Chamber Music


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Making Music in Los Angeles


Book Description

In this fascinating social history of music in Los Angeles from the 1880s to 1940, Catherine Parsons Smith ventures into an often neglected period to discover that during America's Progressive Era, Los Angeles was a center for making music long before it became a major metropolis. She describes the thriving music scene over some sixty years, including opera, concert giving and promotion, and the struggles of individuals who pursued music as an ideal, a career, a trade, a business--or all those things at once. Smith demonstrates that music making was closely tied to broader Progressive Era issues, including political and economic developments, the new roles played by women, and issues of race, ethnicity, and class.




California Polyphony


Book Description

What does it mean to be Californian? To find out, Mina Yang delves into multicultural nature of musics in the state that has launched musical and cultural trends for decades. In the early twentieth century, an orientalist fascination with Asian music and culture dominated the popular imagination of white Californians and influenced their interactions with the Asian Other. Several decades later, tensions between the Los Angeles Police Department and the African American community made the thriving jazz and blues nightclub scene of 1940s Central Avenue a target for the LAPD's anti-vice crusade. The musical scores for Hollywood's noir films confirmed reactionary notions of the threat to white female sexuality in the face of black culture and urban corruption while Mexican Americans faced a conflicted assimilation into the white American mainstream. Finally, Korean Americans in the twenty-first century turned to hip-hop to express their cultural and national identities. A compelling journey into the origins of musical identity, California Polyphony explores the intersection of musicology, cultural history, and politics to define Californian.




American Music Studies


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Evenings on the Roof, 1939-1954


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Yates discusses his fifteen years as director of the Evenings on the roof chamber concert series and the Los Angeles music scene during that period.







Complete Essays


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In this fifth of six volumes in a major publishing enterprise, Huxley continues to explore the role of science and technology in modern culture, and seeks a final level of foundational Truth that might provide the basis for his growing interest in religious mysticism. His philosophy of history took its final form in this period. At their best, Huxley's essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature. "A remarkable publishing event...beautifully produced and authoritatively edited."—Jeffrey Hart. "He writes with an easy assurance and a command of classical and modern cross-references,"—Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times. "There is much to enjoy in these volumes...they are important as a document of his times, and of a window on to a stage in the evolution of his mind."—Economist. "You have to marvel at the range of [Huxley's] interests and the intelligence with which he explores them....What we experience in this high journalism is a man of intelligence, sensibility, and formidable erudition engaging his era and struggling for equilibrium while sharing the widespread perception that something ghastly has happened to European civilization...."—Washington Times




Masters Abstracts


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