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Breaking down walls between genres that are usually discussed separately—classical, jazz, and popular—this highly engaging book offers a compelling new integrated view of twentieth-century music. Placing Duke Ellington (1899–1974) at the center of the story, David Schiff explores music written during the composer’s lifetime in terms of broad ideas such as rhythm, melody, and harmony. He shows how composers and performers across genres shared the common pursuit of representing the rapidly changing conditions of modern life. The Ellington Century demonstrates how Duke Ellington’s music is as vital to musical modernism as anything by Stravinsky, more influential than anything by Schoenberg, and has had a lasting impact on jazz and pop that reaches from Gershwin to contemporary R&B.

In this book, Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states—desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for heightened passions by performers and listeners. While she analyzes the social and historical reasons for the high value placed on expressive intensity in both secular and sacred music, and she also links desire and pleasure to the many technical innovations of the period. McClary shows how musicians—whether working within the contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, Absolutists courts or commercial enterprises in Venice—were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self.

\" Music is acknowledged as an arts medium with a universal and timeless potential to influence our behavior and emotions. As international research about the effects of music on well-being expands it is timely to consolidate and report the gains in the profession of music therapy through this first Oxford Handbook of Music Therapy. With a foreword by Professor Colwyn Trevarthen (Emeritus, University of Edinburgh) this handbook provides an overview of some populations who are served in music therapy, with information about the contexts in which practitioners work. These include mental health services, hospitals, education programmes, and rehabilitation services. The people who come to music therapy either through self-referrals or by referral from a practitioner or service are described in detail by practitioner researchers most of whom are qualified at doctoral level. A range of chapters from internationally recognized experts has resulted in a substantial multidisciplinary, and pluralistic account of recent advances and applications in music therapy. The handbook presents an overview of many of the models and approaches that have developed in the field since its inception. Many of these chapters were written by the founders of the methods. Multiple perspectives to practice are honored in this text, with music therapy predominantly described as a relational therapeutic practice throughout. \"

Most books written about Gilbert & Sullivan have focused on the authors rather than the works. With this detailed examination of all fourteen operas, Gayden Wren fills this void. His bold thesis finds the key to the operas' longevity, not in the clever lyrics, witty dialogue, or catchy music, but in their timeless themes, which speak to audiences as powerfully now as they did the first time the operas were performed. This volume is essential reading for any devotee of these enchanting works, or indeed for anyone who loves musical theater.