Music Horror Stories


Book Description




Dabbling with Diabelli


Book Description

Originally published in paperback with an extremely limited release, this book collects thirty of D F Lewis's favourite short stories, all demonstrating his unique style at the intersection of genre, literature and outsider art.




Nemonymous Night


Book Description

"Mike was a hawler, although he would have spelt it differently had he known the word at all. At this stage, it was unclear what a hawler was-or what a hawler did. But Mike knew he was one and probably knew what one was and what one did, even if he didn't know the name itself." Nemonymous Night is a tale of magic and dream. A rich collage of the British townscape and psyche. A spiral of details, mundane things imbued with significance and significant things that feel mundane. More outsider art than portrait. Missing children and angel wine - ocean liners and helicopters - and a drill vehicle bound for the core of the earth. DF Lewis's remarkable novel is brought back into print again, for the first time in hardcover.




Experiencing Chopin


Book Description

Fryderyk Chopin’s career is intricately entwined with the piano. Although he made forays into orchestral and chamber work, the vast majority of Chopin’s pieces feature the piano. While his relatively brief life shortened his potential contribution as a composer, the originality, richness, and quality of his work is undeniable. His harmonies were often surprising, the rhythms flexible, and the music dramatic. In Experiencing Chopin: A Listener’s Companion,Christine Lee Gengaro surveys Chopin’s position as a composer at a time when the piano stood at the center of musical and social life. Throughout, she shines a spotlight on Chopin and his music, which illuminated the Romantic period in which he lived, the social and artistic climate that surrounded him, and the importance of the individual artist at a time of political foment. Gengaro considers the different genres among Chopin’s works, linking each to the historical, social, and biographical issues that shaped them.




The Life of Beethoven


Book Description




The Unknown Schubert


Book Description

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is now rightly recognized as one of the greatest and most original composers of the nineteenth century. His keen understanding of poetry and his uncanny ability to translate his profound understanding of human nature into remarkably balanced compositions marks him out from other contemporaries in the field of song. Schubert was one of the first major composers to devote so much time to song and his awareness that this genre was not rated highly in the musical hierarchy did not deter him, throughout a short but resolute and hard-working career, from producing songs that invariably arrest attention and frequently strike a deeply poetic note. Schubert did not emerge as a composer until after his death, but during his short lifetime his genius flowered prolifically and diversely. His reputation was first established among the aristocracy who took the art music of Vienna into their homes, which became places of refuge from the musical mediocrity of popular performance. More than any other composer, Schubert steadily graced Viennese musical life with his songs, piano music and chamber compositions. Throughout his career he experimented constantly with technique and in his final years began experiments with form. The resultant fascinating works were never performed in his lifetime, and only in recent years have the nature of his experiments found scholarly favor. In The Unknown Schubert contributors explore Schubert's radical modernity from a number of perspectives by examining both popular and neglected works. Chapters by renowned scholars describe the historical context of his work, its relation to the dominant artistic discourses of the early nineteenth century, and Schubert's role in the paradigmatic shift to a new perception of song. This valuable book seeks to bring Franz Schubert to life, exploring his early years as a composer of opera, his later years of ill-health when he composed in the shadow of death, and his efforts to reflect i







Gartenbergj Strauss


Book Description




Keys to Play


Book Description

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.




Engaging Bach


Book Description

Matthew Dirst examines the leading role of Bach's keyboard works in the creation of his historical legacy.




Recent Books