumentalists, singers, conductors, composers, and other instructors and professionals seeking a quick set of pointers to improve their work as performers and producers of music. Easy to use, contributions to the Music Secrets series fill a niche for those who need quick and easy methods for learning what they need—from those just starting to the advanced musician in need of a refresher or new insights. Rhythms, melodies, and harmonies are the building blocks of music. In Music Theory Secrets: 94 Strategies for the Starting Musician, Brent Coppenbarger offers a full range of methods to help musicians, not only grasp, but remember those key elements upon which the music they play is built: pitch, rhythm, scales, key signatures, and harmony. With over eighteen years of experience teaching music theory, Coppenbarger offers the various teaching and memory strategies he has designed to help musicians understand and retain what they need to know. Coppenbarger covers critical information on how to determine pitch, the use of meter, and how to count rhythms in simple and compound meter; explains major scales and major key signatures, as well as minor scales and minor key signatures; surveys other types of scales (such as those used in jazz) and explains how modes work; presents necessary data on scale degree names and intervals; covers triads and various types of chords; touches upon Roman numeral analysis, inversions, and figured bass; presents non-chord tones and discusses solfege singing, including several pages of sight singing using various clefs and keys (strongly recommended for instrumentalists for practicing transpositions for the appropriate clef and range) demonstrates the different techniques musicians can use for transposing keys; and finally discusses more advanced concepts such as part-writing rules, the use of sequences, and form. Music Theory Secrets: 94 Strategies for the Starting Musician is an indispensable resource for instrumental teachers wishing to incorporate music theory into lessons, classroom teachers, high school and college students, amateur musicians, those wanting to learn to read music, home-schooled students, and college bound music students.
Music Production : For Producers, Composers, Arrangers, and Students
AUTHOR: Michael Zager
Description: The guidance of a skilled music producer will always be a key factor in producing a great recording. In that sense, as Michael Zager points out in his second edition of Music Production: For Producers, Composer, Arrangers, and Students, the job of a music producer is analogous to that of a film director, polishing work product to its finest sheen. And this is no small matter in an age when the recording industry is undergoing its most radical change in over half a century. Although innate talent and experience are key elements in the success of any music producer, Music Production serves as a roadmap for navigating the continuous changes in the music industry and music production technologies. From dissecting compositions to understanding studio technologies, from coaching vocalists to arranging and orchestration, from musicianship to marketing, advertising to promotion, Music Production takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the world of music production, letting readers keep pace with this rapidly changing profession. The focus of the second edition is on such topics as the expanded role of music supervisors, the introduction of new production techniques, and the inclusion of new terms in music industry contracts. Including new interviews with eminent industry professionals, Music Production is the ideal handbook for the aspiring music production student and music professional.
Inside the Music Business
AUTHOR: Tony Barrow and Julian Newby
Description: This book is a comprehensive guide to a career in the music industry. Offering advice as to how to get into the business, it explains the main features of a wide range of jobs, such as management, production, promotion and merchandise through to the working lives of recording artists and session musicians.
Using Technology to Unlock Musical Creativity
AUTHOR: Scott Watson
Description: It has never been easier or more fun for students to compose, improvise, arrange, and produce music and music-related projects than with today's technology. Written in a practical, accessible manner, Using Technology to Unlock Musical Creativity offers both a framework for and practical tips on the technology tools best suited for encouraging students' authentic musical creativity.Author Scott Watson makes a compelling case for creativity-based music learning through eight teacher-tested principles that access, nurture, and develop students' potential for musical expression. Example after example illustrates each principle in a variety of music teaching and technology scenarios. Watson also includes practical ideas for technology-based creative music activities, locating lesson plans and other resources, and assessing creative work. The book provides detailed plans for dozens of attractive projects, each linked to MENC National Standards, and also offers suggestions for making adaptations according to grade level and technology proficiency. Additionally, it includes a valuable section of resources with tips for setting up a computer music workstation, a plain-language description of how digital audio works, and a music education technology glossary. Most of the activities described can be carried out by novice users with free or low-cost music applications.The book also features a comprehensive companion website with dozens of audio and video examples as well as many downloadable worksheets, rubrics, and activity files. Visit the companion website at www.oup.com/us/musicalcreativity.
Making Beats : The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop
AUTHOR: Joseph G. Schloss and Jeff Chang
Description: Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats was the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods, and values of a surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects--from hip-hop artists' pedagogical methods to the Afrodiasporic roots of the sampling process to the social significance of "digging" for rare records--Joseph G. Schloss examines the way hip-hop artists have managed to create a form of expression that reflects their creative aspirations, moral beliefs, political values, and cultural realities. This second edition of the book includes a new foreword by Jeff Chang and a new afterword by the author.
LMMS A Complete Guide to Dance Music Production : A Complete Guide to Dance Music Production
AUTHOR: David Earl
Description: Written in a step by step tutorial style, learning comes as a result of creating a complete dance music track, along with the explanations that follow each stage. You have a computer and a love for dance and electronic music. Maybe you’ve been to some clubs, and the energy of electronic dance music has you completely under its spell. You see a DJ spinning, and everyone is dancing. It’s infectious. You want to make music that affects people that way. Today the open source community has offered you LMMS. Read this book, and you’ll be shown a process to creating great dance music. This book is going to connect the dots if you have already started making dance music, and provide a very solid foundation if you are just getting started – no matter what your skill level is.
Digital Magazines
American Record Guide
Publisher: Record Guide Publications
Full text coverage Jan 1995 (Vol. 58, no. 1) - present
Description: The American Record Guide is a classical music magazine. It has reviewed classical music recordings since 1935.
Future Music
Publisher: Future Publishing Ltd
Full text coverage Oct 2020 (no. 363) - present (delayed 3 months)
Description: Contains news, reviews of music equipment, and profiles of musicians. Covers all aspects of computer music.
Music Week
Publisher: Future Publishing Ltd
Full text coverage Dec 20, 1997 - Apr 13, 2020, some exceptions
Description: Music Week brings you the latest news, interviews and opinions from the music industry.
Sound & Vision
Publisher: Source Interlink Companies
Full text coverage Jan 1992 (Vol. 57, no. 1) - Jun 2014 (Vol. 79, no. 5), some exceptions
Description: Sound & Vision is an American magazine, purchased by AVTech Media Ltd. in March 2018, covering home theater, audio, video and multimedia consumer products.
Academic Journals
Black Music Research Journal
Publisher: Center for Black Music Research
Peer reviewed.
Full text coverage Spring 2004 (Vol. 24, no. 1) - Spring 2016 (Vol. 36, no. 1)
Description: Begun in 1980, Black Music Research Journal is published in the spring and fall of each year and includes articles about the philosophy, aesthetics, history, and criticism of black music. BMRJ is an official journal of the Center for Black Music Research.
Early Music History
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Peer reviewed.
Full text coverage Sep 2001 (Vol. 20) - present (delayed 1 year)
Description: Early Music History is a peer-reviewed academic journal published annually by Cambridge University Press, which specialises in the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the 17th century.
Popular Music
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Peer reviewed.
Full text coverage Jan 2001 (Vol. 20, no. 1) - present (delayed 1 year)
Description: Popular Music is an international multi-disciplinary journal covering all aspects of the subject - from the formation of social group identities through popular music, to the workings of the global music industry, to how particular pieces of music are put together.
Women & Music
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Peer reviewed.
Full text coverage 1999 (Vol. 3) - present, some exceptions
Description: Women and Music is an annual journal of scholarship about women, music, and culture. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and approaches, this refereed journal seeks to further the understanding of the relationships among gender, music, and culture, with special attention being given to the concerns of women.
Database Resources
ProQuest
Britannica
Websites
Classical Archives: "Classical Archives is the largest (and oldest) classical music site in the world. The site was inaugurated in 1994, during the web’s infancy, to offer the most extensive collection of classical music MIDI files. We added live recordings 2001 and have continued to grow ever since. As you can see from the statistics above, we now have over 1,000,000 tracks from over 690 labels. These recordings represent the works of close to 20,000 composers. The site is refreshed weekly with the addition of newly released albums, from which our musicologists carefully prepare a list of selected recommendations."
Choral Public Domain Library: "CPDL currently hosts free scores of at least 37404 choral and vocal works by at least 3733 composers."
19th Century California Sheet Music: "A virtual library of some 2,700 pieces of sheet music published in California between 1852 and 1900, together with related materials such as a San Francisco publisher's catalog of 1872, programs, songsheets, advertisements, and photographs. Images of every printed page of sheet music from eleven locations have been scanned at 400 dpi, in color where indicated. From UC Berkeley. "
Global Music Archive: "The Global Music Archive is a multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas. It is a public facility that promotes education in African and American traditional and popular music through its own activities and by supporting the activities of others. The archive is housed within the Anne Potter Wilson Music Library in Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. It includes public rooms for the study of materials, and an audio and video listening and viewing facilities. "
Digital Resources for Musicology: "This website provides links to substantial open-access projects of use to musicians and musicologists. With a burgeoning number of digital resources available, remembering titles of sites and pathways to them can be difficult. Digital Resources in Musicology (DRM) is organized topically and provides a rapid search tool for specialties within heterogeneous collections."
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