The Devil's Interval


Book Description

Maggie Fiori, magazine editor and amateur sleuth, gets entangled in a high-profile murder among San Francisco's elite.




Devil's Interval


Book Description

The laughs, the drama, and the many takes on class and race relations are unrelenting in this comic novel about a streetwise character named Watt who lives in Harlem with his grandmother, a renowned voodoo priestess. Watt's job is to administer "slap therapy"-technically calibrated, therapeutic body slaps-at Dr. Otto Von Geber's treatment center for those who suffer from Chronic Millionaire Burnout (CMB). Millionaires (and billionaires) afflicted with CMB search in vain for a purpose, feel that life is meaningless, and have come to realize that they can't trust a single soul. It's a little-known disease, however, because if it became common knowledge that wealth and power are such difficult burdens to bear, it could undermine the global economy. When one of Watt's richest patients dies during a therapy session, Watt becomes an instant fugitive, hiding in New York City haunts from Harlem to the posh Sutton Place. All the while, he is pursued by Jehoover, the ruthless and merciless Old Testament police captain who has sworn to kill Watt. This gutsy New York novel moves between the worlds of the rich and the poor, highlighting the comedy and tragedy that binds the two, and indeed all of us, together.




Music Theory for the Bass Player


Book Description

Music Theory for the Bass Player is a comprehensive and immediately applicable guide to making you a well-grounded groover, informed bandmate and all-around more creative musician. Included with this book are 89 videos that are incorporated in this ebook. This is a workbook, so have your bass and a pen ready to fill out the engaging Test Your Understanding questions! Have you always wanted to learn music theory but felt it was too overwhelming a task? Perhaps all the books seem to be geared toward pianists or classical players? Do you know lots of songs, but don't know how the chords are put together or how they work with the melody? If so, this is the book for you! • Starting with intervals as music's basic building blocks, you will explore scales and their modes, chords and the basics of harmony. • Packed with fretboard diagrams, musical examples and exercises, more than 180 pages of vital information are peppered with mind-bending quizzes, effective mnemonics, and compelling learning approaches. • Extensive and detailed photo demonstrations show why relaxed posture and optimized fingering are vital for good tone, timing and chops. • You can even work your way through the book without being able to read music (reading music is of course a vital skill, yet, the author believes it should not be tackled at the same time as the study of music theory, as they are different skills with a different practicing requirement. Reading becomes much easier once theory is mastered and learning theory on the fretboard using diagrams and patterns as illustrations, music theory is very accessible, immediately usable and fun. This is the definitive resource for the enthusiastic bassist! p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.0px Helvetica; min-height: 16.0px} This book and the 89 free videos stand on their own and form a thorough source for studying music theory for the bass player. If you'd like to take it a step further, the author also offers a corresponding 20 week course; this online course works with the materials in this book and practices music theory application in grooves, fills and solos. Information is on the author's blog.




The Devil's Interval


Book Description

Harry MacPherson, an Episcopal priest and writer of thrillers, is approached for help by Mark Raven, whose marriage to Roselyn West Harry has celebrated over twenty years earlier. To discover the father she’s never known, Céline Marquand, the daughter of Mark’s dead lover, Benedict, wants to read her father’s letters to Mark. Her arrival from France risks compromising Mark’s marriage to Roselyn, who is ignorant of her husband’s past. Céline eventually meets their son, Richard, and the children of male lovers fall in love. Meanwhile, the willful and beautiful Lidia Quintavalle also seeks Harry’s help after she is charged with inducing the death of her wealthy husband, Serge Meredith. All these alliances and misalliances are channeled into Harry’s new thriller, The Case of Dante’s Bones, about a mad professor obsessed with burying Beatrice’s remains with Italy’s greatest poet. Under one fictional roof several stories are linked: a triple romance, a thriller based on theft and burial, a memoir of sexual love lost and recovered. The relations between Harry and Lidia, Lidia and Serge, Mark and Benedict, Mark and Roselyn, Céline and Richard are all caught up in the stridency of THE DEVIL’S INTERVAL. Resonating together, the stories fill in the dissonance and sound the strongest chord in Western music, but not before the novel’s jarring, jangling finale.




The Devil's Financial Dictionary


Book Description

Your Survival Guide to the Hades of Wall Street The Devil's Financial Dictionary skewers the plutocrats and bureaucrats who gave us exploding mortgages, freakish risks, and banks too big to fail. And it distills the complexities, absurdities, and pomposities of Wall Street into plain truths and aphorisms anyone can understand. An indispensable survival guide to the hostile wilderness of today's financial markets, The Devil's Financial Dictionary delivers practical insights with a scorpion's sting. It cuts through the fads and fakery of Wall Street and clears a safe path for investors between euphoria and despair. Staying out of financial purgatory has never been this fun.




How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)


Book Description

"A fascinating and genuinely accessible guide....Educating, enjoyable, and delightfully unscary."—Classical Music What if Bach and Mozart heard richer, more dramatic chords than we hear in music today? What sonorities and moods have we lost in playing music in "equal temperament"—the equal division of the octave into twelve notes that has become our standard tuning method? Thanks to How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, "we may soon be able to hear for ourselves what Beethoven really meant when he called B minor 'black'" (Wall Street Journal).In this "comprehensive plea for more variety in tuning methods" (Kirkus Reviews), Ross W. Duffin presents "a serious and well-argued case" (Goldberg Magazine) that "should make any contemporary musician think differently about tuning" (Saturday Guardian). Some images in the ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.




The Devil's Snake Curve


Book Description

A humorous, historical, and hirsute miscellany that's the baseball book Howard Zinn would have written, if he hated the Yankees.




The Master & Margarita


Book Description

Satan, Judas, a Soviet writer, and a talking black cat named Behemoth populate this satire, “a classic of twentieth-century fiction” (The New York Times). In 1930s Moscow, Satan decides to pay the good people of the Soviet Union a visit. In old Jerusalem, the fateful meeting of Pilate and Yeshua and the murder of Judas in the garden of Gethsemane unfold. At the intersection of fantasy and realism, satire and unflinching emotional truths, Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic The Master and Margarita eloquently lampoons every aspect of Soviet life under Stalin’s regime, from politics to art to religion, while interrogating the complexities between good and evil, innocence and guilt, and freedom and oppression. Spanning from Moscow to Biblical Jerusalem, a vibrant cast of characters—a “magician” who is actually the devil in disguise, a giant cat, a witch, a fanged assassin—sow mayhem and madness wherever they go, mocking artists, intellectuals, and politicians alike. In and out of the fray weaves a man known only as the Master, a writer demoralized by government censorship, and his mysterious lover, Margarita. Burned in 1928 by the author and restarted in 1930, The Master and Margarita was Bulgakov’s last completed creative work before his death. It remained unpublished until 1966—and went on to become one of the most well-regarded works of Russian literature of the twentieth century, adapted or referenced in film, television, radio, comic strips, theater productions, music, and opera.




Essentials of Music Theory: Elementary


Book Description

Carl E. Gardner was an American percussionist, drum maker, and method book author. source This book gives teachers and students a foundational understanding of music theory that they can implement when working on instrumental or vocal techniques.




Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale


Book Description

Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale focuses on perceptions of consonance and dissonance, and how these are dependent on timbre. This also relates to musical scale: certain timbres sound more consonant in some scales than others. Sensory consonance and the ability to measure it have important implications for the design of audio devices and for musical theory and analysis. Applications include methods of adapting sounds for arbitrary scales, ways to specify scales for nonharmonic sounds, and techniques of sound manipulation based on maximizing (or minimizing) consonance. Special consideration is given here to a new method of adaptive tuning that can automatically adjust the tuning of a piece based its timbral character so as to minimize dissonance. Audio examples illustrating the ideas presented are provided on an accompanying CD. This unique analysis of sound and scale will be of interest to physicists and engineers working in acoustics, as well as to musicians and psychologists.