From one of our most innovative singers, a vibrant history of song stretching from Hildegard von Bingen and Benjamin Britten to Björk “Songs can be intensely personal (whether you hear them or sing them) and none of us would choose the same twelve songs as anyone else. My choices are based on decades of performing experience in many different genres, but I hope they will reveal aspects of our common humanity as the story evolves from the Middle Ages to the present.” In this celebratory account, author and singer John Potter tells the European story of song. The form has captivated audiences and excited performers for centuries, from the music of the troubadours and the Christian liturgy through classical composers such as Bach and Schumann up to Britten, Berio, and the rise of popular music. Choosing twelve key works, Potter offers a personal tour through this vital tradition, from John Dowland’s “Flow My Tears” to George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Throughout, he reveals who wrote and sang these joyful masterpieces—and what they mean to singers and audiences today.
Why do we sing and what first drove early humans to sing? How might they have sung and how might those styles have survived to the present day? This history addresses these questions and many more, examining singing as a historical and cross-cultural phenomenon. It explores the evolution of singing in a global context - from Neanderthal Man to Auto-tune via the infinite varieties of world music from Orient to Occident, classical music from medieval music to the avant-garde and popular music from vaudeville to rock and beyond. Considering singing as a universal human activity, the book provides an in-depth perspective on singing from many cultures and periods: western and non-western, prehistoric to present. Written in a lively and entertaining style, the history contains a comprehensive reference section for those who wish to explore the topic further and will appeal to an international readership of singers, students and scholars.
Preface / Anthony Burton -- Introduction / Christopher Hogwood -- Historical background / George Pratt -- Notation and interpretation / Peter Holman -- Keyboard / Davitt Moroney -- Strings / Andrew Manze -- Wind instruments / Stephen Preston -- Singing / John Potter -- Sources and editions / Clifford Bartlett
The Man in the Moon has dropped down to earth for a visit. Over the hedge, a rabbit in trousers is having a pipe with his evening paper. Elsewhere, Alice is passing through a looking glass, Dorothy riding a tornado to Oz, and Jack climbing a beanstalk to heaven. To enter the world of children's literature is to journey to a realm where the miraculous and the mundane exist side by side, a world that is at once recognizable and real--and enchanted. Many books have probed the myths and meanings of children's stories, but Goldthwaite's Natural History is the first exclusively to survey the magic that lies at the heart of the literature. From the dish that ran away with the spoon to the antics of Brer Rabbit and Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, Goldthwaite celebrates the craft, the invention, and the inspired silliness that fix these tales in our minds from childhood and leave us in a state of wondering to know how these things can be. Covering the three centuries from the fairy tales of Charles Perrault to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, he gathers together all the major imaginative works of America, Britain, and Europe to show how the nursery rhyme, the fairy tale, and the beast fable have evolved into modern nonsense verse and fantasy. Throughout, he sheds important new light on such stock characters as the fool and the fairy godmother and on the sources of authors as diverse as Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carroll, and Beatrix Potter. His bold claims will inspire some readers and outrage others. He hails Pinocchio, for example, as the greatest of all children's books, but he views C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia as a parable that is not only murderously misogynistic, but deeply blasphemous as well. Fresh, incisive, and utterly original, this rich literary history will be required reading for anyone who cares about children's books and their enduring influence on how we come to see the world.
Apart from a handful of exotic--and almost completely unreliable--tales surrounding his life, Richard Potter is almost unknown today. Two hundred years ago, however, he was the most popular entertainer in America--the first showman, in fact, to win truly nationwide fame. Working as a magician and ventriloquist, he personified for an entire generation what a popular performer was and made an invaluable contribution to establishing popular entertainment as a major part of American life. His story is all the more remarkable in that Richard Potter was also a black man. This was an era when few African Americans became highly successful, much less famous. As the son of a slave, Potter was fortunate to have opportunities at all. At home in Boston, he was widely recognized as black, but elsewhere in America audiences entertained themselves with romantic speculations about his "Hindu" ancestry (a perception encouraged by his act and costumes). Richard Potter’s performances were enjoyed by an enormous public, but his life off stage has always remained hidden and unknown. Now, for the first time, John A. Hodgson tells the remarkable, compelling--and ultimately heartbreaking--story of Potter’s life, a tale of professional success and celebrity counterbalanced by racial vulnerability in an increasingly hostile world. It is a story of race relations, too, and of remarkable, highly influential black gentlemanliness and respectability: as the unsung precursor of Frederick Douglass, Richard Potter demonstrated to an entire generation of Americans that a black man, no less than a white man, could exemplify the best qualities of humanity. The apparently trivial "popular entertainment" status of his work has long blinded historians to his significance and even to his presence. Now at last we can recognize him as a seminal figure in American history.
Extortion is the name of the game and the method is to murder anyone who might get in the way. 'The Dreem' factory and much else is at stake. Inspector West has to unravel it all at gun point, but not without difficulty and surprise . .
Percussion is an attempt—in the author’s words—to make sense of "senseless beating," to grasp how rhythm makes sense in music and society. Both a scholar and a former professional drummer, John Mowitt forges a striking encounter between cultural studies and new musicology that seeks to lay out the "percussive field" through which beating—specifically the backbeat that defines early rock-and-roll—comes to matter for raced, urban subjects. For Mowitt, percussion is both an experience of embodiment—making contact in and on the skin—and a provocation for critical theory itself. In delimiting the percussive field, he plays drumming off against the musicological account of the beat, the sociological account of shock and the psychoanalytical account of fantasy. In the process he touches on such topics as the separation of slaves and drums in the era of the slave trade, the migration of rural blacks to urban centers of the North, the practice and politics of "rough music," the links between interpellation and possession, the general strike, beating fantasies, and the concept of the "skin ego." Percussion makes a fresh and provocative contribution to cultural studies, new musicology, the history of the body and critical race theory. It will be of interest to students of cultural studies and critical theory as well as readers with a serious interest in the history of music, rock-and-roll and drumming.
Jazz is a music born in the United States and formed by a combination of influences. In its infancy, jazz was a melting pot of military brass bands, work songs and field hollers of the United States slaves during the 19th century, European harmonies and forms, and the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean. Later, the blues and the influence of Spanish and French Creoles with European classical training nudged jazz further along in its development. As it moved through the swing era of the 1930s, bebop of the 1940s, and cool jazz of the 1950s, jazz continued to serve as a reflection of societal changes. During the turbulent 1960s, freedom and unrest were expressed through Free Jazz and the Avant Garde. Popular and world music have been incorporated and continue to expand the impact and reach of jazz. Today, jazz is truly an international art form. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Jazz contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,500 cross-referenced entries on musicians, styles of jazz, instruments, recording labels, bands and band leaders, and more. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Jazz.
When a beanstalk starts growing out of the rubble of the World Trade Center, chaos erupts in New York City. Jack Tott, a twenty-six-year-old musician, believes that if he climbs the beanstalk, he will somehow find the means to help save his dying sister. Caitlin Bingham, an archaeoastronomer, suspects that the beanstalk is related to the mysterious disappearance of Pachakutek, a planet she recently discovered. But the lands and inhabitants in the world above the beanstalk are beyond anything Jack or Caitlin could have imagined. A strange cave, a huge thorn maze, a dapper five-foot-tall mosquito, a paranoid bird who is the last of his species, and an ancient Incan civilization are just part of the adventure that awaits Jack and Caitlin. With a lightning-quick pace and basis in real events of the twenty-first century, The Ascendancy offers hope and a new mythology for the world at this volatile point in our history.
For over 25,000 years, humans across the globe have shaped, decorated, and fired clay. Despite great differences in location and time, universal themes appear in the world’s ceramic traditions, including religious influences, human and animal representations, and mortuary pottery. In Global Clay: Themes in World Ceramic Traditions, noted pottery scholar John A. Burrison explores the recurring artistic themes that tie humanity together, explaining how and why those themes appear again and again in worldwide ceramic traditions. The book is richly illustrated with over 200 full-color, cross-cultural illustrations of ceramics from prehistory to the present. Providing an introduction to different styles of folk pottery, extensive suggestions for further reading, and reflections on the future of traditional pottery around the world, Global Clay is sure to become a classic for all who love art and pottery and all who are intrigued by the human commonalities revealed through art.
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