Music: Recommended Books

Executives and artists, experts and novices alike, will benefit from Passman's detailed yet easy-to-understand explanations of the latest technology, legalities, and practices shaping the music business. The definitive, essential guide to the music industry is revised and updated with crucial information on the industry's major changes in response to rapid technological advances and economic uncertainty.

Practical, concise, and approachable, Audio Engineering 101 covers everything aspiring audio engineers need to know to make it in the recording industry, from the characteristics of sound to microphones, analog versus digital recording, EQ/compression, mixing, mastering, and career skills. Filled with hand-on, step-by-step technique breakdowns, as well as instruction in using digital consoles, iPads for mixing, audio apps, plug-ins, home studios, and audio for podcasts.

Gain a deep understanding of audio practice and theory with this easy-to-read book. If you’re an intermediate to advanced recording engineer or audiophile, you already know the basic mechanics of how audio "works." This book will take you beyond that, weaving together audio concepts, theories of aural perception and acoustics, musical instrument physics, and basic electronics and demonstrating their relationships to one another.

Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? Banding Together explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Offering a rare analysis of how music communities operate, she looks at the shared obstacles and opportunities creative people face and reveals the ways in which people collaborate around ideas, artworks, individuals, and organizations that support their work.

In Barrio Rhythm, Steven Loza brings the “Eastside Renaissance” hidden history to life, demonstrating the music's essential role in the cultural development of East Los Angeles and its influence on mainstream popular culture. Drawing from oral histories and other primary sources, as well as from appropriate representative songs, Loza provides a historical overview of the music from the nineteenth century to the present and offers in-depth profiles of nine Mexican American artists, groups, and entrepreneurs in Southern California from the post-World War II era to the present.

Chronicles more than 40 years of contemporary black music, from the hopeful, angry refrains of the freedom movement to the slick pop of Motown; from Woodstock to the war in Vietnam and the race riots that inspired Marvin Gaye to write What's Going On'; from the disco inferno to the Million Man March. 'This book is urgently needed: a comprehensive look at the various forms of black popular music, both as music and as seen in a larger social context.

The latest volume in the Norton Introduction to Music History series focuses on the rise and decline of the Classical style, which flourished from the middle of the eighteenth century to the second decade of the nineteenth. Within each section, he looks to the social conditions and daily life of the musician, the aesthetics and audience preference in structures, performing combinations, and performing styles.

This book looks cross-culturally at some of the many themes that demonstrate the way music is embedded in, reflects, and contributes to broader cultural patterns, themes such as culturally specific beliefs about the nature of music; music's role in religion and ritual; the economics of music; music and the construction of individual and social identity, including gender and sexuality.

In this wide-ranging book, Arnold Whittall moves skillfully between the cultural and the technical, the general and the particular, to explore the various contexts and critical perspectives which illuminate certain works by these composers. Considering the extent to which place and nationality contribute to the definition of musical character, he investigates the relevance of such images as mirroring and symmetry, the function of genre and the way types of identity may be suggested by such labels as classical, modernist, secular, sacred radical, traditional.

Barry Parker's tour of the physics of music details the science of how instruments, the acoustics of rooms, electronics, and humans create and alter the varied sounds we hear. Using physics as a base, Parker discusses the history of music, how sounds are made and perceived, and the various effects of acting on sounds.

A History of Western Musical Aesthetics follows through the centuries debates about the place and function of music, the perceived role of music as a good or bad influence on the development of character, as a magical art or a domestic entertainment, and as a gateway to transcendental truths.

A vital tool in understanding and appreciating jazz -- introducing the key figures, theory, and the controversies that shaped it development. This fascinating entry into the world of jazz for the beginner, novice, or casual enthusiast. John F. Szwed, anthropologist, critic, and musical scholar, takes readers on a tour of the varied and nonlinear history of jazz, exploring how it developed from an ethnic music to popular music to part of the avant garde in less than fifty years.

This book collects key writings about eighteenth century music . It brings together a wide selection of essential documents not only about music theory and practice, but about the historical, philosophical, aesthetic, ideological, and literary debates.

The Singer-Songwriter Handbook provides a useful resource for student songwriters, active musicians, fans and scholars alike. This handbook is divided into four main sections: Songwriting (acoustic and digital), Performance, Music Industry and Case Studies.

Tracing musicology in Latin American during the twentieth century, this book presents case studies to illustrate how Latin American music has interacted with social and global processes. The book addresses such topics as popular music, post-colonialism, women in Latin American music, tradition and modernity, musical counterculture, globalization, and identity construction through music.

This text brings together essays by several of musicology and music theory's young scholars, who take a music-analytical perspective of rock music. Each essay explores the often complex musical structure of rock music and attempts to expand our understanding of the musical experience generally.

Women and Music: A History is a survey of women's activities in music performance, composition, teaching, and patronage from the times of the ancient Greeks to the present, with an emphasis on art music in Europe and the Americas

This book gives a critical account of various methods used in music analysis. Five essays deal with important concepts in music analysis: ambiguity, formal proportions, and similarity within and between works. A further chapter provides a discussion of probability, kinship, and influence - decisive criteria when judging musical plagiarism.

This book is an examination of the uneasy alliance of two confessions, Lutheran and Catholic, at the prominent seventeenth-century court of Dresden, and the implications of this alliance for the repertoire of sacred art music cultivated there, an influential repertoire that has received only scant attention from scholars.

Engaging with feminist theory and previous research about gender and music, this book investigates the meaning of current trends relating to gender, feminism and woman-identified artists in mediated popular music. The volume discusses the media specificity of the different examples, introduces and explains feminist theories and concepts and analyzes the position of women, gender politics and feminisms in popular music.

Five Lives in Music brings to light the private and performance lives of five remarkable women musicians and composers. Throughout the lively and focused portraits of these five women, Porter finds common threads, both personal and contextual, that extend to a larger discussion of the lives and careers of female composers and performers throughout centuries of music history.

Free Jazz / Black Power remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists. This monumental critique caught the spirit of its time and also realigned that zeitgeist. The authors reached radical conclusions--free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power movement, and was a music that demanded a similar political commitment.

Fundamentals, Function, and Form by Andre Mount provides its readers with a comprehensive study of the theory and analysis of tonal Western art music. Mount begins by building a strong foundation in the understanding of rhythm, meter, and pitch as well as the notational conventions associated with each. The book culminates with a discussion of musical form, engaging with artistic works in their entirety by considering the interaction of harmonic and thematic elements, but also such other musical dimensions as rhythm, meter, texture, and expression.

Tyler's systematic study of the two main guitar types found between about 1550 and 1750 focuses principally on what the sources of the music (published and manuscript) and the writings of contemporary theorists reveal about the nature of the instruments and their roles in the music making of the period.

In this book, Charters he recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. In evocative prose, he relates a lifetime of travel and research, listening to brass bands in New Orleans; investigating the emergence of reggae, ska, and rock-steady music in Jamaica's dancehalls; and exploring the history of Afro-Cuban music through the life of the jazz musician Bebo Valdés.

Robert Philip explores the extraordinary history of music in all its forms, from our earliest ancestors to today's mass-produced songs. Looking to Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and beyond, Philip reveals how musicians have been brought together by trade and migration and examines the vast impact of colonialism. Covering a remarkable range of genres, including medieval chant, classical opera, jazz, and hip hop, this Little History shines a light on the wonder of music--and why it is treasured across the world.

Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s underwent a profound and often violent process of social change. In this collection of essays, we examine the history of the militant song movement in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina at the peak of its popularity (from the mid-1960s to the coup d'états in the mid-1970s), considering their different political stances and musical deportments.

Musical Gentrification is an exploration of the role of popular music in processes of sociocultural inclusion and exclusion in a variety of contexts. The phenomenon of musical gentrification is approached from a variety of angles: theoretically, methodologically and with reference to a number of key issues in popular music, from class, gender and ethnicity to cultural consumption, activism, hegemony and musical agency.

William C. Banfield's acclaimed collection of interviews delves into the lives and work of forty-one Black composers. Each of the profiled artists offers a candid self-portrait that explores areas from training and compositional techniques to working in an exclusive canon that has existed for a very long time. At the same time, Banfield draws on sociology, Western concepts of art and taste, and vernacular musical forms like blues and jazz to provide a frame for the artists' achievements and help to illuminate the ongoing progress and struggles against industry barriers.

In all, some seven centuries of Mexico City’s music maintain a living presence in the modern city. This book offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and ethnography of musical rituals in the world's largest city. Mark Pedelty details the dominant musical rites of the Aztec, colonial, national, revolutionary, modern, and contemporary eras, analyzing the role that musical ritual played in governance, resistance, and social change.

Music and Democracy explores music as a resource for societal transformation processes. This book provides recent insights into how individuals and groups used and still use music to achieve social, cultural, and political participation and bring about social change.

Music and Revolution provides a dynamic introduction to the most prominent artists and musical styles that have emerged in Cuba since 1959 and to the policies that have shaped artistic life. Moore shows how the arts have become a point of negotiation between individuals, with their unique backgrounds and interests, and official organizations. It uses music to explore how Cubans have responded to the priorities of the revolution and have created spaces for their individual concerns.

This volume presents the first direct look at the complex relationship between music and power across a range of musical genres and countries. Discourses of power in the region centre on some of the most contested social issues, most notably in relation to nationhood, gender and religion. Individual chapters examine the ways in which music serves as a forum for playing out issues of power, ideology, resistance and subversion in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.

This book brings together research at the intersection of music, cultural industries, management, antiracist politics and gender studies to analyze music as labor, in particular highlighting social inequalities and activism. Providing insights into labor processes and practices, the authors investigate the changing role of manifold actors, institutions and technologies and the corresponding shifts in the valuation and evaluation of music achievements that have shaped the relationship between music, labor, the economy and politics.

In this collection, a group of predominately Black scholars explores a variety of topics with works that pioneered new methodologies and modes of inquiry for hearing and studying Black music.

This volume examines the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, examining the music of such classical giants as Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. He combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, and how the context of each stylistic period--key cultural, historical, social, economic, and scientific events--influenced and directed compositional choices.

Music Production: Recording is organized around real-world scenarios, with details about roles and responsibilities that help you navigate through key stages of production. Improve the artistry of your productions with this techniques guide, which focuses throughout on musicality and how your decisions affect it.

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.

Based on five years of deep participatory experience, this multi-modal (text, musical composition, social media, performance) sonic ethnography is centered around a community of noisy people who make rock music within the constraints of urban life in Singapore.